The Sacred Band (36 page)

Despite the details, Melio could not quite believe the scene. The sea wolves themselves had no shape that he could credit. They looked like whales and squids and sharks all cut into pieces and floating in a wave-heavy stew together.

“What do they want anyway?” Melio asked. “The sea wolves, I mean. Why attack ships? Nothing else does that. Not even deep whales.”

“Nah, they just come and take a look, near to sinking in the process,” Clytus said. “You know how much we’d have made if we were whalers? If we’d taken that big bastard and dragged him back to Tivol?”

“The four of us? Not possible.”

Clytus guffawed. There was a comment to go with it, Melio could see, but Clytus kept it in. “So, do they have a taste for man flesh or what?” Melio asked.

Kartholomé warmed to the question. “Leagueman flesh, I’d say. The league and they are enemies. Always have been. Just like in the painting you’ve been eyeing. Before they had the skin, the league lost a lot of ships to them. Even a brig went down once. Disappeared. None lived, but everyone believes it was sea wolves that took her. Long time ago, this is, but the leaguemen know how to hold a grudge. Once they came up with the skin they—”

“What is the skin? Do you know how it’s made?” Melio accepted the flask from Geena. He drank with the help of her finger, which tilted the flask up to lengthen his measure.

“If I knew, I’d not be here,” Kartholomé said. “I’d be sipping lemon liqueur from a cliffside estate in Manil, with two redheaded whores named Benda and Fenda.”

“He’s partial to redheaded whores,” Geena explained. “An experience he had as a lad, see. Give him enough drink and you’ll hear more about it than you want to know.”

“Anyway,” Kartholomé continued, “what I’m saying is that I’d be rich, is what. Nobody knows how they make it. Could be a process the Lothan Aklun clued them to. Wouldn’t surprise me. It’s the only thing that made the mist trade possible.”

The mist trade? Melio mused. He never calls it the quota trade.

“So,” Melio asked, “should we ever get moving again and come up against these sea wolves, will the skin protect us or won’t it?”

“That’s right,” Kartholomé said.

“Which?”

“It will
and
won’t. You were there when we bought and loaded the harpoons. You didn’t think we were going whaling, did you?” He held up a hand to stop Melio’s response. “Let me finish. You asked a question. Let me answer it. Once the league had the skin, their big ships were safe. Little ones not so much, but the big ones could sail as they pleased. The sea wolves just can’t grasp the stuff. They slip off it. Tentacles and beak and teeth and everything. So the brigs just slid on by. That’s all right if you’re two hundred feet above the water. But when you’re down low like we are … that’s a different story. They’ll jump clear out of the water and smash down on the deck. They’ve got these tentacles with grippers all up and down them. They get one of those around your leg and you’re heading for their mouth. Beaklike, the mouth is. Ugly thing so sharp it serrates the flesh like two curved knives angled just so. You maybe should have asked more about them before you signed on for this trip.”

Melio, remembering that he did not always like this man, met his gaze without humor. “You knew all that and you still came.”

“There’s more,” he said, after a long draft of ale. “The league wasn’t satisfied with just being able to get across untroubled. Spiteful bunch, they are. They took to slaughtering the beasts whenever they could. Harpoons. Those big crossbow bolts of theirs. They even threw out barrels of pitch and set seas full of the wolves alight.”

“They still do that?”

“On occasion, I suppose. Did it for generations. Never did any good, though.”

Kartholomé dabbed at the moisture at the edges of his lips. For some reason this prompted him to flash a sly smile at Geena. She responded with a finger gesture threatening his manhood with an unfortunate break. They did that every now and then. A game, Melio assumed.

“I haven’t made a scientific study of it,” the pilot continued, “but I don’t think so. What I heard is, it never changed things in the slightest. The league got tired of the effort. Now they just sail through them.”

“As we’ll do as well,” Clytus said. “Might have to tack a bit, but—”

“ ‘Tack a bit’?”

The brigand, thickly muscled, masculine-featured in a blocky, weathered way, tried to shape his large hands into a demonstration of the maneuvering he had planned. He looked like a bear trying to explain the use of a pottery wheel.

Kartholomé chuckled. He started to say something but found it too amusing to put into words. Geena flicked a spoon at him. He found that hilarious as well. He got up, coughing out an overflow of humor as he headed back on deck.

Geena reached across the table and patted Clytus’s hand with a solemnity that—on her—could only be in jest. “I’m sure the wolves have never seen the likes of how an Outer Isle brigand tacks. They’ll wet themselves.”

This sat a moment in the room before the dubious humor of it got Melio wagging his head. Geena slid her chair toward his and leaned into his shoulder. Clytus began to explain that it was not just tacking he had in mind. There was … He stopped midsentence. Melio turned, ready to nudge him back into it and feeling it best he get Geena’s head off his shoulder. He caught sight of Kartholomé.

The man stood framed in the door. The blood in his face had drained out of him right along with the good humor he had stepped out choking over. His eyes searched the room without actually focusing on anyone.

Geena started to say something. Stopped. It was Clytus who asked, “What?”

Kartholomé said, very softly, “Come outside.”

Stepping from the dim passageway onto the deck, Melio thought a full moon must have risen, so bone-blue was the light. A pungent scent invaded his nose. It flared his nostrils as it pushed inside, a sea stink so heavy he could barely breathe it. As he stepped on the slick deck, he heard the sound. Not silence anymore but a hushed slithering, a moist friction of something all around the boat, a wet sound like an enormous tongue licking his ear: all of these at once. Then he saw what made the noise, and the light and the smell. The sea was in motion around them again. Only, it was not the water that was moving.

When he learned what the task would entail, Tunnel chose his tools accordingly: two mallets, each of them rectangular blocks of solid steel, with thick hardwood shafts wrapped with black leather. Leaving Avina, he carried one of them in each hand, a feat that few could have managed and that strained even his brawny arms and shoulders. He did not care. He was in a bad mood and did not mind if it showed. He did not like being sent away from Skylene, sick as she was. Nor did he plan to be away from the worsening turmoil of the city any longer than he had to. But the Lothan Aklun relics were part of the dance of power at play in Ushen Brae now. The league wanted them; Dukish wanted them. They all wanted to use them to gain Lothan Aklun powers, all except the Free People, who knew better. If the messenger had found what he claimed to have found, it needed to be dealt with fast, before it fell into the wrong hands.

Outside the gates of the southern end of the city, a small party waited for him: the vessel messenger himself, three youths true to the Free People, and a man who had recently left the Antok clan’s service. This latter was the only one of questionable loyalty, but he brought with him a prize that could not be ignored—one of this clan’s totem animals.

The antok was young, half the size of an adult, but it still stood a hulking bulk of muscle and hide and tusks. The harness on its back was not the standard issue—as usually younger antoks were not ridden—but was a crosshatch of thick leather cords and even thicker lengths of rope. Tunnel was not at all sure just how to mount it. The antok’s tender, Potemp, convinced Tunnel to secure his mallets along the beast’s side. “So they don’t brain anybody,” he said. Then he had each of them climb into the weight arrangement he thought best. This put Tunnel right atop the beast’s shoulders.

If he had not been in such ill humor, he might almost have enjoyed the vantage point it provided him as they set out at a canter. Tunnel—who was still a member of the Antok clan, even though he had broadened his allegiance to include all the Free People—had never ridden one of the beasts upon whose form his own gray skin and prominent tusks were fashioned. He rather liked the feel of it. Looking forward over the mount’s coarse hide, he watched the creature’s tusk jut into and out of view as his head swayed back and forth with his strides.

He is strong like me, he thought, but young. Just a young one.

They made good time the first day, seeing nobody on the road. What a land this is, Tunnel observed, so much of it empty of people. We should change that.

It was not, however, empty of reminders of the civilization that had once thrived there. The second day, they traveled a section of old track called the Bleeding Road. On each side, erected at regular intervals, stood the decrepit remains of the stakes the Fumel clan had been impaled upon. All of them: every Auldek of that clan for the crime of altering their quota slaves to look like them. To be children instead of slaves. The crime was a hard one for Tunnel to wrap his mind around, and the sight of stout spikes and the small piles of bones still at the bases of some of them, half hidden among the weeds, did not help. Auldek bones lasted a very long time. Strong as iron.

None of the small company chose to comment on the sights or the history behind them.

They reached the bank of the Sheeven Lek on the third morning. A little farther downstream the river broke into the main channels of the delta, but here it stretched wide before them, at the full breadth of its single channel. They turned upstream, and reached the site by the middle of the day.

It was a Lothan Aklun structure, all right. That much was clear from the strangely organic shape of it, the melding of the recognizable and the bizarre. The building stood near the bank of the river, shaded by trees but with a clear stretch of beach and a series of ramps leading from the water up to its riverfront side. The beams of the frame looked to be thick tree trunks, irregularly shaped and even knobbed at the base of chopped-off limbs. All this was clear on the framework, atop which the walls and roof of the place draped like a loose skin. Or so it looked from a distance, as they stood warily contemplating it.

From up close, the skinlike material was as solid as stone, as smooth as glass. And inside … inside brought back memories that Tunnel had not turned over in his mind for some time. The white walls, the slick floors, the strange, unnatural scent in the air. The instrument panels, levers, and all manner of devices, many-limbed things that stood like spiders. Dead spiders, but ones that could spring to life at the touch of a Lothan Aklun hand. Tunnel tried to see only what was here, unused and abandoned and powerless. This was not a place he had ever been to. It was larger, with different instruments, but the memories came anyway, visions of that other place and of the things done to him with tools somehow kin to the ones here. Young Tunnel, having his tusks fused right into his skull, the pain of it, the utter calm in the face of the Lothan Aklun woman who worked over him … Nothing had ever frightened him more than that calm.

Fortunately, he was not a child anymore. He slammed his two mallets down on their heads, their shafts standing upright. “This is it, then? Not so much to see.”

The vessel messenger had wide-spaced eyes and the tattoos of the Fru Nithexek, the sky bear. He seemed nervous inside the building, looking around as if he feared the old inhabitants might return at any moment. “It wasn’t that I’d never heard of this place before. I had. You can see it from the river. Once I floated by in a shell from the Sky Isle, but that was at night and the Lothan Aklun still worked the place. With them around it was a place to avoid. When I saw it this time, though, I knew things were different. Can’t just leave it here for anybody to find.”

“Anybody other than us, you mean,” Tunnel said. He studied the panels and levers closely, without touching them. “What does this place do?”

As simple a question as it was, none had a ready answer.

“You don’t know what it does?”

The messenger walked in a nervous circle. “If you mean exactly what does it do, I can’t say, but over there”—he pointed toward the riverfront side of the structure—“are bays that open onto ramps that lead into the water, a deep cove. I think they built the soul vessels here. Or built them elsewhere and brought them here for servicing of some sort.”

“Maybe they put the souls inside them here,” one of the youths said.

The rest let that sit untouched. One of the other youths rubbed his nose. Potemp cleared his throat and looked at his feet.

“Yeah,” Tunnel said, sniffing the air, “this place doesn’t smell good. Back up.” He bent his legs slightly, gripped the shafts of the upright mallets. His gray arms bulged as he raised them, the striations of his forearms twitching with the effort. “Back, back.” The others retreated, and he went to work.

He swung the mallets in wild arcs, smashing the panels, snapping levers clean off. Bits of the stonelike material flew in all directions, twirling in the air and skittering across the floor like shards of glass. The two-armed attack was not easy, but he kept at it for a time, knowing the others were watching him in awe. Tunnel liked being strong. Might as well show it.

When the strain started to pain his shoulders, he flung one of the mallets away. He took the remaining one up in a two-handed grip. Just as impressive, really, as each blow now carried double the force, the whole of his arms and massive back and stout legs combining to drive the steel where his mind willed it.

Sometime later, he paused. He balanced the mallet upright and stood with his hand propped on the end of the shaft. Glistening with sweat, heaving in great breaths, he surveyed the damage he had done. Pretty good damage, he thought. To the watchers, he said, “Let’s have a fire.”