by JDL Rosell
The world sang. It was like hearing the dearest, truest songs of each individual thing, and understanding them. He heard the gentle hiss from the fresh horse fek on the street, the whistling of hot air escaping. He heard the low hum of the cobblestones, the song of their patient burden, bearing thousands of feet trampling heedlessly over them, day after day, year after year. He heard the slow march of the creaking trees as they crept a bit further into the earth, ascended a bit closer to the sky. He heard the people of Zauhn, hundreds and hundreds of people, with their frowns and worried brows, the sounds of averted eyes, the choir of worried gasps.
He heard the people around him, and knew them by their melodies: Tara, Persey, Wil, his father. He heard them all, and he joined them, his own song washing over into them. He heard them and sang, and began to know them as he knew himself, as part of himself.
But there were places he could not go. In a dozen places, his song failed, their bodies guarded by watchful presences. These tasted like snow on his lips, like the silence of a frozen lake. He felt he almost heard something from them, but they were whispers on the wind. He strained to know, sensing it a crucial thing, but they were as impassive as high cliffs in a storm.
But they were not the still, dead things they seemed. They moved, and he felt them move by the silence they imposed where they treaded. They padded forward, closer, every one of them pointed towards him. In the emptiness of their presence, he sensed their hate in every step forward.
Opening his eyes and sitting bolt upright, Erik saw the mooneyes approaching. He heard the gasps of fear of everyone in the cart and knew they were helpless to stop this. He closed his eyes again, concentrating on the cascading echoes of himself around.
He had made the boulder fall. He’d known it all along. Now, he knew he had to do something again, to make the world obey him and stop these creatures from killing him. But there was nothing to use as before. He could try to collapse the surrounding buildings, but the lions would spring about them. He could try to throw stones at them, but they would be unaffected. He had nothing to use… nothing, except the billowing waves of himself.
With a cry lost to all the other songs in his head, Erik pushed out from himself, mustering up waves and throwing them at the mooneyes. He felt them fold around them, like a stream around rocks, but he didn’t stop. Their steps stopped, and they stood poised and unmoving, as if waiting for him to weaken before continuing. But he didn’t, he kept pressing, kept pushing, pushing every bit out of himself to force them back.
Then, all at once, the mooneyes were swept back. Erik opened his eyes, his effort slackening, and saw the black creatures stumbling over their own feet to get away. He would have smiled if he could, but his weariness was too great even for that.
Only then did he notice the others in the cart. Persey’s were the first eyes he met, her gaze fierce and strained, her Mother’s blossom silver hair fallen down before her face. Then he noticed the pained expressions on the others: Wil in the driver’s seat, his father back with them, and Tara pressed against the side of the cart, eyes shut tight. He suddenly realized why. He’d not only pressed against the silent enemy, but them as well. They should have been dead from it, and would have, if Persey hadn’t saved them. He felt her pushing against him now.
But there was no time to marvel at the girl. “Go,” he croaked.
His father was first to recover and climbed up next to Wil. “Move, son,” he said to the tanner. “Back to the bridge.” When Wil didn’t respond, his father took the reins and urged the two donkeys, frozen with terror, back into movement.
Erik closed his eyes, wanting to fade away into the numbness creeping in his chest, but he knew he couldn’t yet. He pulled at himself—though it made him nauseous, made his head scream with the effort—pulled one last tendril of the great sound that had welled up inside him and stretched it out. It was less overwhelming this time, hearing the things he’d always thought inanimate around him, and he was able to concentrate on the one thing he strained to find.
Somehow, he knew to feel towards the tower. He wound up the steps, through the door, and inside the laboratory at the top. Then stopped. Oslef’s song was strong and fast and furious, and the walls of the room trembled as he walked between them, the floor yielded up the point of his focus. Erik probed, tentative, so he wouldn’t be felt, and found a body still in a different way from the mooneyes. Certain whispers trailed from it, but the human form had no song. A corpse was in there with Oslef, and Erik didn't have to strain to imagine whose.
Oslef’s fury grated again Erik’s mind as he stared down at Vodrun’s body. He heard his thoughts form into comprehension. You. You, I know.
And as the Talstalker leapt onto the body and ripped into it, Erik fell back into himself and closed his eyes. He saw the savage delight in the count’s son’s face, and knew the man was all but gone. Oslef was dead. What remained was a hunter, a bloodthirsty beast, bent on whichever quarry it happened upon.
Then why didn’t you kill me before? But he wasn't about to wait to ask. As he opened his eyes, he saw the cart he was in had moved in front of a gate, and his father argued with the guards to have it opened.
Then he could watch no more. He closed his eyes and gave himself up to peaceful, blessed silence.
A’Qed shouted with the fury of a thousand horns
He shouted, and all the Void reverberated with his passion
A’Qed shouted before the ten thousand gathered
He shouted, and all the folk trembled with his passion
Look! he laughed. Look what becomes of him now!
Salt and stone, ash and mud—
Look! he showed them his brother, bound and chained—
Salt and stone and ash and blood
Can he escape this? A’Qed showed them the inferno
That blazed inside the fathomless depths of the Void
Flames the color of fear bled forward,
And the ten thousand cowered as fear covered bound Er’Lothe
Now A’Qed turned to his brother,
And leaned so close the folk thought he might kiss:
I turned you to salt, and you yet lived,
I turned you to dust, and you yet lived
I speared you and flayed you and cut off your head
And yet you lived—you always lived
But brother—and again, A’Qed showed him the flames—
Brother, will you yet live through this?
- The Sons Incarnate, “The Final Taunt,” seventy-sixth cantus
Witnessed by Sanct Eckard, the Living Testament
190 IY, Seventh Cycle of Our Broken World
Twenty-One
3 Years Before
“You won’t always be with me.”
Erik opened his eyes and winced into the noon sun. From where his head lay in her lap, Ilyse had uncharacteristic shadows carved across her forehead even as the rest of her face shone. She stared off into the forest.
“Don’t say that,” Erik said softly. Her cheeks glowed and her eyes sparkled in a way he’d never seen before, and it wasn’t just the sunbeams playing across her face, punctuated by the estar blooms waving above them. She had the healthy fullness and color that came with bearing a child. He’d never much noticed it on other women, but on her, he couldn’t look enough. The gained curviness was just the cream on top. Yet there ever seemed a shadow across her features, a melancholy that would not dissipate.
Then there was the other half of his feelings towards the coming child. Don’t think about that. Not when we only have a few moments together.
“It’s true.” She looked at the ground beyond him. Her hand absently ran through his hair, running down his long locks and untangling their many knots. “It won’t be long before something happens to you, or me, and takes us away. That’s how it happens in families these days. Remember Gertrude?”
Erik sat up on an elbow and gently guided her chin down. “We’ll be together,” he said, peering into her eyes. “Here and
in Shelter both.”
She wrested her chin from his grip and turned aside. “You don’t believe that. You don’t believe in the Mother, or Er’Lothe, or any of it.” She was stiff against him.
He hesitated. How could he deny it? He’d never really felt belief or conviction, not in the way she professed. It didn’t come naturally, and if it wasn’t natural, how could belief ever be true? His father’s disbelief didn’t make it any easier, and perhaps it was even the root of his infidelity to the Mother and her Lastborn. In any case, he didn’t expect Shelter at his life’s end. Just the Void, waiting for all of them to return. Just emptiness, absence, obliteration. How could anything else be beyond in this random, careless world?
But while this upset her, he didn’t think it was the issue now. This was something more immediate, something that had long caused friction between them, as well provoked the censure of her father and the community: Erik’s refusal to wed. How, he thought not for the first time, can I speak the rites for a union when I don’t believe a damn word of it? He suspected this wasn’t his only hesitancy, but no use delving into that. Other reasons, he knew, could only resurrect troubles, and he didn’t need any more of those in his life.
He ran his fingers down her neck, tracing the shadows left by the swinging branches above, then leaned forward to kiss where he’d touched. She pulled away slightly, and he stopped.
“Ilyse,” he said, quietly but firmly. “I… I suppose I’d believe anything that keeps me with you.”
She was still, but not stiff in the same way. When he tried to kiss her again, she let him.
“And with our babe,” she said as he pulled away. “You have to be here for our Little Mother.”
“Or our Flawed firstborn.” He smiled slightly at their ongoing dispute.
It was she who kissed him this time, locking him in an embrace. As their lips lingered, Erik opened his eyes slightly to gaze on the woman who was to be his child’s mother. Her eyelashes still had unshed tears, twinkling as sunlight winked through them. She’s like an angel come down from Shelter, or a faerie of the woods. Practically Mother-sent in her innocence.
Then there was the other voice in his head. Couldn’t you do better? The demon was never silent long.
“I don’t care if we never marry,” she said suddenly, opening her eyes, so close to his they blurred slightly. “Just stay for our child.”
It wasn’t true, her not caring. Though unwed mothers were not uncommon and were accepted in a general sense, especially in Tar Court, they were ever talked about after with a touch of derision. “Of course,” he answered reflexively. “Not just for the child, Ily. For you.”
She settled her head on his shoulder. “You’ll never leave me,” she whispered.
“I won’t leave you.” She worked so hard, all day, every week, spinning and sewing and spinning again, even now when she was with child. At this moment, they were only sneaking away for an hour or two at most, then it was back to work for them. Her spinning, him—still—as apprentice to his father, who had once again banished him from the house to distill the mysterious elixir. Perhaps she wouldn’t have to work herself to the bone if you’d marry her, the voice teased him. But he also thought, Perhaps I would marry her if I could support her, if my father would teach me a single important thing about formulaism. He tried not to think about how he hardly cared to learn about it anymore. The resentment was much easier to bear.
For a moment, Erik closed his eyes too, resting his head on hers, closing out the surrounding lachtrunks. He breathed her earthy scent in and forgot all their troubles in life. For a moment, they were the only two people in existence, and the world around them was only for them, the charfurs chattering only for them, the gentle breeze blowing only for them.
“Erik, you fek-smeared cunt, there you are!”
The male voice threw the idyllic daydream into a sudden spin. Erik bolted upright, dislodging Ilyse from his shoulder, and looked around to see who it was.
“Just me,” Oslef said. He swayed on his feet, though the sun was still high in the sky. “Just your Lion roaring.”
Ilyse leaned off of him, and Erik stood. “Oslef,” he said uncertainly. “Looks like you found us.”
There was a moment of awkward silence. It had been many cycles since they’d last even seen each other. Though their adolescent fight was long behind them, another issue had crept up, this one between them and Ilyse. Those nights that Erik had slunk back splattered with the blood of lurchers and Ilyse would be at his house as she often was, she would say nothing. Yet her silence became so unbearable he told Oslef he couldn't hunt anymore. Cycles later, none of them seemed to have quite gotten over it, Erik least of all. He itched to hunt that very moment.
“Listen, before you say anything, I have something I need to get off my chest.” Oslef’s words were noticeably slurred, and his eye contact wavered.
“Wait.” Erik turned to Ilyse and put a hand gently on her back. “I’ll be right back, okay?”
“Don’t be long.” He could feel her disappointment at one of their rare trysts being interrupted, but they both knew there was nothing to be done for it. The Twice-Late Viscount would not be put off when he was soaked.
He wandered over to Oslef, carefully approaching. And a good thing—the count’s son threw a punch, and Erik narrowly dodged it by reflexively leaping back.
His old friend bent over laughing. “Look at that!” Oslef wheezed. “Jumping like a pre-bled girl.”
Heart still hammering, Erik’s gaze darkened, and he stalked past him to a denser part of the woods. “You want to talk, let’s talk.”
“Come on, Erik, don’t get your britches in a bunch, was just teasing. Just flicking the fek, as they say. Didn’t mean a thing by it.”
“What do you want?” He wasn’t in the mood for teasing. Or anything else from Oslef, really, when he was deep into the eldberry whisky.
The Twice-Late Viscount put a hand on Erik’s shoulder, and he barely refrained from sweeping it off. “You’re my friend, aren’t you, Erik?”
He hesitated. “Sure. We’re friends.”
“You’re my oldest friend,” Oslef continued seriously, or as seriously as he could manage when the words slipped against each other like mating slugs. “You’re my good friend. You’re the greatest—”
“What are you trying to say, Oslef?”
“I’m useless. Useless. There’s not a blighted thing for me to do in the world. Rekkil will inherit Father’s district seat as count. Kalef is a scribe in the Font. But what is there for me, for a fucking lastborn? Nothing, no-thing, not-a-thing. Fucked, that’s what I am, completely redundant and redundantly fucked, you know what I mean, Erik? There’s absolute fek for me to do here. So I drink, and gamble, and yes, pay too many visits to the Grab Asses, and is a damn bit of it my fault? Not one fek. It’s my lot in life. The Twice-Late Viscount. That’s my definition right there, right in that stupid, stupid childhood nickname. Twice-late, twice-hate, twice-hated. That’s my fucking life.”
What was he to say? Erik seethed at every complaint he had. An easy, carefree life he'd had, and what was he doing but wasting it away? Knocking the other man’s hand from his shoulder, he stepped back and looked Oslef hard in the eyes. “Ilyse had an hour to spare with me today,” he said, his face growing hot. “One hour. The rest of her time is spent working herself hard so that she and her old man can survive, and so we can prepare a life for our child.” He studied the other’s face and saw little reaction, which made him even madder. “You really think I’m going to sympathize with your sorry story? Leave us alone, Oslef. Drink yourself to death for all I care. If you’re so depressed with your easy life, go ahead and get out of it.”
He turned and left, not waiting for a response. Ilyse still sat at the base of the estar tree and looked over at his approach.
“Come on,” Erik said, more roughly than he intended.
“What did he want?” she asked, rising. "Not...?"
"No," Erik
said quickly. "Not that.” He shook his head. “I don’t think he knows what he wants. And that’s the problem.”
He took her hand and led her away. She had to walk slowly, but he wanted to walk fast, and somehow it made his chest feel tighter. Do you know what you want? The devilish voice taunted.
“Oslef,” she said softly, shaking her head. She looked at where the Twice-Late Viscount still stood, emptily staring at the ground, and her eyes grew misty again. “What went wrong?” she asked softly. “What makes a good man turn bitter?”
“Never mind,” Erik said, shaking his head. “Stupid thing.” He looked over at her and tried to smile as best as he could. “Let’s just enjoy the time we have together.”
The sad smile she gave him in return made him wonder if he wanted more time, or if he wanted to leave the whole damn town behind. He never could decide.
Twenty-Two
He awoke to the gentle, cradling song of the world around him. He felt the murmur of water as it wished itself earth, then wished itself sky, then back again. Small, quick creatures—silver-finned fish, he somehow knew—glided below, and small sea-plants drifted with the waves, their tremors as much the sea’s as their own. Closer to him, wood shouted protests at the unnatural form it had been shaped into, and at being exposed to the harsh elements and the bite of salt. Erik almost smiled at its grousing. Rocked like a babe in its mother’s arms, he could have smiled at just about anything, with the pleasant humming intoxicating his head.
“Erik?”
The smile evaporated with the voice, and Erik opened his eyes. A hazy sun peered down from the overcast sky, but it still nearly blinded him, his eyes disused to light. In his peripherals, he saw his father watching him, tilting up and down on the waves. Waves… why are there waves?