Nightingale n-1

by David Farland

  There was such excitement in Marie's voice that Olivia was tempted to just hang up on her. After the day that Olivia had just had, no one deserved to be so happy. She asked, "So what's Galadriel talking about?"

  "Oh, you know, the usual—her plans for school this year, and for college, that kind of thing. We were just discussing the kind of man that she wanted to marry," Marie said, then added to Galadriel, "weren't we dear?"

  Olivia graciously said goodbye and then clicked the phone off with unaccustomed zeal.

  Damn that Galadriel, she thought, planning out her life like that.

  Olivia peered into the living room. Mike was asleep in his La-Z-Boy, arms hanging over the edge like a gorilla's.

  Olivia worried. She went to Bron's room, found him lying in bed, blinking stupidly. The half-eaten burger was languishing on its plate. A couple of fries were gone. He'd taken less than a swallow of milk.

  "Get out of bed," she warned.

  "I'm up now," he apologized. He climbed to the edge of the bed and sat.

  She knelt in front of him, took his hands and stared into his eyes. "I just spoke to Galadriel's mother. She's planning for college, and dreaming of the kind of man she hopes to marry."

  "Really?" Bron asked.

  "That girl has never planned anything in her life," Olivia said. "A rabbit plans its day better—eat, poop, sleep!"

  "So you're saying it worked?"

  "I'm saying ..." Olivia gripped his hands tighter, "I'm worried that you gave her more than you took. She's in the hospital setting her life goals, and you can't get out of bed. If you don't wake up soon, I'm going to take you back and have you drain a little of the foam off the top."

  Bron frowned. "I couldn't do that...."

  Olivia studied his eyes. He was serious. He didn't want to have to deal with his powers. She felt relieved by that. He wasn't likely to use them against others, if that was how he felt.

  "Sure you could. Just to even things out."

  Bron furrowed his brow. Olivia breathed a little easier. Bron's powers were dangerous. If he ever got angry enough, he could drain her without a thought. "I'll be all right," Bron assured her, and got up.

  Olivia watched. It seemed he was moving a little easier, but he was strained. She let it go.

  By 8:30 p.m. the clouds were fleeing. Sunset brought red and purple ribbons of light above the bowl of the shadowed vale. Olivia got a call on her cell.

  "Olivia, this is Monique," the speaker said. "Fill me in."

  This was the call that Olivia had been waiting for. Monique was the Weigher of Lost Souls. Olivia had known her in college. Monique had taught Olivia to speak a couple of foreign tongues. Olivia slipped into French, using a dialect that had been popular during the Third Crusade. "J'ai un probleme."I have a problem.

  "What kind of problem?" Monique asked guardedly. Neither of them liked talking over the phones.

  "I took in a young man from social services. He's a dream assassin." There was a silence on the end of the phone, probably while Monique tried to pick her jaw up off the floor. "Are you certain?"

  "Oh, yeah."

  "It's been six hundred years since we've seen one," Monique said. "Does the enemy know that you have him?"

  "This kid has never even heard of the enemy."

  "Don't tell him," Monique said. "It could be dangerous. If he was born one of them, with a little shove ... If he knew what they offer, he might be tempted." Monique held silent as she considered what to do next. "The best thing might be to kill him in his sleep. That's what our ancestors did to the last one."

  "He's just a kid," Olivia said. "We may both be soldiers in an eternal war, but neither of us has ever shed a drop of blood."

  "There is wisdom in the old ways. I could send someone to do it for you. A real dream assassin, in today's world? I thought that there would never be another." Monique considered, and offered, "Every minute that you're around him, you're in danger. Even if you're not in danger from him, the danger grows. The enemy will come. It is only a matter of time."

  "I know," Olivia agreed. "We had contact with five over the weekend. I'm afraid. I only hope to prepare Bron for our next encounter, before it is too late."

  "Don't tell anyone about his powers," Monique ordered. "We can't afford to let this slip out. I'll arrange to meet him—soon."

  "Are you close by?"

  "Ireland, at Geata Na Chruinn."

  Olivia had a brief image of the old castle brooding over the downs, and to the west was a sea of silver. She had never been there, but she knew the castle intimately. She'd seen it once, in Monique's memory, when they were girls, still just playing with their powers. The image conjured wistful feelings, and Olivia yearned to see Monique soon.

  "Come quickly," Olivia begged.

  "Do you have a gun?" Monique asked.

  "Yes."

  "Keep it handy."

  After the phone call, Olivia wondered how she might create some kind of link to Bron, enlarge his compassion.

  There is a reason why muses had been worshipped as gods. In ancient villages, as people sang and danced around the campfire, there were times when a dancer would leap in the air and twirl, and all who saw how high she leapt would declare in wonder, "Allah!" God, "I see god in you!"

  Art was considered divine, and those who had great skill were thought to have been touched by the gods.

  In time, the saying got shortened and corrupted to "Ole!" So that still today, in parts of the world, when someone does something magnificent and worthy of praise, the audience shouts god's name.

  Olivia could not easily give Bron memories of love. Oh, she could manufacture such memories, but she had qualms about becoming that invasive. Still, she could give him something that he craved. She could give him the gift of music.

  So late that night she went into his room, and lightly touched him. For a moment, she peered into his memories, looking for moments when he felt loved, and when he had given love in return.

  She found very little. Bron was so alone inside. The harder that she tried to reach him, the more he would build up walls to protect himself. She wasn't even sure if he could love anymore. It was as if part of his brain were stunted, as if it had atrophied from lack of use, and had died.

  She might be able to cure him over time, but that would be a call for the Weigher of Lost Souls.

  Oh, he'd never hurt anyone on purpose. He wasn't intentionally cruel.

  In searching his memories, she found a song that he was composing—a guitar solo, as beautiful and as dark as a summer's night. She listened to the imagined riff, and her heart broke—a nightingale's song that had never been sung.

  Bending her head in thought, she reached into Bron's mind and began to teach him, to prepare him for the moment when he would have to play....

  Chapter 17

  Beautiful Creatures

  "History shows that the meek can never inherit the earth. The meek inherit only what the powerful abandon."

  — Lucius Chenzhenko

  Blair Kardashian felt humiliated. He was a good agent, and his acolytes had worked hard, but they had not been able to generate any leads on the pair of masaaks.

  Perhaps that justified sending reinforcements, but did they have to be dread knights?

  The agents who appeared at the hotel—three men, one woman, were all brutally handsome, and all dressed in black leathers, with silver bling. It wasn't a fashion statement; it was a uniform. The leather jackets and pants were equipped with a padding made of spun selenium crystals, far stronger than Kevlar.

  But it was not the clothing that dismayed him: it was the demeanor of these people. They glided across the floor as smoothly as if they were skating on ice, while their eyes roved the room, like those of mountain lions, hunting with a cool regard. There was a deadly grace in the way their hips rolled. It came from decades of practicing martial arts, of being exquisitely aware of their centers of balance, of always being prepared to instantly attack or defend.

  The
woman threw a suitcase on his bed, opened it to reveal black helmets and night goggles.

  The lead hunter, a man with spiked hair bleached white, asked, "So you have pictures of the targets?"

  "Just the boy," Blair admitted. He held out his cell phone, showed the image of Bron, climbing into his car.

  The dread knight dismissed the picture with a sneer. "Show me the woman," he said, and reached up to grasp Blair's cranium before he could object.

  Chapter 18

  A Tribute to a Huntress

  "We are more wondrous than we know."

  — Monique

  Bron woke amid dreams of Whitney. He'd seen her soulful green eyes peering up at him from behind a living curtain of honeysuckle that parted like hair. White and golden flowers trailed down her bare arms.

  In the dream, she was more than human, something wild, like a fawn, quick and playful and dangerous.

  She had been singing in the trees, and he realized now that he'd dreamt that she'd been a creature of legend, a wood nymph perhaps, singing in a deep forest, secreted by vines and secluded within the shadows of weeping willows. She sang, but her song was incomplete.

  His guitar needed to accompany her.

  Bron's eyes flew open. He'd dreamt of that guitar riff, and in the dream it had been perfect. He went to his guitar.

  He heard a creak in another room that might have come from the weight of a footfall. He froze. He wanted privacy.

  A little voice inside reminded, "You're going to a high school for the performing arts."

  He felt stupid trying to hide from Mike and Olivia, but it was the crack of dawn and he didn't want to wake them.

  He took his guitar and crept out the back door, where he stood in the mist and gazed into the fields. Not a hundred feet from the house was a herd of elk—a bull, five cows, and six calves. The huge bull had six tines on each antler, which were still in velvet, so that they were covered with wheat-colored fuzz.

  The bull fed contentedly. Two cows lay under an apple tree, while at the edge of the yard, the other animals grazed, legs straddled and heads lowered as they cropped the grass.

  The sun wasn't yet peeking over the mountains to the east, though the sky was colored in ribbons of violet and plum, ruddy orange and gold. The air smelled of a drenching fog.

  Bron did not want to disturb the animals, so he struck south, hoping to circle the herd, but had not gone ten yards when the bull raised its massive head, gave a whistle of warning, and loped away. The herd followed, and the bull slowed, letting the cows and calves take the lead while he guarded them from danger.

  The bull gazed back over its shoulder. It hesitated, as if it might continue its watch, but at last strode away.

  Humbled by the majesty of the animal, Bron crept to the barn. He climbed into the hayloft, looked out over the valley, and saw several deer down among the Oreo Cookie cattle. The animals would be his audience.

  He sat for a moment, relishing the touch of his Yamaha guitar. It didn't have a single scratch or scuff. The back was made from rosewood, while the surface was all of spruce. He caressed the wood, laid his cheek along the neck and just enjoyed the scent.

  He closed his eyes, touched the strings, positioned his grip, and strummed once.

  He was gone. For a solid hour Bron began to pick, thrilled at the way the guitar strings responded to his touch. The nylon strings were easy on the fingers of a beginner, and the music came mellow. But he found himself hungering for steel strings. They gave a pithier sound, greater volume. Mastering them would be hell on the hands.

  He began to strum the song that Whitney had sung, playing from memory. When he reached the guitar solo, he re-cast the bridge and captured that wild, sultry undertone of Whitney's, borrowing from the storm the night before—the grumble of distant thunder, the hiss of the wind and rain. Then he brought in his own harmony to answer and draw out her melody.

  It was not until he had practiced the piece several times that he stopped and recognized that something was wrong.

  He'd begun playing the song from memory, and he'd been able to finger the piece even though he hadn't seen the written music. He'd never done that before. Nor had he ever felt the music spring to his hands so willingly.

  It couldn't have come from practice. He'd been so exhausted on Monday that he hadn't touched the guitar. There was only one answer: Olivia had wormed her way inside his head.

  Bron flushed with anger. He wondered what memories she might have pried, what secrets she might have learned from him.

  Had she taken anything? She'd asked if there were painful memories that he might want removed. Sometimes memories fester. Sometimes the infection spreads, until the whole body is wracked with fevers. Had she tried to do him any favors?

  And what about new memories? Had she added anything pleasant?

  No, he decided. If she had wanted to play with his mind, she would have erased his memories of their talk. She would have left him ignorant, never knowing her powers, or his.

  After consideration, he suspected that she had left him only with this gift: the ability to play the guitar.

  He experimented, fingering riffs that he'd never tried. Whole new songs sprang to mind, songs that he knew how to play in theory but had never mastered.

  He experimented, put the guitar behind his back and played "God Bless America," as Jimi Hendrix had once done. He fumbled a few notes, but it was passable.

  Then he brought his instrument around front and moved smoothly into Eddie Van Halen's "Eruption," struggling to adapt it to the acoustic guitar. He was surprised at how good it sounded.

  Without amplifiers and the distortion common to an electric guitar, the music felt classical in texture, and he thrilled to the sense of reckless abandon in Van Halen's style warring with the need for precision and beauty.

  He didn't have Van Halen's control, but he could feel it coming, just out of reach. It was like trying to pick an apple from a high limb. He could touch it, juggle it on the tips of his fingers, but not quite grasp it.

  What had Olivia said? "Deep teaching takes days." Yet she'd only offered to teach him the guitar yesterday.

  She must have come to his room more than once. He'd been here only since Friday; he had learned more about technique in that time than he could have learned in five years on his own.

  Yet there was something more. He could feel that imaginary apple, the rough texture of its surface. He could thump it and almost taste the crispness of its interior. He was only hours or perhaps days from being able to take it, make it his own.

  He yearned for it.

  He was angry at Olivia for having violated his privacy, delving into his mind, and yet he was more grateful than words could express. What price would I be willing to pay to be touched by the gods? he wondered.

  He knew.

  He returned to the house and found Olivia making breakfast, dropping whole wheat bread into the toaster. Bron could hear Mike in the shower, singing a country song accompanied by a hiss like warm rain.

  Olivia glanced up, saw Bron with his guitar, and froze. "Everything all right?" She looked pointedly at the guitar.

  "Yeah."

  "Do you want more lessons?"

  He knew what she was asking. "How many more do I need?"

  "Three, maybe four."

  "To be as good as Hendrix?"

  "A few lessons, yes, and a lot of practice," Olivia said. "I heard that song in your head. You have a gift, Bron, one that I didn't give you, one that you were born with. You could be great."

  He could see now that Olivia was tired. She had dark bags, like bruises, forming beneath her eyes. She must have been up half the night, and the workload was costing her. "Do I ever wake up when you're doing it?"

  "Part of your mind does," she says. "That's why all of your dreams lately have been about playing guitar."

  Bron nodded. "You're exhausted. You should take tonight off."

  "I can handle my part. I can teach your neural pathways, train your finge
rs and brain to work in harmony, but even Beethoven lost his skills if he didn't practice every day."

  "So will I learn faster if I practice more?"

  Mike's shower turned off and the singing abruptly stopped. Olivia nodded, then whispered, "Don't show people what you can do yet. It would frighten them."

  Bron guffawed. He couldn't imagine it frightening anyone.

  "I'm serious," Olivia said softly. "The things I can teach you.... They'll say that you're in league with the devil, just like Poe and Paganini and Mozart." She was so serious, Bron stifled a laugh. "More than that, you could attract unwanted attention."

  "Okay," he said. Bron went to his room. He imagined fingering a song, a more-complex version of the piece that he wanted to do for Whitney. He grinned.

  Me, touched by the gods, he thought, and in league with the devil!

  School buzzed that morning with news of upcoming auditions. Tryouts began for the Hyperion Club—the most prestigious of all. Everywhere Bron went, people were prepping. Thespians wandered about the grounds delivering lines, talking to the empty air as if they were schizophrenics. Out on the plaza by the Green Open Theater, kids were doing voice exercises. Down in the dance studio, everyone was leaping about.

  Amid all the excitement, Bron felt alone, like a wolf on the prowl. He wasn't into musical theater, and because he had nothing else to do, he took his backpack and guitar up to the plaza and sat at a table.

  He pulled out his guitar and began to tune.

  Suddenly Whitney appeared, sneaking up from behind, took a seat next to him, and sat smiling.

  Bron bumped shoulders, drank in her eyes.

  "You ready to show us what you've got?" Whitney asked.

  Bron froze, looked up at the crowd. Already heads were turning. Whitney had a couple of friends at her back, including Sheriff Walton's son.

  Bron had never felt quite so embarrassed.

  Whitney said, "Don't worry. We're all performers, and we support each other. We all need applause, so we give it freely."