The Sacred Band

CHAPTER THREE

When Dariel Akaran first looked upon the ruins he had to steady himself by grasping Birke’s shoulder. “Scoop it up,” the young Wrathic man said, grinning and lifting Dariel’s drooping jaw with a finger. “You’ll catch flies like that.”

They stood at the summit of a hill on an old road that snaked down into the valley. A great ruin of an ancient metropolis stretched before them. The city reached up to the hills that held them in, wrapped completely by a defensive wall that rose and fell over the contours of the ridgelines. Dariel got lost in gazing at the maze of thoroughfares and alleys, buildings and spires of what must once have been a grand city. It matched Alecia in size, but the pale green of the building stones showed an intricacy of workmanship that would have left Acacian architects envious.

“What is this place?” the prince asked.

“Amratseer,” Mor said. She came up and stood beside them. She said a sentence in Auldek.

“What?”

“ Seeren gith’va.”

Birke translated. “A dead city.”

“Dead? It’s hardly dead.”

Large beaked birds patrolled the skies in raucous groups; gray doves labored into the air; black starlings darted, seemingly for the joy it. Golden-haired monkeys similar to those on Acacia sprinted around the streets and lounged on rooftops, calling to each other in argumentative bursts. Behind that, there was another sound, the rustle of vegetation slowly engulfing the city, as quiet and relentless as a constricting snake winding tighter and tighter around its prey. There was life in abundance here, just not the sort the makers of the place had intended.

Since Dariel dropped down from those slabs of granite, following Mor eight days before, this new world had swallowed him whole. With Tam and Anira, the other two who had come with them, they spent the first day climbing over high fingers of stone, plunging into damp forests, and climbing up over more fingers of stone. That night they had camped in a cave mouth that opened toward the west. Dariel sat staring at the sun setting over an unending undulation of forest, as vast as the ocean.

The third afternoon they had followed the banks of a tributary of the Sheeven Lek. The river water was crystal clear, rippling liquid glass that displayed the blue stones of the riverbed and banks. When they stopped to eat, Dariel stripped off his shirt and prepared to leap in, ripe with the sweat and dirt of so much walking.

Birke caught him by the arm. “You don’t want to do that.”

A short time later Birke led him to the trunk of a fallen tree, atop which they could look at a deep pool at a bend in the river. Beneath them schools of crimson-finned fish swam in shifting ribbons of motion, stretching thin and then clumping together, one school joining another and then splitting. They could have been dancing some elaborate routine. Dariel asked if they were edible.

“Oh, yes. Very tasty.”

That was when it happened. A section of stones on the bottom of the river slid forward slowly at first and then with a sudden upward rush. Dariel stared as a gaping slit opened. It yawned wider than a person was tall, and engulfed an entire swath of the unfortunate fish. Only when its maw shut again and the creature swam forward with leisurely, pleased swipes of its tail did Dariel understand that it was a massive salamander of some sort. Its back was patterned to replicate the blue stones of the river. It had only to stop moving to become invisible.

“Anything else I should be afraid of?” Dariel asked.

“Plenty of things.”

T he fourth day they snaked down through crevasses cut deep into the whitish stone of the earth by a labyrinthine network of narrow streams. It was a different world, with forests of amazingly thin trees that stood side by side at any bend in the river-anyplace that afforded a chance at sunlight-and stretched upward, branchless, until their crowns could explode in plumes of long, narrow leaves. Tiny birds darted through the trees. They made their nests well up in them, cast between several like hammocks.

In places the walls pressed in so close on either side that the group disrobed and swam with their clothes and supplies bundled on top of their heads. Dariel’s heart thrummed in his chest, more from fear of hidden creatures than from the exertion. Despite this, his eyes still managed to linger on the patterning of tattoos on Mor’s back, on the way her blond hair billowed in the water, and on the lovely motion of her legs. Mor herself rarely looked at him. She may have been his escort to meet the Elder Yoen at the Sky Isle, but the role had not made her any warmer toward him. She made it clear that she had left her heart with Skylene back in Avina.

I guess that makes her heartless, Dariel had thought.

A t the close of the fifth day they climbed back to the surface of the world and camped, sheltered by the thick roots at the base of some massive trees. The next morning the prince awoke lying on his back, with something gripping the sides of his head, pressing on his chest, and still another thing moving inside his mouth. He opened his eyes and stared into the metallic blue, bulbous face of some sort of enormous insect. Its eyes were each the size of a man’s handprint, moist and as delicate looking as soap bubbles. A pulsing tube from the center of the face extended into Dariel’s mouth, and the long stretch of its segmented body pressed him down.

Dariel tried to swat at it, but one of the creature’s many limbs pinned his wrist down. He tried the other hand, but he got no further than wriggling his fingers. He kicked and thrashed and screamed. Or he tried to do those things. He could not actually kick because the creature had lowered its segmented torso onto his, and the cage of its legs trapped his own. So pinned at all his points, he created little actual motion. Whatever the creature had inserted in his mouth made it impossible to vocalize. That did not stop him from screaming inside his mind.

Tam’s face came into view, looking down at him calmly, his eyes shadowed by the dark, circular tattoos of the Fru Nithexek’s sky bear. A moment later Anira and Birke and finally Mor appeared as well. None of them shared his alarm. Anira reached out and stroked the creature’s side gently. Dariel directed all his confusion into wrinkling his forehead. Birke laughed and made some remark. In answer, Anira brushed her palms over the creature’s eyes and then leaned her forehead against it. The tube in Dariel’s mouth withdrew, a feeling like many fingers that had been pressing his teeth and tongue the roof of his mouth releasing all at once. The creature’s bulbous head turned, its legs rippling into motion as it curled away from Dariel.

The prince wrenched himself to one side and scrambled to his feet, spitting and cursing, wiping his mouth. He cast about to locate the monster, and saw it slipping away on its numerous legs. The others laughed.

“They’re harmless, Dariel,” Mor said. “Dou worms, they’re called. You should thank them.” She said something in Auldek. The others grinned. She began to turn away, but could not stop from translating for him. “I said that it has just cleaned your teeth for you. It will improve your breath.”

T hat evening, looking out over Amratseer, Dariel felt the parameters of how he measured the world crumbling. In this place monsters hid in plain sight. One beast might appear to swallow you whole. Another might improve your hygiene. This land was cluttered with signs of a civilization older by ages than his own, and yet cities and culture and centuries of history had been defeated. It all made him feel like he knew nothing about the fullness of the world and all the people and creatures that lived in it. Instead of frightening him, the battering of realizations he had received in Ushen Brae blew air into his lungs. He wanted to see it all…

Dariel strolled over to where the others huddled, though he did not take his eyes off the panorama. “Will the gates give us trouble?”

Mor looked up from the simple map Tam had drawn in the dust. “Why should they? We won’t be troubling them. Amratseer seeren gith’va.”

“Are the gates locked?”

“The gates are open,” Tam said, without looking up. “That’s not the problem.”

“Let’s go through, then,” Dariel said. “We could camp in one of the plazas. Oh, I’d love to explore…”

“We don’t enter seeren gith’va,” Mor said.

“Afraid of ghosts,?” Dariel asked.

“We are mindful of them,” Anira said. She rose from her squatting position and crossed her arms. She was Balbara by birth, very dark skinned, with a sensuously muscular physique. Instead of tattoos, she showed her Anet clan affiliation in scalelike plates beneath her eyes and on the bridge of her nose, subtle enhancements that one had to peer closely to see. “They are Auldek ghosts. They mean us no good.”

“You really don’t intend to go through it? That’s what you’re telling me? Who told you tales of ghosts? Your Auldek masters? Maybe they told tales because they were afraid to go back, and they didn’t want their slaves scouring their old cities for treasure.”

“Which is what you want to do,” Mor said. “Still an Akaran, I see. Still love to pillage and steal.”

“Just look at the place! I don’t want to steal, but aren’t you curious? Don’t you-”

Mor closed the distance between them with a rapidity that made Dariel step back. “No,” she snapped. “Amratseer seeren gith’va. I care about the living. About the People. We sleep here, and begin to skirt Amratseer tomorrow. That’s all. Birke, take the prince and fetch water for camp.”

If Dariel appeared to accept the dismissal it was only because his mind was already beyond it. He climbed down to a nearby stream and filled water-skins with Birke. He ate a stew made from dried strips of meat and fresh roots with the rest of them, and he asked questions as if the answers to them were enough to satisfy him.

“In the north there is an even greater ruin than Amratseer,” Tam said, in answer to one such query. He sat cross-legged, a small stringed instrument cradled in his hands. He played it in short bursts of plucked notes, as if he were writing, or remembering, a tune. He seemed to have forgotten the several blunders he had made during their operation to destroy the soul catcher. “It’s called Lvinreth. It was once the home city of the Lvin. They abandoned it centuries ago. Even now they say that snow lions live among the fallen stones. They walk the empty corridors and roar at night, calling for the clan to return.”

“Why did they abandon it?”

“The Auldek were once as numerous as the stars. This city proves it. But that was long ago. They killed one another off, suffered disease, even invasion from a race across the mountains that came, plundered, and then went home. Many things left them the weakened race the Lothan Aklun found huddling together by the coast. They never said so, but I think they were a scared people on the brink of extinction. The Lothan Aklun saved them from that. They gave them immortality.”

“And us,” Anira said. “They gave them the quota.”

“The Auldek are the ones who really think their old cities are haunted. It’s they who want a new land instead. A war has given them a new purpose in life.”

“And given us Ushen Brae,” Anira said. “It’s a blessing that they’ve gone.”

Mor said something in Auldek. The others received it in silence.

Dariel glanced at her. She sat with her back to the group, looking not at Amratseer but toward the east. Dariel did not ask her what she had said. He was convinced she only spoke Auldek to keep him out of conversations, to draw the line between them, and remind everyone of it. He had a mind to ask her why she chose her enslaver’s tongue at all, but he left it.

L ater that evening, Tam nudged him awake. The excitement that surged through Dariel was not anticipation of hours sitting quietly on watch, listening to the sleeping and alert for the sound of any creature that might make a meal of them. That was not what he had planned. Whatever was to become of him, being in this land was a part of it. He was here, in this foreign place so far from home. He needed to know it completely, to learn, if he could, why his life was entwined so deeply with the fate of Ushen Brae.

He sat cross-legged for a time, but once Tam’s breathing slipped into its steady near snore, Dariel lifted his thin blanket from around his knees and stood. With his boots pinched between his fingers, he tiptoed across the stone, down toward the moonlit city.

The wall was massive. Draped with veins, fissured with cracks, cast in shadow and highlight by the moon’s gray glow, it dwarfed even the great wall around Alecia. Dariel had to walk along it for a time, climbing over roots and debris, around stone blocks that had fallen from the crumbling barricade. The night was loud with insect and bird calls, with scuffling noises nearby, and several distant roars, sounds that Dariel had heard before but that troubled him more acutely now. One of these rent the air in a way that he felt physically, as if it flew at him along the long stretch of the wall. The beast they called a kwedeir? Dariel had yet to see one, but he had heard about them, enormous batlike creatures the Auldek had domesticated and used to hunt fugitive slaves. They bite the head. Not hard enough to kill, Birke said, but just enough to get you screaming. They like that. Dariel had not believed the description. Now he wondered.

He reached a two-doored gate. One door was closed. The other-an enormous thing of old-growth trunks bound together with intricately worked steel-had fallen from its hinges and slammed back against one side of the entranceway. If he had not known better, Dariel would have thought giants had built this place.

The roar came again. He could not tell if it was closer, but it was certainly outside the city’s walls. He wondered if it would wake the others. Probably. Mor would rise, cursing him for a fool. He would not argue with her if she did, but when in his life would he ever stand before these gates again? What Akaran had ever been here to learn of the world as he was doing? None that he knew of. Of course he had to see what could be seen. Dariel crept into the shadow beneath the leaning door and entered the dead city of Amratseer.

The green stones of the place glowed with a low luminescence that Dariel could not figure out. As he moved through the cluttered lanes and alleys, he first thought the light was from the moon, but it was not only that. The glow seemed to fill even shadowed spaces, even the insides of houses viewed through the gapping mouths of doors and open crescents of windows. It was night, still dim and shadowy, but it was a different sort of night than Dariel had experienced.

He walked on the balls of his feet, careful not to trip on the vines or debris littering the stones. Just don’t get lost, he told himself. He proceeded straight ahead as best he could, sighting on the position of the moon and studying the shape of hills behind him for landmarks. Soon the high walls of the multistoried buildings blocked his view. Realizing this, he spun around. His heart pounded in his chest and a film of sweat slicked his forehead. This is absurd, he thought. I’ve only come a hundred paces. The way back is just there.

He decided to look around the buildings near at hand. Stepping into the entrance of one, he let his eyes adjust until he could see his way by the dim glow of the walls and floor. Intricately carved wooden chairs and benches took shape before him. No spirits, though. Not yet. An overturned bowl on the floor, a clutter of long rods leaning in a corner, a cloth hung from a hook…

He entered the next apartment down, a living space, chairs oddly arrayed in a circle, but with no table at its center. He found bedrooms and storage chambers, tiled rooms that must have been for bathing, balconies that looked out onto back gardens that were no longer gardens. They were overgrown enough that trees surged out of them and monkeys-several of whom Dariel startled as much as they startled him-climbed right from them to nest in shelter. How strange it was to walk into homes devoid of their intended inhabitants and yet so full of the signs of what had been.

Stepping out into the night again, Dariel noticed an arched gateway a little farther in. Framed by tall buildings on either side, he could not see where it led. He walked toward it, under the shadow of the archway, and through into a massive courtyard.

What must once have been a marvelous tapestry of paving stones stretched before him. There was a patterning in the colors, he could tell, but it was stained and scarred and faded. The stones were heaved up here and there by tree roots that had escaped their plots, sending out shoots that burst through to become new trees and creating a ragged patchwork. The space was so immense that Dariel could barely make out the opposing archway through the screen of trees. Buildings on either side hemmed the courtyard, reminding him of the upper terraces of the palace on Acacia. Only much, much larger.

Some of the trees were massive, bizarrely so, trunks thicker around than any he had ever seen, branches like scaffolding devoid of foliage but cluttered with… No, Dariel realized. The largest of the trees were not trees at all. They were sculptures, with branches that served as perches for batlike, hulking figures. Some sat atop the limbs. Some hung below them. Kwedeir. Kwedeir carved in stone or cast from bronze or some other metal. Dariel walked toward the nearest of these sculptures, into the stencil of shadow beneath it. Were they life-size? It did not seem possible, but Birke had said they were large enough that an Auldek could ride on their backs. These were certainly that.

“This place… Corinn would hate this place for so many reasons.”

One of the kwedeir turned its head toward Dariel. The prince froze mid-step. It thrust its snout forward and sniffed the air. The creature’s two black eyes pinned Dariel between them. It was not a statue at all, a fact which suddenly seemed absurdly obvious. It was furred and dark and so clearly alive, quite different from the stone family among which it perched.

Dariel let out a whispered curse.

The kwedeir leaped into the air. Its wings flared out, black against the night sky. It let out a cry that seemed to tear the skin from Dariel’s face. He turned and ran. At full sprint he just barely reached the arch before the kwedeir. He bolted straight through as the creature flapped above it.

He was halfway to the row of buildings he had just explored when a moon shadow swept down on him. He jumped to one side as the kwedeir landed on the ground just beside him. It was all flapping membranous wings and awkward limbs and a snapping, inhaling, fetid snout full of yellow teeth. Dariel backed from it, tripped, and then he scrabbled away on all fours for a moment.

The beast grunted and leaped into the air again. It came down just behind Dariel as he hurtled through the nearest open door. The prince stumbled into a chair and sprawled over a table, slid off it, and crashed onto the floor. The kwedeir beat its wings. It kicked at the decaying stone around the doorframe, part of which collapsed at its first blow. It folded its wings and squirmed forward, bursting through the stone with the wriggling force of its body.

Dariel fled further into the apartment. He heard the creature break through and scrabble behind him. He ran through the apartment and into a small courtyard. He darted across it, leaped through a back window, down a flight of stairs, and into a dim passageway. He could not hear the beast anymore, but he kept moving. Through alleys, splashing through ankle-deep muck, under a bridge, and into a small cubicle of a room, in which he stood jammed into a corner.

When his panting had quieted enough that he realized he could hear a rodent squeaking somewhere in the room, Dariel let himself relax. He touched the tips of his fingers to his nose, clipping them together as if they were scissors. “By Tinhadin’s nose,” he said, an expression he had not used since boyhood, appropriate now, for his knees felt weak as a child’s.

How quickly would a thing like that forget him? Short memories. They must have short memories, surely. It would be on to something else by now. And if it did appear again? Be ready for it. That’s all. Fight it. He had not even thought to draw his dagger against the kwedeir. He tugged it free now and stepped into the doorway’s frame.

He stood there for some time, his eyes scanning the sky and moving over the buildings rising around him. Nothing swept down from above. The sounds were all the same as before. He had just moved farther out into the lane, hoping to get his bearings, when something rounded a nearby corner and snapped to stillness, staring at him.

It was not the kwedeir, but when a growl started low in its throat and the hair along its ridgeline rose in an angry bristle, Dariel knew it might just as readily kill him. A hound. A lean, long-legged creature as tall as the hunting dogs at Calfa Ven. Its eyes shone the same color as its short tan hair. It crouched with its head stretched low to the ground, the muscles in its shoulders taut and bulging. It stepped forward. Once, and then again, muscles and joints smooth in action.

Dariel hunkered down, slashing the knife in warning.

The winged shadow swept in, blocking out the sky and freezing the hound with one paw upraised. The kwedeir hovered over it. The hound cocked its head, sensing it. Before it could react the kwedeir folded its wings and dropped. It slammed the hound to the ground and clamped its jaws around the canine’s head and neck. The hound struggled, but the kwedeir raked its hind claw down its back, ripping deep gouges. It pressed down, driving its weight through its hind legs. The hound began to yelp in short, frantic bursts. And then the kwedeir bit hard. The cracking of bone was audible, as was the squelch of fluids spraying through the creature’s jaws. It did not pause a moment, but flared its wings and surged upward. The dead hound swung sickeningly from its jaws as it labored up above the height of the buildings, over them, and out of sight.

Dariel did not move from where he stood framed in the doorway. He simply lowered himself to the stones and sat, panting just as heavily as if he had been running again. “Did that just happen?” He looked from side to side as if there might be a companion there to verify it for him. There was no one, of course, but that did not stop him from asking the question several more times as he gradually caught his breath.

As before, he realized he should move again because he heard squeaking somewhere in the room behind him. Or, not squeaking exactly… more like whimpering, snuffling. There was a pattern to it, as if rodents were making noise and then going silent. Calling and then listening. Come to think of it, the sounds were nothing like those of a mouse or other rodent.

Dariel rose and crept back into the room. There was a crate there he had hardly noticed before, turned on its side, its opening facing the wall. He approached it and stood silent beside it long enough to hear the whimpering again. With his dagger thrust before him, he caught the crate with his toe and pushed it to one side until he saw what lay huddled within.

Two pups. Big-eyed and cautious, staring at him. Innocence in rounded features and floppy ears and slightly trembling jaws.

“Oh… look at you,” Dariel said. He sheathed his knife and reached in cautiously. “Look at you.” He stroked one of the pups on the head. It tried to back away. “Shhh. No, no, it’s fine.” His touch was gentle. His fingers sank into the soft fur, over the ears, and then down under the chin. The other pup inched forward. Its eyes were the same color as its fur, a slightly auburn tint now that he was up close. Just like the hound outside. Dariel offered his hand for it to scent. After doing so, the pup slapped its pink tongue wetly against his knuckles. Before Dariel could smile with the joy this gave him, a realization stopped him.

“That was your mother, wasn’t it?” Dariel moved to the doorway and scanned the scene. It lay as it had before, dark and glowing at the same time, still and crackling with unseen motion, silent and filled with a cacophony of sounds. Exactly the same, yet different now.

Looking back at the pups, Dariel asked, “What am I going to do with you two?”