The Sacred Band a-3

by David Anthony Durham

  The next instant, Delivegu watched the Santoth bound up the staircase, driven with sudden purpose. They passed near the royal dais, bunched as it was with warriors with weapons drawn. The sorcerers took four and five steps at a time, leaped over railings, and scaled one section of wall that blocked their way. They shoved through any people trapped or fool enough not to get out of their way. Right up into the highest ranks, they went. They mounted the Carmelia’s barrier wall. One by one, their cloaks flapping behind them in a manner that for some reason made Delivegu think of rats’ tails, they leaped out of sight.

  Delivegu did not rush to the edge to stare after them. He did not need to see them. What he imagined was vivid enough. In his mind he saw them careening down the cliffs toward the rocky beach. From there they roared through the revelers on the sand and jumped first onto skiffs pulled up on the beach, and then from them to other ships, across barges and transports and onward, using the collection of ships as one enormous bridge, hurrying them toward the mainland. Toward Calfa Ven and whatever prize awaited them there. They were gone. A brief wave of relief washed over him. He turned to catch sight of the queen, but the shove and tumult all around him was too confusing. He could not find her.

  The exodus through the one open gate was a full flood now. The entire stadium drained toward it. They were mad, frenzied, and clawing over one another. Delivegu jumped away just in time as a man rolled head over heels down the stairs past him. “What, you fools? They’re gone! Find your senses!” No one around him seemed willing to do that. He shouted that the sorcerers were gone and that, with calm, they could open the other exits as well. Nobody listened. Instead they shoved and cursed and scratched him as they rushed past. He got a hand on his dagger and kept it there, ready to slash out with it. He began pushing back toward the royal dais.

  He reached it, but the royal party was gone. The priestess and her entourage took flight as he arrived, carrying what they could of the ceremony’s accoutrements. Corinn and Aliver were down in the mass of people, although heading for a different passageway from the mob. Marah were tight around them, forming a protective human rectangle that moved with a mind of its own, following some evacuation plan, no doubt. Some plan devised just in case. Just in case what? In case some ancient sorcerers stepped out of the centuries in time to disrupt the coronation of a new king?

  “They say the Marah consider all possibilities,” Delivegu muttered. “Did you ever imagine this one? I think not, friends. I think not.”

  He watched the wedge of soldiers disappear through the exit opened for them, then slammed closed behind them. Well, he had to admit the exit was efficiently done. He wished he was with them. If he could rush there now, he might just get inside before the palace slammed shut. Within minutes the place would be locked down, bristling and stupid with fear. He stood on the deserted platform, considering diving in with the mob. But just look at them! People were being trampled and suffocated, needlessly. The thought of joining them rankled his sense of scoundrel’s dignity. No, he would not be one of them, resolving himself to a long delay before he could gain his quarters again.

  His eyes drew themselves to a person moving against the mob’s crazed men. He was only one person in the mass of bodies. He did run above them, as Leeka had, but still stood out because he was moving against the outflow. The black man’s arms lashed forward, as if he were trying to swim through the torrent of fleeing people. As frantically as he struggled, he made no progress. Indeed, as the exodus gained momentum he began to be dragged back by the surge of them.

  Delivegu muttered about their sanity, but then caught himself. Insanity was driving people out of the stadium. That man was fighting against the madness. The Talayan, he thought, looked more and more familiar. Whatever the man was thinking, he had purpose the others did not.

  Grabbing a passing soldier by the shoulder, Delivegu yanked him close. The young man wore a glazed expression. “Soldier? Soldier!” Delivegu smacked him and stared in his face, waiting for eye contact from him, as he used to do with his dogs as a boy. Only when he had his full attention did he continue. “Recognize me? I’m Delivegu Lemardine. I’m the queen’s man. Listen to me.”

  The soldier could hardly have done otherwise. Delivegu was roaring in his face.

  “That man. See him? The Talayan there.” He stabbed the air with his finger, trying to shoot a straight line between the guard’s eyes and the man’s chest. “Get him. Bring him to me. He knows something. Get him, and bring him to me alive.”

  The soldier began sputtering excuses, but Delivegu sent him on his way with a kick to his backside. The young man went wobbly legged down the steps for a while, then carried on like a good soldier. They like their orders, don’t they? Delivegu smiled and sat down to wait right there on the dais, letting his legs dangle over the edge. All right. He was feeling a bit better. Sorcerers made him queasy. Regular folk he could handle just fine. Chaotic situations… he preferred to think of them as opportunities.

  One of the dragons, Kohl, he thought it was, flapped up over the far stadium wall, black as tar and just as glistening under the now bright sun. Another one slid along the rim for a moment before catching an updraft and lifting into full view. Thais, the brown one with yellow stripes. She was rather plain looking, but Delivegu always got a thrill saying her name. Thais. It would be forever a sexy name to him, recalling the face of a young woman in Alecia who simply would not succumb to him throughout a long night of cunning and chivalrous advances. Why was it always the ones who eluded him that he remembered the most vividly? For that matter, why was he capable of thinking of a brown-eyed beauty from a decade ago right after meeting mad wizards who were likely going to plunge the world into chaos and darkness?

  He shrugged. Anyway…

  Two other dragons hove into view as well, long necked and angry looking.

  “A bit late,” Delivegu said. He jabbed a thumb over his shoulder. “They went that way, if you care.” They could not, of course, hear him.

  By the time the soldier returned to him, with the Talayan man in tow, the confusion had mostly passed. Soldiers were establishing some rough semblance of order. A few people, good-hearted or desperate for their loved ones, had even begun to trickle back into the Carmelia to help the injured and deal with the dead. The soldier handed the man off awkwardly, looking around at his fellows and only then seeming to question why he had taken orders from someone so obviously not an officer. Delivegu dismissed him with a shooing motion of his fingers. He turned his attention to the man.

  He had seen less bedraggled men laboring as life prisoners in the Kidnaban mines. The Talayan’s tunic was a thin, tattered garment hung across a wiry frame, muscles lean and taut beneath his skin. His thigh-length skirt looked to have been dragged across the ground all the way from central Talay, leaving a tattered fringe. He was coated in a layer of dust lighter in tone than his skin, with a crackly film of salt around his hairline. Most bizarrely, his right hand and wrist were completely encased in a metal cage. Delivegu considered the possibility that he had escaped imprisonment, but he had never seen anything like that gauntlet. Besides that, he knew who the man was. No criminal, he.

  “You’ve seen some miles, Kelis of Umae,” Delivegu said. “The hard way, by the looks of it.”

  The man looked surprised, but whether the surprise was at Delivegu knowing his name or at the fact that he was that person, Delivegu was not sure.

  Kelis said, “I must see the queen.”

  “You’ll not get near her looking as you do.”

  Kelis, agitated, scanned the stadium. “The queen. I thought she was here.”

  Delivegu caught him by the elbow as he tried to move away. “Listen! I’ve got sense enough to recognize you, but I doubt any Marah would see anything but a cushion to pin an arrow in.” Realizing he had grabbed the arm with the steel fist of a hand, he let it go. “What happened to your hand?”

  “The queen,” Kelis repeated. “And Aliver, if he truly lives. And where is Leeka?
He came this way before me.”

  “Ah, he was with you, huh?” Delivegu asked. “He’s… around here. All over the place, really.” He gestured vaguely. “Anyway, what’s your message for the monarchs?”

  “I’ll tell the queen,” the Talayan snapped.

  “You’ll tell me first,” Delivegu said. “And then, maybe, if I say so, you’ll tell the queen. You’ll not get near her without me, and you’ll not find anyone else to help you. You’re lucky to have found me.” He stopped and studied him again. “I shouldn’t even waste my time with you, but I’m thinking you’ve had a part in all this?”

  Kelis looked down.

  “And that you have things to tell the queen. Things she really ought to hear?”

  The Talayan nodded.

  “I can probably arrange that. You’ll have to start by telling me, though. Have a seat. Let’s do this like reasonable men. I, by the way, am Delivegu Lemardine. The best friend you have at this moment.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  By the time Sire Dagon reached his compound in the league quarters, his clothes were so disheveled he could barely walk without tripping over portions of his flowing garments. The sole of one of his shoes flapped maddeningly, and he had lost his ceremonial skullcap. His lip was fat from having been punched by a commoner, and dark liquid soiled his front. His own vomit. Several layers of it had been squeezed out of him by more than one sight, but mostly by the glimpse he caught of the things that had writhed in and around and over Queen Corinn’s face. What were they? He asked, but he did not want to know. There could be nothing good in knowing the name of such things.

  He plowed through the servants waiting to greet him and went straight to his office, ignoring their exclamations of concern. He could think of nothing save the horror of what he had seen and the dread at what he had done. Never before had his timing been so disastrous. Absurdly, fantastically disastrous.

  “What have we done?” he asked himself, once seated and panting in his office chair. He really was not sure. He knew what he had done. Yes, but not what the effects of it would be now. Nor what the Santoth had done to Corinn. Nor what they would do to the world. He could not get his mind around it, but the terror squeezing every fiber of his body told him he had to, and quickly.

  “Sire?” His secretary peeked in the open door. “You’re upset, I see. Should I send for Teeneth? She would want to-”

  “No! This is no time for concubines, you-you…” No insult came readily enough, so Dagon let the sentence hang, unfinished.

  “Of course, sire,” the man began again, his voice simpering from the first word. “Do you need-”

  Anger rose in Dagon like alcohol tossed onto a fire. He suddenly hated that this man was talking to him, distracting him, making it harder to get a grasp of his thoughts. What’s more, the room was full of people! They were his people, but he loathed them. “Get out!” he shouted. “All of you. Spies and leeches. Out!” He tossed a paperweight at the secretary. It missed him but grazed a servant across the temple. In a flutter of motion, the servants abandoned their posts and dashed for the door. One knocked over an end table. Another caught it before it hit the floor.

  “Wait! Come back.”

  They all hesitated, secretary and servants, unsure whom he meant.

  “Send for Grau and the others,” Dagon said to the secretary. “All of them. Bring them here.”

  Seeing the man scurry away at the task gave Dagon a moment’s comfort. Yes, he needed his brothers! That was why he had no control of his emotions. He should not be without his brothers at a time like this. In the chaos of exiting the Carmelia, everyone in such a mad frenzy, Dagon had lost sight of the other leaguemen. One minute he was among them; the next some ruffian yanked the silver chain from his neck as he pushed him down to be trampled. By the time he gained his feet again-much abused in the process-he found himself alone within a mob. He tried to put the dreadfulness of that out of his mind.

  Like him, the other sires would just now be arriving back at their guest quarters. They had to meet that very night. They had to decide what to do and how to do it. Dagon knew that the arrival of the Santoth changed everything. He did not know how it changed everything, but that it had was a certainty. He was sure the others would see it the same way. None of them had planned for this. What he had planned for-and just executed-was something very different. And that was what made things worse!

  “You fool, Grau! Your stupid plan. Your bloody compass!”

  The compass. The very gift that the queen had lifted with her bare hands just a few hours ago. He found something almost sexual in the positioning of her palms as they cupped the polished gold. And Aliver. He had run his fingers over it, tracing the words of the inscription as he read them out. Dagon could barely grasp that such a beautiful piece of science and artistry had become a tool of death, but he knew it had. Those brief touches, Grau had assured him, were all it would take.

  I t had all seemed so perfect when Sire Grau first shared his scheme with him. The queen and the new king eliminated in one untraceable action. No bloodstained knife. No arrow in the breast. No assassins to employ and then, in turn, have assassinated. No. It was as simple as league chemistry was complex.

  “We have a poison,” Grau had said through the mist-filled air in his quarters that afternoon in Alecia.

  “We have always had poisons,” Dagon replied.

  “Yes, but this one our chemist can paint onto whatever object we request.” The old man demonstrated this with an imaginary brush. “It goes on as an invisible film. It dries there, leaving no trace to the eye or to touch. No smell at all. When they first showed me, they pointed at an apple that had been coated in the stuff. I almost picked it up despite myself, such was the illusion that nothing was there at all. If I had touched it, though, you and I would not be speaking now.”

  All those who handled an object thus treated died. Not immediately. Their deaths were delayed. The poison needed to work its way into their systems. From the tests the league had done-and they were nothing if not thorough with testing-those who were so poisoned died within a cycle of the moon, sometimes a little longer or shorter. The end, when it came, was swift. They would drop to sleep and not wake. They would be found glassy-eyed, their tongues green, their fingers mottled with spots. In short…

  “They will look to have overmeasured a concoction of the mist,” Sire Dagon had finished.

  Grau showed his pleasure by exposing the filed points of his teeth. “Oh, the vices of royalty. We all know Leodan was an addict. Why not his children as well? The crown sits heavy, doesn’t it, on a brow as delicate as Corinn’s. What’s most charming about this poison is that it doesn’t overstay its welcome. All traces of it fade away from the treated object after the first few days. The poison-I don’t know-it evaporates or something.” The long-nailed fingers of his hand drew the process vaguely in the smoky air. “Anyone trying to find traces of it after the unfortunate death will find nothing whatsoever.”

  “So no fingers can be pointed at us.”

  “Fingers can point,” Grau said, shrugging, “but that’s all they’ll be able to do.”

  “And how would we guarantee that the Akarans will touch a particular object? With all their servants and-”

  “The coronation,” Grau had cut in. “We will put it in their hands ourselves at the coronation.”

  S o they had. And now it was done. The siblings-and a good number of servants and any guests unfortunate enough to have handled the compass-would be dead within a month. They were walking corpses.

  Dagon had been so pleased. Sitting in his box as the ceremony continued, he even began wording his condolences to young Prince Aaden. Dear Noble Lad, he had mouthed in his head, I can scarcely fathom the cruel hand fate has stricken you with…

  He had to stop himself remembering it. It no longer amused him that he had planned to claim to the boy that he would gladly exchange his own life if it would spare Corinn’s, or that he imagined sitting with the
boy as they studied the compass together, both he and the young prince touching the then harmless instrument.

  No, he need not think back on that. What mattered was thinking forward.

  “How have things changed?” Dagon asked himself. He did not notice that he spoke his thoughts out loud, or that most of his servants had crept back into the room and resumed the regular posts. He did not even flinch when a servant handed him a lit pipe. He just took it. He sucked on the mouthpiece, the gurgle of the water loud in the room. He held it for a long time and exhaled the greenish vapors along with his words. “We have sorcerers living in the world, that’s how things have changed. The Santoth.”

  He inhaled again. It felt good to do so. The mist was in him now. With it came the possibility of calm. The tension that had crawled across his skin grew coy, flirtatious. He thought briefly of Teenith, his concubine, but this was no time for seeking solace in her arms. After a few more inhalations, he said, “Now, what do I know of these Santoth?”

  With the mist’s aid his mind picked up the question. He knew what he had seen just an hour ago. They lived. They commanded some foul magic. They killed without remorse. They had redirected Corinn’s attacks to horrible effect. And they wanted something. The Song of Elenet. He repeated the name as he rose and, pipe in hand, shuffled to his library. His loose sole smacked the floor the entire way.

  Setting his pipe on a reading table, Dagon flipped through volumes so rare that the Vadayan scholars, had they known of them, would have put down their parchment and quills and trained as assassins to get their hands on them. One by one, he tossed them on the floor behind him.

  At first he was not even sure what he was looking for, but he remembered having read about the Santoth before. Just after they came out of exile and destroyed Hanish Mein’s army on the Teh plains, Dagon had searched for information about them. A short-lived course of study, it was. The sorcerers had gone back into exile, seemingly just as trapped there as they ever had been. Other matters had pulled his attention away.