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

antok, swaying with the beast’s strides, as at ease as a horseman on a trusted mount. The swine blew plumes of white vapor from beneath the heavy patchwork of throws that covered it. Rialus felt the vapor billow around him, fogging his visor. He smelled the rank scent of the creature’s breath. But that did not make sense. It was not that close. Rialus scrubbed at his visor a moment, smearing the scene before him. He pulled back his hood and yanked the visor from his head.
    The antok had moved away, but still the steaming breath blew past him. A noise at his back turned Rialus around to meet the clear blue eyes of a snow lioness. The cat crouched just a little distance away on a ledge of the station, tensed as if it might pounce. It thrust its chin forward, and then cocked its head, then righted it. Rialus had no idea what that was meant to convey, but the female of the species worried him as much as the massive males. In the wild, he had been told, it was the females that did most of the hunting. The males just used their brawn to fight one another and win wives. Miserable beasts! Rialus thought. He fumbled for the ladder poles, dropped over the edge, and descended.
    Dropping from the ladder onto the frozen earth, Rialus pitched over, as he always did when jumping from the ever-moving structure. He scrambled to his feet, wary of the vehicle’s massive wheels, and had to shuffle run to catch up with Allek. They cut a zigzagging path through the rumbling, roaring, groaning flow of men and machines and furred and horned and tusked beasts, all the while buffeted by the wind.
    They entered the steamstation through a trapdoor that lowered for them to leap up to. A moment later, after climbing a winding staircase, Rialus was shrugging out of his garments, the air warm around him. At least the steamship had that going for it. It was a specially constructed station, one that featured an elaborate heating system fueled by the flammable pitch the Auldek had brought with them in great quantities. A fire burning somewhere inside pumped in enough hot air that the Auldek lounged about half naked, slaves fanning them and serving them chilled drinks and giving them massages. It never failed to remind Rialus of the baths at Cathgergen, a memory which he ran from, remembering just how that had turned out.
    “Ah, Allek, you’ve found my leagueman,” Sabeer said. “You never disappoint.”
    “I try not to, dearest one,” Allek said, bowing his head.
    Dearest one? Rialus sneered inside. As if you have a chance with her.
    “Come, Rialus, sit with us.”
    Sabeer lounged on a low divan, propped up on one elbow, sipping something from a tiny blue glass. She was tall and long limbed, with a tensile muscularity that hummed like a coiled spring, making even languid movements seem somehow dangerous. She wore a thin linen garment, perfectly designed to hug her contours and yet hang loose. Another woman, Jàfith, lay in a similar posture. A man named Howlk sat with her feet in his lap, an absurdly submissive posture for a warrior who, Rialus knew, enjoyed wrestling naked in death matches—or as close to such as an immortal could suffer.
    Two humans stood just outside the group, one beating out a rhythm on a waist-high drum while the other smacked a rattle on his palm. If not for the sloshing liquid in the glasses one might have forgotten the entire station was rolling across an icescape.
    Rialus sat on the cushion to which Sabeer directed him. He had been petrified when he learned she was Devoth’s wife, but what that distinction meant Rialus could not figure out. He rarely saw them together, and when he did they treated each other more like siblings than anything else—deeply familiar, enough so that they were also deeply dismissive. They kept separate quarters, and Sabeer spent her time with whomever she chose. For some reason, Rialus was one of those.
    “Howlk was reciting a song to Sumerled,” Sabeer said, squeezing Rialus’s thigh.