The Sacred Band (73 page)

The lamp’s wick glowed red in the night, too buffeted by the wind to actually flame. She flew under the flying pitch orbs, cut through just above the catapults, and saw the fréketes and their riders circling in the air beyond them. She wanted them to see her, to pursue her, to witness what she was there to do. Dodging and weaving among them, she skimmed over the Auldek encampment, searching for the station Rialus had described.

When the traitor had told her about the station that held the Auldek’s histories, she had not at first understood why he thought it such important information. A library? Documents and tales from the past? Surely it had no military significance. That was what he thought he could buy his forgiveness with? She had sent him away angrily, on the verge of ordering him back to them once more. That would have been a death sentence, she knew, but she came close to delivering it.

Later, as she lay not sleeping in her tent, she had turned over the things he had said. If the Auldek really did not have any memory of their distant past, how important might those records be for them? She could not imagine not remembering her own life back to her first years of childhood. What would it mean to know that the greater portion of your existence survived only on pieces of parchment? The more she thought about it, the crueler it seemed to imagine destroying those documents. If she did so, the Auldek race would be, effectively, always less than a century old. Before that would be nothing, the tail that connected them to their past cut.

A frékete and rider appeared out of nowhere. Elya spun and dove to avoid him. She came out of the corkscrew so low that she touched her feet to the ground and ran for a moment, wings pulled tight, darting between two stations and circling around one of them. When a kwedeir leaped in front of her, she jumped over it. The beast snapped at her, but she rose above it, slapping it with her tail as she pulled away.

The innocuousness of the station surprised Mena. By the time she found it, she realized she had passed near it on several occasions. It was smaller than the rest. It sat dark along a lane of similarly dark stations. The sight of her and Elya’s reflection on the ice-laced glass panes caught her attention. Yes, that’s it. The gold cap at its peak, just like Rialus had said. She looped away from it, fréketes behind her, and came back after she had put some distance between them.

She hovered as long as she dared, and then threw the lamp, straight down with all the force and precision she could manage. It twirled end over end, the wick appearing and disappearing. It smashed through the pane of glass. For a moment the inside of the chamber was alight with a wonderful radiance. Mena took in the stacks of shelves, the many volumes, the logs and legends and journals that kept the history of an entire race. It was, in a way, beautiful.

I killed Greduc. I killed Calrach. And I’ve killed the past.

The flames spread.

Terribly imprudent,” Sire Nathos said as he settled into the elaborate contraption that was his council seat. “I can’t wait to ask what you were intending. This will be interesting, Dagon. I’m sure of it.”

I was thinking about saving the world from the likes of the Santoth, Dagon thought, aware that in a few moments he would no longer be safe thinking thoughts he wanted kept private.

“And, Grau,” Nathos continued, “why would you act without our complete agreement? If you had not hatched your plot to assassinate the bitch and her brother, we would not be so exposed. I can recall nothing like it. Everything we have built is in jeopardy.”

Grau was not in a mood to be chastened. He answered in a gruff whisper, “We did what we had to. Nobody could have foreseen the outcome. Dagon, in my opinion, made the best of an unfortunate situation.”

One that you caused, in part, Dagon thought.

“You’re lucky that some of us have had greater success in our ventures,” Nathos said. By that, of course, he meant himself and his vintage. Why he should be so proud of that now Dagon was not sure, but he looked smug. As Nathos settled back and closed his eyes, a smile tickled the corners of his lips. You hardly seem troubled. Perhaps it’s you who isn’t taking things seriously enough.

Sire Revek called the session into order. “Before I set you to explaining yourself, Sire Dagon,” he said, “we should be sure the entire chamber knows just how the calamitous events in the Inner Sea developed and how you acted and why.”

Dagon started. He knew he would need to do some explaining, but he did not expect the chairman to begin with him. “Sire,” he said, “you have all read my testimony, and Grau’s. I delivered it when I arrived this morning and was told everyone would come here prepared. And, with respect, ‘calamitous’ is hardly the word to—”

“Silence!” Just a word from a frail, thin frame, but with it the chairman stopped him. Resonant echoes of it reverberated through the newly built council chamber on Orlo, the largest of the Outer Isles. Revek had barely more than whispered, but that was all that it took to get heard in here, especially when speaking from the center of the senior leaguemen’s circles. Behind his voice, the chairman sent waves of his disquiet resonating through the council chamber. The acoustic structure of the place was sublime, the airflow circulated the mist efficiently, and the sculpted seats in which they reclined seemed to enhance their capacity for subverbal communication. Revek’s voice, at least, filled the entirety of Dagon’s skull so completely that he felt himself crammed up against the bone. Such a chamber he had never experienced before. Nor had he ever found himself the focus of his brothers’ animus. Not what he expected would greet his arrival at the Outer Isles.

“Dagon, you must acknowledge the seriousness of this matter. Reports, testimonies: these are not enough. You single-handedly ended hundreds of years of league occupation of the Known World. You assassinated two monarchs, informed them of their pending deaths while they yet lived, then abandoned league property, ordered other property destroyed, set the vineyards of Prios aflame …” Revek sighed in exasperation at the unending extent of it. “The list of things you have to answer for is staggering. Because of it, I move that you provide us access.”

Dagon’s heart rate had been increasing. On the word
access
it skipped forward into an irregular, syncopated dance of its own choreography. “Access?”

“Just so. You will be probed. You did not see fit to consult us earlier, when you made decisions that affected us all. You will do so now. We will judge you accordingly, and with the wisdom of hindsight. Do any object? Or think this action unwarranted?”

If any did, the cowards and scoundrels leaning back in their seats kept their mouths shut. Had Dagon been one of them, instead of the individual at the center of this scrutiny, he would have been just as silent. Probing was not without its benefits, at least from the point of view of the ones doing the probing. It was rarely called for, but he had enjoyed the unfettered access to other unfortunate leaguemen’s minds on several occasions. Nobody would refuse looking into his secret places under the guise of an official inquiry.

Being the one being probed, however, was ghastly. It involved inhaling a liquid distillation of mist, one that inundated your mind in a way that let your fellow leaguemen push inside it and explore your memories at will. It was an ancient process, one that each of them trained for in their youth—both to learn how to penetrate and how to allow penetration. Better the one than the other, Dagon had always thought.

What of Grau?
he came very close to saying.
Will he be probed as well?
He did not want to end the possibility of getting aid from that senior leagueman just yet, though. He tried to return the discussion to reason. “We all understand the facts already,” he said. “Truly, if you just let me answer each of these points, I’ll put your minds at ease. Sire Grau can assist me—”

“I second the chairman’s proposal,” Sire Nathos intoned.

Several others chorused their assent as well.

Dagon craned around to see back into the dim ranks of reclined leaguemen behind him. “But if you just—”

Sire Grau said, “Let it be done.”

Let it be done? “Did you say that, Grau? Let it be—”

“Silence, Dagon!” Sire Revek whisper-shouted. “We will hear from you afterward. The probe will be carried out first. That is our decision. You have no choice but to abide by it.”

The litens—special Ishtat officers who normally stayed pasted to the far walls of the chamber—converged on him. They appeared through the mist-thick air as if they had only ever been a step away. Wearing goggles over their eyes and breathing apparatuses over their noses and mouths, they moved with a clearheaded speed that Dagon could not comprehend. They pressed down on his chest, pinned his arms to the armrests, and wrapped cords around them so quickly Dagon only realized what they were doing after they had completed the task. He tried to pull free. He could only strain against them. He kicked, but his feet, too, were bound. He shouted, but that ended quickly, too. A liten vised his jaw in a painful finger pinch. The figure stared down at him, eyes unseen behind the green glass that hid them.

Dagon got ahold of himself. He ceased struggling. It was useless and just made him look ridiculous. This situation was absurd, but it was serious. Better that he acquiesce with faith in his rightness, with dignity. That would be the shortest course back to his proper standing. “Of course, Sires,” Dagon managed through his nearly immobilized jaw. “My—my mind is yours. I have no fear of … being—”

A liten carefully slipped a tube into his nose. Dagon could not help but thrash. He had thought this part amusing when it was happening to someone else, interesting that so much tubing could be shoved and shoved and shoved up a person’s nose. Where did it all go? he had wondered. Now he knew. And then the liquid flowed.

In brief moments he had before the liquid mist overcame him, Dagon thrashed around, both in his chair and inside his head, fighting the rush of fear he claimed not to feel. He searched for thoughts that he should somehow banish, but as soon as he found one that was embarrassing or questionable, another popped up like a bubble beside it. And then another. He got nowhere. There was so much to hide, the innocuous just as much as the substantial. He wondered how this was happening. He should have arrived here a hero. A man of action. One of decisive …

Being mind-probed by a chamber full of leaguemen, Dagon learned, was unequal parts horrifying, degrading, embarrassing, and enlightening. How much of each depended on the moment in question. Each moment of the examination blurred into spiraling circles, in which he could get no sense of time’s progression. He put together a sketchy narrative for himself of how the experience had gone afterward. Even this was putting order to a process that had in truth been like being explored by a swarm of scheming bees.

Early on, his brothers had focused their attention on the Queen’s Council meeting that had so disturbed him, the one in which Aliver had appeared in the flesh. They moved forward through his visit to Grau, in which he suggested and then argued for the monarchs’ assassinations. An observer at his own dissection, Dagon knew that the memory as he reexperienced it did not match the memory as he recalled it, but he could find no way to voice this.

His brothers watched the coronation through his eyes, turned over his emotions as the monarchs caressed their present, felt his fear as the Santoth changed everything. They looked through his eyes as he searched his library for some way to understand them, and they watched him write the letter that confessed the crime he had helped perpetrate only hours before. They followed him as he fled from Acacia aboard a pleasure yacht in the dead of night, chasing a messenger bird toward Alecia. The voyage surprised him in some particulars. Had fleeing Acacia really wrung him through with as much melancholia as it seemed to? No, not possible! He had not gotten teary at seeing the harbor lights recede in the wake of his boat. He had not been overcome with sadness for the lives of all those poor fools still rafted together, in shock and mourning and confusion now, instead of sharing the euphoria the day had begun with.

Apparently—although he did not remember it this way—a barrage of random memories had assaulted him throughout the short voyage. He revisited old conversations with Leodan Akaran and Thaddeus Clegg, his treacherous, conflicted chancellor. Dagon had not liked either man, so why did it seem like he wished he could have them with him in his cabin, talking through the recent events while sharing a mist pipe? Why recall the time one of the white minks the concubines kept got loose in his quarters, unnerving him as it darted about with its long tail swishing behind it? What use was remembering the time he sat through some banquet with a sore tooth, struggling to hide his discomfort from those around him? What a strange, useless thing to recall. And yet there it was, as vivid in its own way as some of the most crucial moments of his tenure in Acacia.

They lingered with him through the dream he had of the time Corinn arrived in his offices—so young then, beautiful in the newly ripened manner of youth. He had thought cruelly about the work he would have liked to put her mouth to when she caught him off guard. He had to retrace the half-heard words she had spoken, taking a moment to comprehend the audacity of the proposal she was making. She spoke her way into an empire right then and bound Hanish Mein’s hands with a few well-conceived words. Not her lover’s pawn after all, it turned out.

And that took him to a view of Hanish’s face in profile as he stared at one of the palace’s golden monkeys. It was an image Dagon saw with such detail it might have been a painting hung on the wall before him. He had hated the man’s perfect features, his lover’s eyes, and the arrogant grace with which he occupied his body. But what he remembered was wondering if Hanish had any suspicion that the league had often used the monkeys as thieves and messengers. They were clever, easily trained, and seemed to take a certain amount of satisfaction from working covertly. Of course Hanish hadn’t known. Nobody on Acacia ever had. Dagon would miss those monkeys. Realizing this made him shake his head at his own mawkishness. He needed the steadying influence of his brothers.