The Sacred Band (82 page)

“The thing is, I won’t be living in that world. So then I ask the same questions, but thinking about the world you’ll live on in, and Aaden and Shen. Do you know what happens to my answer? It changes. It becomes an even firmer yes. I don’t just think you
could
live in that world. I think you
should
. I think it will be a world to be proud of.”

“That’s a lot to ask of me.”

“Mena, it’s not the only thing I’m going to ask of you. Both Corinn and I, we expect a great deal from you.”

Later that night, Aliver once more rose up from his sleeping body. He floated through the top of his tent and hovered in the air above it. For a time he paused there alone, the world quiet around him, save wolves howling somewhere in the distance.

He knew he was not alone when he heard Mena’s voice, saying that she was here.

A little later, Haleeven found them, and then Perrin, glowing bright as he moved toward them. Soon, they were all there with him. Beautiful spirit selves, pure energy and light, hovering about the earth.

“All right,” Aliver said. “Come harvesting with me. Come, you will like this work. Remember, we are not killing. We are setting innocents free. Come harvesting souls with me.” So saying, he led them north, toward the sleeping Auldek.

Amazing, Corinn thought, how different one wave can look from another. She would never have believed it before, but after days on the wing, with only water beneath them, she began to see waves that seethed and waves that crested, ones that bulged in soft mounds and others that cut like blades, some smooth and black as stone, others foaming and hissing. Some cut diagonally against the others. Some changed their character and shading right before her eyes. And some rose like mountain peaks, so vast that they changed the air currents above them and had Po struggling to maintain his course.

The Range, Corinn thought. Dariel saw this before I did.

Amazing also how much the sea thronged with life. Yes, there were great lifeless and gray swaths of sea. But so, too, were there times when schools of fish rose to the surface in such massive numbers they became the world. She watched shoals of silverfish paint swirls and shimmers, dancing as predators cut through them. For the greater part of a morning, they flew over floating islands of sea fronds, so thick that creatures lived atop them, running from Po’s shadow like tiny antelopes. One night the glow of life under the sea outdid the shining of the stars. And once she watched the illuminated outlines of a pod of whales, large and ghostly, moving with a stately grace.

At the back edge of all this wonder ran their hunters, pressing ever onward. Sometimes they, too, seemed like giants, striding ocean miles with each step. But other times they were only men, tiny men in an ocean that dwarfed them. Po stayed beyond the reach of their sorcery, but Corinn heard them speaking to her. For a time they tried to convince her to stop running. They must have the book, but once they did they claimed they would heal her, make her mouth right. They would study
The Song
with her.

Though she knew better, there was something powerfully persuasive about them. Strange how narrow the line between their warm, soothing voices and their evil truth was. The intent behind both was the same, strong in a way that had a similar essence. She never let herself believe them. It helped that Hanish was there whispering warnings, keeping her true to her course.

Eventually, they dropped the pretense and taunted her instead. They would never tire, they said. She had already failed. She had already led them back into the world. She could not stand against them. She was not Tinhadin. She had not his strength. She had not his
mouth
. They would chase her right around the world if they had to. She could not outfly them. They would catch her tomorrow, or the next day. But they would catch her.

The Song
is ours! It’s already ours. Your days are few
.

She did not know if they said that because they knew about the poison in her, or because they intended to make sure of that themselves. She gave them no response. Hanish did not even talk anymore. He just rested his chin on her shoulder and watched the same watery world that she did. That was all right. There was nothing more to say. They just flew.

And then came the day they were searching for. The sea beneath them suddenly thronged with creatures. One moment it was empty. The next, white leviathans clamored at the surface. Hundreds of them. Enormous creatures that she had only seen in paintings, paintings that at the time she had assumed were touched by fancy.

“Sea wolves,” Hanish said.

Po did not like them. At first he roared at them, thinking them some new curse of the Santoths’. Corinn calmed him. Careful not to let him see the images she had of what was to come, she had him bank into a wide circle, looping around and around above the water.

“Why are you doing that?”

I dreamed it
.

“Ah.” She knew that Hanish had a quip to follow, but he held it in.

I dreamed it
. Since that was so, she did the only thing she could. She did what had been shown to her already in the dream. She flew that circle, taking Po lower and lower as she did. Each time she came around, she saw the Santoth on the horizon but closing on them. They had not been part of the dream, but they would be part of the reality.

The sea wolves did something Hanish found very strange. “What in the Giver’s name?” he murmured. Corinn expected it, though. They copied Po’s circular motion. They drew tighter, going around and around beneath them. They swam with a strange pulsing motion, twisting over one another, ghostly white, tentacled, with eyes that watched the dragon fly above them. Hard to separate one from another. The tighter they got, the more that became the case.

They are his searchers
, Corinn said.
That’s all they were ever doing, searching for
The Song of Elenet
anytime ships passed near them
.

By the time Po’s wingtip skimmed the surface they were so close together there was no water visible between them. And when Corinn asked Po to land on them, the bodies of the strange leviathans congealed together, forming a circular, flat surface on which to land. It took some convincing to get the dragon to do it. In the end, he did it only because she promised him he could fly away as soon as she and Hanish were down.

Po’s feet danced across the surface. It was flat, and strangely smooth, but it was made of great, sea-crusted white bodies, entwined tentacles, and large eyes that stared up at them. Po only stayed touching them for the time it took for Corinn to gather
The Song of Elenet
from a saddlebag and climb down. Then he lifted into the air, barking as he did so. It was a strange noise, one she had not heard him make before. For some reason, she knew what it meant. He was telling her to be quick. He did not like this place and wanted to go.

Hanish stood beside her. “What now, Corinn?”

Now we call for the worm
.

She had wondered how he would respond to this. When he did, she knew he had done so perfectly. “All right. I hope it’s quick.” He dipped his head in the direction of the Santoth, who were tall figures now, slashing the air as they ran, sending sprays of water up from their feet.

Corinn held the book out before her. She ran her palms over the aged leather of its cover. Her fingers caressed the frayed leaves of its pages. As she did so, she felt the creature wake. He was somewhere far below them, embedded in the depths of the ocean floor.
Come, I’ve brought it
. What it sent back to her was not an image or a clear thought, certainly not words. It was a feeling. It was the sensation of a massive body peeling away from the bottom, turning upward in the blackness and writhing in great sweeps of its gargantuan length.

It’s coming
. She opened her eyes. The first thing she saw was Hanish, standing just before her, his gray eyes there to meet her gaze.
I could not have done this without you
.

“You could have,” he said, “but I’m glad you didn’t have to.”

The Santoth were much nearer. They stood even taller, their elongated forms stretching far up into sky. Their churning arms cut through the clouds. She could hear them now, singing themselves faster and faster, hungrier than ever for the book that was so near.

Corinn opened it and, pulling her gaze away from the sorcerers, she began to read. The song bloomed inside her. It twined and danced about her. It wrapped her and Hanish in ribbons of energy. It sped the Santoth on, and it snapped through the tail of the creature below them, driving it upward.

When the Santoth reached them, it looked as if they would arrive in massive stature, stamping the strange platform down into the water. They held to that size until the last moment. Po had to pull back, roaring at them. Just as their feet touched the sea wolves, the Santoth shrank. The entire stretched length of their bodies pulled in, so that they stepped onto the platform the size of normal men. Cloaked, dull figures, old and ravaged by time and evil and desolation. Their eyes bulged and trembled with intensity.

“Give it to me.” Nualo extended his hand. “Give it to me!”

Looking at his cracked, aged hand, Corinn realized what the last thing Leeka had tried to say to her and Aliver was.
They cannot take it from me. I have to give it to them
. They stood there, ranked in front of her, like starving men before a feast she held in her hands … and they could do nothing.

For a sliver of a moment Corinn rejoiced. If they could not take it from her, she could keep it! They did not have the power over her that they claimed. She could …

And then that brief madness was gone. She could not keep it. She had not the life to use it anymore, and, even now, surrounded by the threads of beauty that still swam around her, she knew the song should not be sung by any human mouth. Never again.

You cannot have it
, she said.
None of us can. This ends now. Here
.

Nualo’s face bunched with rage. He raked up a curse from deep within him, but before he could utter it, the worm arrived. As when she had envisioned it swallowing the whole of the isle of Acacia, the creature’s mouth was enormous. It emerged under a great swell of seawater, a wide ring that took in everything: the sea wolves, the people standing on them, the sea around them. The mouth rose around them all. It stretched upward, stories upon stories tall, a wall so dripping with water and encrusted with barnacles and hanging with tendrils of seaweed that Corinn could only take in the vastness of it with no greater understanding of exactly what it was. The strong, aquatic smell of it drenched the air. And still it rose.

The Santoth tried to leap away. They roared their anger and slashed out with their foul sorcery. Nualo clawed for the book, begging Corinn to give it to him. She yanked it from his grasp when the sea wolves beneath him fell away. He splashed down among them, bellowing curses. The sea wolves loosed their tight weave and sent the sorcerers down to thrash among their tentacles and the great rolling heave of their bodies. Only the sea wolves directly beneath Corinn stayed together.

The queen pressed the book to her chest and looked at Hanish. He stared back. He reached out and took one of her hands. The two of them stood like that, the only stillness in all that great commotion. His mouth opened as if to say something. But instead of speaking he smiled. Of all the things he could have said and done, that smile was perfect. It was sad, resigned, and yet also confident. Somehow, it conveyed that this was as it had to be, the best of all possible outcomes. It said that what they went to now was nothing to fear.

Then the creature’s mouth closed around them all. It stopped its upward thrust and slowly, heavily, fell back into the sea. Above the churning froth into which it sank, the dragon Po circled for a time, crying out his distress. Circling, as the sea went calm beneath him, as the waves rolled on, and the wind, until there was nothing but the sea.

Standing alone in the dressing room he had been provided, Dariel listened to the murmur of the gathering crowd. He could not help but remember the multitude of voices he had sensed inside that glowing wall on Lithram Len. It was the same sound in so many ways, except that here, out in the main courtyard of Avina, the masses gathered in exuberant joy. They had mouths to speak with, hands to clap, free will to move themselves through the world. They had life to rejoice in, now more than ever.

Such had not been the case with the spirits trapped through the sorcery that encased them in that wall and somehow connected them to all the accursed soul vessels. Dariel did not expect to ever understand it entirely. He hoped he wouldn’t. Understanding the sorcery was the very thing that drove the Lothan Aklun to acts of revenge that had enslaved the entire world—themselves along with it—for generations. Better just to know that his bow of reverence had placed the raised rune on his forehead into the engraving meant to receive it. His living tissue touched that strange, glowing matter. A key. That was what Nâ Gâmen had given him. A key that unlocked that cage of souls, freeing all the spirits that the Lothan Aklun had used to power their vessels. The moment it was done, the glowing wall had gone dark. Silent. Motionless. He had felt a concussion of energy, but it had come from elsewhere. In that small chamber, the cage of souls simply ceased to be, and the enslaved vanished into freedom.

“I freed them,” Dariel said. “Or … you freed them.” That was another thing that he was going to have to learn to live with: that he and Nâ Gâmen would share his soul for as long as they both lived on inside Dariel’s mortal body. Acknowledging that, Dariel said, “We freed them.”

Bashar brushed his leg. He stroked the hound. Still a pup, but tall enough already that Dariel did not need to bend to reach him. All lean muscle and bone. Hunters. The ridge running against the grain up his back bristled stronger than ever. He looked at Cashen, who lay watching them. The pup thumped his tail. Considering the massive pads of their paws, Dariel had finally come to believe Birké had not exaggerated. The hounds would be enormous, and they would be there soon. Dariel repeated, “We freed them.”