The Sacred Band (22 page)

The Auldek shouted something at the fréketes, and then pointed toward the village. The creatures followed the gestures. They glanced at one another as if coming to their own agreement on the order, and then rose one by one into the air. They flew for the village. Devoth had never looked happier. His eyes followed them with childish amazement, as if he somehow were not the architect of all this but just a witness. Then he marched after them without a word of direction to Rialus. As he strode, he reached around and yanked free the long sword strapped to his back. The other Auldek also freed their various weapons.

Rialus almost stayed where he was, an act of protest against whatever was about to happen. But as the Auldek got farther away, the howling emptiness at his back shifted closer. His feet moved of their own accord. He stumbled forward. The fréketes circled above the village. A few of them touched down. Several alighted on the structures’ roofs. The Auldek lumbered forward, getting faster. Rialus himself began to run. On the one hand he hated being pulled forward. On the other he wanted to shout an alarm, to somehow alert the villagers to the enemy upon them and to explain that he was not one of them. He did not get to do any of this. Instead, he was in place to watch what followed.

One of the fréketes on a roof leaped into the air and, holding its wings angled up vertically, slammed down on the structure. The houses, Rialus knew, were built around a framework of pinewood and whalebone, layered with a latticework of beams and skins and covered with turf. The house being attacked was solid enough that the frékete needed to leap several times before it punched through. It half disappeared inside. Only its wings protruded as the rest of its body twisted and slashed around inside.

The others went wild. One shattered another roof. Another punched in a door and shoved an arm in. The first to break through climbed out of the wreckage, a flailing body clenched in its jaws. When its upper body was clear of the rooftop, it grabbed the person in one hand and hurled him out toward the onrushing Auldek. The man screamed as he tumbled through the air and crashed down. Howlk slammed his spear into the man’s abdomen, pinning him to the ground for the moment it took before he strode over him, yanking the weapon out as he did so.

The Auldek reached the village as the inhabitants began to emerge. A man burst through a door and ran roaring into the open. He carried an ax in one hand, raised above his head not so much in an attack as in a gesture of warning. Rialus could tell it was not a war ax. It was one for chipping away ice. Devoth, who was standing directly in the man’s path, spun to one side. As the man passed him, he swung his sword around, angled it up, and severed the man’s arm at the elbow. It and the ax looped away. The man ran forward a few strides, waving his stump as if it still held the ax. Devoth let him turn, spraying blood in a circle around him. He let him understand a portion of what was happening, then he sliced his legs out from under him.

Other men followed, to variations of the same fate. Women and children died the same way. The villagers fought as best they could, or they begged for mercy. The Auldek were like cats playing with baby mice. When the villagers stood still, the Auldek smiled and laughed and said incomprehensible things to them. When they dropped to their knees or ran or lashed out, the Auldek slashed them to pieces. Sabeer was just as gleeful as Devoth or Howlk. Menteus Nemré worked his own bloody havoc. He dove into houses and chased out the inhabitants. He shoved them savagely toward waiting Auldek, slicing to pieces any who ran in a whirling dance of butchery, his face expressionless, his white locks wild and living as he moved, whipping about like snakes searching for victims to bite.

It did not last long. Yet it went on forever. All in the settlement—men and women, old and young, even a few children—were hunted out and slaughtered. All of them. This could happen to Gurta, he thought. This could be what happens to my—He did not let himself finish the thought. It lingered, incomplete, within him.

The last few died within a howling circle of monsters dancing around them, gleefully cutting them down one after another. Until they were all gone. All dead. The Auldek held to that circle, drawing in closer over the bodies, their weapons finally lowered. The fréketes already looked bored. They rummaged through the debris of the houses. One began stoking a fire that had spread from a chimney. The others took up the task, caving in whole walls to watch them ignite.

Rialus hovered at the margin of the carnage. It was like he was standing too close to the fires. The blaze of shame scorched his face even as the raging winter froze his back. The people of Tavirith were not warriors. They had been whalers, hunters, traders, women and children, as poor and simple as any in the Known World. Why kill them? For what purpose? What sense did it make? Didn’t they see what they had done? He wanted to find Devoth and ask him, show him how vile this all was. The work of cowards. An act to be ashamed of for the rest of his eternal life.

That was why he stepped forward across the blood-splattered stones. That was why he approached the circle of Auldek backs. That was why he moved around them, searching for Devoth. That was why he was right in among them when he understood what they were doing. In a crack between the huddled bodies, Devoth worked over a slain villager. The furs and clothing had been cut from his body. Devoth slid the point of his short dagger up along the man’s thigh, slicing away a strip of flesh that he then held dangling from his fingers. He stared at it, the other Auldek silent around him. Their blood joy was gone. This was something else.

“Do it,” Calrach urged. “Believe me, and do it. This is not as in Ushen Brae. This is a new world for us. I tell you, do this thing. Your soul will rejoice.”

Devoth’s eyes moved from face to face. He had never looked so circumspect, so unsure of himself. But when he acted he did so decisively. He held up the strip of bloody flesh and bit it. He had to rip off a morsel gripped in his teeth, with a slice of the knife and a sideways jerk of his head. Immediately, he thrust the rest of the flesh up for someone else to take. Howlk was first. The others followed.

For a few minutes there was no sound but their chewing. That and the crackling of the fires and the screech of gulls that had suddenly materialized; the crash of the waves over the stones and the wind buffeting about Rialus’s head; and the strange calls the fréketes exchanged, like some language of cackling grunts. And the roar of something that was not quite sound but that felt like a storm building inside his skull. Somehow, a sort of silence contained all these things, broken only when Devoth began to laugh.

“Yes,” the Auldek said. “I think this is yes. Something is here.”

Howlk cupped his groin. “I can feel it here. I can feeeellllll it!” He stretched the word out and lifted it into a shout. The other Auldek responded in kind. One after another confirming that they felt it, too, whatever it was.

Calrach danced from one blood-splattered diner to another, clapping and patting them on the back. “I told you so! I know what you’re feeling now. I felt it, too. I didn’t know what was happening. I didn’t believe it. I thought, ‘What’s this I’m feeling? What’s come to life down there?’ But I learned. I learned and I brought you here to give you life back. Tell me you feel it!”

They did.

Rialus turned and ran. He got only a few steps before he lurched over and vomited. As he crouched there on all fours, his insides escaping him, he was more miserable than ever he had been in a life filled with misery. He would not have thought it before, but oh how he loved the people of the Known World. They were his people. His! Even these villagers were his people. He wanted to rise and run from body to body, kissing their faces and pouring his grief over them. But he couldn’t. He had failed them. It was his fault. These monsters were eating human flesh! They were vile, vile, vile. He was vile for even the brief moments he had taken pleasure in their company. Sabeer. She was eating this flesh, too. He had not seen her, but he knew she would. She would eat him if the desire took her.

And what now? After watching this slaughter was he to climb back on that winged beast, with Devoth again pressed against his back? Was he to sit with them as they told the tale to the others, stirred their blood, promised them more was coming for them all? Would he be beside them still when the bulk of the invasion arrived to destroy everything about the world that he had ever known?

No. Better to die. Right now. Here. All he had to do was attack them. He never had! In all his days with them he had never fought! The truth of it stunned and sickened him. All he had to do was grab one of their daggers and stab. They would kill him, but maybe he would even take one of them with him. Or just take one more life out of them. That would be something.

He straightened, got his balance on his bent knees, turned, and looked back toward the group.

Menteus Nemré watched him. The Lvin warrior sat outside the carnivore’s circle, not participating in the banquet but not perturbed by it. He stared at Rialus. No expression that Rialus could read on his thick, tattooed-white features. He stared, but he communicated nothing at all through the stare. And then he lifted his gaze over Rialus’s shoulder.

“I see you, leagueman,” a voice beside his head whispered. Rialus tried to spin, but a body pressed against his back and an arm clenched him immobile. “You think us wretched,” Devoth said, speaking close to his ear. “You think us animals. We make you sick. Isn’t that so, Rialus leagueman?” Devoth squeezed him, but did not wait for an answer. “This is no custom of ours. It was an abomination. A violation of our long laws. You understand? Numrek were banished for eating quota. We took away their totem and sent them into exile. We thought them just as wretched as you think us now. But that was before they came to your lands and returned to us with Allek, a child to prove they were fertile again. Everything is different now. This is why.”

Devoth’s other hand swung into view, a piece of human flesh squeezed in his fist. Blood seeped around his fingers and dripped to the ground. “Coming here, killing your people, eating this meat: these things will give us full lives again. You cannot blame us for wanting that. Are you any different? Don’t you want things, leagueman? Of course you do. If I said to you, ‘Here, eat this. Just one bite and you will have what you most want to have.’ ” He held the flesh close to Rialus’s face, near enough that he could smell the wet rawness of it. “Take a bite, and you can go home. Take a bite and you can have your woman beside you. You can fly in the air to your queen and tell her the secrets of how to defeat us. Take a bite, and I will drop dead just here. I’ll soil myself and shake with fear and collapse in pain and die, right here. And you would be a hero. What would you do if a bite of this meat offered you that?”

Rialus said, “You don’t … you don’t know that this will cure you.”

“It’s what the Numrek did. True, they were starving when they did so, but who is to say that the flesh of the fertile didn’t help them? Who is to say? Can you say? No. So if this deed will bring us what we most want … Well, what would you do? You would eat, that’s what. Tell me if I lie.”

Rialus said nothing.

“That’s right, my leagueman. That’s right. You would eat. I know you would.”

Aliver has returned. Aliver has returned. Aliver has …

Since leaving Bocoum, Kelis kept forming the sentence in his mind, making it a chant. The three words made him light-headed with joy. If it was true, it was wonderful beyond anything he had ever dreamed possible. Aliver could pick up where he left off. He could take the crown from Corinn and shape the world back toward what he had always dreamed. Kelis could love him again in life, not just mourn him as a memory. He would deliver Shen, and Aliver would know that Kelis had cared for her from the moment he knew she lived. Even the Santoth would bow to him, a king who has walked the afterdeath and returned to the living.

But as he drew near the hiding place at which he had left the others, a knot of doubt like an enormous knuckle root took shape low in his abdomen. He paused atop a hillock not far from the ravine in which the others camped. Before him, the plains stretched under the dark of the night. Behind him, a copse of trees in whose star shadows he hesitated, trying to shape his thoughts and decide what to say or not when questioned. Some small creature moved in the trees, a ground bird, perhaps, stirring the leaves. He ignored it. He had been all euphoria at first, yet now he could not help but wonder why Corinn brought her brother back. She might love him in her crooked way, but she would never let go of power. What did she …

When he realized what the sound in the trees had become, it was too late. The man hit him at a run, smashing into his side with his shoulder. The attacker was fast. As they fell, he jabbed his fist repeatedly into Kelis’s abdomen. By the time Kelis hit the ground, scraping across the dirt with the other man’s weight on him, the man had Kelis knotted within the hard limbs of his body. They came to rest, panting, with the attacker’s chin pressed like a weapon against Kelis’s temple, pinning his head to the ground. All this in a few seconds.

“Fool!” another man said. He appeared suddenly, out of breath. “We could have followed him to her!”

“Shut up!” the first hissed. His chin ground Kelis’s skin as he spoke. “Gag him.”

The other punched Kelis in the jaw several times and then jammed a wad of cloth in. He secured it with a leather strap that tied behind Kelis’s head. The first man changed position. He squirmed across Kelis’s back, as intimate as a lover, except that his movements were all sharp pressure and corded muscle. For a moment Kelis felt one of his wrists slip free of the man’s pincer grip. He slipped his hand around and tried to get purchase on the ground with it.

The man pressed the flat of a knife to Kelis’s throat. The back-curved point cut into the skin to touch his lower jawbone. “No,” the man whispered. “Don’t do that.” The man pulled Kelis up to his knees, the knife at his neck the whole time. “Bind him.”