David Durham - The Sacred Band

Dropping from the ladder onto the frozen earth, Rialus pitched over, as he always did when jumping from the ever-moving structure. He scrambled to his feet, wary of the vehicle’s massive wheels, and had to shuffle run to catch up with Allek. They cut a zigzagging path through the rumbling, roaring, groaning flow of men and machines and furred and horned and tusked beasts, all the while buffeted by the wind.

They entered the steamstation through a trapdoor that lowered for them to leap up to. A moment later, after climbing a winding staircase, Rialus was shrugging out of his garments, the air warm around him. At least the steamship had that going for it. It was a specially constructed station, one that featured an elaborate heating system fueled by the flammable pitch the Auldek had brought with them in great quantities. A fire burning somewhere inside pumped in enough hot air that the Auldek lounged about half naked, slaves fanning them and serving them chilled drinks and giving them massages. It never failed to remind Rialus of the baths at Cathgergen, a memory which he ran from, remembering just how that had turned out.

“Ah, Allek, you’ve found my leagueman,” Sabeer said. “You never disappoint.”

“I try not to, dearest one,” Allek said, bowing his head.

Dearest one? Rialus sneered inside. As if you have a chance with her.

“Come, Rialus, sit with us.”

Sabeer lounged on a low divan, propped up on one elbow, sipping something from a tiny blue glass. She was tall and long limbed, with a tensile muscularity that hummed like a coiled spring, making even languid movements seem somehow dangerous. She wore a thin linen garment, perfectly designed to hug her contours and yet hang loose. Another woman, Jafith, lay in a similar posture. A man named Howlk sat with her feet in his lap, an absurdly submissive posture for a warrior who, Rialus knew, enjoyed wrestling naked in death matches-or as close to such as an immortal could suffer.

Two humans stood just outside the group, one beating out a rhythm on a waist-high drum while the other smacked a rattle on his palm. If not for the sloshing liquid in the glasses one might have forgotten the entire station was rolling across an icescape.

Rialus sat on the cushion to which Sabeer directed him. He had been petrified when he learned she was Devoth’s wife, but what that distinction meant Rialus could not figure out. He rarely saw them together, and when he did they treated each other more like siblings than anything else-deeply familiar, enough so that they were also deeply dismissive. They kept separate quarters, and Sabeer spent her time with whomever she chose. For some reason, Rialus was one of those.

“Howlk was reciting a song to Sumerled,” Sabeer said, squeezing Rialus’s thigh. “Continue, sir. Let Rialus hear the end.”

The Auldek warrior cleared his throat. He closed his eyes, his fingers kneading the ball of Jafith’s foot and his upper body swaying with the effort, as if he were putting all of himself into the pressure of his fingers. He tilted his stern features up, long hair flowing over his shoulders, and told a tale of epic love and tragedy that would have brought the entire Acacian senate to tears. Two lovers suffered the wrath of the Lvin for some crime Rialus could not quite pinpoint. Rialus had heard poems performed like this before, but Howlk had a particularly good voice for it. Despite himself, he was transfixed.

Rialus had ceased being surprised by the complex collage that was Auldek culture. At times they seemed as barbaric and prone to violence as the Numrek. But those moments did not define them entirely. Devoth with his dancing hummingbirds. The time Rialus watched them draw garden tapestries with colored pebbles, complex works of art that would blur and disintegrate under the first rain. They achieved a balance in their lives, but it was a balance of extremes. Here was a race who would howl for blood in the morning, and then tend beetle farms on their terraces in the afternoon. Here was a people who would abandon their land to march to war, but then bring with them strange artifacts of gentility.

He would never forget the makeshift banquet held on a black stone beach, waves crashing in the distance. The Auldek delicately plucked the violet leaves of some flowerlike vegetable. They dunked each leathery leaf in fragrant oils and scraped off the softer tissue with their upper teeth. The thing tasted fine, when you got used to it, but it was the spectacle of such rough creatures all silently attending leaf dipping that ranked as one of the strangest sights he had ever witnessed.

When Howlk finished his song and had shaken off the praise offered him, Rialus asked, “How old is that tale?”

“A couple hundred years,” Howlk said. “It’s a newer poem, really.”

“So as new as that? Then… did you know these ill-fated lovers? Personally, I mean.”

Howlk looked away without answering, opening an awkward silence.

Something over Rialus’s shoulder caught Sabeer’s attention. Several Lvin women climbed the circular staircase. Though they were human, Rialus knew them instantly. Their every movement shouted their status, not just with their clan affiliation but as simple sublime motion. Their bodies were lithe and sculpted, honed through torturous training that made them fighters almost on par with the Auldek themselves. They went about wearing only short skirts. They were bare breasted, with chiseled arms and long muscles taut in their legs as they climbed. Like their totem animal, they moved with feline grace, circling and climbing up toward the next level without pausing.

Behind the women came the white dreadlocks and the pale, leonine visage of Menteus Nemre. Like the women before him, he was nearly naked. The slave’s muscles bulged absurdly on his chest and arms, cut fine divisions on his abdomen, and stood out in thick bands running down his legs. He paused halfway up the stairs, taking in the room. For a moment, he seemed to stare so intently at him that Rialus wanted to squirm. Actually, he did squirm. Nothing about the attention of Menteus’s gaze changed, though.

As his torso narrowed, the color of his skin changed from powder white to rich, dark brown from his abdomen down-his natural color. A shade of Talay. He paused on the landing and studied the lounging Auldek group.

Strange to think of this man as a slave, for not an inch of him betrayed the slightest subservience. Rialus had never been this close to him before. He could not think of him without seeing images of the damage he had done during the games back in Avina. The speed of his attack. The way limbs and blood flew from his blade work. The death he inflicted for no other purpose than to determine the order in which the clans would march away on this campaign.

Realizing the man was staring at Sabeer, Rialus looked back at her. She smiled and dipped her head in greeting. Her gaze ascended as Menteus Nemre continued his climb. “You shouldn’t ask such things,” Sabeer said, returning to Rialus’s question. She leaned a bit closer. “You embarrass us. You see, we’ve forgotten.”

“Forgotten?”

She shrugged, waved him away with her hand, and then pointed at the musicians. “Sing.”

Howlk asked, “So what do you believe, Rialus? I’ve heard the quota speak of few gods. There is one that gives, yes?”

“The god of presents,” Allek quipped.

“Yes, that one. Can you get him to give me something? I want a great many things.”

They all looked at Rialus with playfully serious faces, expressions that grew more amused as he tried to convey the essential details surrounding the Giver. Before he had gotten far at all, Jafith said, “What nonsense! Did you just make that up, Leagueman?”

“No, I’ve heard others speak the same many times,” Allek said. “Theirs is a feeble faith. Don’t look offended, Rialus. What sense does it make that one god would create all? Why would he create… rabbits. Soft and cuddly, yes? And then create foxes that hunt them down and tear them to shreds? Why do that? That god is no god to the rabbits. He is a demon that favors their enemies. But nor does that god honor the fox, for he creates other animals bigger than it. Creates wolves. Creates you Acacians. Even you, Rialus, could kill a fox if you were lucky and had the right weapon.”