The Sacred Band

CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

Nualo was the first to appear, called by Corinn’s reading from The Song. Circling high above the ruined valley of Calfa Ven, she saw the moving tumult of his passage. It began as a disturbance to the east, like a small, dense storm roiling on the horizon and moving at an unnatural speed. She did not know why she knew it was he, except perhaps that his hunger was greater than any of the others’, his evil more pronounced.

“How close do we let them get?” Hanish asked.

Close enough, but not too close.

“That could be hard to measure,” Hanish said. “There’s no ruler for such a thing.”

When Nualo was near enough that Corinn could see his tall, elongated form striding up and down the mountains, she turned Po and headed north. They left behind the devastation of Calfa Ven, but there were signs of the Santoth’s wandering destruction written across the hills and valleys beneath them. In places it looked like giant versions of the worms that had eaten her mouth had chewed up the earth and then vomited it back in twisted, sickening piles of soil and vegetation and rock. Would the Santoth do this to the entire world? Would studying The Song move them away from this rage and hunger for destruction, or would it just make them more horrific versions of what they already were? She knew the answers to these questions. The world below her both prompted and confirmed them, over and over again. Whatever had twisted the Santoth had taken them to a state they could not come back from. She hoped the same was not true of herself.

Looking back at Nualo, seeing him shoulder through great pine trees as if they were shrubs, Corinn did not notice how close they flew to another Santoth. Po barked an alarm. The figure climbed up over a buttress of rock on the mountain below them. As soon as he stood with his feet planted, he threw up his arms and bellowed out his garbled version of the song. The notes rushed upward in the form of long, deformed black birds, with eyeless heads stretched eagerly forward from their bodies. They flew without so much as flapping their wings, like darts with only the force of the sorcerer’s voice to propel them.

Po twisted and turned as they reached him. He contorted his body as the bird-shaped missiles zipped by. Each of them cried out as it missed, leaving in its wake a scorching burn that fouled the air. The stench of malevolence was so thick Corinn began coughing; a painful, useless gesture that wracked her chest with pain.

“Don’t breathe it,” Hanish said. “Don’t breathe.”

Hanish’s hands reached around and grasped hers, steadying her. Through her, he pulled the reins to direct Po into a sliding dive away from the sorcerer. The missiles continued to fly past them, but Po kept at his maneuvers even as he banked away, wings pulled tight to edge their speed forward.

One of the birds punched through Po’s left wing. It expanded on impact. Its legs and wings and beak all became hooks that tore through the thick membrane. Blood and tissue sprayed from the ragged hole. The barbed bird then sank away beneath them. Po screamed. He yanked the wing in, sending them into a corkscrew dive. Hanish fought to get control, still using Corinn’s hands. The spin was too chaotic.

“Corinn!” Hanish called. “I can’t…”

Corinn reached for the creature’s mind. She found it a cauldron overflowing with pain and anger and fear. The wound was worse even than it looked. The touch of the bird’s hooks carried the poison of tainted sorcery with it. It ate at Po, burning his wing like flaming oil. The agony of it was driving him mad.

Corinn grasped for the song. She built it inside her head. She conjured the spell she would have used to heal him and shared it with Po. It could not do so, not as she would have liked, but just hearing it in his mind soothed him. She reminded him of who he was, how strong and wonderful. He stretched the wing again, pulling them out of the descent, and flew. The ragged hole remained, loose skin flapping horribly in the wind, but Corinn could feel that he was fighting the poisoned magic, deadening it. And he was beating his wings anyway.

Looking back, Corinn saw the evil bird drifting toward the sorcerer. Dural. That was who it was. He stood calmly, his hands folded, no longer singing, no longer enormous, just a man waiting for the bird to drift back to him. Something about his receding outline gave Corinn his name and brought to mind the face that she had seen him wear back at the Carmelia. Before she looked away, she saw Nualo reach the rock buttress. He, too, had shrunk to normal dimensions. He conferred with Dural, both of them reaching to catch the falling bird.

They have the scent of us, Corinn said. That’s what they just took. They’re hunters, and that bird has brought them Po’s scent. They can follow us around the world now.

Hanish responded by pulling his hands away from hers, giving her the reins again, and wrapping his arms back around her waist. She knew what he was thinking, and loved him for not saying it: better that they have that scent. It would help draw them to her as she led them on. With the part of her mind reserved for Po, she thanked him for it.

Coming on the wide, glimmering snake that was the River Ask, Po rode the air up its course, toward Candovia. All that day they flew. All that day Nualo and Dural trailed them. Toward dusk, another Santoth, Abernis, ran south toward them along the surface of the river. At times he jumped from rock to rock. At others he simply churned across the surface of the water. When he attacked them, he did so with a motion of his hands that scooped water from the river and sent it in a flood up and over them.

As it fell toward them, Corinn knew it was not water any longer. It still sparkled in the air but was more like shards of glass than liquid. The wave of it stretched so wide and moved so quickly that Po could not avoid it. Instead, he beat furiously toward it. As it fell on them, he wrapped his wings around himself, the short lengths of bone in them going loose. They wrapped across his belly and over his back. They covered Corinn and the ghost, and still went farther, wrapping around and around. They punched through the rain of shards like an arrow. Corinn felt Po’s agony as the glass slivers cut into him, savage as living things. They cut into his wings, but not deep enough to touch Corinn.

Po’s momentum carried him through them. Only then did he snap his wings out and catch the air again. They were even more shredded. Like the previous time, the cuts festered with acid. Like last time, Corinn helped Po fight them, to fly through the pain with yet another Santoth now behind them.

That night they stayed aloft. They saw the lights of Pelos to the east but stayed far away from that city. Po carved a meandering course, avoiding settlements as much as possible. During the dark hours Corinn felt other Santoth join the hunters. And early the next morning, Tenith emerged out of the marshes of the Lakelands. He hurled the corpses of cranes at them. The creatures sprang to undead life and surged up toward them. Po dodged a few. Caught one in his jaws. He snatched it out of the air and then, with one whiplike snapping of his neck, he sent it twirling toward the ground. Another he batted away with a foot. Each touch of them was filled with corruption, but he did it anyway. He was getting better at this already.

“Corinn,” Hanish said, “I’ve not told you how glad I am that we have this dragon. And they don’t.”

Don’t tell it to me, Corinn answered. Tell him.

Po swung his neck around and gazed at them a moment. Corinn knew he did so because she asked him to, but it looked very much as if he had turned to hear Hanish’s praise. He received it gracefully, blinking his large, golden eyes and never losing the rhythm and strength of his wingbeats.

The Santoth were pulling together now, drawn not just to her but also back to one another. Corinn kept them as close to the far horizon as much as she could, watching their numbers grow. They flew out over the northern ocean, and then cut around the peninsula north of Luana. The Santoth ran across the waves as if they were moving features of the land. They were tireless, persistent. They could no more stop pursuing her than they could choose to stop breathing.

Good, Corinn thought. Good. Hunt me. Hunt me to our deaths.

Hanish stayed pressed to her the whole time. Often, he spoke beside her ear, telling her tales like the ones he had that night he spent with her after she tried to cut herself a new mouth. He spoke of his childhood, of his brothers. Amazingly, he found humor in even the brutal Meinish winters, in the training that was forced upon him, in the constant need to prove himself to both the living and the dead. Corinn had never shared such stories with him. She had never been able to see the light in the darkness that he did.

Or she had never been able to before.