by C. E. Murphy
As quickly as it had come, Janx's fiery offense faded. "That, I trust, is true. Interesting, that it called to you. I can't play it."
Kate's eyebrows rose dubiously. "I think I would have guessed you could play any instrument in the world."
"I can play a lyre. I can't play this lyre." He ran his fingers over the wires in demonstration. No sound emerged, and a trick of the light made Kate think the strings themselves tried to squirm away from his touch. "It's a human instrument."
"But I'm—"
"Half human. Enough to draw its song out, it seems. Do you know whose this was?"
"No, I—" And then she did, and her breath caught.
"Long ago," Janx said, softly now, "was born a bard. His voice was the sweetest ever known, his songs the most poignant. He never struck a false note, and the gods themselves sought him out to hear him play."
"The gods…?"
"Gods of fire and of speed, gods of stone and of wind. Gods of war and beauty and song, and of all of these, he was naturally most drawn to the song. But you know this story, Kate; tell me how it goes."
"He wooed Eurydice," Kate whispered. Her hands ached to hold the lyre now, knowing whose it was. Whose it had been. "And then sang her back from the Underworld when she was unfairly taken from him, but he lost her again forever when he looked back to make sure she followed. And he never stopped lamenting her loss."
"That," Janx said, and his smile was bitter, "is the human way of telling the tale. Who were the gods, Kate? Who do you suppose were the creatures of magic and might to whom the humans looked?"
"They were imaginary," Kate said, then, as quickly as before, caught his meaning. "Oh no. Oh, don't tell me…"
Janx shrugged a lazy shoulder. "Did you suppose it was only coincidence that they have gone more and more toward believing in only one god, or none at all? Why should they continue to believe, when those they worshiped withdrew? We had to." He cast away regret with a fluid gesture. "We had to, because they were beginning to develop the weaponry to kill us, and gods cannot allow themselves to die so ignominiously, but there was a time, Kate, when we walked among them and were their highest powers. And of all of us, who had the gift of song?"
"The siryns? If the legends are true."
"They are, in that regard. Come." Janx turned swiftly, stalking away. "This is not a story to be told standing still. Bring the lyre, since it wanted you so badly, and listen as we walk. They didn't—then—lure sailors to their deaths. They sang for them, and I'm sure a careless ship or two foundered on the rocks as a result, but they were hardly ruthless killers. And Orpheus didn't happen on them by chance. They were known to have a fondness for Lanzarote—"
Kate breathed, "Who doesn't?" and laughed at the reproving glance Janx bestowed on her. "I'm sorry," she said with no more genuine contriteness than she would expect of him. "Do go on."
"So he went there looking for them," Janx said sourly. "And he found them. Kate, if you're going to be difficult I won't tell you this story at all."
"Perhaps the lyre will."
Janx gave her a second look, this one sharper. "I wouldn't believe whatever tales it tells. It's meant to make you weep, not reflect history."
"History often makes me weep," said Kate, who had lived enough of it to know. Not so much as her father, perhaps, but enough, and she had been, in her way, closer to humanity for all of her life than he could ever be.
"There is that." Janx fell silent for a little while as they walked to the lyre's accompaniment: notes trembled when they crossed uneven ground, though Kate's footstep was as light as any could be. "He came to listen. That's what he told her, when the ships landed. That he'd only come to listen. To hear the music of the gods, and learn from it if he could. And she let him stay, to the doom of them all."
"She?" Kate barely asked the question, half afraid Janx was no longer talking to her at all, half afraid that if he remembered her, he would choose not to share the story after all.
"Eurydice." Janx's nose wrinkled as he spoke the name. "Who was first known to mortals as Inanna, and then Persephone, and a dozen names more around the world. But to the Old Races she was Ninanak, the siryn queen, whose voice was the purest thing ever born of this earth. She sang for him, and he for her, until she loved him for the sweetness of her voice. She learned all of his mortal songs and he captured an echo of her own, which was all the more that he could manage. She felt sorry for him, and so sat with him to craft an instrument. As he shaped it, she sang, so that it would know nothing but purity of music in its making. It would be the greatest instrument ever made, unable to strike a sour note, able to convey depth and power far beyond its humble shape. And when it was done, Ninanak sang for Orpheus and he matched her song note for note. Then he played it back for her, and when he was done she opened her mouth to sing again and only silence came forth. She had given him everything. Everything.
"And he would not give it back.
"The siryns did drown the sailors, then. All of them save Orpheus, whom Ninanak wouldn't allow them to harm. She took human form and went with him instead, perhaps hoping he would return her voice, perhaps simply wishing to be near the music. She never spoke again, so it's hard to know. In time, though, it became such that she could no longer bear to hear the music she couldn't make, and so she ran to the underworld, just as the stories say. And who do you think was King of the Underworld, Katherine?"
Kate turned to him with a question in her eyes, on her lips, and exasperation flitted across Janx's changeable expression. "No, not me. Don't be silly. I may keep my treasures beneath the earth, but I'm at my most magnificent in the sun. No, it was the other one. Your sister's father."
Daisani. Kate didn't so much as breathe the name, only nodded. It had been over a year since New York and her father had yet to forgive Eliseo Daisani for the discovery that he'd betrayed his own people decades earlier. She knew that in lives as long as theirs—even in a life merely as long as hers—a year was nothing, and yet it surprised her that they hadn't reconciled. Daisani, loathe as Janx might be to admit it, had been right…but if he could betray his own people, it was possible, perhaps, that he might someday betray Janx as well, and that, Kate thought, was the wound that cut. Not that they hadn't spent aeons doing just that, as it was part of their game—but that was what it was, or had been: a game. Daisani's choice to betray his own kind had somehow moved the game into deadlier stakes, and Janx had yet to let that action go. He would: their camaraderie was greater by far than their differences. In the end they would always be there for one another.
Unless, of course, they were not, and that seemed to be a possibility too unpalatable for Janx to face. Kate shook off the worry; they had gotten on forever without her interference and would no doubt carry on that way. "What happened?"
"She went to him," Janx muttered. "She ran from her enslaver and went into the underworld, and she made it clear she would rather die than go back to Orpheus."
"Oh my God," Kate said faintly. "Did Daisani kill her?"
"What? No!" Genuine offense sent Janx's voice unexpectedly high. "That's against our rules!"
Katherine Hopkins, proscribed daughter of a dragon and a human, stood in front of her immortal father, looked down at herself, up at him again, and lifted her eyebrows in incredulous challenge.
"Oh, stop that. I didn't know about you, it doesn't count."
"Really." Kate's own voice went flat. "The year you spent as my mother's, that doesn't count? Because that was against the rules too, Janx."
A little silence, a little stillness, filled the room, until Janx finally said, so softly as to be dangerous, "This is not my story that I am standing here telling you now. This is not your mother's story. Do not test me on the matter of Sarah Hopkins, Kate. Not now. Not ever. If you are wise, you will never test either of us on the matter."
"Did you love her?" It was not the time, it was not the story, but the question spilled out of her, and Janx turned his head to look at her as though he had never
seen her before. Or, perhaps, Kate thought, as though he saw someone else entirely within her.
"Better than Orpheus ever loved Ninanak," Janx said, again softly. "Better than you will ever know. And no. Your sister's father did not kill Ninanak. He constrained her in a circle of blood she could not cross, and when Orpheus looked back it was to see her on her knees, screaming silently for the song she could never again sing. He might have gone back for her again, but no living creature crosses twice into Hades' realm and survives. The king of Hell waited, hoping and praying, if we can be said to pray, that Orpheus would turn back a second time. If he could have slain Orpheus, there might have been a way to restore Ninanak's voice."
"But why wouldn't Ninanak let him kill Orpheus in the first place?"
Janx's mouth twisted. "She loved him, or she had once, and he still had the most beautiful voice of any mortal who ever lived, and she was the queen of song. She could not bear for his voice to be lost, even at the cost of her own. There are reasons that we had those strictures in place, Katherine. Good reasons. Not that, in the end, the Negotiator was wrong, but…we Old Races paid heavily, time and again, for dallying with humans. None more heavily than the siryns, because in the end it turned out that they couldn't breed, without Ninanak's song. By the time they realized, Orpheus was long dead and could no longer release Ninanak's voice even if he wanted to. I've had the lyre here ever since. The last person to make music on that was Orpheus, Katherine, and now it answers to your touch. I think you should be honored."
"I'm holding the voice of a ghost." Kate shuddered. "I don't know if that's honorable at all. What happened to Ninanak?"
"She stayed in the underworld until Orpheus died, always hoping he would return her voice. After that…" Janx shrugged. "I suppose she died too. Your sister's father might know otherwise, but I doubt she lived long after that. Even we can die of grief, if we try hard enough. Of all the men who have told her story again through the years, I've often thought that Anderson came closest to its truth."
Kate couldn't help glancing at her feet. "It doesn't feel like knives to walk in human form."
"Find a little poetry in your soul, child. What is the loss of a voice like that, but knives in the soul? Keep the lyre safe, Katherine. It's precious to me."
"I will." Kate hesitated, arms curled around the instrument. "Thank you."
"For giving up an item from my hoard? You're welcome." Janx's eyes glinted. "Don't imagine it's likely to happen again."
"I wouldn't have imagined it was likely to happen once. But I meant for the story, too. Will it bother you if I play it?"
"Play the story?" Janx said lightly. "Are you a child now, to act all the parts of the play? No," he said, at her exasperated glance. "It won't bother me. I might like to hear her voice again, in its songs."
"I don't know those songs."
"The lyre does." Janx left her then, in the too-fluid way that the Old Races had. He was much too large to simply disappear, but she, who could do nearly the same thing, was still left smiling in bemusement at the space where her father had been.
She did not, despite the invitation, begin to play again. Not then, anyway: less-than-idle footsteps took her back through Janx's hoard, her prize wrapped in her arms and its song lulling the hoard's glimmering appeal into insignificance. It wanted—she wanted—to go to the sea, through miles of treasure and more miles still of twisting cavernous tunnels. Away from the heart of the hoard, away from the belly of the volcano that warmed it, the air grew more temperate, until for a long time it was neutrally cool: the temperature of the underground world. She went up, blind certainty guiding her feet, until she could smell salt water. The lyre sang then, a tremble that had nothing to do with her touch. Kate was running by the time she burst free of the lair, and the warm lash of sea salt sat heavily in her lungs as she drew ragged breaths.
The wind itself played the lyre, not tunelessly, for the thing could never be out of tune, but aimlessly, as if searching for a song. Kate found stones only just high enough to avoid holding tidal pools and sat on one, her toes stretched toward the water. The sky above was molten grey, thick and heavy with rain, and turned in the distance to a blur of ocean, the line between them indistinguishable. There were other islands out there, thousands of them not so far away, but with the equatorial waters turned dark from the oncoming storm, she might have sat alone in the single inhabited place on the planet.
A lament came to her fingertips, old and mostly forgotten. It had been composed by an Irish bard called Ruaidrhí, when she was young; until then she would have said she'd forgotten it. But laments were for those who might be forgotten, too, and so when that one ended it became another, a piece by a Polish poet who had died before Kate was born. Kochanowski: that had been his name, and his poem had been for a lost daughter. She had been Ursula, like Kate's sister; Kate's Ursula hated that Kate had memorized the lyric, and put it to music. It was made up of nineteen stanzas, and Kate's fingertips ached long before it ended.
She might have edged a little into her dragon form, callousing her hands with tough scales, but she was afraid she would lose the lyre's song if she did. She would heal quickly anyway: the Old Races almost always did. When she might have stopped for her own sake, the lyre whispered music to her instead, and the notes she pulled from its strings were poignantly unfamiliar. A new lament, or more truly, an ancient one: a song given to Orpheus by Ninanak, and captured for eternity in the lyre.
It carried the howling of a storm in it, the relentless wail of wind over water. It held the sun, rising red over the broken bones of a ship on a still sea. It had the hiss of rain approaching from the distance, a sound so vivid Kate could see it with her eyes closed: flat seas and oncoming clouds, the leading edge of rain a wedge of darkness in the sky. No wonder ships had stopped sailing to listen to the siryns' songs; the lament told the story of the sea, and of all the things lost in it. Sailors would find their loved ones in this music, and no few would be drawn to join them. Kate's fingers bled as she made the music, but it had been aeons: surely a lost people deserved to have a little blood shed in their memory.
Other songs lay beneath the lament, but those mournful strains came back to her time and again, binding one melody to another, and making all of Ninanak's stolen voice part of the same sorrowful tune. Kate played for hours, never opening her eyes, not until a shaft of sunlight turned the darkness behind her lids to red. She blinked then, scattering a crimson sunset across the horizon: only there did the clouds break, just enough to set fire to the sea and sky. Grimacing, she took her hands from the strings and flexed her fingers, finally allowing a hint of transformation to ease the burst and bloody blisters. Janx couldn't do that: no full-blooded Old Race could. Shifting for them was all or nothing, but Kate and her sister Ursula could linger in any half-state of transformation that they wished. So they were clawed, those fingers, delicately serpentine and scaled above almost-human palms, when Kate realized that in taking her gaze from the horizon to her hands, she had seen something in between.
They were there in the water: all she had to do was change her point of focus. The low stones she'd settled on were more deeply immersed now, thanks to the changing tides, and the ocean licked her toes. They could touch her if they wanted to, touch her without even breaking the water's surface. They didn't, though: they only hovered in the shifting sea, their hair inking the surface like seaweed and their black eyes unblinking as they looked up at her. Half a dozen of them, no more, and when they knew she'd seen them, they darted into the depths as one, disappearing between one breath and the next.
"Wait!" Kate slid off the stones, plunging hip-deep into shockingly cold water, and gave a cat-like hiss of disgust. Once upon a time the dragons' sea-born cousins, the krakens, had swam the oceans, but dragons themselves did not like to get wet. Still, there were times that it was worth it, and chasing siryns into the sea seemed as worthy a cause as any. She held herself still, though, once she'd dropped in: she wasn't a strong swimmer, and mo
st fish scattered if chased. Siryns might do the same. "Wait," she said, more softly, doubting they could hear her. "Come back."
The sun fell past the horizon before they did, and with clouds blocking starlight, it was only her Old blood that let her see them return at all. One surfaced and sank again with a chitter of undersea noise that reminded Kate of Ursula's blind-sight clicking. Another rose and dove, speaking again: their conversation bounced off Kate's skin, tickling her. Then at once all of them rose: five women whose slick hair lay against almost-earless heads. Their eyes were large and black above high cheekbones and small chins, making them more elfin than human, save for the ears.
One shimmied closer, her approach reminding Kate of dolphins tail-walking. Up close she was bigger than Kate had expected: half again Kate's height, with broad shoulders that put a large body into proportion. She stayed far enough away to remain in deeper water, surging up and down with idle flicks of her tail; when she rose, Kate saw the sleek but not slender lines of her torso, and strong arms whose power was in no way compromised by the layer of insulating fat that packed them. She looked as though she could effortlessly tear a human into pieces, and Kate knew a moment's gratitude that she wasn't human.
The siryn spoke suddenly, a cadence of words so unfamiliar and well known all at once that Kate laughed in surprise. "What?"
Offense flew across the siryn's face. She breached, diving backward into the water and soaking Kate with a flick of her massive tail. The others all dived as well, slapping the water with their tails in rejection. Kate, alarmed, called, "Wait!" and then, shaping her tongue to an older way of speaking, repeated the word one more time.
The siryn surfaced again, hesitantly. Kate had gotten a glimpse of her whole body with that breach, and had been wrong: she was twice Kate's own size, with flukes like a dolphin's. If she and her pod wanted to be away from Kate, Kate would never catch them in the water, or risk flying low enough to track them in dragon form. Kate spoke hastily, tripping over her words. "My accent is bad. I'm sorry. I haven't spoken this language since I was a child."