by Anthony Ryan
One day he found Bren Antesh near the western gate, a hand shielding his eyes from the sun as he gazed up at a bird hovering overhead.
“Vulture?” Vaelin asked.
As was his custom the Cumbraelin leader gave no formal greeting, something Vaelin found irked him not at all. “Hawk,” he replied. “Of a type I haven’t seen before. Looks a little like the swift-wing from home.”
Of all the captains Antesh had reacted with the greatest calm to the crisis, placating his men and assuring them they were in no danger. His word clearly held considerable sway as there had been no attempts at desertion by any of the archers.
“I wanted to thank you,” Vaelin said. “For the discipline of your men. They must trust you greatly.”
“They trust you too, brother. Almost as much as they hate you.”
Vaelin saw little reason to argue the point. He moved next to Antesh, resting against a battlement. “I have to say I was surprised the King was able to recruit so many men from your fief.”
“When Sentes Mustor took the Fief Lord’s chair his first act was to abolish the law requiring daily practice with the longbow, and the monthly stipend that came with it. Most of my men are farmers, the stipend helped supplement their income, without it many couldn’t feed their families. They may hate King Janus with a passion, but hatred doesn’t put food in the mouth of your children.”
“Do they really believe I’m this Darkblade from your Ten Books?”
“You slew Black Arrow, and the Trueblade.”
“Actually, Brother Barkus killed Hentes Mustor. And to this day I still don’t know if the man I killed in the Martishe was really Black Arrow.”
The Cumbraelin captain shrugged. “In any case, the Fourth Book relates how no godly man can kill the Darkblade. I have to say, brother, you do seem to fit the description quite well. As for the use of the Dark… Well, who can say?” Antesh’s face was cautious, as if expecting some sort of rebuke or threat.
Vaelin decided a change of subject was appropriate. “And you, sir. Did you enlist to feed your children?”
“I have no children. No wife either. Just my bow and the clothes I’m wearing.”
“What of the King’s gold? Surely, you have that too.”
Antesh seemed agitated, looking away, his eyes searching the sky once again for the hawk. “I… lost it.”
“As I understand it, every man was paid twenty golds up front. That’s a lot to lose.”
Antesh didn’t turn back. “Do you require something of me, brother?”
The blood-song gave a short murmur of unease, not the shrill warning of impending attack, but a suggestion of deception. He hides something. “I’d like to hear more of Darkblade,” Vaelin said. “If you would care to tell me.”
“That would mean learning more of the Ten Books. Aren’t you afraid your soul will be sullied by such knowledge? Your faith undone?”
The Cumbraelin’s words summoned Hentes Mustor from his memory, seeing again the guilt and the madness in the Usurper’s eyes. The blood-song’s murmur grew louder. Did he know him? Had he been one of his followers? “I doubt any knowledge could sully a man’s soul. And as I told your Trueblade, my Faith cannot be undone.”
“The First Book tells us to teach the truth of the World Father’s love to any who wish to hear it. Find me again and I’ll tell you more, if you wish.”
In the evenings he would make his way to Ahm-Lin’s shop where his wife would scowl murderously as she poured tea and the stonemason would coach him in the ways of the song.
“Amongst my people it’s called the Music of Heaven,” Ahm-Lin explained one night. They were in the workshop, sipping tea from small porcelain bowls next to the statue of the wolf, which appeared more unnervingly real every time Vaelin visited. The mason’s wife wouldn’t allow Vaelin into the house itself where she invariably secluded herself after pouring the tea. He had once made the mistake of suggesting they pour it themselves which had provoked such an outraged glare that he waited until Ahm-Lin took a sip from his own cup for fear she had poisoned the beverage.
“Your people?” Vaelin asked. He had deduced that the mason hailed from the Far West but new little of the place beyond the tales of sailors, fanciful stories of a vast land of endless fields and great cities where the Merchant Kings held sway.
“I was born in the province of Chin-Sah under the benevolent rule of the great Merchant King Lol-Than, a man who knew well the value of those with unusual gifts. When mine became known to the village elders I was taken from my family at age ten and brought to the king’s court, to be tutored in the Music of Heaven. I remember I was terribly homesick but never tried to run away. It was the law that the treason of the son extends to the father and I didn’t wish him to suffer for my disobedience, though I longed to return to his shop and work the stone again. He was a mason too, you see.”
“There is no shame in the Dark in your homeland?”
“Hardly, it is seen as a blessing, a gift from Heaven. A family with a gifted child gains great honour.” His expression clouded. “Or so it was said.”
“So you were taught the song? You know how to use it, you know where it comes from.”
Ahm-Lin smiled sadly. “The song cannot be taught, brother, and it doesn’t come from anywhere. It is simply what you are. Your song is not another being living inside you. It is you.”
“The song of my blood,” he murmured recalling the words of Nersus Sil Nin in the Martishe.
“I have heard it called that, a name that suits well enough.”
“So, if it cannot be taught, what could they teach you?”
“Control, brother. It is like any other song, to sing it well it must be practised, honed, perfected. My tutor was an old woman called Shin-La, so old she had to be carried around the palace on a litter and couldn’t see more than a foot or two beyond her nose. But her song…” He shook his head in wonder at the memory. “Her song was like fire, burning so bright and loud you felt blinded and deafened by it all at once. The first time she sang to me I nearly fainted. She cackled and called me Rat, little Singing Rat, Ahm-Lin in the language of my people.”
“She sounds a harsh teacher,” Vaelin observed, reminded of Master Sollis.
“Harsh, yes she was that, but she had much to teach me and little time left in which to do it. Our gift is extremely rare, brother, and in all her long life of service to the Merchant King and his father before him, she had never met another singer. I was her replacement. Her lessons were harsh, painful. She needed no stick to strike me, her song could hurt me well enough. It started with the truth telling, two men would be brought in, one having committed a crime of some sort. Each would claim innocence and she would ask me which was guilty. Every time I got it wrong, and it happened often at first, her song would lash me with its fire. ‘Truth is the heart of the song, Rat,’ she would say. ‘If you cannot hear truth, you cannot hear anything.’
“Once I had mastered the art of hearing truth, the lessons became more complex. A servant would be given a token, a precious jewel or ornament, and told to hide it somewhere within the palace. If I didn’t find it by nightfall they could keep it, and I would be punished for its loss. Later, a large group of people would mill around one of the courtyards, talking at the top of their voices, with one of them carrying a dagger beneath their robes. I had only five minutes to find it before her song would stab me as the dagger would have stabbed our master. For, as she never failed to remind me, I owed all to him and to fail him would be my eternal shame.”
“The Merchant King made use of your song?”
“Indeed he did. Commerce is the life-blood of the Far West, those that trade well become great men, even kings of men, and successful commerce requires knowledge, especially knowledge others wish to keep hidden.”
“You were a spy?”
Ahm-Lin shook his head. “Merely a witness to the affairs of greater and richer men. At first Lol-Than would have me sit in the corner of his throne room, playing wit
h his children, if anyone asked I was said to be his ward, orphan son of a distant cousin. Naturally, most assumed I was his bastard, an unimportant but nonetheless honoured position at court. As I played, men would come and go with varying degrees of ceremony and protracted effusions of respect or regret at besmirching the king’s palace with their unworthy presence. I noted the richer the man’s clothes or the larger his entourage, the more he would proclaim his abject unworthiness at which Lol-Than would assure them no insult had been suffered and offer his apologies for not providing a more ostentatious welcome. It could take an hour or more before the true reason for the visit became apparent, and it was almost always about money. Some wanted to borrow it, others were owed it, and all wanted more of it. And as they talked, I would listen. When they were gone, with an assurance the king would give them a swift answer and an apology for the appalling discourtesy of delaying response to their request, he would ask me what song the music of Heaven had sung during the conversation.
“Being but a boy I had little notion of the true import of these affairs, but my song didn’t need to know why a man lied or deceived, or hid hatred behind smiles and great respect. Lol-Than knew why, of course, and in knowing saw the road to either profit or loss, or occasionally the axe-man’s block.
“And so I lived my life at the Merchant King’s palace, learning from Shin-La, telling the truth of my song to Lol-Than. I had few friends, only those permitted me by the courtiers appointed my guardians. They were a dull lot mostly, happy but unquestioning children from the minor merchant families who had bought a place at court for their offspring. In time I came to realise my playmates were chosen for their dullness, their lack of guile or cunning. Friends with sharper minds would have sharpened my own thoughts, made me consider that this pleasant life of luxury and plenty was in reality nothing more than an ornate cage, and I a slave within it.
“There were rewards of course, as I grew to manhood and the lusts of youth took me. Girls if I wanted, boys if I wanted. Fine wine and all manner of bliss-giving potions if I asked, though never enough to dull the sound of my song. When I grew too old to play with Lol-Than’s children I became one of his scribes, there were always at least three at every meeting and no one seemed to notice that my calligraphy was clumsy and often barely legible. Life in my cage was simple, untroubled by the trials of the world beyond the tall walls that surrounded me. Then Shin-La died.”
His gaze had become distant, lost in the memory, shrouded in sorrow. “It is not an easy thing for a singer to hear another’s death song. It was so loud I wondered the whole world couldn’t hear it. A scream of such anger and regret it sent me reeling into oblivion. Sometimes I think she was trying to take me with her, not out of spite, but duty. In hearing her final song I understood that her devotion to Lol-Than was a lie, the greatest of lies since she managed to keep it from her song throughout all the years she had taught me. Her final song was the scream of a slave who had never escaped her master and didn’t wish to leave me there alone. And she showed me something, a vision, born of the song, a village, ruined, smoking, littered with corpses. My village.”
He shook his head, his voice laden with such sadness that Vaelin realised he was the first person to hear this story. “I was so blind,” Ahm-Lin continued after a moment. “I failed to realise that the value in my gift lay in no-one knowing of its existence. No-one save Lol-Than and the old woman I would replace. I remembered all the people Shin-La had used in her lessons, all the suspected criminals and servants, there must have been hundreds over the years. I knew they could never be allowed to live with the knowledge of my gift. I had killed them merely by being in their presence.
“When I woke from the oblivion Shin-La had dragged me to, I found I had a new sensation burning in my soul.” He turned to Vaelin, an odd glint in his eye, like a man recalling his own madness. “Do you know hate, brother?”
Vaelin thought of his father disappearing into the morning mist, Princess Lyrna’s tears and his barely suppressed urge to break the king’s neck. “Our Catechism of Faith tells us hate is a burden on the soul. I have found much truth in that.”
“It weighs on a man’s soul true enough, but it can also set you free. Armed with my hate I began to take note of the meetings Lol-Than had me attend, to write down what was said with meticulous care. I began to conceive of just how vast his dominions were, to learn of the thousand ships he owned and the thousand more in which he had an interest. I learned of the mines where gold, jewels and ore were hewn from the earth, of the vast fields in which lay his true wealth, the countless acres of wheat and rice that under-wrote every transaction he made. And as I learned I searched, pouring over my papers for some flaw in the great web of trade. Four more years passed and I learned and searched, barely distracted by the comforts of the court, left to my efforts by the guardians I now knew to be my gaolers who saw no threat in my new-found studiousness, and all the time the truth of my song never wavered and I faithfully related to Lol-Than all it told me, every deceit and every secret, and his trust grew with every plot or fraud uncovered so that I became more than his truth-teller. In time I was as trustworthy a secretary as a man such as he could have, given more knowledge, more strands to the web, all the time searching, waiting, but finding nothing. The Merchant King knew his business too well, his web was perfect. Any lie I told him would be swiftly uncovered, and my death would follow swiftly after.
“There were times when I considered simply taking a dagger and sinking it into his heart, I had ample opportunity after all, but I was still young and though my hatred consumed me, I still lusted for life. I was a coward, a prisoner whose captivity was made worse by his knowledge of the vastness of his prison. Despair began to rot my heart. I fell to indulgence again, seeking escape in wine and drugs and flesh, an indulgence that would have seen me dead before long, had not the foreigners arrived.
“In all my years in Lol-Than’s palace, I had never seen a foreigner. I had heard stories, of course. Tales of strange, white or black-skinned people who came from the east and were so uncivilised their very presence in the Merchant King’s domain was insulting and only tolerated because of the value of the cargoes they carried. The party that came to treat with Lol-Than were certainly strange to me with their odd clothes and impenetrable language, to say nothing of their clumsy attempts at etiquette. And to my amazement, one of them was a woman, a woman with a song.
“The only women allowed in the presence of the Merchant King were his wives, daughters or concubines. In my homeland they have no role in business and are forbidden from owning property. Through the interpreter I was given to understand that this woman was of high birth and to refuse her admittance would be a grave insult to her people. The likely profits from whatever proposal these foreigners intended must have been great indeed for Lol-Than to allow her entry to the audience chamber.
“The interpreter continued but I could barely follow his words, the woman’s song filled my mind and I couldn’t help staring at her. This was a beautiful woman, brother, but beautiful in the way a leopard is beautiful. Her eyes glittered, her black hair shone like polished ebony and her smile was one of cruel amusement as she heard my song.
“‘So the slant-eyed pig has a Singer of his own,’ her song said, the hollow laughter that coloured it making me tremble. She was powerful, I could sense it, her song was stronger than mine. Shin-Lah may have been able to match her but not I, the rat had met a cat and was helpless before it. ‘What can you tell me, I wonder?’ she sang in my mind, the song plunging deeper, reaching into memory and feeling with brutal ease, dragging up all my hate and my scheming. My intended betrayal seemed to make her exultant, fiercely triumphant. ‘And the Council told me this would be difficult,’ she sang. Her gaze lingered on mine for a moment longer, ‘If you want the Merchant King dead, tell him to reject our offer.’” Then it was gone, her intrusion into my mind withdrawn, leaving behind a chill of certainty. She was here to kill Lol-Than if he refused whatever they proposed,
and she wanted to kill him, the outcome of the negotiations meant nothing to her. She had travelled across half the world for blood and would not be denied it.”
Ahm-Lin’s face was tense with remembered pain. “Sometimes the song lets us touch the minds of others, in all the years since I must have touched thousands, but never have I felt anything to compare with the black stain of that woman’s thoughts. For years afterwards I had nightmares, visions of slaughter, murder practised with sadistic precision, faces screaming or frozen in fear, men, women, children. And visions of places I had never seen, languages I couldn’t understand. I thought I was going mad until I realised she had left some of her memories with me, either out of indifference or casual malice. They faded over time, mostly. But even now there are nights when I wake screaming and my wife holds me as I weep.”
“Who was she?” Vaelin asked. “Where did she come from?”
“The name spoken by the interpreter was a lie, I sensed that even before I heard her song, and the memories she left gave no clue as to name or family. As for where she was from, it meant nothing to me at the time but the delegation presented greetings from the High Council of the Volarian Empire. What I’ve learned of the Volarians since leads me to conclude she would have been most at home there.”
“Did you do it? Did you tell the Merchant King to reject their proposal?”
Ahm-Lin nodded. “Without a moment’s hesitation. Shocked as I was, my hatred was undimmed. I told him they were full of lies, that their scheme was an attempt to spend his treasure and save their own. In truth I had barely any understanding of what they had proposed or if their word was true. As always, however, he trusted my verdict implicitly.”
“And did she keep her word?”
“At first I thought she had betrayed me. Lol-Than gave them his answer the next morning after which they boarded their ship and sailed away. He appeared to be in fine health, and gave every impression of remaining so. Disappointment and fear crushed me. For the first time I had lied to the Merchant King. Surely, I would be discovered and an ugly death would follow. A month passed as I worried and fought to conceal my fear, and then Lol-Than slowly began to sicken. It was nothing at first, a small but persistent cough that of course no one would dare to mention, then his colour became paler, his hands began to tremble, within weeks he was coughing blood and raving in fits. By the time he died he was a wasted bundle of bone and skin that couldn’t remember its own name. I felt no pity at all.