House War 03 - House Name

by Michelle West

  “They have to be stopped,” she said, voice low and gravelly, as if she had swallowed the earth, and it had become the only part of her that could speak. “They have to pay.”

  He bent over her. Her hands still clung to the spade, and he had to work to remove it. “They will,” he said, lips as close to her ears as he could bring them. “I swear it by the turning and by every life I will ever have.” He pulled the shovel from her hands and tossed it to one side, and then, without a further thought for the magi, the Astari, or The Terafin, he gathered her in his arms and lifted her, the way he might have lifted a much smaller child. Her legs swung over the curve of his left arm, and he felt her weight; she was so rigid she might have been stone.

  “Come, this is not the place for you.”

  He felt her arms tighten around his neck and felt the cool abrasion of her cheek as she pressed her face into his chest, eyes closing before they vanished from his view. He held her, looking for exits, listening for a silence that would not, and did not, come.

  What came instead was a voice that could cut through the screaming and the terror without ever becoming a part of it: a strong, clear voice. A woman’s voice. Anyone who had heard that voice could not forget it; it was the voice of the bardmaster, the woman who commanded the fractious, rebellious and much-loved bards of Senniel College.

  Sioban Glassen.

  Jewel lifted her head, and Devon let her; he walked toward the manse rather than away from it, for he followed the sound of the bardic voice as if it alone could provide safety and comfort for the girl in his arms. The child, he thought, although he did not say it.

  She asked him who they were, as they at last came into view, for she now recognized most of the First Circle mages by name—and temper—and she did not recognize these strangers. Devon did.

  The bards began to test their instruments—stringed lutes, mandolins, and small harps. They were tuning, but even in the act of tuning, they brought music to the spaces they occupied, and it was a music that nothing could break; that was the talent and the power of Senniel.

  After a few moments, Jewel’s hold around his neck eased and her legs moved as she attempted to climb out of his grip. He let her go.

  She listened. He watched her expression, and he felt a measure of comfort, for she had lost both the look of wild-eyed, unseeing frenzy and the shut-eyed retreat of a panicked child; what remained was pale, and it hinted at quiet determination, although Jewel, in Devon’s experience, was seldom quiet in practice.

  The dying still screamed, but the tenor of those screams shifted, quieted—and Devon noted that sound, unlike magic, seemed to travel in both directions: in and out.

  “That,” he told her, “is Sioban Glassen. She is a friend to the Kings and the Queens, and she presides over the famous Senniel College.”

  “Are they all bards?”

  “They are. They are all,” he added, “Master Bards. Sioban has, I think, emptied the College. Only two are missing, and I think they are well outside the Empire at the moment, traveling from Court to foreign Court.” He named them all, slowly, and she nodded as he did; he wasn’t sure how much of it she would retain. It didn’t matter.

  “What—what will they do?” Jewel asked. The question was quiet, but it was a question; she was now firmly behind her eyes. Those eyes glanced away from his in momentary embarrassment, and he didn’t tell her that she had no cause for it; she did. But he didn’t chide her; he had the same cause, after all, and he was older and more experienced.

  “Listen,” he said quietly. “They cannot speak normally if they are to be heard; you will doubtless hear what they have to say.”

  “But the bards—”

  “Can speak in whispers that span miles, yes—but in my experience, they can speak to one person that way, one at a time. They will not do so now.”

  “We can sing them to sleep,” Sioban said. Her eyes were ringed with gray, and her skin was tinged green, but her expression was grave and focused; Devon had always admired her ability to work with the bard-born. She drew from them the discipline she required, no more—but she was wise enough not to ask for more.

  “You’re right,” Master Bard Alleron snapped, running his hands through his hair. “It’s not good.”

  “Then come up with something—anything—else.” Sioban folded her arms across her chest and held tightly. They were, as Devon was, holding on to what they could. He glanced at Jewel; she was listening to the voice, and if her breath was shallow, it was now even.

  He waited to see who would speak next and was slightly surprised when he received his answer. The youngest Master Bard that Senniel College had ever produced now lifted his golden head. Ringlets trailed the sides of his face; his expression was both grave, which was expected, and calm, which was not. He reminded Devon, for just that moment, of Member APhaniel; the screams and the pleas of the dying did not seem to touch him at all.

  Who is Kallandras? Duvari had asked a decade ago.

  The only answer anyone could give was Master Bard of Senniel; the unknown otherwise shrouded his past. Yet it was this bard, of all the bards at her disposal, that Sioban most frequently sent traveling into dangerous territory, and this bard who had always survived.

  “Sioban Glassen has the right of it. If we drown out the screams, we aren’t ending their pain, not even for a moment.”

  “And putting them to sleep will end it?” Alleron demanded. “They’ll be woken again, sure as sunrise—it’ll be that much worse; the hope and then more torture.”

  “Alleron.” Ah, Devon thought. Tallos. Tallos AMorriset. One of the few Housed bards. “We do not think clearly. Kallandras, Sioban—forgive us. This is not the work that we thought to do when we first arrived.

  “Let us weave a song of sleep, and let us make it strong. We have fifteen voices here; it will not be so easy to wake the sleepers while our voices still have strength. And after? After, we will know that we have done all that we can. The Triumvirate does not ask for more, and if we are to continue, we must not.”

  “Alleron.” Master Bard Gilliane now spoke. She was of an age with Tallos; older than Sioban, although less careworn on most days. This was not one of them. “You tell this to your students time and again: The voice cannot force a man to do much against his nature. The voice cannot order a man to die. These we cannot save; accept it.”

  Jewel stiffened at Devon’s side, and her face went white. He understood then that she had not yet faced the truth that the rest of the magi had already—bitterly—accepted. Those who were trapped beneath the city would die, and they would die horribly; those who labored above, working against the magic of the impenetrable shield, were not laboring under the illusion that they could somehow come to their rescue.

  She looked up at him, and he nodded. She said nothing; her hands clenched into fists at her sides, as if by so doing they might be prevented from picking up shovels or picks or rocks.

  The fire went out of Alleron, then. “I’d give them death if I could.”

  “Then you would study the lost arts. The dead arts. And you would make of us something other than what we are—if that possibility exists in the here and now.”

  “I know it,” he said. “But it must be better than allowing that.” The silence that followed his words was strong enough that he could feel it, although it was broken—always broken—by the sounds of the dying. “Sioban,” he said, as he lowered his forehead to rest against the top edge of his harp, “Forgive me. I—I will speak sleep.”

  “It is already done,” she replied, her voice loud enough to carry the compassion she meant to offer. “Come. Let us begin.” She turned and lifted her hand, signaling not to the bard-born, but the mage-born.

  They drifted out of the bowels of the manse as if relieved that they could leave their duties in her hands, if only for the moment. Devon understood the feeling too well to despise it.

  Meralonne APhaniel came last, but before joining the members of the Order, he approached Sioban. �
��The field is yours,” he said, and he tendered her a perfect, patrician bow. She didn’t even notice.

  She was, as she had often described it, finding her voice; her expression was troubled but focused; there was no doubt at all in it. She would find what she needed.

  Devon, like most of the men and women born in Averalaan—or the breadth of its Empire—was talentless. He had none of the power that marked the talent-born and none of the peculiar and often singular drive. But he found it fascinating, and he watched—he had always watched—as they brought their talents to bear.

  Sioban began to sing. Her voice carved a space for itself among all the other voices raised not in song but in terror, and her voice held that space, clear and free, demanding that the voices all around hers begin to conform to its subtle command.

  She did not demand sleep; she cajoled it, taking the mother’s voice, or the wife’s, or the sister’s: speaking of exhaustion after the long, hard day, of the weariness and pain that sleep alone might relieve.

  Talos AMorisset joined her, twining harmony around her melody; he spoke of dreams, suggesting the ways in which they turned from the possible into the impossible, the probable into the improbable, the horrific into the sublimely beautiful; a place without sense from which all things might be drawn, and to which all things were.

  Alleron’s voice was lower, older, as was the man himself, and where the others spoke softly or gently, he was the stern parent, reminding his children that there were rules about bedtimes in his home, and he expected them to be obeyed. No forbidden lamplight, his voice suggested, would evade his notice; it was time, past time, for sleep.

  One by one the other Master Bards joined their voices—and their power—to Sioban’s, until only their voices could be heard at all.

  Devon thought, listening to them, that wars could be brought to a halt should they ever convene for that purpose; what man, in the end, desires neither sleep nor peace? It might take time for the voice to reach that desire, for many desires crowded the minds of men—but he had no doubt at all that these voices would, in the end, sway giants.

  And the victims below were not those.

  They slept. Their silence was a blessing, and if it was broken—and it was, repeatedly—nothing could be done to stop the bard-born voices from compelling, again, what they had compelled the first time.

  Instead, for the first time since the screams had started, Devon heard voices that were raised not in terror or pain but in frustration and anger, and he knew that those voices were not human.

  Jewel’s head was listing against his chest; she was young, and she did not have his schooling; the bardic voices touched her almost as strongly as they did the voices of those below. He felt her lean against him, and he slid an arm around her shoulders, to catch her if she fell.

  It was time, he thought. Time, now, to leave. The bards would sing for as long as their power held out—perhaps longer, by the grim set of their lips and their jaws. The Isle was distant enough that the voices would not trouble her, and if she woke to the memory of screaming—as they would all now wake—let it be hours from now in the dim comfort of familiar surroundings.

  But before he could lift her, the last of the Master Bards suddenly raised his chin, and what Devon heard when he opened his full lips and began to sing drove all thoughts of Jewel’s comfort from him.

  Kallandras did not sing, as his fellow bards did, of sleep. Sleep was not a worthy subject for the purity and ice of his voice, the sudden cold blue of his eyes. He sang of death.

  It was a death song that Devon, who had never heard it and would never hear it again while he lived, knew more intimately than he knew sleep, and he felt—for just a second—that it was his own soul laid bare.

  The Senniel bards sang of sleep and the dark of night in which sleep might rightfully take place; Kallandras of Senniel sang of a darkness and desire that had no room for sleep at all. His voice soared; his range was impressive. His power could almost be seen, Devon felt it so strongly.

  He spoke of killing. He spoke of how to kill. He spoke of what might come from that act, that final intimacy, when all hope and all struggle, all ambition and all complacency, met their end and were revealed as ashes and daydream. His song touched all manner of death, brief and sweet, long and endless.

  But it did more than that; for as the rest of the bards compelled the helpless to find peace, this one lone voice spoke not to the victims but to the torturers, and it spoke as strongly as the other fourteen combined.

  Devon woke Jewel, then. It was hard, but he understood that Kallandras of Senniel, and Kallandras alone, had the ability to speak not to those who waited to spend their last hours—perhaps their last days—in torment and fear but to those who would end them.

  Jewel stirred, her eyes fluttering open and closing again. Devon shook her as gently as he could. The third time, he succeeded. Or perhaps she heard what Devon himself could hear; she pulled back, and her gaze turned to Kallandras and became riveted there.

  One child’s voice stopped suddenly, almost at the same time as his mother’s. They would never be heard again. A roar shook the broken stone—literally shook it, it was so strong—and that voice broke sleep for a moment, while the Master Bards strengthened their efforts without pause.

  Abraxus-karathis! Stop!

  The roar grew like the wave that becomes so large it can shatter walls. Human cries, confused and frightened, followed in its wake—but they, too, were brief. Wings beat, fire crackled.

  And among the final voices some were strong enough to be heard offering thanks, as if it were a prayer. He understood it and understood why; Jewel, however, shook. Maybe one day she would understand that death was sometimes the only possible peace; now, it was just an end. The wrong end.

  STOP! I COMMAND YOU!

  What were demons, after all, but the impulse to kill and destroy? How much compulsion, in the end, did the bard-born need to lay on them? Devon heard the screaming fury of the command itself, and then he heard the leathery beat of wings—huge wings, by the sound of the storm that rose with them. He heard thunder, the clap of lightning striking stone, and the harsh, guttural snarl of fury so intense it could not be contained in words.

  He heard death, but not a death without battle. The demons were fighting each other, now.

  Kallandras continued to sing until the storm receded, and all roars and thunder had once again been replaced by silence. Only then did he stop and bow his head; his face was gray-tinged white. The bards quieted, but less suddenly; their work was not yet done, or if it was, they had received no signal from Sioban. Nor would they, Devon thought; she was watching her youngest Master Bard with an expression of concern that was marred only by a trace of primal fear.

  So, he thought.

  He turned to leave, and he heard in the darkness a distinctive, quiet chuckle.

  Very clever.

  Kallandras raised his head for a moment, and he gazed into the distance of stone and earth, as if searching for the visage of the speaker. He did not, however, speak—not in any way that Devon could perceive.

  “Come, Jewel,” he told his silent companion. “It is time to return to Terafin, and make our report.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  19th of Corvil, 410 A.A.

  Merchant Authority, Averalaan

  FINCH TOOK A DEEP BREATH and let herself into Jarven’s office, knocking first to let him know that she was coming. He was, at this very early hour of the morning, standing with his back toward her and his eyes toward the long window that faced into the heart of the Common. Beneath him, beneath them both, the Common was coming to life, as it did at every dawn, rain or sweltering heat notwithstanding.

  “Finch,” he said, gazing at her reflection in the window. “You are here early.”

  “Lucille is making your tea,” Finch replied, implying that she was not the only one who had chosen to make their way to the Merchant Authority before the sun had fully crested the horizon.

  Jarven
nodded and then turned. His expression was grave, and he did not offer his usual smile. “Have you heard the news?” he asked her quietly. A knock answered before Finch did, which was just as well; she had rehearsed everything she meant to say while walking—beside Torvan, whose company after everything that had happened in the manse was an unexpected joy—and all the words were there—they just didn’t make it out of her mouth.

  “Come in, Lucille,” Jarven said, raising his voice slightly.

  Finch ran to open the door, and Lucille nodded brusquely as she passed, tray in her ample hands. She set the tray down on Jarven’s desk and then met his gaze. Something passed between them; Lucille was either worried or annoyed—it was hard to tell because when she was worried, it annoyed her, and when she was annoyed, she shared.

  Jarven offered her the smile he had withheld when Finch had entered the room. Lucille exhaled. “How bad is it?” she asked the man who in theory ruled these offices.

  “Bad,” he replied without preamble. “Would you care to join us? I intend to occupy some of Finch’s time.”

  “It’s not busy enough that it matters,” was Lucille’s terse reply. “But no. I don’t want tea. I would like to strangle someone.”

  “Anyone in particular?”

  Finch cringed, because usually if you asked Lucille a question like that, you got an earful of answer. Today, however, Lucille made a tight line of her lips and shook her head. “I’ll be outside,” she told Jarven. “Try not to get Finch in trouble.”

  “I assure you—”

  “Save it. It’s not me you’re negotiating with.”

  He took his chair and lifted the teapot. “As you wish, Lucille. Finch, please, take a seat. You’re standing like a rabbit that’s ready to bound off at the mere hint of a human presence.”

  Finch did as bid. She even remembered how to sit properly, as it was one of the things Ellerson liked to explain any time he saw her sitting in a chair. The idea that there was a right way to sit and a wrong way had never occurred to Finch, and she thought it funny. Most of the time. Today, Jarven’s mood dampened humor.