Excerpt from The Sacred Band about coming home: A man as angry as Nikodemos was, in the aftermath of the Theban rescue gone awry, didn’t belong among the civilized. And the island of Lemuria was the most civilized place Niko had ever been: a city-state with towering citadel, power unchallengeable behind its sheer seaside walls. Nikodemos was a secular adept of the Bandaran mystery of maat – of transcendent perception, equilibrium and mystic calm. He was failing himself and all maat’s precepts if he lost control of his temper, of his balance or his heart. So once back safe, if not sound, on New Year’s Day in Lemuria, he quietly ordered the Sacred Band of Stepsons and the new Theban Sacred Band, all twenty-three pairs, to make ready for an unspecified sortie as soon as they were fit to fight. Seeing hell in his eyes and muscles jump in his angular jaw, his flesh wounds unbandaged and scabbing up willy-nilly, Stepsons went scurrying through the whitewashed barracks and the town below, preparing for they knew not what. Meanwhile, Niko chased after his temper, trying to get it under control. But he couldn’t catch it. There was too much unrest in his soul. (193) Then he had to face the Riddler’s woman up at Pinnacle House in that uncanny palace of hers, with indoor trees and arcane windows to take you anywhere in the blink of a god’s eye. Up he went as the sun was setting, a supplicant on a pilgrimage, seeking absolution in that vast and vaulted hall of glass and stone where multicolored streamers hung from rafters, tattered standards from forgotten wars. His own cowardice shamed him. “I’m here to see the Evening Star,” he said when a jowly servant with black dogs on either side opened up the huge oak doors. “Come in, Lord Nikodemos,” the man bid him. They all knew he’d wed a princess, years ago, and was royalty in his own right – if he cared to return to the city at the edge of time. He didn’t care if he ever went back there. Those were other days; other hurts that fed his anger – but none as deep as these, today. How was he going to tell Cime how badly he’d failed, what a botch he’d made of this mission of mercy that Tempus had decreed? Niko was led by the padding servant and the dogs through marble halls, all red and black and white, to her sanctum. Cime was the Riddler’s sister, some said: a gray-eyed beauty, her black hair silvered, wearing silk and leather and a look on her diamond-shaped face as if she’d seen a ghost. Ageless, Cime was, as long as he’d known her; as they all were here, while in Lemuria’s embrace. She seemed thirty. He’d heard she was far beyond three hundred years of age. She had a deeper beauty than mortals do, a fabled power, and a voice always full of seduction. Always. Always, but not today. She knew at first glance that something was very wrong. Perhaps she sensed his misery. Or she’d heard whispers. She was braced and guarded. “What is it, Niko?” Voice too sharp, edgy. She looked him up and down and found him wanting. Three huge black dogs milled around her feet; some said they changed to humans when she chose. “What happened?” So he had to own to it. He squared his shoulders and sucked in a breath. As she came up close, he bowed his head to look into those gray eyes his commander loved so well. “We fouled up. I did. He got hurt. Badly, maybe. And the god… is not helping him today.” (336) She said nothing, but ran full-tilt past him down the hall, like a sprite or a goddess bent on vengeance. She’d know where Niko would have put him. He had to run after her. And he never caught her till they got to where the Riddler lay. When they reached the Stepsons’ billet, everyone was there who had no incapacitating wounds or pressing duties. Even a couple of Thebans waited (walking wounded in kirtles and mantles, hair shorn, alike as father and son, eyes so full of loss they barely noticed what they saw), helmets under their arms. Stepsons saw Cime, then Niko, come running and parted the crowd for them, squinting at them as if from a hundred miles away. No one talked. All stood back. It wasn’t a good day, everybody knew. He tried to guide Cime to the sickroom. She shook him off – a sharp, dismissive shrug. Inside, Strat and Crit sat on the Riddler’s either side with a bucket full of bloody rags and murder in their eyes. Whitewashed walls seemed too close, the simple bed of his commander’s office cell too hard. Tempus just lay there, unseeing, a wound bubbling in his chest that should be mortal. But wasn’t – yet. Niko clutches that hope like his dream-forged sword. Cime pulled two rods down from her hair and it tumbled around her face. Even Niko stepped back involuntarily. All three Stepsons in this room know what those diamond rods can do: suck your soul, suck your life, and leave you empty, lost, or worse. What else they did was between her and the powers that she served. “Well,” Cime said, still at the foot of the Riddler’s sickbed, diamond rods in fists on either hip, “now you’ve done it, haven’t you, all you fools? Tempus, can you hear me?” “Life to you, Cime,” said the Riddler from his bed, “and everlasting glory.” He smiled his humorless kill-smile, just a tightening at the corners of his mouth. The last thing Cime would do was acknowledge the Sacred Band greeting. “Get out of here, Stepsons. I’ll see to him. You three have done quite enough today: all of you and your feckless, treacherous god.” And with that, she banished them. Niko hoped this banishment was not forever, but who could say? The last thing he saw was Cime striding to the bed. The last thing he heard was Tempus’ voice, rattling deep in his chest, saying, “Sister, don’t bait the god today.” (414) Thebans. These unlucky Thebans were bringing their fate home to roost here, looking dazed and amputated, full of silent grief for their lost brothers and the entire world they’d known. Better off than dead. He would take them to Sanctuary, the most luckless town he’d ever seen. They would fit right in there. And he and Straton, Tempus’ two witch-cursed Stepsons, would face their fears – or their doom. It didn’t seem to matter. Greater dooms win greater destinies. This, his commander had taught him. The next day, after Niko had gone to Cime, helmet in hand, begging assistance and pleading for mercy, apologizing until he thought his heart would break, she relented and let him see the Riddler. (118) Not long after that, Niko rode beside Tempus as the commander, still healing, led his Sacred Band of Stepsons on their best horses into Lemuria’s mystic portal. And out again, to emerge – by dint of Cime’s Lemurian power – right onto Sanctuary’s northwest shore, with every boy-soldier and Theban bringing up the rear, just as the Riddler had planned. Once Tempus’ vision returned, by Enlil’s grace, the Evening Star couldn’t interfere with the commander’s wishes. Niko sympathized. No one could. Steady drizzle falls. The sky above is restless with scudding clouds. A furious storm masses behind them, out to sea, throwing black spears of rain down from heaven’s walls. Dark waves flee inland, surly, breaking on the beach. Riding toward the ochre walls of Sanctuary on his sable mare, with the Riddler beside him on his gray Trôs horse, Niko catches Tempus’ eye. Tempus stares back, baring his teeth: “Enlil rides with us, Niko. Every step of the way.” Wet wind blows like the breath of the gods on Niko’s neck. Rain falls harder. Thunder cracks as distant lightning skewers the sea. Since the storm is coming near, and his commander sitting easily on his horse, Niko doesn’t doubt the Riddler’s word. Enlil, ancient storm god of the armies, is with them; and Vashanka, the local storm god; and Niko’s maat. And perhaps even the Theban goddess, Harmony, daughter of Ares and Aphrodite. Good. They will need every man and god and skill among them in this hellhole. Even his sable mare knows it. She raises her head and challenges the heavens as they jog along, the Stepsons two by two, Crit and Strat close behind: sixty-six fighters, all told, come into the city-state of Sanctuary through the Gate of Justice. Maat is justice, as well as balance. In all the years he’d served here, Niko had never ridden through this gate. Maybe it will be lucky for them this time, with a child of Sanctuary’s storm god, a warlock’s son, a seer and all the saved Sacred Band of Thebes in tow. But Niko isn’t counting on it. (348) Around walled Sanctuary, the storm swells the White and Red Foal rivers till they burst their banks and lap against cellar, step and statue. The seaborne storm soughs and blows and whistles and sings its salty song, so that those old enough to remember wizard weather take shelter in their attics, digging out old, half-forgotten warding charms. But this storm is no wizard’s work, some say, for no charm or ward forfends it. Sixty-six Stepsons have come riding into Sanctuary, some say, bringing the storm and the wrath of the storm gods down upon them all. The gods are angry at Sanctuary, some say, for becoming too irreverent: a lesson must be taught. All this time, the rain rains harder and the gale gusts fiercer. In the palace, a priest called Torch orders sandbags laid. Meanwhile, the oligarchic council tries the power of prayer and prays as it has never prayed before. Down on Wideway and up past the docks, word of the Stepsons’ coming spreads like the swelling tide of brackish water and people worry for their lives. Mothers hug their children tight and caution maiden daughters, while older women stare out their windows with dreamy eyes, remembering days gone by. On the Street of Red Lanterns, at Amoli’s Lily Garden and Phoebe’s Inn, whores bolt their doors. At the Aphrodisia House, a harlot named Shawme, dreaming of heroes, peeks out her shutters but sees only the wild wind, swirling rain in arabesques as if invisible lovers dance amid the storm. The storm sees the girl and caresses her face, then moves on. In the Bazaar where the city-guard captain, Walegrin, has taken down a soggy awning from outside his sister’s shop, a blousy S’danzo seeress named Illyra reads her cards. She looks up at her big brother and says, “Arton is coming. My boy is coming home,” but she is not smiling, not in the face of this awful storm. Walegrin, soaked to his sandy braids and needing to get back out there among his men, says, “What else, Illyra? I know that look.” “Death, reversed. A son of the storm god. A son of sorcery. A son of fate. The Three of Swords, reversed.” Hoops shiver madly in her ears as she lunges toward her brother, grabbing him tight. “Don’t go back out there tonight, Walegrin. Don’t.” (394) And, of course, Strat was watching over the man upstairs. The Riddler was holed up in his old corner room, resting. What did it mean? The commander never slept, could work every man of them into the grave. Or could once. Was there something, as Niko and Crit thought, unlucky about the Thebans? Did the Fates, who predestined all men’s lives, take offense at saving these? But this storm was a consecration, wasn’t it, of their mission? Straton read it so. The guildhall master said they’d broken the drought here, riding in with two storm gods squalling in the Stepsons’ wake. There’d been a long drought here. The Sanctuarites should be happy with the rain the storm gods brought. Maybe they would be, when the emergency relief crews got done. No use wondering, with so much left to do. The storm-lashing this little city was taking was just a portion of its due, to Straton’s way of thinking. And the omen of storm was always the best of signs for Tempus and his Stepsons, a sanctification of this, or any, foray. If you are a man of the Riddler’s, in good standing with the Sacred Band of Stepsons, any storm is bound to clear your way. Or at least Strat hoped so, because he’d just sent Sync and Gayle down by the White Foal Bridge, where Crit had made Straton promise, under any circumstances, not to go – where the necromant Ischade once kept a small, unassuming house; where Straton had gone too many evenings, ten years past. And where he went in his dreams, sometimes, still. He rubs his left shoulder, twice arrow-shot, never right but not too bad today; his scalp wound plagues him worse, scabs pulling on his hair. Sync and Gayle would see to that house, and any in it, to rescuing anyone who needed help down where the White Foal River found the restless dead another home. Although the witch who lived in his dreams needed no man’s help, and never would. He decided he’d go see his ghost horse in the stable out back, the ghost horse she gave him. The ghost horse needed to know that they weren’t going back down there. Not this time. (371) As he rode his dappled Trôs horse south along the White Foal through summer streets, blessedly alone on this warm gray morning, Tempus knew he’d been right to do it: to bring his new Sacred Banders here where everything was always wrong, where venal fools played at small men’s games and battles even smaller. Sanctuary is changed, a mere decade’s difference, nothing very daunting to a man who’s seen centuries come and go. The streets wind the same way; people scrabbling for a living scramble now, as people always do, to reestablish normal life in a wild storm’s wake. The Sacred Band of Thebes needed Sanctuary, a place to acclimate and integrate with his Stepsons. Here they would learn new ways: burn their dead as Stepsons do; thank new gods; and meet new challenges where honor and glory are enough. They were his now, and would step up to even greater things: fight for life itself and everlasting freedom of the human spirit. But not yet. Like Sanctuary, throwing off the damage of the storm, they needed to put their backs into tomorrow, not cry for yesterday. The Thebans must heal, to join with his greater Sacred Band. Damaged and wounded, ripped and sundered, they sojourned now in a strange new country. At least they were not in the country of the dead. They needed a place to live, to renew their pride, to forgive each other and their pain – not feel guilty that they’d kept the breath of the gods in their nostrils while their brothers had died. (259) “Commander, there’s a problem with the trainees.” “Then put it right, Niko.” Stealth was sheepish, coming after him and finding nothing wrong. “We’re moving out to the old Stepsons’ barracks in the morning. Send Sync and Gayle out to see what else we’ll need to do there.” “This will be the third time we’ve moved in there,” Nikodemos reminded him, eyes searching: judging how he rode, watching where they went, and not daring to ask what he wanted to know – how Tempus was healing. “It’s better, every day,” he told Niko without being asked. He hoped it was, this wound, which would have killed him if he’d been mortal. The god was never slow to heal his avatar unless he was very angry. “We need to deploy the Band, get those Thebans where they can do more than mourn their dead. Have a funerary rite of our own out there, so those who came away with us can say farewell to those who stayed behind.” For all the fated dead: maybe that would placate the angry gods. Maybe. (178) “Your Bandaran boys need to be treated like the others, Niko. I can’t manage the squadron this way, with Thebans needing one thing and Bandarans something else, and Stepsons outnumbered. All my senior pairs have problems about this posting as it is.” “You mean, Strat has problems.” Here, where the pair has had troubles before. “You deal with the commander. I’ll deal with Strat. That’s not what’s on the table.” They were standing face to face now, in the doorway where the sunlight slanted through, under the overhang – bodies speaking volumes, opposed. They were about the same size and weight, if push came to shove. Niko took a deep breath. Too much anger. When had they lost one another? “I heard Strat sent Sync and Gayle down to the White Foal River where that necromant of his used to live. You chase away your ghosts, I’ll chase away mine, and we won’t have a problem.” He struggled to blunt the edge in his voice. “If you and Strat have troubles, or he does – like before – you come to me. I’ll help, just among us three.” The ghost horse was the Band’s keepsake from those days, an apt reminder of all that had happened here. And none of that could be allowed to happen again. “What’s Tempus really doing, here?” Crit finally asked. “Ask him, not me.” (226) Outside in the muggy air, Tempus strode up to Charon the Theban and said, “This goddess of yours, Harmony – we need to deal with her. Now. Can you help us?” “Now? Perhaps,” said Charon, “we can find a way. Our deities are not like yours…. Except on the battlefield.” His golden son, Lysis, looked from Tempus, to his father, and back. “If your goddess is unhappy here, maybe we can help get her home where she belongs.” The Riddler’s voice may have chilled the Thebans, but it gladdened Niko’s heart. It was a voice like gravel sliding downhill, like bones being crushed for marrow or chariot wheels turning, or your destiny about to take command: Tempus as he always has been, and is again, at last. Then they all rode full-tilt, back toward the Sacred Band barracks in a clatter of hooves and a flurry of manes and tails and mantles, through streets where people scrambled out of their path and dove for cover, who hadn’t heard so many warhorses come running in a long, long time. (177) Before him on the bridge, a dark hole in nothing at all is sealing itself with a pop. A darker figure arises from the gloaming, small and robed, only deep eyes showing in a pale, cowled face. Crit heard the clop-clop of Thebans on horses, following his orders, headed for safety. “How dare you?” hisses the necromant, floating their way, getting bigger all the while (black eyes huge, then twice huge), until she stands, just eyes and cloak and slash of mouth, between the calm ghost horse and Crit’s agitated sorrel. She puts a hand out to the ghost horse. It licks her palm. Strat merely shivered once, silent, and felt around in his belt-pouch as if, now that the worst had happened, he was going to roll a smoke. But he didn’t. “How dare you?” asked Ischade again. “Blame that strumpet’s death on me.” Strat said, “Ischade. Let me explain.” But he didn’t. Crit said, “So you’re saying it wasn’t you?” when what he wanted to say was ‘Get away from my partner. Don’t touch him.’ This hellish creature of the twilight, who’d done so much harm to so many, had nearly gotten Straton killed twice and left him with a crossbow-shot shoulder for a souvenir. “We thought you didn’t live here anymore. If ‘live’ is the right word for it.” She said, “Critias, does your commander know you’re out this late?” Ischade put a hand on Straton’s thigh, patting him like a dog. Crit’s shortsword came snicking out of its scabbard before he could think. Ischade said, “Oh, please.” Eyes deeper than hell flicked to Straton and back to Crit again. Strat said, “Crit, that won’t solve anything.” “It’s all right, Straton.” Ischade stared at Crit. As an urge to put away the sword overwhelmed him, Crit struggled briefly. Sheathing it, he felt foolish. What had he been thinking? And here they were, in it again – up to their necks in Sanctuary’s undead. (325) .
Posted on: Fri, 05 Dec 2014 04:29:49 +0000
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