The Sacred Band (78 page)

Standing on the long, high pier as the others climbed, Clytus scanned the distant piers, ships, and even the town itself. “We still don’t have a plan, do we?”

Dariel said, “If it were just me, I would’ve worn a disguise. Tried to blend—”

“With that face?” Clytus asked. “I haven’t seen too many Ishtat wearing full facial tattoos.”

“True enough. They’ve no fashion sense.”

The others continued to bunch around them, nervously looking about. Tunnel came up last. He had looped a strap of leather around his neck and hung his mallets from it. They dangled behind him as he climbed. Gaining the pier, he let the mallets drop, heavy things that dented the wood and stuck to it, pressed down by their weight. A moment later, as everyone watched, he hefted both up and straightened. He stood, surprised to find all eyes on him, holding the mallets out to either side as the muscles of his arms and chest and ridged compartments of his abdomen flexed. “What?”

“I’ve got the plan,” Kartholomé said. He pulled his hand away from the oiled tip of his beard and pointed at Tunnel. “We follow him.”

They did. Weapons drawn—bare-chested like Tunnel, open shirted like Clytus and Kartholomé, smiling with unaccountable good humor, like Geena—Dariel and his brigands marched down the pier and into the Lothan Aklun port city of Lithram. Dariel took the vanguard, unsure where his destination was. I’ll feel it, he thought. I’ll feel it when I’m close.

He thought of Bashar and Cashen, wishing they were with him to help sniff out the place he intended to find. They would not have actually helped, however. The place he searched for was not to be found by scent. Part of him already knew his destination. It was that part of him that had proposed this, vague as it was, to the others. He had not even detailed what he hoped to accomplish here. He had just said that Nâ Gâmen was urging him to go to Lithram. There was something he needed to face there, something important.

They met no one along the waterfront. In the distance several people went about their work, but none was near enough to notice the new arrivals. “Any idea where we’re headed?” Clytus asked.

“We could ask that fellow,” Geena said, indicating a figure passing between two buildings without noticing them.

Quietly, so the man would not actually hear him, Kartholomé said, “Hey, you know where to find the thing we’re looking for? Not sure what it is, but …”

“Up there,” Dariel said, indicating a narrow structure, the roof of which was just visible rising above the nearer row buildings. “It’s over there.”

Joking aside, nobody asked him how he knew that. They found a stairway between two of the larger buildings and ascended it, taking the steps a few at a time. Reaching the higher street, they stepped cautiously onto it. Tunnel pointed out that the architecture of the town was nothing like the Lothan Aklun estates he had seen on some of the barrier isles. Though childhood memories, the images were strong in his mind, as they were in Dariel’s. Here the smooth granite stones and the spires atop some buildings looked like the work of laborers, not sorcerers. They did not have long to ponder the differences.

Kartholomé saw them first. He cursed.

A hundred or so paces down the street, a contingent of six Ishtat dashed into view. Judging by their well-armed look of determination, they had been alerted to the group’s presence. They pulled up, spotting the intruders. They conferred for a moment. Swords drawn, they fanned out, evenly spaced, clearly disciplined.

“We can handle them,” Clytus said to Dariel, drawing his sword. “They can’t be the best of the lot. Else they wouldn’t be here. They’d be with the invasion.”

Kartholomé cursed again. Another group of Ishtat appeared on the far side of them, about the same distance away. The two groups converged, with Dariel’s group in the middle.

“We’re not so good at sneaking, huh?” Tunnel asked. “Oh well …” He stepped toward the first, nearer contingent of soldiers. He paused. “Dariel, I see a passage. What do I do? Go around and over? Or through?”

“Through it,” Dariel answered.

Tunnel grinned. “That’s the way.” He walked at first, but as he came nearer the soldiers he fell into a jog, and then a run. His mallets came up. The careful array of soldiers burst like an explosion had just hit their center. Tunnel had to swing around and come back at them, pressing several up against a building wall. He went to work, mallets hissing savage arcs around him, smashing stone, knocking swords away, and then, when he got serious, smashing bones.

“Go,” Clytus said grimly. “Do what you have to. We will, too.” He led the charge toward the other group, with Kartholomé just behind him, already snapping his throwing stars into hissing motion.

Geena pulled her knife free. “Go, Dariel!” she said, pointing to the narrow structure Dariel had indicated earlier.

It took great effort for the prince to pull himself away. He hated doing so. He had never left his companions in danger. Hand on the hilt of the Ishtat sword he bore, he almost could not go.

“There’s your goal. We’ll sort out these ones. Go!” She rushed to join Tunnel. “Go!”

Dariel turned and ran. The entrance of the narrow building stood open. He dashed into it and kept going, stumbling over a low table, reaching out for the wall for support. He kept moving down a long corridor, past adjoining hallways and rooms, not really thinking about where he was going. He just got himself farther and farther from his friends, committing himself to leaving them behind.

Once he was deep enough inside and the clash and shouts of fighting had faded, Dariel paused. All right. Let me do this quickly. He closed his eyes and waited, hoping direction would come to him. When it did, he wasted a few precious seconds realizing it. As ever, Nâ Gâmen did not speak to him as a separate being. He spoke as part of Dariel himself. So the vague feeling that he had to walk down the corridor to the second opening, through it, and down the stairs was not just an idle thought. Remembering this, he opened his eyes and dashed for the opening.

The next several minutes passed in the same manner. Dariel had to keep reminding himself that his instincts were more than instincts. He was not guessing. He was following a path he already knew, though it only came to him piece by piece. It felt like his knowledge stretched only as far as the light of a candle. As he moved, the illumination did as well. He kept going.

Until he stopped. At some point, just an empty stretch of corridor, he lost the drive to move forward. For a moment the fear that he was lost knifed through him. He breathed. Tried to trust. He leaned his hands against the wall and pushed his weight into it. As before, he thought the action was meaningless until the section of wall turned soft. He pushed right through and emerged into another room.

A small chamber. Four walls and seemingly sealed tight. Just before him, a lean, curving pedestal rose up to waist height. The room was not exactly dark and not exactly light, but he could see what he needed to. The dust was inches thick on the floor. Beneath his feet, it was as soft as carpet, undisturbed until this moment. The league has not found this place yet. They must have scoured the city already and the island after that and farther still, searching without knowing what they were searching for. Here, though, was a relic right here, undiscovered.

I wouldn’t have found it either, Dariel thought. Not without help.

Having found it, he stared, hoping Nâ Gâmen was not done helping, for he had no idea what to do now. A framed area on the wall before him glowed with a low luminescence. The frame held no painting or window, and yet it was the center—the purpose—of the chamber. Staring, Dariel saw. Deep inside the wall, which was translucent, lights pulsed and wavered, much like the glowing aquatic life he had seen on special nights at sea. The energy in there was different, though. It changed shape before his eyes. At times it looked like a constellation of stars blooming into life all at once. But then that wasn’t right. The lights moved in swirls, tossed and shaped by layers of different currents. In other moments the light came in pulses, like so many heartbeats.

Looking closely at the pedestal’s top, he saw a single shape on the flat surface. It looked strangely familiar, but it took him a moment to realize it was an engraving of the same symbol protruding from his forehead.

His fingers tingled.

He had thought the chamber was completely silent, but that was not quite right. He heard something. He craned his head this way and that, sure that there were sounds just out of reach. The sound did not come from inside the room. It did not come from the pedestal. It was not even inside the living wall.

Stepping back, he took in the whole frame. As if in response, the constellation bloomed again. So many lights, all of them pulsing, pulsing. In time with one another. He pressed up close against it. And then he understood. The lights were not within the frame. The lights were not even lights. The wall was simply a way of seeing what they represented. He knew then what this place was and why he had come here. Most important, he knew what he was supposed to do.

He did not question the impulse that came to him. He moved around to the pedestal. He bent forward like a peasant before a king, like the faithful before evidence of his god. He bent forward in reverence and humility, and he touched his forehead to the altar. He placed the rune he wore into the imprint that matched it.

You can’t be serious,” Mena said. “You can’t mean to try that. Not after what they’ve done.”

Aliver almost replied that he was dead serious, but considering the things they had spent the night discussing he did not think the expression would go over well. “I am, Mena,” he said. “I do mean to try it. I may be wrong, but it feels right. It feels like it may be the way to cut through to the heart of things. I know it’s a hard thing to hear me say, but let’s toss it back and forth. If I can’t convince you, I won’t manage to convince anybody else either.”

They had already been at council many hours, sitting together in a shelter made of living bodies. Elya lay at its center, with the long bulk of Kohl curved around her and the two humans. Aliver and Mena sat, wrapped in blankets, with an oil lamp burning between them, heat and light both, such as it was. The night blustered above them, but the spread wings of the dragon covered them, dulling the sound of the wind. An unusual chamber in which to hold a reunion, but it was what the Giver allowed them. Aliver was more thankful for it than he could have expressed.

Mena! He was really seeing Mena again. It took her some time to stare Aliver into belief, to accept him as real, but he knew her without a doubt. It was truly Mena who had touched his face with her fingers, smearing his tears even as she cried herself. It was Mena who had first been wordlessly amazed, and then had been possessed by a babbling of half-formed sentences and declarations. Aliver had found what threads he could in her words and tied them together. Because of this, Mena—his sister; his young, wise, gifted sister; she who lived both gentle and furious, her faces like two sides of a sword blade, one of peace and one of war—came to believe in him again.

She was leaner than ever, her face gaunt, curls of skin peeling away from her nose and cheeks. Painful-looking crevices lined her lips. She was not the girl he had known in childhood. Nor was she the woman he had later known on the fields of Teh. How very strange their lives had been. How much he loved her, even though fate had kept them apart more years than it had let them be together.

Ilabo and Dram had flown their mounts to meet the tattered remains of Mena’s army, to chase back the fréketes and to protect those battered troops as they continued south. They numbered only a fraction of the souls the princess had set out with. By the time they arrived, they would be even fewer than they had been the day before. Mena, delirious with pain and fatigue, battered by the sight of Elya’s horrible wounds and the shock of Aliver’s appearance, had stilled only after Ilabo had sworn to guide her army to safety.

“You’re not alone out here anymore,” Aliver had said.

There, with the sleeping mother and daughter sheltering them, they worked through many things of import. When they did begin to talk, everything came out in a rush: all the events on Acacia, the truth of things Corinn had done, the arrival of Shen and the Santoth, the events at the Carmelia, the curse on Corinn’s mouth, and the changes they all went through in the days just afterward. So much. Aliver confessed the death sentence that he and Corinn were under. He thought it best to reveal this right away, before Mena grew too accustomed to him being among the living again.

The many things Mena told him in return were troubling. Her hatred of the Auldek blazed in her eyes. The hardest of the things Aliver had to explain was that he wanted to make peace with them. But that was the truth, so he said it.

“You can’t be serious,” Mena repeated. “They nearly killed Elya. They would have, if you hadn’t arrived. If they had … if they had, I would have gone mad. I would have killed every one of them, each and every soul I’d have—”

“Mena, I did arrive. Elya is not dead. I don’t want you dead either. I don’t want thousands upon thousands more dead—which will happen if we keep fighting.”

The look she gave him was a glare, but he thought the lamplight exaggerated her anger. He hoped so, for the wildness in her eyes was nothing he had seen in her before. She said, “I hate them. There is no way to make peace with them.”

“What if I find a way? Would you consider it?”

“They
ate
the villagers of Tavirith. That can’t be undone. It can’t be forgiven.”

“I know,” Aliver said, “but perhaps the way to move forward is to find peace without forgiveness. Or to find forgiveness in peace. Not to forget anything but to put first the lives of those still living. Mena, you’re arguing with me, but everything you’ve done up here was for the same cause. In all your decisions I see you trying to keep your soldiers alive. That’s what I’m proposing. If we ask the thousands who are still climbing up the Methalian Rim to run to their deaths, they’ll do it. If we do that, they’ll understand it. It will be the same as what our family has asked of them for generations. Maybe their sheer numbers will tire the Auldek’s arms or dull their blades. But what then? Won’t that be defeat? What world will there be for any of them afterward?”