The Sacred Band (81 page)

The boat closed some of the distance so that he had an improved view when the barges pushed forward a third time. They smacked right up against the quay, stopped dead there. The first contingent of soldiers jumped the narrow gap. They poured onto the platform and clambered over the rubble. The defenders, to their credit, rushed down to meet them. They seemed, in their exuberance, to forget that they were supposed to stay safely in the city. They brought the fight out to the quay itself.

Only the early ranks of the troops could engage, but that was perfect. The first ashore would batter the defenders into bloody heaps until they surrendered or fled. Lethel rather hoped they would do the latter. Let them run through the city streets, Ishtat in pursuit. Slaughter every last one of them, for all he cared. They did not need them. In the coming years, the league could repopulate the city as they saw fit, just as they would rebuild it to suit them. Crumbled walls, massacred rebels. It was all messy at the moment, but to build a sturdy foundation one always began with a bit of demolition.

Lethel still could not find the Akaran. He did focus in on one individual who seemed to be directing the defense, but it was not Dariel. His hair was darker than the prince’s, an unruly mop clinging to his head. After pointing and shouting and gesticulating for a time, he dove down into the mêlée below the wall.

Lethel assumed that the sound, when he first noticed it, was coming from the besieged city itself. He had experienced an earthquake once while staying along the Talayan coast, and the strangeness in the air reminded him of the odd moments that preceded the earth shaking. He yanked the spyglass up, expecting to see the entirety of the wall come tumbling down or something like that.

It did not. The fighting just continued.

What happened next did not so much frighten Lethel as perplex him to his core. The humming grew louder. He wrinkled his forehead, making the thin slashes of his plucked eyebrows into two squiggles. The fighting figures stopped. They must have heard it, too. And then the sea … it went flat. Not calm, but completely flat. The entire undulating surface of the water became as featureless as polished stone. Lethel saw this all clearly, especially when his vantage point shifted.

He soared up from the deck, so fast he left his gasp at water level. His seat came with him, ripped free of the vessel. He hung in the air with a view of the sea beneath him. Craning his head around, he saw that all the thousands of soldiers on the transports likewise floated in the air. The leaguemen and staffers and concubines turned circles, their arms and legs waving about them in a slow pantomime of panic.

How unusual, Lethel thought, sure that nothing like this had been included in his briefing.

There followed a moment of stillness, and then the world changed. The soul vessels concussed with a sudden explosion of pressure, except that it was not really an explosion. It was soundless. There was no flame or smoke, no flying debris. Only a flash and ripple in the fabric of the world. In an instant, the vessels all disappeared. Lethel’s ship vanished beneath him, as did the frigates and schooners and brigs, as did all the barges. They just ceased to be. Just afterward all the hovering people—thousands of them—splashed down into the sea.

As he hit the surface, losing control of his bodily functions on impact, Lethel was certain this had not been mentioned in his briefing. Nobody had said anything about this.

The next couple of days brought a steady inflow of troops coming onto the plateau. Not just soldiers, the new arrivals included the young and the old, women, bakers and cooks, merchants offering their wares, laborers offering their bodies for whatever work needed to be done. It looked, gloriously, as if the people of the empire all came to aid the war effort, bringing whatever they could with them. Aliver had known from his connection to them that this was happening. As he spoke to them about why and how to overcome the addiction to the vintage, he challenged them not to lose their sense of purpose. Clearly, they had not.

Elder Anath, and Sinper and Ioma Ou of Bocoum appeared. They came riding in a covered carriage that looked most out of place on the plateau, among the dreary disarray of a growing war camp. They petitioned for a meeting with Aliver. The king allowed it, but he kept it brief. He could see these men wanted only to ingratiate themselves with him, to play up their role in getting Shen back to him, and find some way to turn all this turmoil to their benefit.

Aliver gave them nothing. Once he was gone they would grab for power and influence through their connection with Shen. He had already done the best he could to leave a legacy behind him, in that locked box back in Alecia. He gave Rialus Neptos more of his time, for the things he had to say had more bearing on his present actions. Beyond that, he decided to speak to no one but those he needed to help him end this war.

The Auldek approached as well. Before them, fréketes swooped through the air, calling taunts from a distance. They did not come very close. The dragons had only to lift off the ground to drive them back. The invading army crept over the horizon one morning, and by midday had paused to make their camp. That was it. They were in place. The tundra between them would be their battlefield. The meeting Aliver had arranged with Devoth would happen tomorrow, before the two hosts, both of them ready for battle.

When Kelis arrived, tired from running across the mainland, his friend Naamen with him, Aliver could not have been more ready for them.

“I need your help,” Aliver said. “Each of you, I need you to fight with me in a way you have not before.”

He stood before the small group he had summoned to meet him: Mena, Kelis, Naamen, Perrin, Haleeven, Rialus. “What I say here is, for now, to stay among this company. I am going to ask something of you that few others would understand, and I’m going to ask it for a goal not many would imagine possible. Mena knows what I intend. She is a skeptic, which I understand. Still, she helped me choose each of you for this. Mena herself has dream-talked with her sister’s spirit before. Perrin, Mena tells me you don’t know this, but you were kind enough to offer your body as a spirit vessel.”

The young officer could not have looked more perplexed.

“Corinn also reached you, Rialus, over a great distance. You must be sensitive to the spirit world. Kelis, you were born with powers over dreams, with gifts outside the waking world. Naamen, few people have spent as much time with sorcery in the air around them as you, and, Haleeven, I believe your people for generations knew much about conversing with the dead.”

The old Mein nodded.

“It’s those traits in each of you that I want to use. Before I tell you what I want us to do, I should tell you why I want us to do it.” He sat down to be closer to the others. “I am going to make peace with the Auldek.”

“No!” Rialus barked. And then, surprised by his own outburst, asked much more quietly.” What … did you say?”

Aliver repeated it. He saw exactly the concern and doubt he had expected—and which he had received from Mena as well. As with her, he took some time to explain himself, making it clear that he did not mean surrender or defeat in any way. He intended for both sides to gain much more in the agreement than they would lose by continuing to fight.

By the time he finished, the concern and doubt had moved around on all their faces. It remained, but in differing proportions on each of them. Rialus was, again, the first to find his tongue. “Your Majesty, this … this cannot happen. Even if we offer it, they will never accept. You don’t know them as I do. They are fearless. Ruthless. They have no respect for life. Not their own or anybody’s. I saw them eat human flesh!”

“Why did they eat flesh, Rialus?”

“I told you!” Shocked again by his outburst, he said, “Your Majesty, I explained earlier. They thought it would make them fertile. They wanted to have children. They are so obsessed with—”

“With life? That’s what they’re obsessed with. They are not casual about life. They hunger for it. More than anything else they want to be parents. Wouldn’t you say that?”

Rialus thought for a moment. He seemed reluctant about the answer he came up with. “Yes, but they want war and conquest, murder just as much. They are vile. Just vile!”

“They are not ‘just vile.’ There is more to them than that. If you cannot see that, then you have only one of two choices: destroy them or be destroyed by them. I want more than two choices. Rialus, you yourself told me the Auldek once built magnificent cities. You said they sing poems of love and tell tales of valor. You said that they trained birds to dance about them, to land even in their mouths! You said that in their country eating human flesh was a crime. And you said, Rialus, that you were certain that their codes of honor mean more to them than ours do to us. I’m sorry to use your own testimony against you, but the race you described to me was not entirely vile. And the part of it that is most vile—the ways they use our people as slaves, body and soul … that is something we partnered with them on.”

Rialus shook his head. “I pray you destroy them all.”

“I pray for something better,” Aliver said.

Mena’s young officer Perrin spoke for the first time. “If we do make peace with them, what’s to stop them from becoming our enemies again sometime? They’ve suffered coming over here. We made sure of it.” He glanced down at his hands, which were wrapped with layers of new bandages. Frostbite, suffered on the long run south with the Auldek tormenting them. He had lost parts of all his fingers. He knew something about suffering, though it barely showed on his boyish face.

What a group we are, Aliver thought. Perrin with his hands two bandaged mallets. Kelis with one hand part flesh and part metal. Naamen, born with one stunted arm, small of stature. Rialus, sniffling through his peeling nose, his eyes darting about, nervous as a mouse. Haleeven, once an enemy, now a grave face watching him from the back of the small group. And Mena, bruised and battered, her shoulder wrapped and arm in a sling, ready to shake free of it and bring up a sword again at a moment’s notice. An extraordinary group …

“But what about in ten years?” Perrin asked. “Twenty? Who is to say they won’t come at us again? I would not want future generations to have to face them because we didn’t.”

“Nor would I. But it may also be that a future generation will find them to be friends. I am an idealist, Perrin. Have you heard that about me?”

The young man smiled. Nodded.

“What else can I do but provide the possibility of us all finding our better natures?”

Haleeven, sitting behind most of the others, said, “I can testify that such a thing is possible. Enemies may become friends.” Lest he sound wistful, he carried on more sharply, “But will our soldiers accept this? All these people, they’ve come to fight, haven’t they?”

“They came to live. They came because living meant they might have to fight. It’s the peace they want, though, not the war that precedes it. If we can end this honorably, of course, the troops will support it. Perhaps in the future some will find cowardice in the act, but I hope they will see inspiration instead. Mena and Rialus—perhaps you as well, Perrin, Haleeven—think that the Auldek will accept nothing but victory on their terms. Right now, today, that’s probably true. But by tomorrow, if you help me, I believe we can have them thinking differently. Will you help me?”

As nobody objected, Aliver explained it as best he could.

They think you’re crazy,” Mena said, once the others had exhausted their questions, talked it all through, and then walked, mystified, out into the fading day.

Aliver smiled. “Yes, but they will get past that soon. Before I got here, they thought you were the crazy one.” He caught the first scent of the dinner stew. That made him smile as well. He could count the time he had left alive on his fingers and toes, and yet he still knew hunger when his belly was empty.

“How is Elya?” he asked.

Mena nodded. “Much better. I think she is healed as much as she is going to. She is strong everywhere except the wing that the frékete chewed on. I’m not sure why. I think she could heal it if she wanted to, but … I don’t know. I may be imagining it. I may be thinking of myself instead, but I feel like the intent of the wound is what she fears. It was too malicious. She was not meant to be attacked like that.”

“With time?” Aliver asked.

“She will heal that, too. Yes, I think so. We will have to be far from here, though.”

“Has she warmed to her children?”

“No,” Mena said. “I know she recognizes them. She stares at them. They approach often, but she hisses them away. They’re so much bigger than she, but they fear her. Corinn took them from her. I don’t know if I can forgive her for that.”

Aliver closed his eyes. He nodded and exhaled a breath and said, “I know.”

With the hand of her good arm, Mena rubbed her injured shoulder. It, too, was healed she said, but only as healed as it could be. That arm had tried to leave her body several times already, the first when she was a girl being pummeled by the surf in Vumu, hand clenched around a sword too heavy for her to even lift at that point. The shoulder was healed by Elya’s touch, but that did not mean it had not been damaged by time and abuse.

“Mena,” Aliver said, “I am going to die.”

“You told me that already, but I don’t need to believe it until it happens. Sire Dagon is a liar. I would not trust him to tell me whether it was snowing outside or not.”

“You’ve changed, Mena. Before you came up here, you would not have talked of snow. You would have said, ‘I would not trust him to tell me whether it was raining outside or not.’ We knew so little of snow on Acacia. Just that one time, really. That’s the only snow I remember.”

He cleared his throat, then coughed for a bit. By the time he quieted the memory had passed. “I can feel it. Believe me. I’ve been to death already. I know what it feels like as it approaches. I’m not scared. I do wish I had—”

He stopped himself. Cut the words with the side of his hand and pushed them away with the flat of it. “It’s hard not to talk of regrets, but I won’t. Waste of time, regret.” He sat forward and took her hands in his. “Mena, I am constantly asking myself if I could live in a world in which the Auldek are at peace with us. Can I find a way to get beyond the crimes they’ve done and the suffering they’ve caused? Can I do all the things that come after this war ends in peace between us? It’s not easy to imagine.” He looked at her a long moment. “When I ask these things, the answer I come back with is yes. Yes. Of course yes. I would be a fool to let even one more good person die if he or she didn’t have to. That’s what tyrants do, not kings.