The Sacred Band (19 page)

As he listened, Dariel understood the word-notes that were that strange language, so filled with longing, so true and perfect. Somehow, they carried the solidity of the substance of the world rendered in living sound.

For hundreds of years we lived and died and worked at this mission
, Nâ Gâmen said. He held Dariel by the wrist now. They walked along a narrow shelf of rock that dropped off down a steep slope on one side. Before them, a stone staircase curved up toward the peak of the mountain. They carried on toward it.
The world was in chaos through all that time. See it
.

And Dariel did. Warring factions. Uprisings. Tribal betrayals. Atrocities. The Known World as it had once been flashed before Dariel’s eyes in a torrent of images. He saw things real and surreal, things that made sense and things that did not. An army of mail-clad warriors smashed against howling tribesmen in furs and leather. Creatures with the lower bodies of horses and with human torsos above pounded across dry plains. Black skinned as Balbarans, they screamed war. A queen bearing a narrow, simple crown spoke before a gathered host of snarling monsters, crammed together inside a huge chamber. She showed no fear of them. She just spoke on, her freckled face serene before the madness.

Nâ Gâmen explained that Edifus left the Dwellers alone as his conquest took shape. He even visited them on occasion, learning the song himself and adding his voice to theirs. Perhaps he still respected the god. Perhaps he believed as they did. For a time it seemed so. He convinced them that the world they were building—once the warfare was over—would have a beauty in the god’s eyes. In that way, he would aid in luring the Giver back to the Known World.

We came to trust him. We freely gave him
The Song of Elenet.
Who better than a king to protect it? His sons, Thalaran, Tinhadin, and Praythos, wanted to become students of
The Song,
but we would not teach them. Even Edifus would not teach them. He did not trust them. He wanted them to wait, to grow older, to find wisdom through warfare first. He hid
The Song
in a place he thought nobody could find it. When Edifus died, one of the sons showed himself to be everything Edifus had feared. Tinhadin, the middle son, was a man apart from his siblings. He fell into warring with them. Even as their Wars of Distribution spread the empire farther than Edifus had ever dreamed, he found ways to kill both his brothers. Still he wanted more
.

A man with Akaran eyes and a twice-crooked nose raged into a temple, pushing through chairs and desks, his sword slashing at any of the robed pupils near enough for him to cut down. Many fled from him, but one man did not. He stood, leaning against a lectern, his hands clasping it behind him, holding it, his face defiant. The warrior swung his sword, sloppy with rage. It sliced through one of the priest’s arms and most of his torso. He let loose the weapon and climbed over the gore slipping from the dying body to reach the text that the priest had been protecting. The look of rapture on his face was like nothing Dariel had ever witnessed.

We should have been prepared. We should have seen it coming. We did not. He stole a text that should never have been read and made himself a sorcerer. He used it to teach his chosen warriors. Together, no army could stand against them
.

Warriors in orange cloaks waded into a great host, an army like the entire world. The sorcerer warriors hewed forward with great sweeps of their long swords. They whispered words that Dariel heard as if their lips were pressed against his ears. He knew the meaning of the words for the space of time it took to hear them. Horrible words. Sounds that were the unmaking of the world. Notes that tore and destroyed. Phrases that twisted in Dariel’s ears like living cancer. And then he saw the man with the twice-crooked nose on a field of carnage. The man ripped off his helmet and stood, the only upright figure in a graveyard that stretched to the horizon on all sides, bodies countless. The silence terrible.

The Santoth
, Dariel said.
You are like the Santoth. You use the same magic
.

No
, came the reply.
No, we do not speak the same magic. No, we were not like them. No more so than a scholar of warfare is a warrior. We were scholars. We kept
The Song.
We preserved it. For centuries we stayed outside the world’s power struggles. We kept
The Song
alive and refined the Giver’s tongue for the good of all. You must understand that. We made it even purer, so that if ever the Giver returned we could speak with him and show him that we were not all like Elenet. That’s what we were
.

The Santoth … What they stole was not
The Song of Elenet.
It was the texts we had removed from it, the parts of it that were most foul and twisted. If they had been true scholars, they would have known this, but they were warriors. They only ever wanted the things that warriors want. Conquest. Power. To be feared. These evil texts were aid enough. And Tinhadin only wanted their rage, so he inflicted them with pain to plague them all the moments of their lives that were not spent fighting for him. That was why they fought so mercilessly. By inflicting pain, they escaped it briefly themselves
.

It was not until later that Tinhadin discovered where his father had hidden
The Song of Elenet.
He retrieved it, and once he had it, none could stand against him. Not the Dwellers, not his Santoth. He sent his own sorcerers into exile without sharing the true
Song
with them. They were raging evil, hateful, but they were powerless against him. He had only to speak to destroy them, so they accepted their exile
.

Dariel shook his head.
But I saw them on the Teh Plains. When they thought my brother dead, they marched north to search for him. Aliver had promised to release them once he found
The Song of Elenet.
He died before he could. When they confirmed that he was dead, they unleashed a nightmare on the Meins. It was a horror, but they did it for us. They did not seem vengeful. They won that war for us
.

No, not for you
, Nâ Gâmen corrected.
For themselves. If what you say is true, they fought and destroyed—as is dear to their hearts. Don’t believe they did it for you, though. If they destroyed your enemy, it was because that was the only place they could direct their anger and disappointment. Dariel, be thankful your brother died before he released the Santoth. Be thankful he never gave them
The Song of Elenet.
If he had, they would have destroyed him and taken the world as payment for their suffering. That’s what they want. Time does nothing to change men like them
.

So that is the truth as I know it
, the Watcher said.
Tinhadin stole from us and created the Santoth. We should have fought him before that, but we had no gift for prophecy. We did not know what was coming. How could we? I ask you, how could we?

A week away from the question, out of Rath Batatt and back into Inàfeld Forest, Dariel sat away from the others, on night watch. He pressed his back against the base of a large tree. The group slept—or lay quiet with their thoughts, like him—in the small clearing just below him. He still pondered Nâ Gâmen’s question. He had not answered it when asked, but now he thought he knew. They could have known what was coming if they had paid attention to the world. If they had kept their eyes open to the struggles of nations and the ambitions and fears of man, instead of believing they could ignore such things for their higher calling. Of course a thing that
could
be made into a weapon
would
be a made into a weapon. It did not matter if it was a thing of beauty. It did not matter if their mission was holy and benevolent. It only mattered that
The Song
could be twisted to serve human greed. If that was so, it was only a measure of time until someone grasped for it.

A man like Tinhadin, whose blood—Nâ Gâmen reminded him—flowed in his veins. He did not let himself think also of a woman like his sister. That thought lurked at the margins of his consciousness. He knew it was there and that it would not likely go away, but he could not face it yet. There was too much else to face, too many things more pressing on him. As he had thought before, he needed to solve the problems of this land. It was here in Ushen Brae that he found himself, and here that he had to carve a path forward. The fact that Nâ Gâmen looped it all back to the Known World did not change that. It just made everything more urgent.

“Dariel?” Anira climbed the small rise up toward him. He had not seen her until she spoke. “May I sit with you?”

Dariel indicated the space beside him, with a crescent of root that would make a comfortable seat. “I’m no good as a watchman tonight.”

“When were you ever? Are you still thinking of him?”

“Of course. You?”

Anira sat back against the trunk, her arm pressed against his. “I never had trouble sleeping before. Now …”

“Was your time with him … bad? I mean …” He hesitated. “I don’t know what I mean. It’s still hard to talk about.”

“No, my time with him wasn’t bad. Was yours?”

“I don’t know how to answer that,” he said.

An eruption of monkey calls peppered the air just then. For a few moments, the creatures leaped and swung through the trees above them, passing like a great herd along a road of branches and limbs. When they were gone into the distance, both of them let the silence be. Anira did not seem to mind that he had not answered the question. Dariel was glad, as he was grateful for the press of her dark skin against his.

Anira said something in Auldek.

“Why do you all sometimes speak Auldek? I would think you would hate it.”

“The tongue of our enslavement?”

“Something like that.”

“All the tongues offered us were the tongues of our enslavement. Would you have us speak Acacian?”

“You do speak Acacian,” Dariel said.

“Out of necessity. It’s still the language that sold us to slavery. It’s the language of the league. We all came here with a first language, not always Acacian, but we also spoke some Acacian. We had to. It’s the language of your empire. If we could have sorted ourselves we might have kept Balbara alive in us or Candovian or Senivalian. But we were thrown into a world where two languages were the only true currency. Auldek among the Auldek, Acacian among ourselves. At least we speak two languages. What about you?”

“I speak a bit of lots of things.”

“A bit?”

“I had to. I traveled all over. I worked among the people in Aushenia. Right in with them, rebuilding after the war with Hanish Mein.”

“My noble prince,” Anira teased. She leaned her knees up over his and rested her head on his shoulder. “And how much of their talk can you speak? You can say, ‘Hello.’ You can say, ‘My name is Dariel. What is yours?’ You can ask where is the toilet and comment on the weather, so long as it’s something you know the words for, like raining. Am I right?”

“I never
had
to speak anything other than Acacian. I did it because I … wanted to show that I cared.”

“Do you know what Mór would call that? Insulting.”

Dariel looked away. “I can’t be accountable for what someone finds insulting.”

“No, but you should try. Trying counts for a lot.”

“That’s what I just said!”

Anira laughed. “You want me to teach you Auldek? Real Auldek, not just polite phrases?”

“Yes,” he said. “I do. If it’s your language I’m learning—not the Auldek’s.”

“There are no Auldek here anymore. They are your people’s problem. I’ll teach you if you will try to learn.”

“I’ll try,” Dariel said.

Back on the Sky Mount, Dariel and Nâ Gâmen had stood atop a pinnacle of stone, a high protrusion at the very tip of the mountain. Clouds flew past them at incredible speed, wet against Dariel’s skin. It was terrifying each time they cleared and the entirety of the mountain heights fell away beneath them. A span of time had passed since last they spoke, he knew. He had reached this place by walking up the stone staircase. He knew that. But he had not walked up it in a continuous journey from when this conversation began. Time, or his awareness of it, did not progress with such reasoned steadiness.

What did you do?
he asked.
How did you respond to Tinhadin’s crimes?

Look there and see
, Nâ Gâmen answered.

Following the Watcher’s gaze, Dariel looked down and saw, overlaid on the mountains, a vast ocean. At the edge of it a tiny fleet hugged an arctic shoreline colder and more forlorn than any Dariel had seen. They were specks on an infinity of water and waves, stone and ice. He swept down closer. Figures huddled on the decks, wrapped in blankets. None of them worked the sails, and yet the ship moved forward. Among them, on the deck of the last vessel, a man stared directly at Dariel, his green eyes desolate, hopeless. He opened his mouth and spoke with the Watcher’s voice.

Cowards, we fled. We did not even manage to get
The Song of Elenet
back from Tinhadin. We tried, but he attacked us with a savagery that combined the true song with the evil texts. He threw a curse at our backs, one that forever banished us from the Known World. It burned, and we fled before it. We were not warriors, Dariel Akaran. We were the faithful, and our faith had been raped and violated. The Giver had truly forsaken us. He was gone and would never return. His abandonment of the world was complete. No prayers or devotion or singing his praises would ever bring him back. Instead, he gave the world to men like Tinhadin. We thought the world had ended
.

They were years in the Far North, progressing slowly or not at all. At times they were stuck fast in the pack ice for months on end, often floating back toward the Known World. They survived by murmuring the words of
The Song
. They kept it going constantly, passing it from ship to ship like a lantern to warm and light them. They did not have the actual text of
The Song of Elenet
to guide them anymore, but they had studied it hard before fleeing. They knew enough, and they had seen that the Giver’s words could be twisted to serve man. So they sang. Not to call back the Giver, though. They sang to live. To stay alive. And as they did, floating in a lifeless land, they learned hatred.