The Sacred Band a-3 Read online

  Corinn heard her officers conferring. She turned and drew General Andeson’s eyes. “It remains as I told you last night,” she said. “No weapons are to be drawn. Understood? I will do this myself.”

  She turned back to face the enemy. There was a sudden buzz of arguing behind her. She knew what they were saying. They thought her some fool version of Aliver, trying to re-create his mistake in fighting Maeander Mein on a field much like this one. If they had their way, she would be shunted to the rear of the army and encased within a wall of Marah, long-legged soldiers who would stand ready to lift her and sprint at the least sign of danger. That’s what they had said last night, at least-that her safety was paramount.

  In truth they feared fighting the Numrek without a much superior force. Why offer the terms she had? They argued it was madness. They might have balked at her order, but they feared shame even more-just like the Numrek. They feared her, though they likely half wished she would perish. Die and yet somehow leave them alive afterward to fight among themselves for power. All this was true. No matter. Let them watch and learn yet more of who she truly was. What had she told Aliver she was going to do? She had said…

  For a moment she could not remember. And then it came to her. She had said, Destroy them. I’ll destroy them.

  With that thought behind her, she opened her mind to the song. At first she kept it within the curve of her skull, letting it build, searching for the rhythms within the dissonance. And what a cacophony it was! Had she not known better, she would have thought the noises in her head were the tumultuous ravings of a world exploding. Raw emotion and anger and beauty and longing and hunger screamed in a thousand ways at once, with the timbre of myriad voices and notes played on all manner of instruments at war with one another.

  She could also hear order within the confusion. She could pinch with her mind’s fingers the song fragments she wished, each of them a living, moving line of codes and runes and words all held in fluid motion along ribbons slithering through the tumult. She could hold much more of it now than when she had first begun her study. She found meaning more easily than even a few weeks ago, before Aaden nearly died and before she worked her spells upon Barad’s eyes and Elya’s children and before gathering back the spirit that had been Aliver. Yes, she had much more mastery now.

  She walked forward. She parted her lips and let the first notes of the song escape her mouth, barely louder than exhaled breaths. The Numrek, accepting her commencement of the battle, strode to meet her. As the distance between them closed, the song grew stronger and began to shift the substance of the air, creating currents around her that seethed and squirmed. She felt the heart of the spell gather in her chest, a stone of greater and greater density. Her mind seethed with hatred. That was what she would give them. She would hurl at them a roiling animus that could take no single shape but instead erupted in ever-changing forms. What she saw happen on the field before her reflected this. Had she not owned it so completely she would have been just as shocked by the horror of it as the soldiers behind her were.

  Suddenly the stone inside her surged up out of her chest, scorched through her throat, and rushed from her mouth in a great torrent. The Numrek paused in their tracks. Some backstepped. Many fell as if shoved savagely. Corinn centered her gaze on Crannag. She knew as it happened that his face was going to blister with a heat from within, that his hair was going to burst into flame, and that a moment after his skull would burst.

  The man beside him tried to flee, but his legs and arms moved stiffly. They folded and snapped. In seconds he was on the ground, writhing but incapable of action, his bones fracturing with each effort. Another Numrek stepped over him, coming forward, and Corinn knew the moment his skin would erupt with maggots that consumed his living flesh. His armor and weapons and even the sudden wig that was his hair fell to the earth along with the squirming mass that had been his body.

  And so it was throughout the entire Numrek force. No two among them died the same way, but each one did die. A woman became a sack of flesh with nothing solid inside. A man thrust his hand into his breast and pulled out his own heart. Some panted and contorted with unknowable tortures. Some blistered with poxlike scars or went yellow or gangrenous. Things grew inside a few, protrusions and antlers that burst their skin as they screamed. Some danced as if they were being hacked by unseen weapons. One youth ran raging, his mouth red with blood. An old soldier lowered himself to the ground and-a single still point among the chaos-folded into himself, and turned to ash.

  Through it all Corinn let her body be the song’s instrument. It gave her what she wished and went further, making it more terrible than she could have imagined. At some point the stream of sound slowed, slackened. And then ceased altogether.

  The silence was gorgeous, even if it was not a complete silence. She heard her soldiers retching. At least one of the officers behind her spilled his breakfast in a splatter on the ground. A few mumbled prayers or expressed disbelief. And yet in the wake of the song such sounds were dwarfed by the magic that had come before. Homage, really, to the language of creation. And destruction. The reverence did not just come from the Numrek dead. Not just from her trembling soldiers. This silence was sung to her by the entire world. All creation had been awed speechless.

  So it seemed for the stretch of many breaths. The army came up behind her. Realizing that her officers stood hushed and waiting, Corinn said, “Send soldiers to the fortress for the children. They are to live, for now, as our hostages.”

  The queen turned around, the links of her chain mail clanking as she did so. General Andeson was staring at her, pale faced. Melio stood beside him, his eyes fixed on the carnage. They recoiled when the stench of burning flesh and offal hit them. The stink and gases of bodies turned inside out was almost too much to bear. Corinn breathed through her mouth. She took her strength from the awe and revulsion and fear in the men’s faces.

  “But these that I’ve eliminated here,” she continued, “burn them all. Reduce what’s left of their corpses to ashes and have them brought back to Acacia. We will mix them with mortar and repave the streets of the lower town with them. From now on, even the humblest peasant will walk atop the remains of the Numrek. Thus it will be for any who oppose me.”

  Andeson’s throat caught. Instead of speaking, he nodded.

  Corinn turned on her heel, satisfied.

  She almost reached the horses before she wavered, stumbled, then fell.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Scav met Princess Mena Akaran on a desolate stretch of beach littered with whale bones and dotted with chunks of translucent sea ice. He stood shirtless despite a frigid wind, his scrawny chest exposed and his small, dense muscles pronounced beneath a thin membrane of white-blue skin. His flaxen hair hung limp and matted, plaited in several places with strips of hide. He did not look up as Mena leaped from the landing boat and kicked her way through the froth to the sand. He did not meet her eyes when Gandrel announced her or return the gazes of any of her party. He answered the questions Gandrel put to him in a rough dialect that Mena could not follow at all.

  “He says this is where the Numrek came through,” Gandrel translated. He pointed at the man with one thickly ringed hand, while his other hovered near Mena, as if to keep her from stepping too close to him. He was like that, protective, large as a bear and with a jagged scar across his nose as if he had fought on equal terms with clawed creatures. “Where the Mountains Cry the Sea, he calls it. A narrow pass that leads to a route through the mountains.”

  Mena glanced up at the sheer black rock that rose from the sand, cracked and fissured, marbled with veins of silver flaring here and there. Clouds hung low enough that the tops disappeared into them. Cascades of frothing water poured through numerous crevices, looking like they were draining the sky itself.

  “His people are poets, then,” Mena said. “I wouldn’t have guessed it.”

  “Hardly,” Gandrel said. “They just can’t say things right. He says a little south
of here the mountains jut into the sea. Unpassable. The only way through is to go inland via this pass and eventually come down through the Ice Fields.”

  “Can we believe him?” Mena asked.

  Gandrel spoke to the man again, listened to the answer. “He claims his father died here and that many of their clan were killed when they confronted the Numrek. Burned by pitch, butchered.” Gandrel pointed at the man’s chest. “The bones on that necklace are from his father’s right hand. That’s what he says, at least.”

  Mena did not look at the bones. An artery pulsed at the base of the man’s neck. Having noticed it, she found it hard to look away.

  “They fought them?” Mena’s first officer, Perrin, asked. He stood beside the princess, tall and long limbed, nearly as rangy as a Numrek. He would have been imposing, save his face was so clean lined and pretty it seemed suited for an actor, not a soldier. His brown hair was perpetually tousled. This, too, managed to be endearing.

  “So he claims. He comes here sometimes to listen for the ghosts of those who died here. That’s part of how they hunt: they claim the dead guide them.”

  “And did he hear ghosts?” Mena asked.

  After Gandrel translated the question, the Scav’s gaze lifted and touched her face a moment. His blue eyes might have been attractive were they not embedded in such a pale, weathered visage. He dropped them and mumbled his answer.

  “He always kills,” Gandrel said, “because of the ghosts he captured there.” Aside, he added, “That’s why he’s so plump, I guess.”

  “Can we believe him?” Mena asked again.

  “No reason to do that. We can listen, though. And look. Judge for ourselves.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “His name is Kant. It doesn’t mean what it sounds like. It’s the name of a bird, one that dives into the swirls along rocky shores.” He tried to demonstrate with the edge of his hand. Gave up halfway through the motion.

  “All right,” Mena said. “Tell Kant to show me the pass.”

  F or the past fortnight Mena had sailed north aboard the only Acacian warship stationed on the west coast of the Known World. Hadin’s Resolve was paltry compared to the vast array of Ishtat crafts floated by the league, but she had three masts and was deep bellied and armor plated on the prow. She flew the flag of the empire: the black silhouette of an acacia tree across a brilliant yellow sunburst.

  A hastily gathered fleet had flanked her, mostly made up of imperial soldiers stationed at bases along the Coastal Towns and of Candovian civilians conscripted for the empire’s protection. The ships were a hodgepodge collection. Some were Acacian naval vessels, but the armada contained Candovian merchant ships, brimming with supplies. A few of the larger fishing boats from the Coastal Towns carried contingents of troops while simultaneously trawling the waters for fish to salt and dry.

  North along the Candovian coast, they pushed off the empire’s maps and into frigid waters. They threaded through mountains of ice that jutted from the water, slow-moving floating islands of white and blue and green, some carved into intricate shapes, ghostly to behold and ever changing with the slip of the sun across the sky. Never before had an Acacian army crossed seas like this. They did it on this occasion only because the league and Queen Corinn believed an Auldek army marched to invade them, following the land route the Numrek had stumbled upon during their years of exile.

  Mena fought not to think too often of the two beings she loved most in the world. Melio had his own missions. It was better, she knew, that he not be here with her. This was war, not the hunting expedition that chasing the foulthings had been. She needed to make the right decisions. Many of those would send her soldiers to their deaths. Would she be able to do that to Melio? Or would she protect him unfairly? No, he wouldn’t allow that, which might mean he ended up in greater danger. Far better that he serve the empire elsewhere. Far better that she make her decisions without thinking of his crooked smile, the smell of his hair, or the time he held her in their tent on the Teh plains the night after Aliver was killed, or her promise that she would, one day, take his child inside her. What good was thinking of such things-of longing for the past or hoping for the future-when she had a war to fight? Better not to think about him or about Elya.

  She had left the bird-lizard in Corinn’s care on Acacia, after a tearful parting that she had ended abruptly. Mena feared she had left Elya with the impression that she was angry with her. Nothing could have been further from the truth, but Mena had pushed her away, loving the kindness of her eyes too much. Mena tried not to think about Elya, lest the thoughts somehow reach her across the miles. This was no place for Elya. War was no task to set her.

  Mena’s mood blackened with the passing of sea miles. The air became colder, the wind seemingly trying to shove them back from whence they came. But return was not an option. Queen Corinn had made that clear. Meet the Auldek horde, she had ordered, outside the Known World. Delay them, so that the empire had time to better prepare. Defeat them, if such a thing were possible. And in all this the implicit: be sacrificed for the good of the nation.

  G andrel set his hands on his hips, listening as the Scav spoke and gestured. “This is where the Numrek first came through. The tracks from their carts are still deep in the ground, he says.”

  They stood about a half mile from the coast on a buttress of rock thrust close to the ceiling of clouds. Below them, the jagged ridgelines on two sides sloped down, leaving a gap that headed toward the heart of the Ice Fields, a swath remarkable for its flatness and for the promise of ease of passage, as it veered off to the east and out of sight.

  “They must come this way?” Perrin pressed. “If we invest everything here and then they go elsewhere…”

  “Aye,” Gandrel translated Kant’s response. “It’s the only way. The mountains to the north stand like wolves’ fangs. Those to the south he calls Bear Teeth. Only here, between the two ranges, is navigable. He calls it the Breath Between.”

  Perrin guffawed. “They’ve got a name like that for everything.”

  Mena’s gaze drifted over the bleak landscape, from the sheer heights down to the flat tundra. No doubt about it. This was the place Corinn meant her to hold. This was where her sister wanted the invasion thwarted. Feeling cold to the core, Mena pulled her fur-lined robe tighter around her body.

  “I want to go down and check these cart tracks he talks of,” Perrin said. “I can’t believe they’re still there all these years later. Should I send word for the ships to begin unloading camp supplies?”

  “Not yet,” Mena said. “Come. Let’s all see these tracks. We should send a scouting party along the pass as well.” She began walking before any of the men had responded.

  See the tracks they did. They were there, obvious once Kant pointed them out. The ruts were each a carriage-length wide, cut by massive wheels that had churned up the soil. Even covered with spongy moss and tough grass the slashes were knee-deep. According to the dispatches that chased them with new information from Acacia, the Auldek would come with vehicles with massive wheels like the ones that had scarred the land.

  She listened to Perrin’s astonished rambling and Gandrel’s translations of Kant’s tales of how the Scavs had been the first in the Known World to face the monsters. She asked questions and made comments and ruminated on how they might use the terrain to their favor, speculated on where to place troops, set ambushes, where best to join battle. She acted as a royal war leader should, but in truth a question greater than all these details had settled in her mind.

  That evening her officers dined with Mena on Hadin’s Resolve. Though cramped and simple by Acacian standards, the dining hall was quite comfortable. The table was one large slab of stained wood, beautifully grained and worked so that the contours of the edge seemed to fit each particular person, with resting places for each forearm and a modest concavity to accommodate expanding waistlines. Spiced pork and grilled vegetables sat on white-gold trays, with small dishes of relishes, pickle
d whitefish, and bowls of sliced fruit. The dark red wine was the same consumed on Acacia itself. To soldiers new to positions of command it must all have seemed quite grand.

  By and large these soldiers were new to her, a very different lot from the Talayans with whom she had hunted the foulthings. Paler men and fewer women than she was used to, blue- and gray-eyed Candovians, some Senivalians, and even a few who might have claimed Meinish identity had that clan not been so defeated and scattered throughout the empire. They all seemed so very young. Few of them had fought against Hanish Mein. All of them wished for glory. They seemed to both relish the danger marching toward them and disbelieve in it.

  When they all finally left to return to their vessels, Mena found herself alone with Perrin. They sat opposite each other, reclining in soft chairs near the small stove that heated the room. They sipped a liqueur made from yellow plums. Despite the warmth caged within the metal stove, a chill crept around the edges of the chamber through chinks in the woodwork. The portholes had begun to rim with ice.

  Perrin propped his shiny leather boots on a footstool and set a hand on his abdomen, patting his stomach. “I’m going to miss meals like that. No matter how well we think we’ve provisioned, such bounty won’t last long. I had to laugh at how much the troops complained when we didn’t accept the casks of wine the league offered us. They acted like we were spoiling their planned holiday.”

  “When the league comes bearing gifts, beware.” Melio had said those exact words before. Saying it herself, she heard his voice.