The Sacred Band (13 page)

When the boat popped into the air again, it did so with the bow pointed toward the sky, twirling. As water drained toward the stern, Melio clung to one of the low benches. Just as he began to doubt he could hold on any longer, the bow smashed back down. Geena got jolted away from her hold. One side of the boat dipped, and a gush of water washed in. It swept her with it, dragging her along the gunwale. She fought it, clawing for purchase. She began to slide overboard, one arm upraised and flailing, while the tongue of the sea slurped her in. Melio caught her by the wrist. He braced his feet against the submerged gunwale and hauled back with everything he had. She smashed into him. Their limbs entwined as Melio scrabbled back toward the rear storage compartment, Geena in his grip. She understood and crammed in next to him. The two of them knotted together and stuck fast just as the boat passed into the swirling chaos rushing around the galley’s rear end.

Again the small boat’s stern submerged, making the bow pirouette in the air above them. Melio watched it against the sky. Among the falling debris, water glistened as it dropped. The mast had snapped in half and the sail hung like a dead thing. A tide of hissing, bubbling air rose around them. Melio tried to breathe, but the air was foaming water in his mouth. He spit it out, but it rushed in again. He spit it out; it rushed in again. He gave up trying. He closed his eyes and clung to Geena.

It could have been worse. Mór had been angry, fuming and spitting venom, on the verge of using those stubby nails of hers to rip new tracks across Dariel’s face. She danced through an improvised tribute to her anger. One of her eyelids twitched out a rant of its own. By the time it all ended Dariel had admitted his fault and claimed to be chastened. He swore he would never do something as foolish as sneaking alone into Amratseer again. Eventually, Mór left her exasperation at Dariel’s feet. She ordered the others into motion and she told the prince to leave the pups behind. He didn’t. Chastened, yes, but not without some resolve.

It took them a full day to circumambulate Amratseer. By the second morning they cleared the semiorder of the agricultural region outside the city and plunged into Inàfeld Forest. It extended all the way north as far as anyone had been, hemmed in at the west by the mountains of Rath Batatt. Tam claimed that they were following a route of sorts, but it was one of many that the People had developed over the years. Not wanting to leave a traceable path to the Sky Isle, they used a variety of trails, each of them trodden on rarely enough that they betrayed few signs of actually being trails.

They wormed over and beneath tree roots, along fallen old-growth trunks, and through dank waterways, stepping carefully on the moss-heavy stones. The forest grew thick enough that the sky was only a distant idea. The pups did not make it any easier. Fully half the terrain was unmanageable for them. Before long Dariel had given up on encouraging them forward and instead carried them in a sack slung over his back. When he complained about the weight of them one afternoon, Birké took one and walked with it cradled like a baby in his arm. “You’ll have to name them, you know?”

“Yes, I guess I will.”

“You must geld them. Not yet, but before too long.”

“Cut their balls off? No, I don’t think that’s—”

“Scoop it up, Dariel,” Birké cut in. “They’re cathounds. Male ones. The Anet used them to hunt lions. In six months they’ll be almost as tall as you are. At least they’ll be lighter without their balls.”

“Be sane! I saw their mother. She was—”

“Young. They birth children young. And the females are smaller anyway. No, Dariel, believe me, you’ve got more on your hands than you know. Snip them. I could do it for you if you like.” Birké made his fingers into shears and demonstrated the ease of the action. He smiled. What should have been fearsome—the thick hair that covered his entire face, the canine incisors that shone savagely through his grin—usually managed to cheer Dariel. Not so this time.

Dariel reached for the pup. “I don’t mind carrying him after all.”

He still carried them both an hour later when they stepped into a clearing in the woods created by an enormous fallen tree. A man stood atop it, arms crossed and still. Blinking in the unaccustomed bright light, it took Dariel a moment to believe that he was really there. Mór shouted something to him in Auldek; the man responded and pointed to a route up onto the tree. Without a word of explanation, Mór led them up.

The man was slight of build. His head was clean-shaven, with a splattering of tattoos across his scalp, patterning that Dariel had not seen before. “So this is him?” the man asked, switching to Acacian. “There is much talk of him in Avina. The destroyer of the soul catcher. The Rhuin Fá.” He studied the prince with a trader’s critical eye, as if he were considering a purchase. “Funny, he just looks like common Shivith clan, not even ranked. I hope he is what he promises.”

“I never promised anything,” Dariel said. The pups churned in the sack, trying to get a view of the stranger. Dariel tried to stand without flinching, but they really did have sharp claws. “And I’m standing right in front of you. You could address me directly.”

The man gave no sign that he heard him. “Last word from Avina was that the clans are squabbling and that league ships are patrolling the coastline. More each week. If this Dariel Akaran wishes to prove himself, he’ll have ample opportunity, and soon.”

Before Dariel could respond, Mór asked, “Tell me, messenger, why have you come?”

“With a message, of course.” He drew himself up and spoke more formally. “I carry an elder within, a voice meant for your ears.”

Mór said, “May the vessel never crack.”

As she and the messenger moved away together, Dariel unslung his sack. He poured the pups out onto the wide tree trunk, across which they surged with bumbling enthusiasm, greeting one person and then the next and then starting over again.

“What’s this about?” Dariel asked Birké, once the others had settled down to wait.

Birké stroked a puppy’s head. “The council sent him with a message.”

“About what?”

“We’ll see shortly,” Tam said, laying out a spread of hard crackers and cucumbers on the tree bark. He set out a wooden bowl. Above it, he used his knife to cut off the bottom of a plee-berry, a nondescript fruit, brown, slightly hairy, and oblong. The liquid inside it gushed out as he squeezed the length of it. The juice looked like a collection of frog eggs, blue tinted, slimy. The first time Dariel had seen it he had gagged and stared in horror as the others drank it with relish.

“Some of your favorite drink, Dariel?”

After having made a show of being disgusted by the frog-egg look of the fruit pulp, Dariel had to admit he had grown to rather like it. It was like drinking liquid sugar, and the strange texture of the seeds had actually become his favorite aspect of it. He took a slurp from the offered bowl, rolling the slick orbs around on his tongue.

Tam pulled his tiny instrument from his pack and began plucking it. Dariel watched Mór and the messenger, but could gather little from their distant exchange. He thought he saw stiffening in Mór’s spine, an indication of anger, but the next moment it melted into something softer as she gestured with her hands.

“What’s he mean he has an elder within him?”

“It’s quite a trick. Can’t say I understand it, really.” Birké pushed one of the pups into Dariel’s arms. “Here, take your pup. I shouldn’t handle them so much. I’ll end up liking them. Have you named them yet?”

The pup climbed happily enough into Dariel’s lap, churning in a circle around the geometry of his folded legs. Dariel stilled it with his hand, rubbed under its chin, and looked into its eyes. They were the same color as its fur, which was a reddish-brown, soft, short coat. Only the ridge along its back was different. There the hair bristled back against the grain, almost spiny. It was the only part of him not completely adorable. “I was thinking of this one as Scarlet.”

“Scarlet?” Birké asked. “That’s no name for a cathound!”

“No? What is, then?”

Birké did not hesitate. “Ripper. Killer. Punisher.”

“Jaws of Death,” Tam said.

“Devothrí-grazik,” offered Anira. “It means ‘Devoth’s bane.’ ”

Tam said something in Auldek, pointing at the other pup, who had just tumbled over in an effort to lick his bottom. The others laughed. No one offered a translation.

A little later, they all stood as the two rejoined them. The messenger looked as pleased as ever, but Mór’s lips pressed a new measure of annoyance between them. She barely opened them when she said, “The council has spoken. We have new instructions. From here we go to Rath Batatt. We seek the Watcher in the Sky Mount.”

“Nâ Gâmen?” Birké asked, a measure of awe in his voice.

“Yes,” Mór said. “Nâ Gâmen. Let’s go. Time is more important now than ever.”

Dariel came close to asking who Nâ Gâmen was, but the group was already in motion.

The mountains that the People called Rath Batatt sprouted like bony crests along the backs of horrible, reptilian beasts. Rank upon rank of them, stretching off unending into the west.

“Beautiful, eh?” Birké asked.

“Not the description I had in mind.”

“They say the Sky Mount is not far in. We won’t hike more than a day or so in the mountains. Just along the edge of them.”

“The edge?” Dariel asked. “How far do these mountains go?”

“I don’t know. No one has been all the way through them. This was once Wrathic territory. My clan’s home. They lived at the edge of Rath Batatt but ranged into it, hunting. I’ve always wanted to do that.”

“You never have?”

“How could I?” the young man asked. “The time that the Wrathic hunted in Rath Batatt is but legend now. Tales they tell the children to bind them to the clan. Wonderful tales of packs of wolves and how they hunted mighty beasts together. I never even thought I’d live to see these mountains with my own eyes.”

Dariel placed a hand atop his shoulder. “I imagine the hunting is good now. Shall we? We haven’t had fresh meat in a while. Even Mór would like that.”

That afternoon Dariel and Birké loped away before the others. They climbed a steep slope, navigated the pass at its peak, and dropped down into the alpine valley on the other side. They picked their way through massive boulders, some of which pressed together so that they had to squeeze through or beneath them. Beyond the boulders stretched a long descent to a crystal blue lake, rimmed by short grass, abloom with purple wildflowers. A herd of woolly-haired oxen grazed—stout creatures thickening to face the coming winter, with flat horns that spread across their foreheads like helmets welded to their scalps. At first they were unaware of the humans, and then unfazed, and then—when Birké sank an arrow into one’s shoulder—furious.

The insulted beast charged them. After a brief moment of consideration, Dariel and Birké turned and fled. They reached the relative safety of the boulders with the ox’s hooves pummeling the ground just behind them, grunting insults into air suddenly thick with its musk. The creature pursued them in. It rushed through the narrow crevices between the stones. Dariel, trapped in a dead-end corridor of granite, had to scramble up it.

“I don’t think it was quite like this before!” Birké shouted, laughing as he hopped from boulder to boulder. The creature snorted outraged breaths below him, following them farther into the maze, looking rather murderous for a thing that fed on grass and flowers.

“Not a Wrathic technique, then?” Dariel called back.

It was not the most heroic hunt ever—they made the creature a pincushion with arrows shot from safely above it—but the result was satisfying. That night they fed on thick steaks roasted over a fire and told stories surrounded by an amphitheater of stone. Birké recounted the great Wrathic hunts of old, and of the ancient times when young men were sent alone into the wilderness, to return only if they wore the jawbones of a slaughtered kwedeir draped over their necks. Listening to him, Dariel almost forgot Birké was talking about members of the Auldek clan who had enslaved him, not about young men like himself. He almost forgot that this was not just the hunting trip it briefly seemed. He almost accepted it as an evening spent in the company of friends, with no purpose save enjoyment. Almost.

“So, tomorrow we’ll see the Sky Mount. Why don’t you tell me what that is, and who the Watcher is?”

In the silence after his question Dariel realized how different the night was here from what it had been just days before in Inàfeld Forest. Here, in the mountains, the main feature of the near silence was the scrape of wind over the jagged peaks. That and the sound of Mór honing the blade of her dagger on a stone propped on her knee.

“Well?” Dariel prompted.

Anira pulled another strip of meat from above the fire, set it on the small stone she was using as a table, and sliced it into bite-size pieces. When she had a few, she pinched them in her fingers and offered them to Dariel. “The Sky Mount is a palace built by a Lothan Aklun called Nâ Gâmen. He built it long ago, back in the early years after they arrived. We should see it tomorrow, perched atop the highest peak in this area.”

“So what is it that Mór doesn’t believe?”

“That the very same Nâ Gâmen who built it all those years ago still lives in it.”

“A Lothan Aklun lives?”

Anira shrugged. “He may. The elders among the People say that long ago he exiled himself there for his own reasons. He once came down from the Sky Isle and gave them—”

“Promises.” Mór looked up from her work. “He spoke promises and regrets hundreds of years ago, and has done nothing else since. But the elders, in their wisdom, believe that he still sits up there, waiting for something. For you, perhaps.”

“You don’t believe that?”

Mór bent forward and began the rhythmic drag of steel over stone again. “What I believe doesn’t matter. I’m taking you.”

By noon of the next day Dariel had fixed his attention on a single peak in the distance, one that came in and out of view as they navigated the ridges preceding it. The high clouds that had obscured it in the morning cleared, revealing a ring of snow crusting its peak, the only mountain thus accoutred so far. Or so he thought.