Song for the Basilisk

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Hollis,” he said softly, and Hollis saw him finally. Caladrius loosened his magister’s robe gently, let it drop. “Come.”

  Looking back once, he saw the prince fall, as if loosed from the massive coils of snake. Luna bent over him. In the hall, the confused guard, seeing only the librarian and an unarmed guest, let them pass.

  The crowds had fled the fighting that had spilled beyond the gate; basilisk masks and puppets lay scattered like leaves on the stones. To the west, the sky was stained again with red. Like a satin banner in the wind, color folded over itself and fanned, glowing from roof to roof. Above the city, the sun burned like a basilisk’s eye through the fire.

  PART THREE

  The Basilisk’s Egg

  One

  “Close the city gates,” Arioso Pellior said when he could finally speak. “No one leaves Berylon. No one.”

  “There’s fire, my lord,” a guard reported tentatively. “Along Weaver’s Street. Houses and warehouses are burning. The country folk are fleeing across the Iridia Bridge—”

  “No one!” Arioso screamed, or tried to, his face turning purplish gray. His physician, kneeling at his side in the Hall of Mirrors, amid a wreckage of mirror shards, spilled flowers, bloody weapons, and magisters’ robes, bent over him, murmuring. Arioso’s fist came down on a lily washed across the floor. “I want him!”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “Alive. Still speaking. The rest of them, kill them as you find them. Before they find a place to hide. Empty the music school and seal it shut. Search Tormalyne Palace and guard it. Take them out of their houses—all of them. Even if they’re blind, crippled, hairless, and deaf—anyone bearing a shadow of that name in their past. Kill them. I will obliterate that name until no one dares even think it. And then I will crush the griffins in the city into dust.”

  Luna, standing next to Taur, felt him still trembling, whether in excitement or fear she couldn’t tell. He asked her softly, confused, “But which was he? Griffin Tormalyne? What does he look like?”

  “The music librarian. The man in black.”

  “Him?” His voice rose slightly. “But I recognized him! I tried to tell you. He was the man crossing the Tormalyne Bridge behind the trapper. The one everyone was looking for.” Their father made a strange, incoherent sound, glaring at Taur as the physician loosened his clothes. Taur added defensively, “How was I to know he was in the music room all this time? I hate music.”

  “Pick him up,” the physician ordered the pale, hovering servants. “Gently. Take him to his bed.” He moved to turn over a guard who had fallen under a basilisk’s gaze. Luna, following with Taur after their father, heard the physician catch his breath.

  “How did he do that?” Taur asked, glancing back nervously into the hall. “Make that thing?”

  “The white basilisk?” Luna mused. “I’m not sure. Our father knows. He recognized the pipe.”

  “And how did those tiny ones come alive?”

  “Something he did, I suppose. He can do some very odd things.”

  “You’re very calm about all this,” Taur complained. “Raven Tormalyne’s heir appearing alive out of nowhere after all these years, in the middle of our father’s birthday—I thought the entire family had been killed. Our father saw them all dead. How can he be so sure—”

  “Weren’t you listening to the opera? He was with the bards when our father had the school burned. He was never a farmer. They hid him on Luly. Which is where, I assume, he learned to play such music.”

  “But someone else was playing, too.”

  “I know.” Her eyes narrowed slightly; she smiled, out of habit, at what she saw. “I wonder who.”

  “Anyway.” Taur stopped, started again. “Anyway, it was an opera. A story. Who—how did it turn true?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Well.” He mused silently, watching their father laid beneath black velvet and lace. Arioso’s eyes fluttered. He caught sight of the blood-red basilisk woven across the canopy overhead and groaned, closing his eyes again. “Well,” Taur murmured. “It was the most memorable birthday he’s ever had.”

  Their father spoke, his voice as dry as snakeskin. “Luna. Stay with me. The rest of you, leave.”

  “Father,” Taur said. “I’m here. I’ll stay.”

  “Go away.”

  “Sleep if you can,” the physician advised. “I will see to Lady Damiet.”

  “What’s the matter with her?” the prince asked fretfully.

  “An attack of nerves,” the physician added temperately. “Most likely she needs only a sedative.”

  “I will kill that librarian with my hands.”

  “Rest, my lord.”

  He did, for a time, while Luna sat beside him, with a little jeweled book of poetry in her hands that she did not see. Her father stirred once or twice, crying out; she whispered, calming him. Then she gazed down at the book again, seeing the face of the farmer in the music room with Veris Legere, and then the face of the librarian, and then the face of Griffin Tormalyne, above his magical pipe. The face of the piper in the chorus she had not seen as clearly; it had been lowered, shadowed. What their music summoned awed her, but it had seemed curiously apt. She wondered if her father had a pipe like that, somewhere among his odd instruments. He had never shown her one, but he had recognized it. Perhaps he did not trust even her to know.

  She considered that, her green eyes narrowed again, flecked with fire from the candlelight. She was aware of her father’s gaze before he spoke; he might have heard the double-edged question in her mind.

  She loosed her thoughts, let them scatter, hid them within the light in her eyes as she turned to him. She waited for him to speak.

  “I want you to look for him,” he said very softly. “They’ll never find him. He’s eluded me for thirty-seven years. You have your ways.”

  “I will find him,” she said.

  “I wonder how he survived me…And why he waited so long to return.” He paused, swallowing; his eyes found the basilisk again and he winced. “He’ll tell me. I have my ways.”

  “Yes.”

  “I should have recognized that Tormalyne face. But it was the last thing I expected to see.”

  “Who was the other piper?”

  “I don’t know. A bard of Luly, bent on revenge after I burned the school, perhaps. Find him, too.” He groped for her hands, still linked around the little book. “Now that Brio has vanished, I must use you. You must be my eyes. Remember all I have taught you. And never be afraid to use it. Be circumspect.” He paused, still holding her hands with one hand, his eyes filmy with memory or dreams. “I did not realize how much you had learned until you saved my life. But he surprised us both. Remember that. Be very careful.”

  “I will.”

  He brought her hands to his mouth, kissed two fingers and a jewel. “You are my supreme creation.” He turned the book to see the title. “Your great-grandmother’s poetry.” He loosed her hands wearily. “Read to me a little. It’s full of birds and flowers; it will put me to sleep.”

  The physician came in again while the prince slept. Damiet, he whispered to Luna, refused to be sedated, refused to stop crying, and was tearing her dress into ribbons in her distress. She had driven her maids and ladies out of the room; she had flung the physician’s sedative out a window. She would see no one, she cried, but Caladrius.

  “Indeed,” Luna said. She rose, left the physician to watch her father, and went to Damiet.

  She found her sitting in a thundercloud of torn mauve silk, her face patched and swollen with anger and tears.

  “I’m going to him,” she announced defiantly as the door opened. “I will search the streets of Berylon.” She recognized her sister then, and jerked a purple ribbon loose, threw it on the floor. “Don’t try to stop me. You don’t know what it’s like—you have never loved anyone.”

  Luna contemplated her silently. Damiet stared back at her challengingly. Luna chose the path of least resistance t
hrough her sister’s tantrum and shrugged lightly. “I suppose I haven’t.” She turned, toyed with a clutter of jewels and ribbons in a rosewood chest. “If,” she added slowly, “I were truly in love, as you are, I would knock on every door in the city until I found this man. As you intend to.”

  “I do,” Damiet stated. “I will.”

  “I suppose you had better do it quickly, then; our father is very angry. There won’t be much left of him if the guards catch him first.”

  Damiet’s face flushed; her eyes grew swollen. “How can you be so cruel?”

  “I’m only being practical. It’s my nature. But I am trying to help. This man did, after all, try to kill our father. Our father’s anger is, if not justified by history, at least understandable.”

  “It was the other piper—the man in the chorus!”

  “So. Caladrius is innocent.”

  “Yes! He must be!”

  “Because you love him.”

  “Yes,” Damiet said impatiently.

  “Then if you are going into the streets to rescue him, I suppose torn mauve is the appropriate costume. You look distraught in it. Rent by love and fate.”

  Damiet blinked at her. “You are beginning to understand. You aren’t so heartless after all.”

  “I’m trying.” She sat down among the tumbled bedclothes beside her sister, fingered the mistreated mauve. “It’s very pretty.”

  “I never got to sing my mauve song. The one where I am so frightened and unhappy because my beloved is taken from me, and being treated so unjustly by my father.”

  “I think you are singing it now.”

  “After that song, I change into my white, with the rosebuds.” Her face crumpled again; she gripped Luna’s arm. “He said that on the day I sang to my father, he would tell me his name.”

  “He did.”

  “At my last picochet lesson. When I sent Veris Legere away, and Magister Dulcet was rehearsing. We were alone in the music room.”

  “Yes.”

  “I tried—he—” She stopped, pulling at a mauve rosette at her waist. “I gave him permission to speak then.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of his love for me.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “Very little.” A line ran across her brow; she tugged more fiercely at the rosette. “Except that he would speak after I had sung.” Her frown vanished. “Perhaps he will send a message.”

  “Why did he wait? Why didn’t he declare his love then? He did in the opera, very promptly, and with passion.”

  “I don’t know. He was ill. He fell into the spinet.” The rosette parted from its last thread; she threw it on the floor moodily and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “Still, he could have said something.”

  “Indeed.”

  “He did not even praise the color of my eyes. Or try to touch me. He should have spoken then. Now he is in danger and has no time, unless I go to him.”

  “When you go, be careful of the fires near the Iridia Bridge. And you should change your dress to avoid notice. So that you won’t lead the guards to him.”

  “I could wear my black,” Damiet said with remarkable lack of interest. She picked at a lilac button, frowning again at the shreds and wisps on the floor. “He could have waited to play his pipe. Or not played at all—our father would never have noticed him then.”

  “But he promised to tell you his name.”

  “He didn’t—” She paused, gave a sudden jerk at the button.

  “He did.”

  Her mouth pinched angrily; her eyes filled again. “Our father,” she said ominously, “killed his father.”

  “Yes.”

  “All this is our father’s fault.”

  “So he knows,” Luna said steadily. “Because he thought he had killed all the children and he was mistaken. One lived to remember him. He should have killed them all.”

  The threads snapped. Damiet threw the button across the room, watched it strike the marble hearth and fall, spinning on the floor. “And now he will.”

  “So he says.”

  Damiet said nothing. Luna, watching her, saw tears slide down her averted cheek. She picked another button loose, let this one fall. “So he could never have loved me,” she said suddenly, very clearly. “He could never have loved anyone belonging to this House.”

  “In that way, he is somewhat like our father.”

  Damiet turned at her fiercely. “He is nothing like our father. Nothing.”

  “Well. You know him better than I do. You saw him daily.”

  Damiet jerked ribbon out of a sleeve band, frowning at nothing. “I did not,” she said finally, crossly, and tore the ribbon loose. “I did not know him at all.”

  “No one did.”

  “He lied to us all and tried to kill our father. They might have killed us all, the magisters.”

  “Yes.”

  “So he deserves to die.” She did not sound convinced. She pulled the sash out of its loops around her waist and tried to tear it. The stiff satin refused to part; her fingers, working restlessly, began to string knots along it instead. “I sang to him. Everyone saw. Even our father. He did not even wait to hear my final song. My white song, with the roses.” Her face twisted again briefly, then smoothed into a glassy calm. “I will miss him.” She wrenched another knot tight. “The librarian, who taught me the picochet. I will never play it again. And if our father kills him, I will never sing again.”

  “Before our father kills him,” Luna said softly, “he must be found.”

  “Perhaps he left the city.”

  “I doubt that. He has not finished his own song…”

  “You mean he has not yet killed our father.” Her hands stilled; she let the sash slip out of her fingers, fall, weighted with its knots, to the floor. She picked a likely shred of silk off the bed and blew her nose. She looked at Luna finally. “If he kills our father, I cannot love him; if he doesn’t, our father will kill him. What kind of an ending is that?”

  “One for a black song. And no ending at all for Berylon.”

  She left Damiet still sitting in her tattered mauve. A maid had ventured in, and was hunting for buttons beneath a chest; another had opened the wardrobe doors to lure Damiet’s attention to the colors within. Luna heard another button spin across the floor as she gestured to the brilliant cluster of ladies-in-waiting starting back from the opening door. Their entrance did not elicit protesting shrieks, only a single sharp word. All but one scattered into the hall again, leaned against the walls to wait.

  Returning to her father’s room, Luna found the captain of the palace guard beside the door. He bowed; she paused, sensing trouble.

  “My lady—” He hesitated.

  “What is it?”

  “Brio Hood has been found. Should I tell the prince, my lady?”

  “He is sleeping now,” she said swiftly. “Where was Brio? Besides dead?”

  “In Tormalyne Palace.” He cleared his throat. “In a torture chamber. We were searching for the rebel magisters there.”

  “Did you find them?”

  “No. The place was empty, except for the body.”

  “How was he killed?”

  He shook his head slightly, perplexed. “No one can guess. He was well armed and not injured in any way that we could see. There were some fresh bloodstains on the floor, but not from him.”

  “I see…” She did so in memory, seeing the librarian with his halting, spellbound speech, and the smoldering pipe around his neck. “Perhaps he died of fear in that place.”

  “He died, my lady. That’s all we can tell the prince for certain.”

  “I will tell him,” she said. He bowed again, relieved.

  She sent the physician to examine the body and took his place beside her father’s bed. He roused after a while, with a hoarse cry. She put her hand on his arm, let him see her smile. She opened the book of poetry and read to him again softly, calmly, until his fixed, terrified stare into the shadowy canopy a
bove him eased and the basilisk freed him once again to dreams.

  Two

  The heir of Tormalyne House hid with his son within the flimsy curtains of an abandoned puppet stage at the edge of a square near Pellior Palace. At a glance, the square, with its empty stalls and stages, looked like a small, ramshackle village in the aftermath of some peculiar battle that had littered the ground with dead puppets and glittering masks. Smoke from cooking fires and burning phoenixes still smoldered, acrid in the fuming air. The guards had already searched the square, overturning many of the stalls. Apples, nuts, wheels of cheese, pools of ale and milk, strips of smoked meat, crowns of wheat and dried flowers, ribbons, balls, wooden swords, painted cards, the paraphernalia of games lay scattered in a whirlwind’s wake on the grass. When night came, so would the hungry, the country folk trapped within the burning city, with no place to live but in their stalls and wagons.

  Hollis, dreaming awake, scarcely seemed to breathe. Caladrius, still, tense, listened to the voices of the city: the distant cries among the billowing flames, the imperious commands of guards, closer shouts and screams, sobs and curses cut ruthlessly into silence. “No,” he heard a woman moan over and over. “No, no, no, no,” until her cry rose and a bird caught it in its beak and flew away, echoing her over the city. He closed his eyes, breathed a memory of ash and smoke from the fires that blew again over Berylon.

  Hollis, drifting in and out of the music he had wakened, reached beyond his dream, touched Caladrius. Then he straightened, shaking the narrow stage.

  “Have I been sleeping?” he asked in wonder. He cracked the worn curtains carefully, looked out. Caladrius heard his breath catch. “What are they—” He began to move. Caladrius gripped him quickly.

  “No.”

  “But they’re—they just pulled some old blind man out of his house and stabbed him. They left him in the street to die—”