The Sacred Band

CHAPTER FIFTY

Rialus worried to no end about the frostbite that damaged the tip of his nose and the skin of his cheeks. It did not go deep, but he feared that Devoth or Sabeer or Allek-annoying Allek-would notice it and question him. To him, the dead flesh, which went red and painful and peeling as it warmed in his room, wrote his whole escapade right there on his face. He would cave at the first query. Where had he been that first day of battle? Why had somebody seen him trekking across the snow? Was that where he got that frost damage to his skin? Had he really thought he could desert them, and that his people would want him back?

It all felt like such a great folly. Shuffling away from the enormous torches that were the burning towers; stumbling into the dark; fearful every moment of discovery; and then, eventually, alone in the howling arctic night. How foolish. And then he had been found, bundled into the Acacian camp, surrounded, interrogated. As cold and as miserable as he had been, joy had sputtered to life, a single candle flame of heat and light within him. How foolish. He had spoken to Princess Mena in the flesh, offering his pathetic bits of information, thinking he was saved. He was with Acacians again. He was with his people! How foolish. Scarcely an hour of hope, and then back to the ice again, sent away by people who loved him not, back into the jaws of his enemy.

He would have liked to believe it was a nightmare, except that the proof of its reality was right there in the bits of flesh that Fingel trimmed away from his face, right there in the wounds she treated with an alcohol ointment that kicked his eyes back into his head with the scorching pain of touch. He could not tell if she enjoyed hurting him. She worked, actually, as if the pain did not occur to her at all.

“Fool Rialus!” he said. “Why even have your face tended? Let it fester and go green and kill you. Death, you know, is your only way out of this misery.”

Fingel said nothing. She hardly ever said anything. Finished with her work, she turned away with the warm water, bloody towels, and shears. She put them down and then checked the small pot of broth she had brewing over a shallow pitch fire.

“They wouldn’t have me, Fingel,” Rialus said. He could not tell if she listened to him at all, so unresponsive was she to his words. He spoke anyway, a habit he took some comfort in, which soothed his occasional stutter right out of his voice. “I tried, but they wouldn’t have me. They sent me back. Told me to bring them more. To them I’m nothing but a traitor.” He watched the shape of her back as she worked. Even bundled under several layers of clothing, he could still make out her figure. He had studied it often enough, and thought of it many a time in erotic fantasies. Why had he never forced her? Because I’m afraid of what that would mean about me. It would mark the end of anything worthwhile in me.

“I wonder if you would kill me if I asked you to. It would be your last act as my slave. I could write a note explaining that I had ordered you to do it, so that you wouldn’t get punished. I wonder if you would.”

And yet he did not make the simple changes to his phrasing that would have made the question the young woman had to answer. Instead he looked at his damaged face in his hand mirror. He slurped the meat broth Fingel had made for him. He waited for the summons he dreaded and anticipated.

I t did not come. Not that day, at least. Not during the following evening, nor in the dark of that night. His station remained immobile, steaming away like a behemoth at rest. He heard movement outside, all the normal sounds. Men shouting, laborers at work. Beasts bellowing. A few times he heard the distinctive chattering of freketes in flight. They seemed louder than usual, more agitated. And yet hour after hour passed without the expected knock on his door or the shout that would call him to explain himself.

On the morning of the second day since the battle, Rialus could not help asking Fingel what was happening outside. She had just returned from some errand. Stripping off layers, she said, “Nothing.”

“Nothing? Where’s Devoth? Why haven’t they called for me?”

He knew she would not answer these questions. He followed them with others that she did not answer either. Eventually, he could not take her silence anymore. He pulled on his furs, yanked tight his hood, and shoved his hands into his mittens. He went out to find the people he most feared finding.

Devoth and the other clan leaders sat at council in the large station outfitted for the purpose. The human guards at the entrance barely noticed as Rialus walked past them. They seemed preoccupied. They talked among themselves. Argued actually. Rialus slipped inside.

The council was in full swing, crowded and contentious. Several Auldek were talking at once, each of them vying to be the center of discussion and none of them managing it.

“I told you we were too many,” Calrach said. When nobody listened, he slammed his palm on the table. “You forget that we Numrek did this journey before, fought these Acacians before. I told you it was foolish to display the whole army in front of them. Now you see why. We can do nothing with so many against so few! We should be more selective.”

To this, Skahill offered the slight that the Numrek had made this crossing before, but they did so like thieves in the night, with no one to oppose them until they were welcomed as guests, given a fortress and a steaming chamber to feast in. Considering that, what did Calrach know about how to fight the war they were fighting, up here, on the ice? “You want to be more selective. Perhaps we should send the Numrek to do battle by yourselves, all eleven of you. Will that shut your mouth?”

“I would do it with joy,” Calrach ground through his teeth, no sign in his visage of the joy he spoke of. “Not everyone is so afraid to die as you.”

“Afraid! Anets were in the front lines. We pleaded for the cowards to fight us.”

“So you say. Perhaps you pleaded them to bend you over and-”

Skahill shot to his feet, slamming a fist on the table as he did so and roaring in wordless rage. Calrach shoved the man next to him as he began coming around the table. Skahill did the same, upsetting chairs and the people in them, clawing with one hand for his dagger.

Faster than Rialus could follow with his eyes, Sabeer went from sitting to crouching on top of the table, with an arm thrust toward either man. Each fist clenched a curved crescent of steel. She stayed that way a moment, lean and gorgeous. Utterly terrifying. “Stop it! Keep bickering and I’ll take you to death myself. Say another word in anger. Either of you. Just one more word…”

Neither man took her up on that. They continued to glare at each other, but they held their tongues and crashed back into their seats. If they had not been warriors they could have been chastened, angry children.

What in Hadin’s name is going on here? Rialus wondered. He had never seen the Auldek so ill-tempered. Herith glared at Sabeer’s back as she climbed down from the table. Or so melancholy. Millwa leaned forward on the table, his head cradled in his hands. Or so distressed. Jafith… Well, if Rialus had not found the idea impossible, he would have said that Jafith had been crying recently. And Devoth wore a look of profound perplexity written on the lines of his forehead and with the vague, unfocused way his gaze floated without fixing on anything.

What in Hadin’s name? Rialus avoided the empty seat at Devoth’s side. His seat. He slunk around the edge of the chamber and found a stool that hid him behind the bulky shoulders of several of the chieftain’s assistants. There he listened. As the chieftains paid those behind them no mind, he even scooted up beside the assistants and whispered questions to them. In the hours that followed, he pieced together a mental mosaic of what had transpired.

The battle had not gone well for the Auldek at all. Instead of a day of glorious slaughter, they had experienced one of confusion, frustration, humiliation, and even an Auldek death. This latter thing it took him some time to understand. He could not picture how it came about, but somehow Mena had cut through most of Howlk’s neck in midair, both of them riding on Nawth’s back. The impact from his fall finished the job, sending his head twirling across the ice, through the feet of the high-stepping, horrified Auldek. His body spasmed through death after death, all his lives tearing themselves out of him in one long agony. The Auldek who saw this from up close-including Jafith-were shaken to their cores.

Nawth did not die from the fall, but he was so crippled that the clan chieftains had decided he would have to be abandoned. Freketes could not be killed for some sacred reason that Rialus could not fathom, but neither could injured ones be kept alive. Their bones do not heal, apparently. Nawth would never be anything more than broken. Better he be dead, then, by Auldek logic.

Incredible. And there was more.

The things he heard stoked the fires of rebellion inside him. The Auldek could make no sense of the tactics Mena had employed, but he could. He saw the results of the things he had told Mena in all of it. She had cut the amulet off Nawth’s neck because he had told her she should. Right? Of course. Yes. She had avoided fighting the Auldek because he had told her about their impenetrable body armor. And she had sent volleys of arrows into the slave flanks because he had said they would be vulnerable. It all seemed so obvious to him. His culpability swam in his head, making him dizzy.

I did this, he thought. I helped this…

“Rialus leagueman!” Devoth’s voice snatched him up from his paroxysms of self-congratulation. He had quite forgotten himself, and was stunned to find all the chieftains gazing at him. “Come to my side,” Devoth said.

When Rialus managed to reach him, after stumbling over stools and having to squeeze among bodies that stubbornly did not move to let him pass, Devoth said, “Where have you been?”

Exactly the question Rialus had feared. His short-lived euphoria evaporated, replaced by the dread he had become so used to. “I-I’ve been trying to understand.”

“You and all of us. Why do they not fight us, Rialus?”

Feeling his pulse quicken, Rialus picked up the stylus on the table before him as if he had just remembered something he needed to make a note of.

“Tell me. You know them. Why will they not fight us as they should? Are they cowards? Have we come across the roof of the world to fight cowards?”

No, you’ve come across to die, Rialus thought. He said, “Yes, they are cowards. Look no f-f-further than that. They’re cowards.”

Devoth did not seem to have heard. “It’s like they are wolves and we the prey. They attack our weak points, the lame, the young. They avoid the strong. I did not expect this.”

“Don’t compare them to wolves,” Herith said. “The Wrathic are not cowards.”

“Perhaps the Acacians are not either,” Sabeer said. She spoke to Herith, but her eyes were on Rialus.

He looked down and stayed that way as the conversation circled around the idea of Acacian cowardice.

Some time later, Sabeer remained the only one who saw something other than cowardice in the events of the day. “The princess did not avoid Howlk and Nawth,” she said. “You cannot say she is a coward.”

“Exactly,” Rialus said. He regretted it the moment the word was out of his mouth. She had just said something so obviously true the affirmation slipped out of him.

The other chieftains fell silent. Devoth turned and looked directly at Rialus. “No, she showed bravery in that, at least. How did she know to cut loose the amulet?”

“She knew more than that,” Sabeer said. “She knew our strengths and avoided them. She did not strike at us-at the Auldek-or engage the mounted warriors. Arrows may be cowardly, but they felled thousands of divine children. She hurt us more than we hurt her. Clever, in a way.”

Having not taken his eyes off Rialus, Devoth pressed, “Rialus, how did she know these things?”

Rialus kept his head bent, his attention on the page. He did not want to speak. Words bubbled in him too ferociously. He did not want to let them out, and yet he did not even shrug. He did not motion with his fingers or purse his lips or give any answer to Devoth at all. He knew he should, but he did not. He wrote, How did she know? How did she know?

“Stop scribbling.”

How did she…

“Stop scribbling and answer me!”

“I have no answer to give!” Rialus snapped. He slashed the stylus across the words he had written and tossed it down. He looked around at the Auldek faces staring at him. “What do you want me to say? That I snuck out of camp in the night, ran across the ice to them, told them all your secrets, ran back across the ice, and crept into my quarters unseen? Would you believe that? Even know I’m a spy? If you were wise, you would kill me, kill me now before I bring your entire race to ruin!”

Rialus finished shouting. His face flushed red and his hands trembled. The Auldek around the table stared at him with mild revulsion, as if he had just demonstrated his insanity in some depraved manner. Devoth asked quietly, “Is that true?”

“Yes, that’s exactly what I did,” Rialus said. His voice dropped to match Devoth’s and lost its edge, but he looked at the chieftain as he said it. “I met a lioness on the way and I broke her neck.”

The room was silent for a moment. The chieftains stared. The officers and assistants behind them craned forward. “Broke her neck?” Devoth asked.

“With my bare hands.”

A grin tugged at one corner of Devoth’s lips, and then won over the other as well. “All right, Rialus leagueman. All right.” He slapped Rialus on the back and shared his sudden humor with the others. “He is a lion killer,” he said. “Our Rialus. Who would have thought it?”

“Lioness killer,” Sabeer corrected. The others guffawed, enjoying yet another joke at Rialus leagueman’s expense.

Rialus sat looking at the scribbled words on the parchment before him, hating them.

B y the time he left the meeting, well into the night, he knew of the other significant development in the war. The night after the battle, Mena and the Acacian army had packed up their camp and departed. That was why there had been no continuation of the battle the next day. Mena had the tail end of her forces into the ice slabs before outriders on woolly rhinos could reach them. This was another thing the chieftains debated at length. Whether it was cowardice on Mena’s part or some design they could not fathom, there seemed only one course of action: to pursue. The Acacians ran toward the Auldek’s goal anyway, so why not chase them out onto the Mein Plateau, then on toward the heart of Acacia?

T he next morning the jarring sensation of his station grinding into motion awoke Rialus. Whips cracked like ice serpents, brutal, punishing sounds met by bellows of protest from the beasts. Flakes of dust rained down on him from the beams above. The engines of the station gurgled and groaned. All the familiar sounds and sensations. They were in motion again.

“We’re going home,” he said out loud, knowing that Fingel would be sitting on her mat, engaged in some small work already. “We’re going home.”

It proved to be a difficult homecoming. The clear weather of the recent days ran away, pursued by a blizzard of snow and ice crystals. Rialus stayed huddled in his station as much as he could. Though he was secure inside, Rialus could not escape Nawth’s anguished jabbering at being left behind. How could his voice travel so far, grate on the ears with such intensity? Nawth’s entreaties were so close to language. He sounded like he was fumbling with speech to make a case for himself. It was made worse by the cacophony of cries and moans and bellows of the other freketes swooping in the air above. And his circling brothers… they heard him. They left him anyway. Rialus could not be certain, but he thought that even days later the wind brought snatches of Nawth’s ongoing misery to him, across miles of ice. Haunting. He would never forget the sound.

Allek brought him news of the troubles they were having. Rialus could not have said why, but the Numrek youth seemed to like spending time with him, belittling him, teasing him. Allek could not do so to anybody else, so Rialus served the purpose.

The weather was a frozen chaos. “You would get blown by the wind,” he said to himself. “The cats would chase you as you bounced and screamed.” Even without the storms, the ice fields would have been harder to navigate than anything they had faced so far. The enormous slabs of sea ice thrust up at chaotic angles. Dropped off into crevices they could not see the bottom of. Ice that looked thick shattered beneath the slightest touch. Animals slipped on the slopes and fell, wedged down below. They broke legs or bit each other or kicked their human handlers-to death in several cases.

The stations that had rolled over so much now could barely progress at all. The ground was too irregular. “It’s not even ground at all!” It had none of the natural shape of mountains or hills or river channels. One of the stations was damaged beyond repair when the ice under one side collapsed, canting it sideways in a manner that broke its spine and sent pitch sloshing about, aflame, inside it.

And came the time an entire station-one of the dining halls that fed the divine children in efficient shifts-fell through the ice and disappeared into a cauldron of glass-blue water. Everyone in or on the station went into the water. People and animals near it slipped screaming on the tilted slabs. Nearly everyone involved died. The divine children who managed to claw back to the surface and get pulled out were as pale as death by the time they did so.

One Auldek was inside the station. Of him nothing was heard. Another had been on a kwedeir just beside it. Mount and rider went into the water. Neither came up. Allek had not been there, but you would think he had been by the glassy-eyed way he described the Auldek’s plunge. He imagined him stoic in the moment of realization, still instead of thrashing, looking up with stern acceptance of his fate as his iron-boned weight plunged him downward.

More likely he was screaming like a girl and jabbering water words as he died. Again and again, Rialus thought.

“If that had been one of the chieftains’ stations, or the temple of records… I can’t even imagine it. The Acacians did it,” Allek said.

Rialus looked up. He noticed that Fingel did as well. “What?” he asked.

“We think so. The ice was… weakened in places. Lines cut in it. Some of the pitch they stole from us, Sabeer said. They cut lines in the ice with it, made weak sections.” Allek scratched his neck, and then looked askance at Rialus. “Your people are wicked.”

Wonderfully so, Rialus thought. He glanced at Fingel, who dropped her eyes back to the stitch work in her hands.