The Sacred Band Read online

  “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, pickled 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.

  “Too right, Your Highness. The stuff wouldn’t have lasted long in any event. I know this from experience.”

  “You trained on the Mein Plateau.”

  Perrin nodded. His shoulder-length hair swayed with the motion. “Two years based in Cathgergen. Rather boring, really, considering that there weren’t actually any Meins to be worrying about anymore.”

  “Did you see much of the plateau?”

  “It’s mostly much of the same. Snow and trees and ice. Snow and trees and ice. Oh, there’s a mountain!” He feigned surprise. “That sort of thing. I went west as far as Scatevith. Wintered for three months in Hardith. Saw Mein Tahalian in the height of summer.”

  “What was it like?”

  “You’ve never been?”

  Mena shook her head.

  “In summer it was a misery of mosquitoes and biting flies. Place was deadly with them—we were bitten and the air was so thick with them, we could not help but breathe them in and choke. It wasn’t the winters that made the Meins so cranky. It was the summer wildlife.”

  “Is what they say of Haleeven Mein true?”

  “That he camps outside Mein Tahalian? Yes. That he is insane from grief and shame? That, too, perhaps. I think I saw him once, but he was so covered in furs that it was impossible to tell for sure. Not much of a life for a man who could have been chieftain of the Mein. I almost feel for him.”

  Perrin drew back his legs to let a nervous servant through to the stove. The boy fed the fire with the thin shavings of hardwood. Watching him, the young officer continued, “Tahalian itself I saw only from outside. It was sealed shut by then. It huddled against the ground, pretending to be dead, waiting for you to come too close. Don’t laugh at me, but I used to dream that the Tahalian you could see—the wood beams and buttresses of it—was the headgear of a buried giant. I woke up sweating in my bedroll more than once to the image of the head rising, eyes opening, and the whole thing clawing up from the tundra. Am I embarrassing myself here?”

  Just the opposite, Mena thought. He was diverting, pleasant to look at and to listen to. Rare to find a man so at home in his body, so easy with life and able to talk without self-importance or hidden meanings. Knowing well the conspiratorial world of court life on Acacia, Mena found this apparent naïveté refreshing.

  “Did you ever see the route from Tahalian to Port Grace?” she asked.

  “No. It’s a well-established road, though. The ascent from the coast is gradual, wide. A fortnight’s march, if the weather isn’t troublesome.”

  Mena glanced at the portholes again, even more rimmed with delicate lacings of frost now. The wind had picked up, gusting and setting up a sporadic clanking from the rigging. “Let me ask you something. Do you think we’ll survive a winter camped here?”

  “Many will die, Princess Mena. Not even the Scav stay out here. Not exposed this way. We could travel inland a bit, find a sheltered spot along the pass, but still … it will be along, hard winter. Ice will lock us in. In a month we’ll be trapped here until the spring. And we’ll need every day of that month to prepare. Each day will be shorter, colder; before long there’ll be little daylight at all. We’ll need to divide our labors quickly. Some building the shelters, some bringing the ships to shore, some hunting and fishing. Kant says there are seal beaches just to the north. We should send as many ships as we can, fill them full of the blubber. We’ll need it.”

  “You make it sound like the war is with the winter.”

  Perrin looked at his wineglass again, studying it as if the act of doing so would be enough to refill it. “It will be. The other officers can think about slaying Auldek. I almost wish the Auldek would hurry up and get here so we could have this fight. Who knows? Maybe they will, but I’d wager we’re in for a wait.” He paused a moment, drained his glass, then rolled the stem between his fingers. “It’s what’s been ordered, though. The queen’s command. So we’ll do it.”

  “You don’t think we should?”

  “I won’t say a word against the queen’s wishes. I understand completely how the situation wo
uld look from Acacia. She’s right, of course. If we could stop the Auldek here … Even if we just weaken them, delay them, the empire could be that much better prepared to meet them if they ever stumble out of the Ice Fields. No, I see the advantage of this move very well. It’s just … we won’t be the ones that reap that benefit.”

  Mena dropped her eyes when his met hers. “Good night, Perrin.”

  The next morning Mena met with her officers on the northern ridge along the pass and traversed its spine as it snaked inland. It afforded an even better view of the mountains stretching off to the north and the curve of the coastline as it vanished into the distant mist. Perrin and Edell, the Marah captain Bledas, and the Senivalian Perceven represented the military units at her command. Daley, the captain of Hadin’s Resolve and several others attended on the naval side. Gandrel was there for his knowledge of the Scav.

  The princess waited as the men gathered around her, all of them taking in the view, desolate yet strangely beautiful to behold.

  “Look,” Perceven said, “a chase.”

  On a sloping stretch of rock-strewn tundra below them, two figures moved. They were tiny amid the vastness of the valleys and mountains, but their motion was easy to follow. A white hare leaped in a crazy, jolting, zagging line. Behind it a snow cat bounded.

  Mena kept her eyes on the hunt but said loudly enough that all the men could hear, “We will die here.” None disputed it. They looked at her, at one another, then back to the pursuit that held Mena’s gaze. “The Auldek will arrive to find an army of ice sculptures waiting them.”

  Gandrel said, “True. Or they’ll find us cut to pieces by the Scav. There are more of them around here, I tell you. Even if they’re hard to spot. I wouldn’t put anything past them. Not even jolly young Kant here.” Kant watched the hunt and made no sign that he heard or understood.

  “There are too many ways our deaths here might be for naught,” Mena said. “If I knew what was coming—when and how—that would be one thing. But for all we know the Auldek might arrive six months from now. Or they may take a different route. Or they might never arrive. Considering all this, I cannot have us winter here.”

  The snow cat slapped at the hare’s hind leg. For a moment the prey seemed frozen, its body tilted as it floated above the tundra. Then it landed hard. The cat fell upon it and the two rolled into one ball of motion. When they stopped, the cat had its jaws around the hare’s neck, patient now as it suffocated its prey.

  Mena looked away, as unsatisfied with the outcome as she had been watching the pursuit. “That’s my decision,” she said.

  “But the queen …” Perrin began.

  “We leave here immediately,” Mena said. “Sail to Port Grace. From there we march inland to Tahalian. We’ll winter in the fortress and adjust to whatever challenges the thaw brings with it. Go and see to it.”

  The next afternoon Mena sent a ship south to alert the small settlement of Port Grace that they would soon be inundated with a passing army. On it she also sent a note to be flown by messenger bird, once they were far enough south to ensure the bird would know the landmarks. She had spent the previous night composing a long missive to explain the situation in all its complexity. In the morning, she ripped it to pieces. Instead the message she sent was terser.

  Queen Corinn,

  The plan to meet the enemy in the far north is untenable. I am moving the army to Mein Tahalian. We will winter there, training.

  With your permission, I will lift Haleeven Mein’s exile and ask for his aid.…

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  When Dariel Akaran first looked upon the ruins he had to steady himself by grasping Birké’s shoulder. “Scoop it up,” the young Wrathic man said, grinning and lifting Dariel’s drooping jaw with a finger. “You’ll catch flies like that.”

  They stood at the summit of a hill on an old road that snaked down into the valley. A great ruin of an ancient metropolis stretched before them. The city reached up to the hills that held them in, wrapped completely by a defensive wall that rose and fell over the contours of the ridgelines. Dariel got lost in gazing at the maze of thoroughfares and alleys, buildings and spires of what must once have been a grand city. It matched Alecia in size, but the pale green of the building stones showed an intricacy of workmanship that would have left Acacian architects envious.

  “What is this place?” the prince asked.

  “Amratseer,” Mór said. She came up and stood beside them. She said a sentence in Auldek.

  “What?”

  “Seeren gith’và.”

  Birké translated. “A dead city.”

  “Dead? It’s hardly dead.”

  Large beaked birds patrolled the skies in raucous groups; gray doves labored into the air; black starlings darted, seemingly for the joy it. Golden-haired monkeys similar to those on Acacia sprinted around the streets and lounged on rooftops, calling to each other in argumentative bursts. Behind that, there was another sound, the rustle of vegetation slowly engulfing the city, as quiet and relentless as a constricting snake winding tighter and tighter around its prey. There was life in abundance here, just not the sort the makers of the place had intended.

  Since Dariel dropped down from those slabs of granite, following Mór eight days before, this new world had swallowed him whole. With Tam and Anira, the other two who had come with them, they spent the first day climbing over high fingers of stone, plunging into damp forests, and climbing up over more fingers of stone. That night they had camped in a cave mouth that opened toward the west. Dariel sat staring at the sun setting over an unending undulation of forest, as vast as the ocean.

  The third afternoon they had followed the banks of a tributary of the Sheeven Lek. The river water was crystal clear, rippling liquid glass that displayed the blue stones of the riverbed and banks. When they stopped to eat, Dariel stripped off his shirt and prepared to leap in, ripe with the sweat and dirt of so much walking.

  Birké caught him by the arm. “You don’t want to do that.”

  A short time later Birké led him to the trunk of a fallen tree, atop which they could look at a deep pool at a bend in the river. Beneath them schools of crimson-finned fish swam in shifting ribbons of motion, stretching thin and then clumping together, one school joining another and then splitting. They could have been dancing some elaborate routine. Dariel asked if they were edible.

  “Oh, yes. Very tasty.”

  That was when it happened. A section of stones on the bottom of the river slid forward slowly at first and then with a sudden upward rush. Dariel stared as a gaping slit opened. It yawned wider than a person was tall, and engulfed an entire swath of the unfortunate fish. Only when its maw shut again and the creature swam forward with leisurely, pleased swipes of its tail did Dariel understand that it was a massive salamander of some sort. Its back was patterned to replicate the blue stones of the river. It had only to stop moving to become invisible.

  “Anything else I should be afraid of?” Dariel asked.

  “Plenty of things.”

  The fourth day they snaked down through crevasses cut deep into the whitish stone of the earth by a labyrinthine network of narrow streams. It was a different world, with forests of amazingly thin trees that stood side by side at any bend in the river—anyplace that afforded a chance at sunlight—and stretched upward, branchless, until their crowns could explode in plumes of long, narrow leaves. Tiny birds darted through the trees. They made their nests well up in them, cast between several like hammocks.

  In places the walls pressed in so close on either side that the group disrobed and swam with their clothes and supplies bundled on top of their heads. Dariel’s heart thrummed in his chest, more from fear of hidden creatures than from the exertion. Despite this, his eyes still managed to linger on the patterning of tattoos on Mór’s back, on the way her blond hair billowed in the water, and on the lovely motion of her legs. Mór herself rarely looked at him. She may have been his escort to meet the Elder Yoen at the S
ky Isle, but the role had not made her any warmer toward him. She made it clear that she had left her heart with Skylene back in Avina.

  I guess that makes her heartless, Dariel had thought.

  At the close of the fifth day they climbed back to the surface of the world and camped, sheltered by the thick roots at the base of some massive trees. The next morning the prince awoke lying on his back, with something gripping the sides of his head, pressing on his chest, and still another thing moving inside his mouth. He opened his eyes and stared into the metallic blue, bulbous face of some sort of enormous insect. Its eyes were each the size of a man’s handprint, moist and as delicate looking as soap bubbles. A pulsing tube from the center of the face extended into Dariel’s mouth, and the long stretch of its segmented body pressed him down.

  Dariel tried to swat at it, but one of the creature’s many limbs pinned his wrist down. He tried the other hand, but he got no further than wriggling his fingers. He kicked and thrashed and screamed. Or he tried to do those things. He could not actually kick because the creature had lowered its segmented torso onto his, and the cage of its legs trapped his own. So pinned at all his points, he created little actual motion. Whatever the creature had inserted in his mouth made it impossible to vocalize. That did not stop him from screaming inside his mind.

  Tam’s face came into view, looking down at him calmly, his eyes shadowed by the dark, circular tattoos of the Fru Nithexek’s sky bear. A moment later Anira and Birké and finally Mór appeared as well. None of them shared his alarm. Anira reached out and stroked the creature’s side gently. Dariel directed all his confusion into wrinkling his forehead. Birké laughed and made some remark. In answer, Anira brushed her palms over the creature’s eyes and then leaned her forehead against it. The tube in Dariel’s mouth withdrew, a feeling like many fingers that had been pressing his teeth and tongue the roof of his mouth releasing all at once. The creature’s bulbous head turned, its legs rippling into motion as it curled away from Dariel.