The Sacred Band

CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT

As soon as the vessel cleared the quay, Lethel called to his pilot, “Let’s go.” He sat on a seat he had ordered specially constructed. It perched high on the sleek ship’s deck, the perfect vantage from which to watch the Lothan Aklun vessel devour whatever distance he set it toward. “Make it fast,” he shouted as he pulled tight the straps across his waist.

The pilot backed out, as silently as if by sail power, and yet without any sails or oars or poles. The boat moved with a power infused into every portion of the craft. It spun atop the water and surged forward, into a curving arc that bore them away from the estate Lethel had claimed on one of the craggier barrier isles. It moved north around the island, then turned west.

When the open stretch of the Inner Sea came into view, the vessel raced, smacking and leaping across the waves with a speed like nothing Lethel had ever experienced. He clung to his chair, roaring with laughter each time the spray fanned over him. He liked speed very much. In no time at all, the leagueman’s hair was a disheveled bird’s nest blown back behind his pointed cranium. He clutched his skullcap in his hands, riding high on the exhilaration of the journey.

When they joined the invasion fleet, the great mass of soul vessels plowed toward Avina. Lethel had his pilot zip among the barges and larger ships at breathtaking speeds. He could not help himself. He laughed idiotically. Every spray of water that fell over him, or any expected turn that yanked his body one way or another, caused him to throw back his head in uncontrolled hilarity. To think that the league had avoided military campaigns all these years! What a waste.

As far as Lethel was concerned, this invasion was a lark. They could not lose. The outcome was obvious. They had the troops. Ishtat by the thousands. Sire El’s trained army of quota slaves. They had the means to deposit these troops anywhere they wished. Everything just as he had told Dariel Akaran and Mor of the Free People. The only thing for him to do, really, was to enjoy it.

The pilot pushed them through a narrow, choppy gap between two barges. Their ship squeezed past them and shot out ahead of the armada. The coastline of Avina stretched before him. It shone bright in the morning light. The city’s drab seawall crawled with life.

The Free People out to defend themselves, Lethel thought. How charming.

They raced toward the shoreline. The pilot pressed the speed so unrelentingly that Lethel let go of his cap and gripped the seat beneath him. His cap flew away in the wind. The pilot wrenched the boat to the left at what must have been the last possible moment. Water sprayed up from the side of the boat, drenching the breakwater and washing well up onto the quay that ran along the base of the city’s walls. The flat stone ledge would make a wonderful platform on which to deposit their soldiers. The boat sped along it, sending up a spray of water the whole way. The speed was such that Lethel’s eyes watered in the wind. He still managed to look up at the figures on the wall beside them. A few of the figures threw stones at him, but none of them gauged the speed right.

In response, Lethel waved a chastising finger at them.

A little later, back out toward the rear of the fleet now, he sat watching from a safe distance. He spotted the large schooner that Sires Faleen and El had chosen for the occasion. At least, he thought he should call it a schooner. It hardly looked like one in his understanding of the term, but for pure size and carrying capacity he thought the term fit. Multistoried, outfitted for pleasure, the ship crawled with Ishtat guards, staffers, hangers-on, and concubines. El, when he arrived with his army, had done the leaguemen the service of bringing a great number of these with him. Most of them, it seemed, hung about the upper decks of the schooner.

“They’re hardly even paying attention,” Lethel muttered. He waved a hand, trying to catch someone’s attention so that he could point at the attack, which had commenced. He did not try for long. The proceedings proved too interesting to be distracted from them.

The barges approached the shore first. Though massive, packed with soldiers and ballistae, battering rams and movable towers, their draft was so shallow they could press right up to the quay, with the water beneath them only on the height of three or four men. It would be as if the barges had simply added a wide extension to the shoreline, one filled to the brim with soldiers.

The barges halted a little distance from the quay. The large ballistae, with their mortar-punching missiles, cranked back. When they shot, the barbed bolts flew with blurred speed. They slammed into the stone walls with explosive thuds, sinking deep and sending shards of rubble into the air. Each bolt was attached to a length of rope trailing back toward the barges. More and more of the missiles struck home. Soldiers fastened the trailing end to anchors jutting from the barges. Then they reloaded and shot still more missiles.

The fools on the wall hunkered down. They cowered each time a missile sent up clouds of debris. “Do you know nothing?” Lethel asked. Having been briefed just the previous day on how the attack would proceed, he knew that it was not the impact of weapons they had to fear. It was what they did next.

Once enough of the bolts were set, the ballistae stopped firing. Normally, Lethel had learned, winches would crank back on those ropes. The lines, going taut, would pull the missiles, which in turn would cause the barbed points of them to expand inside the stone, pulling down sections of the wall for the invaders to clamor over into the city. Normally, this winching was a slow process, dangerous for the attackers because of the tension in the ropes and the possibility of mechanical failure. But these were not normal circumstances.

Today, the barges simply backed away from the shore. The ropes went from drooping lengths to straight, taut cords. All along the expanse of the wall, Lethel watched the chaos that ensued through a small spyglass. In some spots single blocks crashed down. In others the wall buckled and weakened before the prong fell free. Whole sections of wall crumbled toward the sea in an avalanche of stone blocks, debris, and screaming Free People.

Lethel set down his spyglass and clapped his hands. He yanked it up to view again. Where was Dariel Akaran along that wall? Where was Mor or the bird woman or anybody else he recognized? The confusion was considerable. He could not make sense of what the defenders were doing, like so many ants responding to the destructive pressure of a boy’s foot. Swarming, running in circles. He thought of calling for a larger spyglass, but with the pitching of the boat he would not be able to keep anyone in focus.

The barges approached the wall for a second round. As with the first, the poor defenders could do nothing but scurry about or cower. The walls came tumbling down. As they should. They were unforgivably ugly. The Lothan Aklun, having feared the sea, had looked away from it. They left the shoreline drab and unfinished. Not a facade at all, the wall more resembled the dingy rear of a city. Let the entire thing fall. The league would redesign the coastline to wonderful effect. Avina would become one of the world’s premier trading cities, a powerhouse for a nation that the league would rebuild to suit them.

Why am I so far back? Lethel wondered. He shouted over his shoulder for the pilot to move them in.

The boat closed some of the distance so that he had an improved view when the barges pushed forward a third time. They smacked right up against the quay, stopped dead there. The first contingent of soldiers jumped the narrow gap. They poured onto the platform and clambered over the rubble. The defenders, to their credit, rushed down to meet them. They seemed, in their exuberance, to forget that they were supposed to stay safely in the city. They brought the fight out to the quay itself.

Only the early ranks of the troops could engage, but that was perfect. The first ashore would batter the defenders into bloody heaps until they surrendered or fled. Lethel rather hoped they would do the latter. Let them run through the city streets, Ishtat in pursuit. Slaughter every last one of them, for all he cared. They did not need them. In the coming years, the league could repopulate the city as they saw fit, just as they would rebuild it to suit them. Crumbled walls, massacred rebels. It was all messy at the moment, but to build a sturdy foundation one always began with a bit of demolition.

Lethel still could not find the Akaran. He did focus in on one individual who seemed to be directing the defense, but it was not Dariel. His hair was darker than the prince’s, an unruly mop clinging to his head. After pointing and shouting and gesticulating for a time, he dove down into the melee below the wall.

Lethel assumed that the sound, when he first noticed it, was coming from the besieged city itself. He had experienced an earthquake once while staying along the Talayan coast, and the strangeness in the air reminded him of the odd moments that preceded the earth shaking. He yanked the spyglass up, expecting to see the entirety of the wall come tumbling down or something like that.

It did not. The fighting just continued.

What happened next did not so much frighten Lethel as perplex him to his core. The humming grew louder. He wrinkled his forehead, making the thin slashes of his plucked eyebrows into two squiggles. The fighting figures stopped. They must have heard it, too. And then the sea… it went flat. Not calm, but completely flat. The entire undulating surface of the water became as featureless as polished stone. Lethel saw this all clearly, especially when his vantage point shifted.

He soared up from the deck, so fast he left his gasp at water level. His seat came with him, ripped free of the vessel. He hung in the air with a view of the sea beneath him. Craning his head around, he saw that all the thousands of soldiers on the transports likewise floated in the air. The leaguemen and staffers and concubines turned circles, their arms and legs waving about them in a slow pantomime of panic.

How unusual, Lethel thought, sure that nothing like this had been included in his briefing.

There followed a moment of stillness, and then the world changed. The soul vessels concussed with a sudden explosion of pressure, except that it was not really an explosion. It was soundless. There was no flame or smoke, no flying debris. Only a flash and ripple in the fabric of the world. In an instant, the vessels all disappeared. Lethel’s ship vanished beneath him, as did the frigates and schooners and brigs, as did all the barges. They just ceased to be. Just afterward all the hovering people-thousands of them-splashed down into the sea.

As he hit the surface, losing control of his bodily functions on impact, Lethel was certain this had not been mentioned in his briefing. Nobody had said anything about this.