The Sacred Band

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

T he journey north from Teh was uneventful, slow for most of that first day, but faster that night, as the salt-heavy breeze picked up in the early morning hours. The second day they rode the current in its swirl toward the west. That evening, the barges rowed out of it near enough to Acacia to see the glow of lights throughout the night.

Around them the sea bobbed with life. Crafts of all sorts hitched to the breeze or scooped the surface with oars or even dipped paddles to propel themselves. People called to one another, unusually festive. Some tossed foodstuffs across the water. Bottles and skins of wine. When they fell into the waves, young men dove for them, coming up dripping wet, their teeth shining white. It seemed that to everyone but Kelis and his party this passage was the beginning of a grand celebration.

If anyone noticed that immobile figures stood in among the close-packed swine, they did not voice it in Kelis’s hearing. The Santoth took up posts throughout the barges. Once positioned, they went as still as standing stones. The other passengers and crew avoided them, but they did so without being sensible of it. A boy, picking his way toward a Santoth on some errand, would choose a route that took him around the sorcerers. Once, two men cast their bedrolls in a clear spot at a Santoth’s feet. Instead of lying down, they stood shuffling, talking, ill at ease. They fell to arguing. Both of them moved away in a huff. One slept awkwardly wedged between two pink-skinned swine. The other sat forlorn near the area used as the latrine, staring into the night. As far as Kelis could tell, the man slept very little.

For his own part, Kelis did not sleep at all. Swollen sacks drooped from his eyes, and when he blinked, his eyelids hesitated before rising again. He had never been so tired in his life, but sleep was not a comfort he could visit. Since boyhood, when his ability to find visions of the future in his dreams had emerged, sleep had been a troublesome thing for him. Back then, he had dreamed the future. He had walked in other worlds and conversed with animals and commanded tongues that he had never learned during his waking hours. A gift to the boy but not to his father. His father beat sleep out of him. He wanted his son to be a warrior, like him, not a dreamer. A man of spear and sword, a lion and laryx slayer. Not a man of visions and words, no dealer in things he could not see with his own eyes.

His father had succeeded in molding him, but Kelis never forgot the visions he had seen and the way they made him feel. It was not power that he felt, but a sense of rightness. He thought of it sometimes when he watched fish in water. That was where they belonged. They breathed what men could not and thrived. He had once, briefly, been a fish in the ocean of dreams.

For the first time in many years, Kelis wished he could regain the gift he had abandoned as a child. Would that he could sleep now and see what the future held for them. He could not. When he closed his eyes, he just saw more clearly the scene around him. Some gifts, once neglected, can never be reclaimed.

T he next morning-that of the actual coronation-found them one of hundreds in a logjam of vessels that surrounded the isle of Acacia. The crafts bumped and jostled one another. Whether a barge or a sloop or a fishing rig or a rowboat, tall or short, long or narrow or wide-none could move any farther. Those that had small enough skiffs inched them through what gaps they could find, but as the numbers of ships joining the raft grew, such pathways were squeezed out.

“Look at this mess.” Benabe stood atop a crate and squinted against the glare of the sun, which had just cut its way through clouds that had left them sodden with rain during the night. “We’ll never get anywhere near the island!”

Kelis climbed up onto the crates. Acacia was there to be seen. He could make out the higher reaches of the palace, the spires adorned with long, silken ribbons that wafted on the breeze. To the south, the promontory of Haven’s Rock was also visible. He knew the contours of the place, but it looked different. Squinting, he realized it was as crowded with tents and people as were the seas below it. Shen must have noticed them, too.

“Will it sink?” Shen asked. “Because of all those people, I mean. I saw a raft sink once when too many climbed on.”

“No.” Benabe mussed her curly hair. “An island can’t sink. Not unless the pillar that holds it in place breaks, and the Giver made those to last forever.”

Shen considered this with one eye narrowed. Instead of responding, she asked, “What are those?”

The adults studied the view again. “What?” Naamen asked.

“I saw something flying. A giant bird.”

“One of the queen’s dragons, no doubt.” Benabe pursed her lips sourly. “Some boys last night were talking of them. They bear riders, they say. I’ll believe that when I see it.”

“I saw one, just for a moment, and then it dipped out of sight. I want to see it closer.”

“One day,” Benabe said, “if we ever get through this mess.”

Naamen rubbed the elbow of his stunted arm. “They have to clear a way for us. We’re with the pigs. They’ll want pigs. There must be a way through. A lane kept clear for-”

“For pigs?” Benabe huffed. “You’re seeing what I am, yes? Look at that. We’re stuck! And there’s the island right there!”

“But the pigs-”

Benabe cut him off. “People who want pigs will come here, not the other way around! No, we’re stuck.”

She had it right, Kelis knew. He had just come from unsuccessfully trying to speak with the captain. He overheard him making arrangements with an empty whaling ship stuck just as fast nearby. They had ovens on it that could be used to roast pork, a smokehouse to cure bacon, large decks for slaughter, storage in the hull for the offal. The captain had decided he need go no nearer to sell his product. Indeed, he thought he could double his money.

“We could leave the barge,” Naamen proposed, “and move from boat to boat. Others are doing so.”

Kelis had noticed that, too. Men and women and children moved from vessel to vessel, clambering up the sides, sometimes with the help of ropes thrown down to them. Some swam between the ships, flopping wet onto the decks. A few captains balked at strangers climbing across their vessels, but most were oddly cheerful about it. With the shouted greetings and bursts of laughter and occasional impromptu songs, the festive atmosphere grew. Kelis wished he could feel some of that himself, but he had only to catch sight of a Santoth to feel his insides knot with worry. He could not imagine them passing from boat to jovial boat. Nor was that what they intended.

The sound, at first, was like the start of some holy man’s prayer to the Giver. Kelis heard it but did not turn his head immediately. It was not until a second and then third and then more voices merged with the first that he snapped around. He was stunned twice by what he saw.

The Santoth were singing. They had gathered in one group, standing as still as a choir, and each of them intoned the same song, if song it could be called. It was a mixture of foreign words and sounds that were like notes. These had an almost physical presence. The air around them rippled with it. It was transfixing, but there was no beauty in it. There was a garbled under-tune, something that gurgled and squirmed within the music. An evil thing like a snake slithering quicksilver fast through and around and over the notes.

The Santoth looked different. Their robes were not the colorless garments they had been. Now they bloomed with a rich orange, like dye seeping into the fabric even as he watched. For the first time Kelis could see their faces. The roiling emptiness that had obscured their features was all but gone. Instead, he saw them for the men they were, with cavernous cheeks and eyes that seemed absurdly bulbous. Ancient and weathered, their skin had been burned by the Talayan sun, brutally creviced and parched as desert soil, stretched over the bones beneath. They looked every bit their great age. Like dead things standing and walking… and singing.

Kelis jumped from the crates and waded through a pen full of pigs to where Leeka stood staring openmouthed at the sorcerers. “Leeka, what are they saying?”

The old warrior was still for a long moment, staring at one of the figures in particular. Instead of answering, he approached the sorcerer. “Nualo? Aged one, what work is this? What do you-”

The Santoth swept his hand in the man’s direction, his fingers flicking whiplike. Leeka staggered. Nualo’s mouth still contoured around the song, but anger burned in the sorcerer’s eyes. He flicked his fingers again, and Leeka flew back, lifting into the air so that only his toes dragged on the deck. A pen railing clipped his ankles and he spilled over on the backs of several startled pigs. He was up from beneath the squealing swine a moment later, his face a carved exaggeration of fear.

Then the barge began to move. It jerked forward once, throwing people off balance and sending panic through the pigs. And then it began a more steady progress. In seconds the linked barges collided with the nearest vessels. A skiff overturned, tossing the youths onboard into the water, and was promptly run over by the barge itself. The barge pressed the shell down and smashed into the side of a larger ship beyond it. This one leaned toward them as though the masts would crash down atop the Santoth, but it only came so far before stopping abruptly, as if colliding with an invisible barrier. The ship slid to one side and around the barge, which carried on with increasing speed.

Kelis heard Naamen exclaim, half hopefully, that the Santoth were clearing a way for them. It was true. They were heading toward Acacia. But this was all wrong. Kelis knew it without doubt. Whatever the Santoth intended had evil slithering within it. They were wrong, and Kelis could not let them continue. He had made an enormous mistake in letting them come this far. Any doubt he had about it was gone now. He struggled toward them, his eyes on the one Leeka had named Nualo.

“Stop!” he said. “You must stop!”

Nualo did not answer. Closer to him now, Kelis could see that his skin still crawled with tremors and crevasses, but the face they distorted was emerging. The jagged peaks of his hairline, the strong hook of his nose, eyes the color of an overcast winter sky: his features were that of one man, flesh and bone, born of a woman. For the first time to Kelis’s eyes one of the Santoth looked like a human, not a phantom in the guise of a man.

“Stop!” Kelis roared. He realized he had his spear in hand. Though he did not remember snatching it up, he held it now in his right hand, gripped to throw.

Nualo’s gray eyes found him. His mouth kept at the song, in chaotic time with the others, but he spoke directly into Kelis’s mind. Soundlessly, he said, You are nothing. You know nothing. You will learn.

“I will not let you pass.”

The girl released us, Nualo thought-spoke. You already have let us pass.

Kelis raised his spear, balanced it on his strong dark fingers. The Santoth were flesh now. He could pierce them. They always had been, but now he knew it.

We are again. We are again, and the world is ours again!

The sorcerer extended one arm toward Kelis and squeezed his hand into a fist, saying something different from the others for just a moment. The spear in Kelis’s hand went suddenly molten. Not hot, but as soft as melting wax. The shaft and point drooped as if they would drip to the deck, then instead they curved back in time with the twisting motion of Nualo’s fist. Kelis cried out and tried to release the spear, but it would not come loose. The shaft wrapped around and around his hand until it and his wrist were encased in ribbons of soft metal. Then it went hard, forming a cage of iron.

Trouble me no more, Nualo told him. With that, his attention moved away. He rejoined the others fully, Kelis forgotten.

Kelis stared at his hand, expecting pain but feeling none. It felt different, trapped, immobile, but not in any way he had experienced before. He knew that the song continued. He had not stopped anything. He felt the impact of the barge against other vessels, grinding through or over them. People cried out, some in anger and some in fear and many in confusion. Benabe and Naamen reached him. Naamen pulled him back while Benabe tried to get her fingers under the metal gauntlet. She couldn’t. There was no separation between it and his flesh. As she tugged and scratched, Kelis could feel her fingernails through the metal. Not on it, but through it. It was part of him now. In that instant he knew that it forever would be.

Shen started toward the Santoth, who had carried on with their song as if nothing else mattered to them. Kelis grabbed her with his unchanged hand. He was surprised at how steady his voice was. “No, don’t. They are not your friends anymore. You can see that, can’t you?”

He expected the girl to protest, but she did not. She stayed silent. Her face, for the first time, was stricken with doubt. Kelis knew from it that she had heard what Nualo thought to him. It was written there in the skin around her eyes and in the slight tremble of her lower lip. His heart rushed out to her. He searched for the words to convince her that whatever was happening was not her fault.

The barge smashed against the bow of the whaling ship. The jolt sent them all reeling. The bow of the whaler rose above them as the ship’s stern jammed against something else. It crashed off to one side of the barge, just beside the Santoth, crushing a pen of pigs and grinding them across the deck in squealing confusion.

Kelis yelled for them to move. They rushed toward the rear of the barge. It picked up speed as they stumbled over the railings and shoved through the increasingly frantic swine. Kelis managed to swing Shen onto his back. She clung there as he kicked savagely at pigs, fearing they would bite. One tried to, and he smashed it across the snout with his metal-clad hand. Kelis clustered with several others at the rear. They hunkered down and watched as the barge crashed its way forward, propelled by sounds mightier than any wind.

The chaos of the smashed and overturned boats and the screaming people was so overwhelming that Kelis did not see Acacia until they were upon it. Their barge splintered through the last few vessels, tightly packed and firmly secured to the docks of the main harbor. When they could go no farther because of the sheer bulk of compressed debris and wood and iron, the Santoth ended the song. It dropped into nothingness instantly. The next moment Kelis realized he had already forgotten what it sounded like. He would never be able to describe it. It had been horrible, but he would not be able to explain how in any detail.

“Look,” Naamen said. “They’re going.”

Kelis shot to his feet. “Come with me,” he said to Naamen. To Benabe and Shen he added, “Stay here. Right here. Do not move until one of us comes back. Agreed?”

Benabe nodded. Shen, for her part, stayed curled in a ball trapped within her mother’s arms.

Leeka was already at the barge’s railing when Kelis and Naamen joined him. For a moment they all watched the backs of the receding sorcerers. The Santoth had already cleared most of the packed ships and debris. They climbed over the ships. In some places they scrabbled over obstructions like excited children. In others they leaped gaps as if finding purchase on the air itself. Kelis still had no idea what their intention was, but there was no doubting the eager fervor with which they pursued it.

The sorcerers leaped onto the dock and began shoving their way furiously into the crowd. The people were too closely packed to flee, but they drew back before the figures as best they could. The impact of their progress pushed through the multitude in waves. Those who saw them pressed back to avoid them, causing still more confusion.

Naamen said, “Kelis, they’re madmen. I see them now. Really see them! What should we…”

Kelis did not hear the rest of his sentence, his mind stuttering over the realization. Those who saw them… For people did see them! It was clear in the way they cringed in surprise, the way confusion melted into fear as soon as their eyes touched on them. The Santoth were visible now, and horrible! Revealed here right in the heart of the empire. They now looked taller than normal men. Seven, eight feet, perhaps-towering over the gathered crowd. Their long arms swung in great arcs, like scythes attacking wheat. They headed for the gates of the lower town, the entry point for everything else on the island.

“Brother, go back to Benabe and Shen,” Kelis said to Naamen. He turned away from the sorcerers long enough to draw his gaze. “That’s what you should do. If anything happens”-he paused, snapping his head around to watch the disappearing Santoth, then met Naamen’s eyes fiercely-“protect them with your life. If this goes badly, hide them. Don’t hesitate. Hide in the lower town. Do what you must, but protect them. Do not try to go to the palace. Stay in the lower town. If things are calm, come at sunrise to the inner gate-the lion gate that opens to the second ring. I will come for you there.”

That was all he had time for. He peeled himself away from Naamen’s entreating eyes and looked at Leeka instead. He called the man by name, and when he had his attention said, “Are you with me? Or with them?”

Leeka answered, “I’ve been deceived.”

“We’ve all been deceived,” Kelis said. He raised his ironclad hand, as much for himself to note as for Leeka.

“Yes, but I for many years now.” He stared after them, thoughts clearly racing behind his eyes. “They used me. When I thought they were teaching things, they were really pulling knowledge from my mind, learning about the world. Without even knowing it, I helped them find Shen. I can’t explain it, but I feel it. They worked to win her trust from a distance. When they felt Shen was within their reach, they sent me out to bring her in. They couldn’t do it themselves, so they used me. Now my eyes are open. I know things about them as well.”

To Kelis’s surprise, Leeka jumped the gap to the pier and began shoving his way through the roiling, agitated crowd behind the sorcerers. He moved not with their speed but as if he were grabbing hold of the energy in their wake and heaving himself forward.

Kelis made the same jump and ran in pursuit.