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

could not stop from translating for him. “I said that it has just cleaned your teeth for you. It will improve your breath.”

    T hat evening, looking out over Amratseer, Dariel felt the parameters of how he measured the world crumbling. In this place monsters hid in plain sight. One beast might appear to swallow you whole. Another might improve your hygiene. This land was cluttered with signs of a civilization older by ages than his own, and yet cities and culture and centuries of history had been defeated. It all made him feel like he knew nothing about the fullness of the world and all the people and creatures that lived in it. Instead of frightening him, the battering of realizations he had received in Ushen Brae blew air into his lungs. He wanted to see it all.…
    Dariel strolled over to where the others huddled, though he did not take his eyes off the panorama. “Will the gates give us trouble?”
    Mór looked up from the simple map Tam had drawn in the dust. “Why should they? We won’t be troubling them. Amratseer seeren gith’và .”
    “Are the gates locked?”
    “The gates are open,” Tam said, without looking up. “That’s not the problem.”
    “Let’s go through, then,” Dariel said. “We could camp in one of the plazas. Oh, I’d love to explore.…”
    “We don’t enter seeren gith’và ,” Mór said.
    “Afraid of ghosts,?” Dariel asked.
    “We are mindful of them,” Anira said. She rose from her squatting position and crossed her arms. She was Balbara by birth, very dark skinned, with a sensuously muscular physique. Instead of tattoos, she showed her Anet clan affiliation in scalelike plates beneath her eyes and on the bridge of her nose, subtle enhancements that one had to peer closely to see. “They are Auldek ghosts. They mean us no good.”
    “You really don’t intend to go through it? That’s what you’re telling me? Who told you tales of ghosts? Your Auldek masters? Maybe they told tales because they were afraid to go back, and they didn’t want their slaves scouring their old cities for treasure.”
    “Which is what you want to do,” Mór said. “Still an Akaran, I see. Still love to pillage and steal.”
    “Just look at the place! I don’t want to steal, but aren’t you curious? Don’t you—”
    Mór closed the distance between them with a rapidity that made Dariel step back. “No,” she snapped. “Amratseer seeren gith’và . I care about the living. About the People. We sleep here, and begin to skirt Amratseer tomorrow. That’s all. Birké, take the prince and fetch water for camp.”
    If Dariel appeared to accept the dismissal it was only because his mind was already beyond it. He climbed down to a nearby stream and filled water-skins with Birké. He ate a stew made from dried strips of meat and fresh roots with the rest of them, and he asked questions as if the answers to them were enough to satisfy him.
    “In the north there is an even greater ruin than Amratseer,” Tam said, in answer to one such query. He sat cross-legged, a small stringed instrument cradled in his hands. He played it in short bursts of plucked notes, as if he were writing, or remembering, a tune. He seemed to have forgotten the several blunders he had made during their operation to destroy the soul catcher. “It’s called Lvinreth. It was once the home city of the Lvin. They abandoned it centuries ago. Even now they say that snow lions live among the fallen stones. They walk the empty corridors and roar at night, calling for the clan to return.”
    “Why did they abandon it?”
    “The Auldek were once as numerous as the stars. This city proves it. But that was long ago. They killed one another off, suffered disease, even invasion from a race across the mountains that came, plundered, and then went home. Many things left them the weakened race the Lothan Aklun found huddling together by the coast. They never said so, but I think they were a scared people on the brink of extinction.