The Sacred Band by Anthony Durham

They never said so, but I think they were a scared people on the brink of extinction. The Lothan Aklun saved them from that. They gave them immortality.”
    “And us,” Anira said. “They gave them the quota.”
    “The Auldek are the ones who really think their old cities are haunted. It’s they who want a new land instead. A war has given them a new purpose in life.”
    “And given us Ushen Brae,” Anira said. “It’s a blessing that they’ve gone.”
    Mór said something in Auldek. The others received it in silence.
    Dariel glanced at her. She sat with her back to the group, looking not at Amratseer but toward the east. Dariel did not ask her what she had said. He was convinced she only spoke Auldek to keep him out of conversations, to draw the line between them, and remind everyone of it. He had a mind to ask her why she chose her enslaver’s tongue at all, but he left it.
----

    Later that evening, Tam nudged him awake. The excitement that surged through Dariel was not anticipation of hours sitting quietly on watch, listening to the sleeping and alert for the sound of any creature that might make a meal of them. That was not what he had planned. Whatever was to become of him, being in this land was a part of it. He was here, in this foreign place so far from home. He needed to know it completely, to learn, if he could, why his life was entwined so deeply with the fate of Ushen Brae.
    He sat cross-legged for a time, but once Tam’s breathing slipped into its steady near snore, Dariel lifted his thin blanket from around his knees and stood. With his boots pinched between his fingers, he tiptoed across the stone, down toward the moonlit city.
    The wall was massive. Draped with veins, fissured with cracks, cast in shadow and highlight by the moon’s gray glow, it dwarfed even the great wall around Alecia. Dariel had to walk along it for a time, climbing over roots and debris, around stone blocks that had fallen from the crumbling barricade. The night was loud with insect and bird calls, with scuffling noises nearby, and several distant roars, sounds that Dariel had heard before but that troubled him more acutely now. One of these rent the air in a way that he felt physically, as if it flew at him along the long stretch of the wall. The beast they called a kwedeir? Dariel had yet to see one, but he had heard about them, enormous batlike creatures the Auldek had domesticated and used to hunt fugitive slaves.
They bite the head. Not hard enough to kill
, Birké said,
but just enough to get you screaming. They like that
. Dariel had not believed the description. Now he wondered.
    He reached a two-doored gate. One door was closed. The other—an enormous thing of old-growth trunks bound together with intricately worked steel—had fallen from its hinges and slammed back against one side of the entranceway. If he had not known better, Dariel would have thought giants had built this place.
    The roar came again. He could not tell if it was closer, but it was certainly outside the city’s walls. He wondered if it would wake the others. Probably. Mór would rise, cursing him for a fool. He would not argue with her if she did, but when in his life would he ever stand before these gates again? What Akaran had ever been here to learn of the world as he was doing? None that he knew of. Of course he had to see what could be seen. Dariel crept into the shadow beneath the leaning door and entered the dead city of Amratseer.
    The green stones of the place glowed with a low luminescence that Dariel could not figure out. As he moved through the cluttered lanes and alleys, he first thought the light was from the moon, but it was not only that. The glow seemed to fill even shadowed spaces, even the insides of houses viewed through the gapping mouths of doors and open crescents of windows. It was night, still dim and shadowy, but it was a different sort of night than Dariel had experienced.
    He walked on the balls of his feet, careful