Song for the Basilisk

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  She laughed suddenly, then pushed her face against his shoulder, wiping away tears. “I want to find Justin,” she said tightly. “At least, I want to know what happened to him. We’re not safe here; they could come searching among us at any moment, with their torches and swords. We might as well make use of the dark. If he’s alive, it’s what he’ll be doing.”

  He took her potato, put it in one pocket, slipped the onion into another. “At least we’re armed,” he said dourly, and followed her slow, cautious path along the river into darkness.

  Justin, Nicol, and a handful of the scattered remnant of the Griffin’s Claw sat among rain-streaked slabs of marble, unfinished tombstones, and monuments in Evena’s uncle’s work yard. He and his family had fled, or been taken away; the house and the workshops below it were dark, silent. Justin, who had run into an inexpertly wielded sword, nursed a slash across his forearm, bound in the frayed, stained sleeve of a magister’s robe. Nicol, holding a piece of the same robe to his cheekbone, was talking about messages, gathering places, as if, Justin thought grumpily, he were not sitting behind a tombstone in the mud, with his army in hiding and, in truth, more dangerous to itself than to the Basilisk.

  “Music,” Nicol said. “A ballad. You could hide a message in a ballad, recognizable only to us, sing it in the streets—”

  “Nicol, if I so much as whistled in this city, I’d get my lips cut off. The guard is not in the mood for music.”

  “We must pull ourselves back together, fight for the House, now that we have the Griffin to fight with us.” He seized Justin’s arm in his fervor. “Think of it! Griffin Tormalyne returned, with all that power. He’ll need us—” His grip loosened as Justin hissed. “Sorry. But think—”

  “I am thinking. What I’m thinking is that for thirty-seven years arms have been forbidden in Berylon except to Pellior House and there was no one around to tell us that there is more to fighting with a sword than waving it around in the air. We should forget about fighting, and find him. Let him tell us what he needs us to do.”

  Gaudi, in the shadows behind Nicol, said uncomfortably, “I did that to you, Justin. I’m sorry. I wasn’t looking.”

  “My point.” Justin sighed. “If we’re this dangerous to ourselves, we will be just as dangerous to Griffin Tormalyne. The House is dying all around us. He won’t have a House to rule by dawn unless we help ourselves.”

  There was a short silence. Then Nicol asked calmly, “What do you suggest?”

  Justin, rendered momentarily speechless by the question, answered haltingly, “We must gather ourselves together. You’re right. All of us. We must find our families, help those still alive, find some safe place for them.”

  “The music school,” someone suggested.

  “It’s still guarded. I went there earlier to see if I could find Giulia.”

  “Did you?” Nicol’s voice sounded oddly harsh.

  “No.”

  “What about Tormalyne Palace?” Gaudi asked. “They’ve already searched it.”

  “It’s too dangerous. They’ll be watching for us there.”

  “Iridia House,” Nicol said. “They fought for Tormalyne House. We could ask them for help.”

  “Do we know anyone to ask?”

  “Some of the magisters, if we can find them. If they’re still alive. Hexel Barr has some family connection. I don’t imagine they like Arioso Pellior any better now than they did thirty-seven years ago.”

  “What about here?” Evena asked, startling them as she moved silently among the stones. She had been rummaging in the house for food; she unfolded a cloth on the mud. “I found bread, some cheese, turnips, what smells like boiled mutton. They won’t be watching this place. My uncle has rooms below the workrooms where he keeps flawed headstones, broken statues, marble coffins he’s carving for people who want something elaborate waiting for them when they die.”

  “That might be useful,” Justin murmured.

  “Let’s look,” Nicol said promptly. “It’s safer than sitting here in the rain.”

  They ate among yawning coffins out of which stone flowers had begun to emerge, among statues with cracked arms, unfinished smiles. A single lamp, left burning from the afternoon, showed them one another’s weary, muddy faces. Nicol made his way rapidly through bread and a slab of tasteless mutton. He said, chewing, “We have to search at night. Tonight. Go to the houses of people we know, look for anyone hurt or in hiding. Take what food you can find, bring it back here. Justin, you search for Griffin Tormalyne. You know what he looks like. And the bard Hollis.” He paused. “I had no idea they taught such things on that rock.”

  Justin nodded absently, wondering where in the dark, fuming city he was most likely to find Giulia. The school was guarded, the Griffin’s Egg too close to the Tormalyne Bridge, and dangerously named, besides…His own small, untidy rooms? He had found her there more than once, unexpectedly, waiting for him. Fear seized him suddenly, that she would go there and the guards, searching for those of Tormalyne House, would find her…Where he might likely find Griffin Tormalyne, who spoke to ravens and charmed basilisks out of a pipe, he had no idea.

  “I’ll find him,” he said, thinking: Giulia.

  They finished eating and went out again into the night. leaving the lamp burning like a talisman among the coffins.

  Four

  Luna Pellior stood in the dark at Tormalyne Palace, listening.

  She had walked alone through the streets of her father’s city, smelling the bitter air from the smoldering fires, hearing in the tense stillness around her the occasional, descending scale of secret footsteps, a brief staccato scream. Those she passed saw her as a stir of dark, a ripple of shadow against the night. In the tangled, dying gardens of Tormalyne Palace, she did not need light; she saw as the moon sees, in a glancing reflection of light. She shaped the heavy, rusted chains across the massive doors with her hands, unbound them like ribbon. Carved griffins on the doors stared past her; they did not see her enter.

  She walked curiously through the vast, empty rooms, their walls charred black like chimney stones. Cries followed her, seeped out of the past around her. She listened to them, but did not answer, left no more of herself among the ghosts than a movement of air, a rustle of dead leaves that had blown through the shattered windows. She had come to find past more tangible than memory to work with. In an upper room, with an immense hearth, she found a circle of ash. She bent, studied the fragments of bone in it. She reached for one, a fingerbone, and caught the ring that slid from it.

  Air dragged at her, like the sudden rise of immense wings. In the garden, ravens stirred and muttered. She wiped ash off the ring and found the griffin stamped in gold. She put the ring on her thumb and the bone in her pocket, and rose.

  She heard music then, distant and very strange, as if ancient voices stirred beneath the moon, spoke in forgotten ways. She stood motionlessly, hearing bone speak, stone, skin, a singing reed, a heartbeat, slow and steady, soft yet and undefined: the drum of mourning, or war, or the beginning of the dance.

  She looked at the griffin, pale gold in her moonlight gaze, and smiled.

  In Pellior Palace, she vanished into the hidden chamber. Her father slept uneasily behind one of its walls, as if he, too, heard the ancient songs. The imagery of his dreams, rich and terrifying, weltered through her thoughts, like things rising, half-glimpsed, out of deep, starlit water. She let them surface and slip down again, intent on her work. She laid the griffin ring on its broken finger in the center of a round mirror. Then she poured a circle of oil around the rim of the mirror and lit it.

  A man’s face appeared within the flame, worn and bloody, one eye closed, the other torn and empty, seeing death. He cried at her, a soundless word that splintered the mirror. Minute ravens flew out of the cracks, turned to ash in the air. She said the word on the ring: the Griffin’s face appeared, broken in a dozen places. His eyes were closed; he held a clay flute to his mouth. Candle fire illumined half his face, and the white bir
d painted on the flute. She watched him for a long time. His music trembled in the air around her; she felt it, but she did not hear.

  She reached into the dying flames, drew the ring off the bone and held it to her eye. Through the griffin eye, she saw the room around him: the marble walls, the long tables, the dark-haired man sleeping on the floor behind him. The Griffin lowered the flute abruptly then and turned, seeing what she saw. She put the ring down quickly and extinguished the fire, leaving only a smear of oil, a cracked mirror, a fingerbone to tell where she had been.

  She heard the palace stirring around her as she stepped into it again. The windows in her father’s council chamber showed her a smoky dawn. She went through the private door into his room; he shifted, aware of her in his dreams, and woke to see her.

  He sensed the night still clinging to her, the spells. He said harshly, “Did you find him?”

  “In a room,” she said, “somewhere in the city. That’s all I saw.” She touched his hand, quieting his restless tossing, then went to the door. “Be patient,” she said lightly. “I won’t fail.”

  “You failed me once,” he complained.

  “Do you think I would dare twice?” She opened the door, spoke to the chamberlain and attendants waiting, red-eyed and sleepless, in the hall. She sent them for the physician, for breakfast. Taur, up early for once, hovering, looked at her hopefully. She turned her head.

  “Father, Taur is—”

  “No.”

  She left him with the physician and found Taur again, pacing, disheveled, a glass of wine in his hand. He seemed more relieved than discomposed by his father’s refusal; he said only, “I suppose he is too furious to die.”

  She heard the regret in his voice. “I think he is,” she agreed.

  “The captain of the city guard came to me, wanting to open the bridges. I asked if they had cleaned out the rat’s nest of Tormalyne House. He said some were still in hiding. So I said no.”

  “So our father would have said.”

  “Tell him I did that. Maybe he’ll see me, then. It looks bad that he won’t.”

  “He’s ill,” she said temperately. “He is not thinking clearly.”

  “He’s thinking the way he always thinks about me. Maybe if I—”

  “Maybe if you see him yourself and explain to him what you’ve done…”

  “He won’t let me in.”

  “He will,” she said, her bright smile only slightly wan from sleeplessness, “when I explain why you want to see him.”

  Her father turned the color of the basilisk above his head when she gave him Taur’s message. She watched him, impressed, half expecting flames to come out of his mouth, his eyes to change color and glow. He flung his breakfast to the floor and bellowed for his heir. Taur, calm as he came through the door, was met with a firestorm that turned him the shade and fragility of old paper.

  “You spoke for me?” his father raged. “You gave orders? Must I kill you before you get it into your head that I am still alive?”

  “No,” said Taur, and “yes,” and “but,” the only words not burned to a crisp before they came out of him. Luna, listening gravely over a piece of needlework, flung him a sympathetic smile. Taur stared at her a moment, before his father’s fury seized him by the hair again and shook him.

  “Leave me! Send the captain of the guard to me. The bridges will be opened.”

  “But—”

  “Get out!”

  “Will you really open them?” she asked her father wonderingly, when Taur had crept back out.

  “Yes,” he said brusquely. “When there is one life left of Tormalyne House and his name is Griffin Tormalyne.” He fell back then, exhausted, coughing. She rose to call the physician again; he caught her hand. “You will not leave this city in Taur’s hands,” he commanded painfully.

  “No.”

  “There are things—I will show you before—if I die. When. Power that will pass to you from me. So that you will know my thoughts and wishes even after death.” She was silent, gazing at him, her eyes opaque, for once not smiling.

  “Power beyond death?”

  “So that you will see out of the Basilisk’s eyes…my eyes.” His hand loosened, freed her slowly. “Later. When I regain strength. Then I will give you your heritage.”

  She sat with him until he slept, the needlework idle in her hands, her eyes searching the familiar lines of his face as if she could find, beneath them, the shape that he would take past death. She touched her own face, wondering if that, too, would change in her eyes, if she would recognize herself, or even remember what she had once been.

  He reached for her once, his own eyes closed, and murmured, “Your hand is cold. And your thoughts.”

  “I am a little tired.”

  “Find me Griffin Tormalyne.”

  “I will.”

  She called for Damiet after he fell asleep, left her sister sitting sullenly, contemplating their father. She rested for a while, then went back into the hidden room. There she shook the pieces of the broken mirror into a bowl and filled it with water. She passed the ring through flame and dropped it onto the shards of mirror. The piece of bone she floated on the surface of the water. She blew it gently, whispering a name with each breath, until the bone, turning and turning under the name, found the ring beneath it and refused to move.

  “What shall I call you?” she asked. The water gathered colors, shapes from the splinters of the mirror: a raven-dark eye, a painted white bird, a drum, an eye socket black with blood, a hand, the corner of a blanket. “Speak to me,” she urged. Bending, she took a sip of water and gave it back. “Speak…” She heard music rising from the water, faint and sweet, then a voice, fragments of words. She saw an angle of an unfamiliar face: a dark brow, an eye the darkest shade of blue, opening senselessly as at a dream or a premonition. “What shall I call you?”

  She heard Caladrius’s voice: Hollis.

  She broke the image immediately with water poured from a silver pitcher. The bone weltered out of its frozen position; she picked it up, and then the ring beneath it. She laid them on black silk. She poured the shards and water out of the bowl, all the scattered images, into a jar of blackened glass, and sealed it with wax. She knotted the bone and the ring in the silk, and tied the silk around her wrist, pushing the secrets up her sleeve.

  Hollis, the Griffin said again in her mind. She inhaled deeply, as at some wild, sweet scent, and wiped the bowl clean of images.

  Returning to her father’s chamber, she found it filled with flowers, fruit, messages from Iridia House, Marcasia House. In an antechamber, she met with officials of the city pleading with anyone who passed for an audience with the prince. They clustered around her like birds discovering a crumb of hope.

  The streets along the bridges were impassible, they explained. Full of carts, animals. No one could move and the stench was terrible. Fights broke out constantly over the rotting food in the carts. Fires were started anywhere, in the middle of streets, in doorways, on the riverbank; carts caught fire, threatened houses. Moored boats had been set adrift by the city guard so that no one could escape. The city was beginning to fester from its wounds.

  “I will ask my father,” she told them.

  “Tell them to find me Griffin Tormalyne” he told her. “And then I will open the gates.”

  The moon saw her on the streets again, in the early hours before dawn. The dead that the guard had left lying on their thresholds the night before had been spirited away, she noticed. The doors had been closed. Lights flicked here and there in darkened houses, brief and elusive as fireflies. This time she went where music was played, to the chained and guarded Tormalyne School.

  She let the guards see her face.

  “My father has sent me here,” she said as they stared, stupefied, at her. “To find something belonging to Tormalyne House that he can use in his secret ways.” She smiled her charming, golden smile that unlocked chains and opened doors. She spread her cloak to the noise they made
, drew it into soft velvet folds. Her steps as light as leaves, she walked down the empty halls, hearing, all around her, phrases and echoes of the strange music that had welled up out of the broken mirror.

  She heard human breath at last, deep and even, from the rooms where magisters slept. There was a spell over the door; it gave voice at her touch. She recognized its short, vigorous thrum: the picochet.

  She stopped, hearing a sudden shift, an intake of breath. She was silent, a stroke of dark beneath a moonlit window. A candle flared. She felt the darkness searched. Someone grunted, “A mouse. Go back to sleep.” She waited; the moon inched down into the window to watch with her. Finally the breathing was even again, thoughts quiet.

  She stepped to the door, opened her cloak around the warning wails of the picochet, and muffled them, let them fade.

  Hollis, she said in Caladrius’s voice. Get up. Come with me. Don’t wake up, there is no time. Don’t speak. Be still. As still as nightfall, as starlight. Put on a robe. Come with me. Come.

  He drifted out of the dark room like a ghost, stood waiting, his eyes closed, while she touched the magister’s robe, turned its fabric as dense and heavy as sleep. She bound him in it, and then hid him behind his form less, flickering dreams, a patchwork of shadow and moonlight.

  She left him there, while she went into the room to lay a gift for the Griffin on Hollis’s empty bed: a ring and a bone wrapped in black silk.

  Come, she said to Hollis. The guards, half dreaming beside the open doors, remembered only that she bade them good night as she left.

  She was waiting for Caladrius when he came out.

  Five

  Dawn opened a red, swollen eye above the river, glanced across the water in splinters of light at the crowd massed and stirring beside the Pellior Bridge. Children wailed fretfully; dogs snarled and barked; birds like shreds of night swirled up from the waking and scattered over the city. Giulia, stretched next to Hexel, dreaming of bread, winced as a finger of light jabbed her eye. She had wrapped herself in a purple-and-white-striped awning that had come adrift from a stall. Hexel, already awake, stared morosely back at dawn. He wore a piece of tapestry that had flung itself at him out of a window during the night. The violence that had precipitated the tapestry from within the high room had been hidden behind sharply closed shutters. They had found the city by night even more perilous than by daylight. Footsteps were anonymous; sound distorted itself along the streets; screams and shouts echoed relentlessly against the stones. Even silence seemed dangerous; it was the language of the hunter, the language of the dead.