The Sacred Band

by David Anthony Durham

  I was thinking about saving the world from the likes of the Santoth, Dagon thought, aware that in a few moments he would no longer be safe thinking thoughts he wanted kept private.

  “And, Grau,” Nathos continued, “why would you act without our complete agreement? If you had not hatched your plot to assassinate the bitch and her brother, we would not be so exposed. I can recall nothing like it. Everything we have built is in jeopardy.”

  Grau was not in a mood to be chastened. He answered in a gruff whisper, “We did what we had to. Nobody could have foreseen the outcome. Dagon, in my opinion, made the best of an unfortunate situation.”

  One that you caused, in part, Dagon thought.

  “You’re lucky that some of us have had greater success in our ventures,” Nathos said. By that, of course, he meant himself and his vintage. Why he should be so proud of that now Dagon was not sure, but he looked smug. As Nathos settled back and closed his eyes, a smile tickled the corners of his lips. You hardly seem troubled. Perhaps it’s you who isn’t taking things seriously enough.

  Sire Revek called the session into order. “Before I set you to explaining yourself, Sire Dagon,” he said, “we should be sure the entire chamber knows just how the calamitous events in the Inner Sea developed and how you acted and why.”

  Dagon started. He knew he would need to do some explaining, but he did not expect the chairman to begin with him. “Sire,” he said, “you have all read my testimony, and Grau’s. I delivered it when I arrived this morning and was told everyone would come here prepared. And, with respect, ‘calamitous’ is hardly the word to—”

  “Silence!” Just a word from a frail, thin frame, but with it the chairman stopped him. Resonant echoes of it reverberated through the newly built council chamber on Orlo, the largest of the Outer Isles. Revek had barely more than whispered, but that was all that it took to get heard in here, especially when speaking from the center of the senior leaguemen’s circles. Behind his voice, the chairman sent waves of his disquiet resonating through the council chamber. The acoustic structure of the place was sublime, the airflow circulated the mist efficiently, and the sculpted seats in which they reclined seemed to enhance their capacity for subverbal communication. Revek’s voice, at least, filled the entirety of Dagon’s skull so completely that he felt himself crammed up against the bone. Such a chamber he had never experienced before. Nor had he ever found himself the focus of his brothers’ animus. Not what he expected would greet his arrival at the Outer Isles.

  “Dagon, you must acknowledge the seriousness of this matter. Reports, testimonies: these are not enough. You single-handedly ended hundreds of years of league occupation of the Known World. You assassinated two monarchs, informed them of their pending deaths while they yet lived, then abandoned league property, ordered other property destroyed, set the vineyards of Prios aflame …” Revek sighed in exasperation at the unending extent of it. “The list of things you have to answer for is staggering. Because of it, I move that you provide us access.”

  Dagon’s heart rate had been increasing. On the word access it skipped forward into an irregular, syncopated dance of its own choreography. “Access?”

  “Just so. You will be probed. You did not see fit to consult us earlier, when you made decisions that affected us all. You will do so now. We will judge you accordingly, and with the wisdom of hindsight. Do any object? Or think this action unwarranted?”

  If any did, the cowards and scoundrels leaning back in their seats kept their mouths shut. Had Dagon been one of them, instead of the individual at the center of this scrutiny, he would have been just as silent. Probing was not without its benefits, at least from the point of view of the ones doing the probing. It was rarely called for, but he had enjoyed the unfettered access to other unfortunate leaguemen’s minds on several occasions. Nobody would refuse looking into his secret places under the guise of an official inquiry.

  Being the one being probed, however, was ghastly. It involved inhaling a liquid distillation of mist, one that inundated your mind in a way that let your fellow leaguemen push inside it and explore your memories at will. It was an ancient process, one that each of them trained for in their youth—both to learn how to penetrate and how to allow penetration. Better the one than the other, Dagon had always thought.

  What of Grau? he came very close to saying. Will he be probed as well? He did not want to end the possibility of getting aid from that senior leagueman just yet, though. He tried to return the discussion to reason. “We all understand the facts already,” he said. “Truly, if you just let me answer each of these points, I’ll put your minds at ease. Sire Grau can assist me—”

  “I second the chairman’s proposal,” Sire Nathos intoned.

  Several others chorused their assent as well.

  Dagon craned around to see back into the dim ranks of reclined leaguemen behind him. “But if you just—”

  Sire Grau said, “Let it be done.”

  Let it be done? “Did you say that, Grau? Let it be—”

  “Silence, Dagon!” Sire Revek whisper-shouted. “We will hear from you afterward. The probe will be carried out first. That is our decision. You have no choice but to abide by it.”

  The litens—special Ishtat officers who normally stayed pasted to the far walls of the chamber—converged on him. They appeared through the mist-thick air as if they had only ever been a step away. Wearing goggles over their eyes and breathing apparatuses over their noses and mouths, they moved with a clearheaded speed that Dagon could not comprehend. They pressed down on his chest, pinned his arms to the armrests, and wrapped cords around them so quickly Dagon only realized what they were doing after they had completed the task. He tried to pull free. He could only strain against them. He kicked, but his feet, too, were bound. He shouted, but that ended quickly, too. A liten vised his jaw in a painful finger pinch. The figure stared down at him, eyes unseen behind the green glass that hid them.

  Dagon got ahold of himself. He ceased struggling. It was useless and just made him look ridiculous. This situation was absurd, but it was serious. Better that he acquiesce with faith in his rightness, with dignity. That would be the shortest course back to his proper standing. “Of course, Sires,” Dagon managed through his nearly immobilized jaw. “My—my mind is yours. I have no fear of … being—”

  A liten carefully slipped a tube into his nose. Dagon could not help but thrash. He had thought this part amusing when it was happening to someone else, interesting that so much tubing could be shoved and shoved and shoved up a person’s nose. Where did it all go? he had wondered. Now he knew. And then the liquid flowed.

  In brief moments he had before the liquid mist overcame him, Dagon thrashed around, both in his chair and inside his head, fighting the rush of fear he claimed not to feel. He searched for thoughts that he should somehow banish, but as soon as he found one that was embarrassing or questionable, another popped up like a bubble beside it. And then another. He got nowhere. There was so much to hide, the innocuous just as much as the substantial. He wondered how this was happening. He should have arrived here a hero. A man of action. One of decisive …

  Being mind-probed by a chamber full of leaguemen, Dagon learned, was unequal parts horrifying, degrading, embarrassing, and enlightening. How much of each depended on the moment in question. Each moment of the examination blurred into spiraling circles, in which he could get no sense of time’s progression. He put together a sketchy narrative for himself of how the experience had gone afterward. Even this was putting order to a process that had in truth been like being explored by a swarm of scheming bees.

  Early on, his brothers had focused their attention on the Queen’s Council meeting that had so disturbed him, the one in which Aliver had appeared in the flesh. They moved forward through his visit to Grau, in which he suggested and then argued for the monarchs’ assassinations. An observer at his own dissection, Dagon knew that the memory as he reexperienced it did not match the memory as he recalled it, bu
t he could find no way to voice this.

  His brothers watched the coronation through his eyes, turned over his emotions as the monarchs caressed their present, felt his fear as the Santoth changed everything. They looked through his eyes as he searched his library for some way to understand them, and they watched him write the letter that confessed the crime he had helped perpetrate only hours before. They followed him as he fled from Acacia aboard a pleasure yacht in the dead of night, chasing a messenger bird toward Alecia. The voyage surprised him in some particulars. Had fleeing Acacia really wrung him through with as much melancholia as it seemed to? No, not possible! He had not gotten teary at seeing the harbor lights recede in the wake of his boat. He had not been overcome with sadness for the lives of all those poor fools still rafted together, in shock and mourning and confusion now, instead of sharing the euphoria the day had begun with.

  Apparently—although he did not remember it this way—a barrage of random memories had assaulted him throughout the short voyage. He revisited old conversations with Leodan Akaran and Thaddeus Clegg, his treacherous, conflicted chancellor. Dagon had not liked either man, so why did it seem like he wished he could have them with him in his cabin, talking through the recent events while sharing a mist pipe? Why recall the time one of the white minks the concubines kept got loose in his quarters, unnerving him as it darted about with its long tail swishing behind it? What use was remembering the time he sat through some banquet with a sore tooth, struggling to hide his discomfort from those around him? What a strange, useless thing to recall. And yet there it was, as vivid in its own way as some of the most crucial moments of his tenure in Acacia.

  They lingered with him through the dream he had of the time Corinn arrived in his offices—so young then, beautiful in the newly ripened manner of youth. He had thought cruelly about the work he would have liked to put her mouth to when she caught him off guard. He had to retrace the half-heard words she had spoken, taking a moment to comprehend the audacity of the proposal she was making. She spoke her way into an empire right then and bound Hanish Mein’s hands with a few well-conceived words. Not her lover’s pawn after all, it turned out.

  And that took him to a view of Hanish’s face in profile as he stared at one of the palace’s golden monkeys. It was an image Dagon saw with such detail it might have been a painting hung on the wall before him. He had hated the man’s perfect features, his lover’s eyes, and the arrogant grace with which he occupied his body. But what he remembered was wondering if Hanish had any suspicion that the league had often used the monkeys as thieves and messengers. They were clever, easily trained, and seemed to take a certain amount of satisfaction from working covertly. Of course Hanish hadn’t known. Nobody on Acacia ever had. Dagon would miss those monkeys. Realizing this made him shake his head at his own mawkishness. He needed the steadying influence of his brothers.

  Irrelevant, he thought, and yet some of his brothers seemed fascinated by these things and by the fact that he buried all such thoughts deep when he met with his fellow leaguemen in Alecia. They had all been agitated, both by what had happened during the coronation and by the call for evacuation that Dagon arrived with. He had acted recklessly. There would be a reckoning about it. An investigation. Consequences. Despite the grumbling, they echoed Dagon’s orders to their own staff.

  See, Dagon thought, they did what I suggested because there was no other choice! I acted. I led. And why was there no mention of Grau’s part in all this?

  By dawn of the next day they had all fled aboard the largest vessels they could organize on short notice. They sailed south, bristling warning with the manned ballistae hanging from the sides of the ship. In their wake they left abandoned estates and billows of black smoke rising from their offices and libraries, storehouses and estates. Dagon rather liked the images it all left in his mind. It helped sweep away the troublesome memories. Here was something decisive. When the leaguemen abandon a place, they leave scorched earth behind them. Nothing for others to use. No apologies. No regrets.

  These portions were not so bad. Much of the probing vindicated him. If it had ended there—and it should have—he would have had no reason to complain. It did not end there, though. He would later wonder just which of his brothers had spent so much time on raking through his childhood like a gardener turning manure into the earth. And who circled around and around his early sexual encounters? What reason was there to tease out small, perverse moments, things at the edge of his life, things inconsequential?

  He knew the answer. It could be any of them. And they did it because it amused them. Those things were out of his hands. Only how he handled himself when the probe ended could matter now.

  Regaining consciousness took much longer than Dagon would have imagined. He slowly came back into his body. He felt the tubes as they were yanked out of his nose, and then the straps on his feet, and later wrists, being untied. Someone wiped spittle from his mouth and tugged at his nose with the same cloth. He heard one liten ask another if Dagon had soiled himself, and felt the cursory probing of his nether regions that prompted the response, “Not from the back end, at least.”

  Though his consciousness returned, it took some time before he could so much as open his eyes. He lay there listening to his brothers discuss him. The gurgling of their mist pipes sounded like laughter. If they had spent time discussing the serious matters, they were beyond it now. Sire Grindus joked about the childhood infatuation he had for one of his maids. Sire Pindar increased the mirth by mentioning that he still had the same infatuation, despite the fact the woman must surely be many years a corpse. If the queen knew the sort of things he had pictured her doing, another said, she would have his head. “She would have all our heads,” Grindus admitted, to a murmur of laughter that echoed around the chamber.

  “Odd the workings of the mind,” Sire Nathos said.

  “Ah …” Dagon said. “Ah, odd … indeed.”

  The others hushed a moment, until Revek said, “I believe he is back among us. Dagon, we have discussed your matter at length. Wake and hear our verdict.”

  Dagon drew out a handkerchief and dabbed at his face. He ran a hand up over the long cone of his skull, patting his hair into place. That was all the regaining of dignity he managed before Revek continued. Pulling his mouth away from his pipe, he spoke through an exhalation of green mist vapor. “We find you guilty of gross misconduct.”

  “No!”

  “Yes, we do. Why wouldn’t we? We know everything that happened. Without a doubt, you committed grave actions without the council’s consent. You compounded these with further actions, and then you compelled your fellow leaguemen into actions they had no choice but to agree to. All these things are true. I suggest you close your mouth before letting any of the thoughts in your head slip out of it. Remember, Dagon, that all of us in this chamber have been inside you. We are still, to some degree. So hush. That is a command. For the rest of this council, you will not say a word, on pain of banishment.”

  Stirring a cloud of mist vapor from in front of his face, Revek peered through it. “So that is the verdict,” he said. “As for punishment … we are also agreed upon that. You are to forfeit your Rapture tithe. You will keep your rank, but if you ever hope to gain Rapture, you will need to earn a great deal in the coming years. Your tithe will be divided among the sires nearest to Rapture themselves.”

  This can’t be happening. I only did what you all would have. And I did not do it alone. He glanced across the close circle at Grau, but the man had attention only for the chairman.

  “Now, let us discuss the future,” Revek said. “I know the situation looks dire, but it may not be as bad as all that. We know the ill tidings well enough. Let us share the better news. I’ll start.” He glanced around, touching each of the faces of the men in the inner circles. “It appears Sires Faleen and Lethel have been doing fine work in Ushen Brae.”

  Dagon reclined, numb. He knew that what he thought had just happened had, in fact, just happened,
but it was too enormous a reversal—and too unwarranted and cruel—for his mind to grasp the whole of it. Despite himself, he listened to Revek’s report on Ushen Brae.

  The nascent unification of the slaves into some collective state had been nipped. Instead, the slaves had fractured along the very lines of their enslavement. The strongest groups among them were loyal to the league. To aid in the continent’s pacification, Sire El had been dispatched with his army. They would ensure that the league secured its position there, should Ushen Brae need to become their base of operations.

  Of the fate of the Known World, Revek shrugged and said that what will be, will be. He did not subscribe to the sort of panic that had taken possession of Dagon’s senses. “To those who likewise despair I ask one thing,” Sire Revel said, “just one thing and then I will fall silent while the younger among you speak.” He let that sit a moment, as if to demonstrate that he was capable of falling silent. “Who is to say that we won’t be able to do business with the Santoth when all the confusion dies down? They are sorcerers like Tinhadin was, and we had no difficulty coming to a most agreeable arrangement with him. It could be the same with the Santoth. Better, even, for we now have years of experience on which to set our terms. That, Dagon, is where you erred. Not even a Santoth victory is as calamitous as you seemed to believe.”

  The phrase “too true” escaped more than one leagueman’s lips.

  “Bu—” Dagon began, but clipped the word before he completed it. All that he had done, the decisive action he had taken, and this was the thanks he got for it? He wanted to lash out at them all. He could not, though. He realized, listening to the murmuring affirmation and enthusiasm that greeted Revek’s “one thing” that, had someone else acted as he had, he would himself be speaking against him. He could not argue because Revek was right. The league had not been in the danger he feared. How could it be? They were the league. It was as simple as that. They rode atop the tides of other nations’ follies. They did not—or should not—fall into their traps themselves.