The Sacred Band

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Dariel lost track of time the moment he stepped through that doorway. He answered the slim man’s beckoning. He went first, and the others followed. He could not now remember the words they had spoken, or how introductions were made, or any of the things customary to a meeting. None of that mattered, for nothing inside the Sky Mount was the same as outside. It did not so much cling to the mountains as belong to them, a part of them, smooth and organic, as if the rock had once been living tissue. It was sparse, clean, with none of the everyday items of life: no tables or chairs, no beds or hearths or cupboards. Dariel had the feeling that all these things had once been here, but now there was nothing but a long sweep of corridors that led to empty rooms.

The whole time he was there, he knew that the others were also somewhere within the dizzying sprawl of the place. He could feel them. He could even hear faint indications of their thoughts, like voices heard at a distance. His hound pups were inside as well, somewhere in the maze of rooms and passages. All cared for. All safe. This was not about them, though. From what felt like the first moments his time in the Sky Mount was spent with only one person. Na Gamen.

That was why he seemed to pass all his time-immeasurable as it was-by the Lothan Aklun’s side. They walked from room to room, sharing thoughts, conversing without opening their mouths. This, too, was a thing Dariel did not remember beginning, but it soon seemed natural enough. Shape a thought. Send it. Hear the answer within his head. Never a sound except the wind that whipped through the passages and the scuffing of his feet across the smooth gray stone. Aliver had said he spoke to the Santoth in a similar manner. Now Dariel understood.

Na Gamen was slender in the extreme, famine faced, with copper skin that lay thinly across the bones of his bald skull. He stood a little distance away, gazing through an opening in the wall of his sky-top sanctuary, looking at the dizzying drop to the valleys far below. He looked so lost in thought that Dariel feared he was about to fall forward through the opening and plummet from the heights. Why Dariel should care what happened to this man he could not have said yet. But he did care. He already believed that Na Gamen, the Watcher of the Sky Mount, was entwined with his destiny.

You are an Akaran, Na Gamen said. I can smell it in the oils on your skin. It’s in your breath when you exhale. I hear it when your heart beats. I see it in the vibrations of the air around you. Do you know, Dariel Akaran, that you trail your ancestors behind you on a silver string? I see them waving in the air. All the living trail behind them those who came before. A portion of each soul grasps the string and stays with you always. I didn’t always see them, but I have for a long, long time. Do you know how I know this?

How? Dariel asked.

Because the same is true of me. I trail many strings. Thousands. Tens of thousands. And each of these touches a million souls. Sometimes I feel very heavy, pulling them behind me. Sometimes lifting my arm is like moving a mountain. As it should be for one like me. An accursed one like me.

The notion of weight was hard to equate with the tall, slight man who placed the words in Dariel’s head.

How do you know me? Dariel asked. The smell of my skin. My breath. How?

Because you are of Tinhadin’s line. I see him in you.

You knew Tinhadin? You are truly from my lands?

Na Gamen turned and set his green eyes on him. They were larger than normal, jewels in his gaunt face. His earlobes spread out in large curves shaped like butterfly wings. They moved when he did. When he stilled, they swayed as if rocked by a gentle tide. We are children of the same land, yes. And I did know Tinhadin. I know him still. One does not forget the man who tried to murder him. That man who helped, in his way, to make this accursed life.

You have said that before. How are you accursed?

You would know it all?

Yes.

It will come at a price, Dariel. A gift, but a dear one. One that will be hard to live with. Do you want it?

Whether I want it or not, I’m here, he thought. Sharing, he answered, Yes.

Na Gamen gestured that they should continue walking. Dariel fell in step beside him. Again, the sound of his feet stood out strangely compared to the silence with which the Watcher moved. If the man’s feet-hidden beneath long gray robes-touched the stone at all, they gave no indication of it. Not even the fabric of his robes swished audibly. Beside him, Dariel felt awkward and loud. Every motion he made was too large and cumbersome when compared to the silent grace with which Na Gamen floated beside him.

Listen. See. I will feed it to you.

Dariel did not get a chance to ask what that meant. Before the words had faded from his head, images began to scroll across his vision, scenes through which he could barely see the real world behind. Mixed with this, thoughts and emotions came to him, delivered not with words, not explained, just given to him. He felt them as if they were his emotions. His thoughts. And through that Na Gamen’s voice came and went, moving him forward, answering questions as he thought them.

The name Lothan Aklun, he claimed, was the Auldek translation of their name, given to them in this land. Before that they were called the Dwellers in Song. They were a religious sect in the Known World. It was they who had preserved the Giver’s tongue through the eons. They long lived in cloistered seclusion, respected by all the tribal powers. They kept The Song of Elenet safe, the actual book itself, written in that thief’s crimped hand.

Back then, they still believed the Giver would return. They believed they could make amends for Elenet’s arrogance, for his crime of stealing the language of a god and using it in folly. They did not use the god’s song for themselves-as Elenet had-but sang it for the pure beauty of it. They did not create things. Instead they formed the song into a hymn in praise of creation. They sang it so that the Giver, wherever he was, would hear it ring with purity and would know they were worthy of his attention. That was all they wished to do. Make amends for Elenet’s crime and bring the god back into the world.

Also, they worked to purify the song. There were, even in Elenet’s own hand, errors and impurities in the song, evil or hateful flourishes. The Dwellers worked to find them and remove them, so that the book would be pure. It was an ongoing task that gave their lives meaning.

When new devotees were ready, they journeyed across the land, in small groups or singly. Dariel saw all this as much as heard it through Na Gamen’s words. Cloaked figures greeted the dawn with their heads raised and voices flowing out over the hilly Talayan landscape. A single man walked a mountain pass, keeping time with the tapping of his walking stick on the stones. Women knee-deep in the tranquil waters of a blue ocean praised the sun as it burned its way into the rim of the world. A circle of singers around a campfire, wrapped in cloaks against the frigid wind, eyes gazing at the millions of stars as their lips moved, asking the Giver to come back and bring harmony to the world again.

As he listened, Dariel understood the word-notes that were that strange language, so filled with longing, so true and perfect. Somehow, they carried the solidity of the substance of the world rendered in living sound.

For hundreds of years we lived and died and worked at this mission , Na Gamen said. He held Dariel by the wrist now. They walked along a narrow shelf of rock that dropped off down a steep slope on one side. Before them, a stone staircase curved up toward the peak of the mountain. They carried on toward it. The world was in chaos through all that time. See it.

And Dariel did. Warring factions. Uprisings. Tribal betrayals. Atrocities. The Known World as it had once been flashed before Dariel’s eyes in a torrent of images. He saw things real and surreal, things that made sense and things that did not. An army of mail-clad warriors smashed against howling tribesmen in furs and leather. Creatures with the lower bodies of horses and with human torsos above pounded across dry plains. Black skinned as Balbarans, they screamed war. A queen bearing a narrow, simple crown spoke before a gathered host of snarling monsters, crammed together inside a huge chamber. She showed no fear of them. She just spoke on, her freckled face serene before the madness.

Na Gamen explained that Edifus left the Dwellers alone as his conquest took shape. He even visited them on occasion, learning the song himself and adding his voice to theirs. Perhaps he still respected the god. Perhaps he believed as they did. For a time it seemed so. He convinced them that the world they were building-once the warfare was over-would have a beauty in the god’s eyes. In that way, he would aid in luring the Giver back to the Known World.

We came to trust him. We freely gave him The Song of Elenet. Who better than a king to protect it? His sons, Thalaran, Tinhadin, and Praythos, wanted to become students of The Song, but we would not teach them. Even Edifus would not teach them. He did not trust them. He wanted them to wait, to grow older, to find wisdom through warfare first. He hid The Song in a place he thought nobody could find it. When Edifus died, one of the sons showed himself to be everything Edifus had feared. Tinhadin, the middle son, was a man apart from his siblings. He fell into warring with them. Even as their Wars of Distribution spread the empire farther than Edifus had ever dreamed, he found ways to kill both his brothers. Still he wanted more.

A man with Akaran eyes and a twice-crooked nose raged into a temple, pushing through chairs and desks, his sword slashing at any of the robed pupils near enough for him to cut down. Many fled from him, but one man did not. He stood, leaning against a lectern, his hands clasping it behind him, holding it, his face defiant. The warrior swung his sword, sloppy with rage. It sliced through one of the priest’s arms and most of his torso. He let loose the weapon and climbed over the gore slipping from the dying body to reach the text that the priest had been protecting. The look of rapture on his face was like nothing Dariel had ever witnessed.

We should have been prepared. We should have seen it coming. We did not. He stole a text that should never have been read and made himself a sorcerer. He used it to teach his chosen warriors. Together, no army could stand against them.

Warriors in orange cloaks waded into a great host, an army like the entire world. The sorcerer warriors hewed forward with great sweeps of their long swords. They whispered words that Dariel heard as if their lips were pressed against his ears. He knew the meaning of the words for the space of time it took to hear them. Horrible words. Sounds that were the unmaking of the world. Notes that tore and destroyed. Phrases that twisted in Dariel’s ears like living cancer. And then he saw the man with the twice-crooked nose on a field of carnage. The man ripped off his helmet and stood, the only upright figure in a graveyard that stretched to the horizon on all sides, bodies countless. The silence terrible.

The Santoth, Dariel said. You are like the Santoth. You use the same magic.

No, came the reply. No, we do not speak the same magic. No, we were not like them. No more so than a scholar of warfare is a warrior. We were scholars. We kept The Song. We preserved it. For centuries we stayed outside the world’s power struggles. We kept The Song alive and refined the Giver’s tongue for the good of all. You must understand that. We made it even purer, so that if ever the Giver returned we could speak with him and show him that we were not all like Elenet. That’s what we were.

The Santoth… What they stole was not The Song of Elenet. It was the texts we had removed from it, the parts of it that were most foul and twisted. If they had been true scholars, they would have known this, but they were warriors. They only ever wanted the things that warriors want. Conquest. Power. To be feared. These evil texts were aid enough. And Tinhadin only wanted their rage, so he inflicted them with pain to plague them all the moments of their lives that were not spent fighting for him. That was why they fought so mercilessly. By inflicting pain, they escaped it briefly themselves.

It was not until later that Tinhadin discovered where his father had hidden The Song of Elenet. He retrieved it, and once he had it, none could stand against him. Not the Dwellers, not his Santoth. He sent his own sorcerers into exile without sharing the true Song with them. They were raging evil, hateful, but they were powerless against him. He had only to speak to destroy them, so they accepted their exile.

Dariel shook his head. But I saw them on the Teh Plains. When they thought my brother dead, they marched north to search for him. Aliver had promised to release them once he found The Song of Elenet. He died before he could. When they confirmed that he was dead, they unleashed a nightmare on the Meins. It was a horror, but they did it for us. They did not seem vengeful. They won that war for us.

No, not for you, Na Gamen corrected. For themselves. If what you say is true, they fought and destroyed-as is dear to their hearts. Don’t believe they did it for you, though. If they destroyed your enemy, it was because that was the only place they could direct their anger and disappointment. Dariel, be thankful your brother died before he released the Santoth. Be thankful he never gave them The Song of Elenet. If he had, they would have destroyed him and taken the world as payment for their suffering. That’s what they want. Time does nothing to change men like them.

So that is the truth as I know it, the Watcher said. Tinhadin stole from us and created the Santoth. We should have fought him before that, but we had no gift for prophecy. We did not know what was coming. How could we? I ask you, how could we?

A week away from the question, out of Rath Batatt and back into Inafeld Forest, Dariel sat away from the others, on night watch. He pressed his back against the base of a large tree. The group slept-or lay quiet with their thoughts, like him-in the small clearing just below him. He still pondered Na Gamen’s question. He had not answered it when asked, but now he thought he knew. They could have known what was coming if they had paid attention to the world. If they had kept their eyes open to the struggles of nations and the ambitions and fears of man, instead of believing they could ignore such things for their higher calling. Of course a thing that could be made into a weapon would be a made into a weapon. It did not matter if it was a thing of beauty. It did not matter if their mission was holy and benevolent. It only mattered that The Song could be twisted to serve human greed. If that was so, it was only a measure of time until someone grasped for it.

A man like Tinhadin, whose blood-Na Gamen reminded him-flowed in his veins. He did not let himself think also of a woman like his sister. That thought lurked at the margins of his consciousness. He knew it was there and that it would not likely go away, but he could not face it yet. There was too much else to face, too many things more pressing on him. As he had thought before, he needed to solve the problems of this land. It was here in Ushen Brae that he found himself, and here that he had to carve a path forward. The fact that Na Gamen looped it all back to the Known World did not change that. It just made everything more urgent.

“Dariel?” Anira climbed the small rise up toward him. He had not seen her until she spoke. “May I sit with you?”

Dariel indicated the space beside him, with a crescent of root that would make a comfortable seat. “I’m no good as a watchman tonight.”

“When were you ever? Are you still thinking of him?”

“Of course. You?”

Anira sat back against the trunk, her arm pressed against his. “I never had trouble sleeping before. Now…”

“Was your time with him… bad? I mean…” He hesitated. “I don’t know what I mean. It’s still hard to talk about.”

“No, my time with him wasn’t bad. Was yours?”

“I don’t know how to answer that,” he said.

An eruption of monkey calls peppered the air just then. For a few moments, the creatures leaped and swung through the trees above them, passing like a great herd along a road of branches and limbs. When they were gone into the distance, both of them let the silence be. Anira did not seem to mind that he had not answered the question. Dariel was glad, as he was grateful for the press of her dark skin against his.

Anira said something in Auldek.

“Why do you all sometimes speak Auldek? I would think you would hate it.”

“The tongue of our enslavement?”

“Something like that.”

“All the tongues offered us were the tongues of our enslavement. Would you have us speak Acacian?”

“You do speak Acacian,” Dariel said.

“Out of necessity. It’s still the language that sold us to slavery. It’s the language of the league. We all came here with a first language, not always Acacian, but we also spoke some Acacian. We had to. It’s the language of your empire. If we could have sorted ourselves we might have kept Balbara alive in us or Candovian or Senivalian. But we were thrown into a world where two languages were the only true currency. Auldek among the Auldek, Acacian among ourselves. At least we speak two languages. What about you?”

“I speak a bit of lots of things.”

“A bit?”

“I had to. I traveled all over. I worked among the people in Aushenia. Right in with them, rebuilding after the war with Hanish Mein.”

“My noble prince,” Anira teased. She leaned her knees up over his and rested her head on his shoulder. “And how much of their talk can you speak? You can say, ‘Hello.’ You can say, ‘My name is Dariel. What is yours?’ You can ask where is the toilet and comment on the weather, so long as it’s something you know the words for, like raining. Am I right?”

“I never had to speak anything other than Acacian. I did it because I… wanted to show that I cared.”

“Do you know what Mor would call that? Insulting.”

Dariel looked away. “I can’t be accountable for what someone finds insulting.”

“No, but you should try. Trying counts for a lot.”

“That’s what I just said!”

Anira laughed. “You want me to teach you Auldek? Real Auldek, not just polite phrases?”

“Yes,” he said. “I do. If it’s your language I’m learning-not the Auldek’s.”

“There are no Auldek here anymore. They are your people’s problem. I’ll teach you if you will try to learn.”

“I’ll try,” Dariel said.

B ack on the Sky Mount, Dariel and Na Gamen had stood atop a pinnacle of stone, a high protrusion at the very tip of the mountain. Clouds flew past them at incredible speed, wet against Dariel’s skin. It was terrifying each time they cleared and the entirety of the mountain heights fell away beneath them. A span of time had passed since last they spoke, he knew. He had reached this place by walking up the stone staircase. He knew that. But he had not walked up it in a continuous journey from when this conversation began. Time, or his awareness of it, did not progress with such reasoned steadiness.

What did you do? he asked. How did you respond to Tinhadin’s crimes?

Look there and see, Na Gamen answered.

Following the Watcher’s gaze, Dariel looked down and saw, overlaid on the mountains, a vast ocean. At the edge of it a tiny fleet hugged an arctic shoreline colder and more forlorn than any Dariel had seen. They were specks on an infinity of water and waves, stone and ice. He swept down closer. Figures huddled on the decks, wrapped in blankets. None of them worked the sails, and yet the ship moved forward. Among them, on the deck of the last vessel, a man stared directly at Dariel, his green eyes desolate, hopeless. He opened his mouth and spoke with the Watcher’s voice.

Cowards, we fled. We did not even manage to get The Song of Elenet back from Tinhadin. We tried, but he attacked us with a savagery that combined the true song with the evil texts. He threw a curse at our backs, one that forever banished us from the Known World. It burned, and we fled before it. We were not warriors, Dariel Akaran. We were the faithful, and our faith had been raped and violated. The Giver had truly forsaken us. He was gone and would never return. His abandonment of the world was complete. No prayers or devotion or singing his praises would ever bring him back. Instead, he gave the world to men like Tinhadin. We thought the world had ended.

They were years in the Far North, progressing slowly or not at all. At times they were stuck fast in the pack ice for months on end, often floating back toward the Known World. They survived by murmuring the words of The Song. They kept it going constantly, passing it from ship to ship like a lantern to warm and light them. They did not have the actual text of The Song of Elenet to guide them anymore, but they had studied it hard before fleeing. They knew enough, and they had seen that the Giver’s words could be twisted to serve man. So they sang. Not to call back the Giver, though. They sang to live. To stay alive. And as they did, floating in a lifeless land, they learned hatred.

When they finally sailed south along the new coastline that was Ushen Brae, they saw the possibility of life returning to them. A new nation, a new people.

I stood on the beach the first day we made contact with them. They bunched before us, all threat and armor and weapons. No language between us, but they made themselves clear. They would kill us, destroy us. Throw our corpses back into the sea if we offended them. That’s all they offered us, though we arrived with no heart for war. We looked past them, over them, to the land beyond. Ushen Brae was rich and fertile, bursting with plant and animal life. The Auldek were fools to have turned their back on it and to have spent themselves at war instead of peace. They were, we thought, no better than Acacians.

Dariel saw all this. He felt what they had felt. They could live on in the new land, but not among the Auldek. They would live separate from them. They would scrape by, living on the barrier isles, where the Auldek feared to go. So they did, building at first a crude settlement. It was not life as it had been. They could not rekindle the love of the world they had once felt, but they would survive in defiance of Tinhadin. They would spurn him. They would be revenged on him by that very act. Once awakened, revenge is a hunger as great any other.

There was a problem, Na Gamen said. Already our mastery of the song had begun to lose its purity. Our voices warped from true, like instruments losing their tuning. Soon, it seemed, we would have to abandon it entirely. That was too much to bear. So we learned to preserve some of the Giver’s tongue outside ourselves. Knowing it would decay in our minds until it was nothing but curses, we worked to put the song into things. We trapped our intent inside stone, wood, metal. We built with material and sorcery bound together. For, yes, the song was sorcery to us now. We became like Elenet, seeking to use it for our own means.

The soul vessels, Dariel said.

Na Gamen stared out toward the horizon. His large eyes open against the buffeting wind. And other devices, yes. These made our lives easier, gave us power, made it possible to trade with the Auldek. We thought for a time that would be all. We would trade with them what we could. We would survive. But then a ship reached us from the Known World.

Dariel saw it. A floating wreck. A ship with a shredded mainsail and the smaller ones in tatters. The men upon it skeletal. The dead and living mixed together, hard to tell apart. They had not sailed to Ushen Brae intentionally. They had floated with the currents after being battered by a savage storm and blown far from their normal waters. They were suffering from illness and delusion. Some spoke to the sorcerers they saw as if they believed them to be keepers of the afterdeath.

The sorcerers nursed the sailors back to life, a few of them, at least. It was not easy. They were far gone, insane from their ordeal. To save them Na Gamen and the others fed the sailors a diet of mist threads, keeping them in a chamber rank with the smoke of the stuff and using the threads to sew their festering wounds and made poultices of it to soothe their sores. They bound their heads and squeezed the madness out of them, bringing them back in a form that suited them.

Then the Dwellers in Song developed a scheme to use them. They would send them back to the Known World in a new, better ship, one that could sail directly across the Gray Slopes without fear of succumbing to sea beasts. They could not do this themselves, for Tinhadin’s curse would forever hold, but these sailors could. They would offer trade with a vast new nation.

We called ourselves what the Auldek called us: Lothan Aklun, the Dwellers in Song. We said nothing about our origins. Through these sailors, we offered a deal with Tinhadin, though he would never know with whom he partnered, or why we offered it. This, Dariel, was the birth of those you call the league.

Of course it was, Dariel thought.

We saved them, created them. They have thought themselves apart from other men ever since. And we made this trade into a punishment. Revenge on the Acacians. Punishment for the Auldek for being so like them in their love of war and destruction. The Auldek needed to repopulate their nation after years of war. We took that ability from them, made them barren with the song. Tinhadin, the sailors told us, was fighting with his own sorcerers. They had turned against him, or he against them. He was trying to hold together an empire that denied it even was an empire. He was at the verge of losing everything. We had only to find a thing that each side could provide the other. We did. Children for Auldek. Sedated peace for the Acacians. So it was arranged.

We did not understand at the beginning how long it could last, how we would prosper. We harvested souls from the quota children and kept them within our own bodies. We became immortal by sucking lives from Acacia. We gave them to the Auldek so that they would live and live and live, always needing more. We made the quota children infertile, so that the Auldek would always need more of them. So it has been ever since.

How was that a punishment? Dariel asked. You made us prosper. We ruled unbroken for twenty-two generations.

What greater punishment, Na Gamen asked, is there than sacrificing your morality for a delusion? What’s worse than living with lies woven into the fabric of your every interaction? We are nothing but the lives we lead, Dariel Akaran. Even poor children sold into slavery may live honest lives. No Akaran has done that since Tinhadin became the despot he was. Your people have escaped death these many generations, but they have lived failed lives in the process. Yours, prince, is as yet a failed life.