The Sacred Band

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

It’s finally come to it, Rialus thought. He stood atop an Auldek station in a buffeting wind, taking in the view south toward Mena’s army. In the dwindling light the Acacians were visible as a stain, a dark slash across the pale expanse of snow. War. Another war. For the second time in my life I’m helping an enemy invade my own country.

He hated the words but could not shake them out of his head. He believed more fervently than ever that he was not a traitor. None of it was as it seemed. He loved the Known World and all its people! In his dreams he replayed his recent exchange with Princess Mena again and again. In his dreaming version he leaped across the few strides that had separated them. He joined her and rebelled against the Auldek. He flew up into the heavens on her dragon’s back, snug behind the princess, so elated that he crashed into consciousness on the swell of it.

If he could dream that, there had to be the possibility of truth in it. His dream self did not know it was only a dream self. Was not the point of such imaginings to prove that he was, somewhere inside himself, the man who could act like that? He could feel the pride and euphoria of decisive, righteous action for once in his life. Of course he could. It was not too late. He still believed that the Giver rewarded his worthies. The fact that his waking hours contradicted that truth frustrated him more than he could bear. It was not a new feeling, but he was getting very, very tired of it.

He climbed down from the station after only a few minutes, already feeling his fingers and toes stiffening. As ever, he was absurdly bundled in layers of fur. No warmer for it, though. Howlk had joked that furs only kept a living body warm because of the heat within it. “Perhaps you are dead already,” he had said, poking him, “just a shell of a man who doesn’t know it yet.”

Though Rialus climbed down with all the slow caution he could, his feet slipped off the rungs several times. On the lower landing he fell flat on his backside. At least the station was not moving. It had stopped the evening before at the first sighting of the Acacian force. Rialus knew that the Auldek had wanted to reach solid ground before meeting the Acacians, but they did not seem too troubled to be out in frozen arctic sea. The ice was so thick and constant it might as well have been stone. It did not creak beneath the weight of the stations.

The Acacian force had pushed their camp forward early the next day, staking out ground a couple miles from the jumbled shoreline. The battle would commence the next day. Because of it, Rialus scurried across the frozen ground between the steaming stations and spent several hours sitting beside Devoth during his war council with the other chieftains. Rialus was there to answer any last-minute questions about Acacian tactics. He had long since given up explaining that he did not really know anything about military matters. When pressed on details, he sat dumbly. He refused to answer, despite the chuffs about the ears and the threats directed at him.

It did not matter anymore. The chieftains were more intent on figuring out their positions in the line of battle than anything else. The Lvin took the center front, of course-the honor of the spearpoint, which Menteus Nemre had won for them in such bloody fashion back in Avina. The Kulish Kra got the left flank for some ancestral reason that Rialus could not fathom. The Antok, it seemed, won the right flank based on the toss of a handful of colorful bone dice. Millwa, the Antok chieftain, grinned his pleasure. The rest squabbled for positions behind them.

Rialus sat through it all, miserable, his head pounding. He might as well have been surrounded by a mob of jostling children. Did none of them understand that they were arguing over which of them was lucky enough to get them and their slaves killed first? It was almost like they did not know what the morrow really held for them. Yes, they would overrun Mena’s forces. How could they not, when each of the Auldek had lives to spare imbedded in him or her? But it would still be a horror of pain and slaughter, and the divine children had only their one life to risk.

Just when Rialus thought the meeting might be drawing to a close, Skahill, the head of the Anet clan, offered to trade positions with the Antoks, arguing that the dice toss was not strong enough to override their seniority. He made some argument about their performance in a footrace they had held on a stony beach earlier in the invasion. Rialus wanted to smack him. Instead, Rialus took off his inner gloves and pinched a mist pellet in his fingers. Nobody took any notice. He stuffed it up his nostril with his thumb and inhaled. The first time he had seen Howlk do this he had been horrified. Now he was quite used to it. The ball disintegrated almost immediately, and the euphoria of the mist came fast afterward. Rialus closed his eyes and tried to relax.

Remembering what Sabeer had confessed to him, he realized that the Auldek did not personally remember the wars they had fought in more than a hundred years ago. They may have done battle themselves, but their knowledge of the events would be no more real to them than things they read in books. The actions they attributed to themselves would be like those of characters in the old tales.

How do they even know their own records are accurate? he wondered. Acacian histories were full of rubbish. He opened one eye and scanned the faces gathered around the table. You sad people. You don’t even know who you are anymore.

When the meeting ended, Howlk steered Rialus into the frigid dark with an arm clamped over his shoulder, following Sabeer. Rialus did not protest. Within a few minutes he was stripping off again inside the station that the Lvin used for martial exercises. It was as hot as a steam room. Despite the cold outside, Rialus was sweaty from the moment he entered. He tried to cling to the mist’s sedative effects, but doing so just pushed him further away from the mild bliss he had managed during the meeting.

“Rialus, I’m going to show you our secrets,” Sabeer said. “Let me hear your opinion. Come.”

She stood in the center of a sparring ring marked out on the floor, a small gathering of Auldek and sublime motion around her. She held one of the curving Auldek swords and stepped deliberately through a choreographed routine of strikes, parries, and footwork. At first Rialus thought she was wearing a black training suit of some sort. It clung as snug as leather shrunk to fit her contours, with a patterning to it something like fish scales. As ever, Sabeer wore it with a deadly sensual grace.

“Devoth doesn’t like it that you’ve decided to shut your mouth to us,” she said. “I don’t either. Perhaps you are having pangs of doubt now. Perhaps you’re dreaming that your princess will defeat us. For your own sake, you should forget such hopes. She has no chance against us.”

When Howlk took up a sword and slashed at the back of her leg, Rialus thought he had finally gone mad from his lust for her. The strike was hard and fast. Rialus expected it to take her leg off at the thigh and send her sprawling, blood spurting horribly. He went instantly light-headed. A cry of “No!” escaped his lips.

Instead, Sabeer spun on Howlk and came back at him in a playful attack. The sword had done no damage at all. They carried on for a time, Sabeer obviously letting Howlk strike her. She even tossed her sword to Menteus Nemre, who stood watching, and went at Howlk with a sudden barrage of kicks and punches. She blocked his sword strikes with her forearms, and she kicked his blade free with a sudden roundhouse kick. The move was lightning fast, the first that Howlk responded to with true surprise.

The two of them were all grins as they turned to Rialus. “Our battle skin, Rialus,” Sabeer said, raising her arms and twisting to display her suit. “You see, in this I will be very hard to kill. They won’t be able to chop off an arm or a leg. Believe me, that’s something we worry about. The souls inside us can do nothing about a missing limb.” She paused a moment, looking as if she were wistfully disappointed in the souls for not being more diligent in their service to her. “But I won’t lose any. The amusing thing is that the princess and her soldiers won’t even know we’re wearing it. It’s against the skin, as you see. I’ll have all my clothing on over it. For this battle, at least. Down in Acacia in the warmth of spring I’ll fight just like this. It’ll be a sight, won’t it?”

“It’s… armor?” Rialus asked, unable to twin the concept with the way the fabric showed the curve of Sabeer’s hips and the contours of her muscles.

“Of a sort. It’s flexible, but it can’t be cut. It even absorbs the impact of a blow. You may come away bruised, but that’s better than limbless. The records say that Lothan Aklun bestowed it on us so that we would have a harder time killing each other off. It worked.” She lit up with an idea. “Do you want to try to cut me?”

He didn’t, but she would not leave off the idea until he had tried several times with an Auldek dagger. It was as she described. He could not cut her. When he tried to stab her square in the sculpted abdomen, he did no more than twist his wrist. She went back on her heels, but that might have been in amusement as much as from the force of his thrust.

“Has Princess Mena anything like this?”

Rialus shook his head. The mist’s effects were long gone. Fatigue and depression seeped up inside him again. “No, nothing like it.”

“Did she really fight an eagle god? What was its name?”

“Maeben,” Rialus murmured, hoping she did not ask him to retell the tale yet again.

She folded her arms and stood beside him, close enough to touch him with her hip. They watched Howlk work through some technique with Menteus Nemre. “All the things you have told me about her,” she mused, “I almost don’t want to kill her. Perhaps I won’t. Not straightaway, at least. I’ll cut her legs out from under her. We’ll stop the bleeding somehow and then she and I can talk.”

“If you’re going to cut anything off, you should start with her sword arm,” Rialus said. He regretted saying it immediately.

Sabeer grinned and ran a finger up his arm. “There, Rialus, you’re talking again. Good. It’s proof that you love me. You think you want me dead and buried. I see it in your eyes. But you’re not only eyes, are you? Other parts of you like me very much.” She pretended to reach for his groin. She let him squirm away. “Have you decided where you want to live yet?”

This was one of Sabeer’s favorite topics. Through the many long nights of the trip she had made Rialus detail every locale in the Known World that he could remember. When he grew bored, she had always pressed him to think about where he would want to live once the war was over and he was allowed to live a life of leisure. He had placed himself in a cliffside villa in Manil. He had walked the estates of Bocoum, or lived in a stacked tower surrounded by the teeming life of Alecia. He had taken in the view from Calfa Ven. He had imagined a rustic lodge somewhere in Talay, from which he could watch the sun set into the grasslands and sip cool beverages with his feet up, served for all the rest of his days by a staff composed entirely of brown-skinned women.

He had even, to his surprise, found himself thinking of Cathgergen. He could not understand why he had been so unhappy there. The idea of being cocooned from the cold, locked inside an immobile fortress of stone far away from the world’s machinations seemed a sort of bliss. Back then, he had compromised nothing. He was just himself, Rialus, a governor with very little actual work to do. He had not yet become a traitor to the realm two times over, a pawn for Maeander Mein, a joke in Hanish’s eyes, slave to the Numrek, now a guide for the Auldek. What a journey his life had been. So full of improbable twists and turns. Would that he wasn’t knotted in the center of it all now, trapped and being dragged forward to a resolution that, no matter what Sabeer claimed, could only be another type of disgrace for him.

He answered Sabeer’s question. “No, I haven’t decided where to live yet.” He thought, I haven’t decided if I want to live yet.

This tendency toward morbidity was new to Rialus. He had always valued his life highly. Increasingly, he mused on just giving up. That thought brought him back to Gurta. It seemed important that she and the child he had never met mourn him, but he was no longer sure they would. Gurta could know nothing of his fate at this point. When she found out, it seemed to him, she would reject him out of hand. A traitor. How could he ever have thought she would take him back after he arrived as the mascot of an invading army? Her temperament would never allow her to see beyond appearances. He could describe his heroic dreams all he wanted. But what did you do? she would ask. But what did you do? To have her back, he would have to do something to deserve her.

Rialus had just decided that he had stood around long enough to be able to depart when the first explosion shook the station. He thought for a moment that the vehicle was starting to move again, but that was not it. It did not move forward at all, just boomed and then trembled. It reminded him of an earthquake he had once experienced in Aos. Everyone stopped.

As the stillness stretched, Rialus could almost believe that they had all imagined the sensation. Then another boom came, more distinct this time, followed by shouts and the bellowing of some animals and the long, low groan that was a warning horn sounding.

The room erupted with motion. The Auldek and the sublime motion grabbed garments, tossed one another weapons, and then careened down the stairs and out into the night.

Sabeer pulled up just before descending. “Rialus, come!”

The night smacked him as he stumbled into it, still tugging his outer coat on. The scene that greeted him was utter confusion. Shapes darted around him, nearly knocking him from his feet. An antok roared by, the thick chain that was supposed to bind it skittering across the ice. The sky glowed a strange yellow. When the top of a station a little distance away exploded into flames, Rialus wondered why. There were several such fires blazing up into the night. How such an accident could occur in not one, but two, three-boom!-four different places. It couldn’t, could it?

“We’re being attacked,” he concluded.

Sabeer yanked him into motion. They ran between two stations and along a line of frantic oxen, all the creatures pulling at the ropes that bound them, kicking and biting one another. Rialus thought he heard the clash of steel off in one direction, but he could not be sure. They came around a sledge piled high with supplies and stepped into the heat and glare of one station. The entire structure was aflame. It crackled and combusted, seemed to breathe air in and then roar it back out like the embodiment of some fire god. Figures ran around, lit by the blaze, trying to organize some way to fight it.

Devoth shouted orders, pointing and gesturing, half giving directions and half dancing through fits of rage. “My amulet! Bring it to me!” he shouted.

His frekete mount, Bitten, seemed just as angry as he was. He clawed the ice, shooting weary glances at the fire. His wings cast evil shadows, the veins in them glowing red when they caught the firelight.

Right through all this, a snow lioness trotted, a corpse dangling from her jaws. The cat seemed at ease amid the chaos, strolling almost. Sabeer pulled Rialus after it. The body’s hands and feet dragged on the ice. He was not Auldek. That was obvious, but it was not until the lion dropped the body at Devoth’s stomping feet that Rialus got close enough to see more. Devoth gripped him by the shoulder and pressed him closer, kicking others back so that light from the fire illuminated him. “Who is this? Who is this!” he snarled, beastlike himself in his rage.

On his hands and knees-with the lioness and her bloody jaws just inches away-Rialus peered at the man. He was a stranger. His face was pale, with lean features scarred by frostbite.

“Who is he?” Devoth asked. “Answer me!”

“I do-don’t…” Rialus pulled off a mitten, reached out with trembling fingers and drew the man’s stringy golden hair back behind his ear. There was a tattoo on his cheek, a crescent slashed like a tear escaping the corner of his eye. He had seen it once before. “A Scav. He’s a Scav.”

“You know him then!”

“No, no, no. I knew some of his people before.” Rialus started to explain that he had only met a few prisoners brought to him at Cathgergen for petty crimes and poaching.

Devoth was not listening. A slave ran up with the amulet and thick chain he had been shouting for. Devoth wrenched it from him. Rounding on Rialus, he seized him by the collar of his coat with his free hand. “You didn’t tell me she would do this!”

“How could I?” Rialus asked. “I didn’t know.”

“Your princess is a coward who sneaks in the night. She has just made it worse for your people.” The Auldek flung Rialus away, and then strode toward Bitten. The creature bent to accept the chain and amulet that Devoth slung around his neck and fastened. A moment later, Bitten surged upward, one dead-start jump that took him and Devoth up above the height of the flames, where his wings fanned out and lifted them higher.

Rialus stood there a moment, forgotten even by Sabeer, who had joined the fight against the fire. He knew he should check on his station to make sure his room and all his documents were safe, but he was frozen in place. He had just discovered something. He was sure of it, but he could not quite place what it was. Another station exploded with a concussion of sound and flame, Rialus almost did not notice, so transfixed was he. The Auldek shouted curse-laden orders. Divine children rushed toward the new fires, as if they had anything prepared to fight them.

And then he had it. Rialus knew he had it because the thought began like a centipede at the base of his spine and ran up his back with a hundred legs. And having the revelation, he knew what he had to do with it.