David Durham - The Sacred Band

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 melee 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, freketes 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?”