The Sacred Band: Book Three of the Acacia Trilogy by David Anthony Durham Read Free Book Online

and adjust to whatever challenges the thaw brings with it. Go and see to it.”

    T he next afternoon Mena sent a ship south to alert the small settlement of Port Grace that they would soon be inundated with a passing army. On it she also sent a note to be flown by messenger bird, once they were far enough south to ensure the bird would know the landmarks. She had spent the previous night composing a long missive to explain the situation in all its complexity. In the morning, she ripped it to pieces. Instead the message she sent was terser.
    Queen Corinn ,
    The plan to meet the enemy in the far north is untenable. I am moving the army to Mein Tahalian. We will winter there, training .
    With your permission, I will lift Haleeven Mein’s exile and ask for his aid .…

C HAPTER
T HREE

    W hen Dariel Akaran first looked upon the ruins he had to steady himself by grasping Birké’s shoulder. “Scoop it up,” the young Wrathic man said, grinning and lifting Dariel’s drooping jaw with a finger. “You’ll catch flies like that.”
    They stood at the summit of a hill on an old road that snaked down into the valley. A great ruin of an ancient metropolis stretched before them. The city reached up to the hills that held them in, wrapped completely by a defensive wall that rose and fell over the contours of the ridgelines. Dariel got lost in gazing at the maze of thoroughfares and alleys, buildings and spires of what must once have been a grand city. It matched Alecia in size, but the pale green of the building stones showed an intricacy of workmanship that would have left Acacian architects envious.
    “What is this place?” the prince asked.
    “Amratseer,” Mór said. She came up and stood beside them. She said a sentence in Auldek.
    “What?”
    “ Seeren gith’và .”
    Birké translated. “A dead city.”
    “Dead? It’s hardly dead.”
    Large beaked birds patrolled the skies in raucous groups; gray doves labored into the air; black starlings darted, seemingly for the joy it. Golden-haired monkeys similar to those on Acacia sprinted around the streets and lounged on rooftops, calling to each other in argumentative bursts. Behind that, there was another sound, the rustle of vegetation slowly engulfing the city, as quiet and relentless as a constricting snake winding tighter and tighter around its prey. There was life in abundance here, just not the sort the makers of the place had intended.
    Since Dariel dropped down from those slabs of granite, following Mór eight days before, this new world had swallowed him whole. With Tam and Anira, the other two who had come with them, they spent the first day climbing over high fingers of stone, plunging into damp forests, and climbing up over more fingers of stone. That night they had camped in a cave mouth that opened toward the west. Dariel sat staring at the sun setting over an unending undulation of forest, as vast as the ocean.
    The third afternoon they had followed the banks of a tributary of the Sheeven Lek. The river water was crystal clear, rippling liquid glass that displayed the blue stones of the riverbed and banks. When they stopped to eat, Dariel stripped off his shirt and prepared to leap in, ripe with the sweat and dirt of so much walking.
    Birké caught him by the arm. “You don’t want to do that.”
    A short time later Birké led him to the trunk of a fallen tree, atop which they could look at a deep pool at a bend in the river. Beneath them schools of crimson-finned fish swam in shifting ribbons of motion, stretching thin and then clumping together, one school joining another and then splitting. They could have been dancing some elaborate routine. Dariel asked if they were edible.
    “Oh, yes. Very tasty.”
    That was when it happened. A section of stones on the bottom of the river slid forward slowly at first and then with a sudden upward rush. Dariel stared as a gaping slit opened. It yawned wider than a person was tall, and engulfed an entire swath of