The Sacred Band

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.

“Sire?” The secretary’s voice was barely audible.

Dagon yanked around. How much time had passed? Measuring by the clutter on the floor it could have been hours. “Are they here? All gathered?”

“No,” the man said. He stood with one foot out of the room, seeming to slide farther out as he spoke. “They are all gone. Sire Grau and Sire Peneth. Sire Flann. All their attendants.”

“Gone?” Dagon let his arms droop. “Gone how?”

“They sail even as we speak, through the channel the Ishtat kept open. I’m sorry, Sire, but I could not reach them. The Ishtat withdrew. The channel closed.”

A folder slipped from Dagon’s hand. “All of them are gone?”

“All of them,” the secretary said. And then, stepping a little closer, “We’re alone. Trapped.”

Normally Dagon would have slapped the man for being overdramatic. Instead, he cast around, found his simmering pipe, and sucked on it like a pup on his mother’s tit.

T he dark hours of the middle of the night found Dagon still in the library, having picked himself up from the floor, and again rummaging through what volumes had not already been strewn across the stones. When he found the book it was obvious he could have done so all along, had his mind been calm enough to organize a more orderly search. It stood on a shelf among some of the oldest books. Jeflen the Red’s account of the Wars of Distribution. That was what he had been looking for, even if he had not been clearheaded enough to know it.

Dagon tipped it down. He placed it in the stand on a round table, the one best situated beneath the reading lamps, and he stared at the cover. Jeflen had been Tinhadin’s official chronicler. As such, his account of things was suspect, but it was the most complete single volume of the times that Dagon knew of. And it was also vivid. Dagon remembered that now. He felt it in the pit of his stomach and in his fingers, which trembled despite the mist’s sedative effects. He got up, flapped across to the other table, and worshipped at the pipe until he killed it.

Opening well into Jeflen’s account and flipping forward, Dagon skimmed the pages that documented the wars themselves. His eyes stuck on descriptions of battle, on numerical equations that measured the massive death tolls of the time. It described scenes of incredible carnage, in numbers that made the Santoth’s destruction of the Meins seem a minor skirmish in comparison. It was horrible, made more stunning because Dagon had images of his own to compare them to. That ribbon of red, torn flesh. It had taken him a long time to understand what he had seen. And when he had, he had vomited all down his front. This book, though, told of such things on a massive scale. Entire wars fought that way, between all-powerful sorcerers and armies that could do nothing but march forward to their ghastly deaths. The Santoth had never been defeated by any army of men. Never even close. So there was that.

Moving forward, he read of the growing friction between the king and his sorcerer knights. They each of them were ambitious, greedy men, ravenous for greater portions of the world. Were they not gods walking the earth? Did not the very words from their mouths destroy or create? According to Jeflen, Tinhadin came to believe the Santoth would soon turn against him. Against each other as well, but first against him, as he sat as king over them all. It was in reading his father’s journals for guidance on how to handle them that he discovered something his father had not intended him to discover. It was there in the journal, hinted at, suggested, promised. He came to believe that he and the Santoth had learned only a portion of the Giver’s tongue. The first text he acquired from the Dwellers was incomplete. It was only much later, after his father died and he began to piece together clues from his journal, that he realized there was an even more complete volume.

The Song of Elenet.

It was not, as Dagon had dimly remembered, an old epic poem. It was not a lament or a dirge or a eulogy. It was the first thief-sorcerer’s manual for speaking the language of a god. Dagon had known that, come to think of it. He just had not credited it. It had never mattered. He doubted it ever existed. Doubted such a language ever existed, or Elenet to overhear it. He had doubted, really, that there had ever been a Giver.

“You believe now, don’t you?” he asked himself.

Even when the Santoth proved themselves real on the Teh plains he had not truly had to face the ramifications of their existence. And when Corinn had begun to work sorcery, Dagon had thought it a nuisance peculiar to her alone. If she was removed, the nuisance would be as well. How foolish that seemed now.

He read on.

Tinhadin had gone in search of The Song of Elenet. Jelfen wrote at length about the epic journey Tinhadin had undergone to find it, but Dagon skipped that. What mattered was that Tinhadin had found it, studied it, and returned as a more powerful sorcerer than all the Santoth combined. The song lived in him. It coursed through him. He breathed it and sweated it. He dreamed in the language of creation and sometimes woke to find the world changed.

When Tinhadin returned to Acacia-for his search had taken him far away-his sorcerers came against him. He threw them back. He would have destroyed them, but a moment of compassion stayed him. They had been his companions from youth. Like brothers to him. Soldiers beside him for so many years. He hated their betrayal, but he did not want to sing them out of existence, as he could have. Instead, he banished them to the Far South.

The Santoth went, for they could not disobey their master. They could not stand against him, not when he was so much more a god than they. The sorcerers vented their rage on the land and up into the skies and upon any who got in their way as they moved south.

Only one nation massed to stand against them. A race of centaurs from the far south of Talay, the Anniben Dur Anniben. These horsemen had for eons roamed rich southern grasslands that teemed with life. They were among the Giver’s first creations, and they had always scorned humans, the spawn of the Betrayer, as they named Edifus. They had stayed outside the affairs of the Known World, and Tinhadin had not risked battle with them before. In his act of banishment, though, he sent his sorcerers against them.

Behind Burith-ben they ranked to face the raging sorcerers. They stood side by side in one great herd and said the Santoth could not pass into their lands. The Santoth destroyed them with fire, with worms that dropped from the sky and rolled across the plains, flattening the grasses and leaving them charred, with diseases that blistered their skin and split their hooves and ignited their hides and-

Dagon stopped reading. The words burned his eyes. It was all as horrible as he had feared. Before, if he had read descriptions like this, he would have thought them the fancies of imaginative, if twisted, minds. Now, he read them as truths that might as well have been written in the paving cement the queen had recently had spread across the streets of the lower town. The Santoth were loose in the world again, soon to have the book that would grant them even greater power. They would each of them be as strong as Tinhadin ever was, and much more twisted. How would they punish the world then? How long before they turned one against the other?

“They’ll destroy us all,” Dagon said. Only Corinn could possibly fight their sorcery, but she… Regardless of what had happened to her in the Carmelia, the clock of her life was winding down, and she didn’t know it. If she didn’t act quickly… “They’ll destroy us all,” he said again. Dagon heard Grau’s voice: What use is going to Rapture if it all comes crashing down in a few years? He tried to laugh, but he only managed to blow air through his nose. “It is the end of Rapture.”

He called for his secretary. The man stepped into the room before the sound of his voice had faded. He glanced around for a moment, looking as aghast at the state of the place, and then found Dagon with his eyes. “Sire?”

“I will visit the palace,” he said. “Send a messenger to alert them. Prepare an escort. Ishtat to go as far as the royal grounds. Do it just now. I must see… no, not the queen. I shouldn’t want to see her. Or tell her what I have to. Make it the… king. Aliver, I mean. I’ll tell him. Arrange it.”

The secretary nodded but did not set to it. He worked his nervousness with fingers, curling them over each other like spider legs. “You will have to change, Sire. Your clothing…”

Dagon looked down. “Yes, I’m filthy. This is not my blood. I don’t know if it is blood. It’s filth. It’s…”

“We’ll run a bath,” the man said. “I’ll get fresh clothes. We’ll burn those. Do not concern yourself with them.” He darted away.

Into the silence after his departure, Dagon said, “He thinks you’re mad, you fool.”

He ran his fingers over the crackly, yellowed pages of Jeflen’s account. He flipped the pages absently, lost not in thought but in the absence of it. So much to think through, and yet he felt empty. His gaze drifted down to the pages of their own account. His eyes began to move across the words there with an interest not really matched by the mind seeing through them. Monsters. The words described monsters. Wolves, leviathans, a great worm at the black bottom of the ocean…

He tore his eyes away.

What am I thinking? I can’t go to the queen and tell her she’s dead on her feet. That would be madness. Don’t make yourself a fool, Dagon.

He called his secretary back and retracted the message to the palace. Fortunately, it had not yet been sent. “Bring me parchment and a pen. Oh, and the fading ink. I’ll write a note. Much better idea. And then alert all the staff-everyone essential-that we are leaving.”

“Leaving, Sire?”

“Yes. We will take everything we can and… go.”

“For how long, Sire?”

“Assume that we will not be returning at all.” End of Book Two