Song for the Basilisk

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  They had returned to the Pellior Bridge exhausted and hungry. Hexel did not dare seek shelter in his own house; Giulia was locked out of hers. She had gone to Justin’s room, found it disheveled, empty. Hexel, with good sense, had persuaded her that she could not stay. He had found the houses of his closest kin unnervingly empty; whether they had died or taken shelter elsewhere, he could not guess. On the riverbank again, in the dark, they had shared bread and apples snatched from overturned stalls. Now the sun began to bake smells that the night had cooled; sweat, dung, rotting fish mingled with smoke, onions, roasted vegetables over the cooking fires of those who had scavenged during the night. Not all the scavengers had returned: some ate only bitterness that morning.

  They had seen few other magisters or students at the Pellior Bridge. The name itself terrorized. Those they found extended relief and sympathy but few words; it was best, they felt, not to know, not to be known, in that mass of strangers. As the sun climbed out of the clouds into unremitting blue, the crowd grew still again, beaten under the threat of heat. They watched the motionless guard at the gate and hoped for hope.

  Giulia, discarding her awning as the sun climbed, dreamed of green northern provinces, her grandfather’s farm. There was music hidden everywhere around her, she thought: the country folk had carried songs into the city with them, a favorite pipe, small harps, dances. But under that burning eye no one sang, no one whistled; not even mothers dared a lullaby to a miserable child, lest the Basilisk hear. Giulia played the picochet in her head for comfort, and watched the water out of gritty eyes, thinking and trying not to think of Justin.

  Hexel, unusually silent, seemed to find his own consolation in some enchanted place. He did not notice the crying children, the animals bawling for hay. His eyes, charred with weariness, were abstract, distant. Giulia touched him finally, wondering where he had gone, why he did not take her with him.

  “Hexel. What are you thinking?”

  He looked at her from that distant place and murmured incoherently. She watched him a little, wondering. The guards had doubled force at the bridge, fiercely determined to let no one cross. They still searched then, she guessed, for the vanished Griffin, who would not have come all that way, after so many years, to flee the city twice. He would die first, she thought, seeing his face again: a strong, unsmiling marble ghost in a music room. Justin would be looking for him, too, if he were still alive. And the fastidious Nicol, and pretty Gaudi, who had been taking voice lessons from Hexel. And half her opera chorus, the students and the strangers among them. If they were still alive…

  But where? she demanded in sudden frustration. “Hexel.” He did not answer. She continued anyway, thinking of them all. “Maybe the Griffin’s Egg, the Tormalyne Bridge…” Those places, named aloud, seemed wildly improbable. No one of that House would survive in the northern part of the city. Of the four bridges, that one was easiest to close, and the most dangerous to risk.

  Hexel spoke finally, startling her. “They have gone underground.”

  “Yes,” she said a trifle testily. “But did they go alive? Hexel, where are you?”

  “Listening,” he said obscurely. He added, enlightening her, “And without that moonstruck girl and her demented voice.”

  Giulia considered Damiet, not without a grain of sympathy. “She did her best.”

  “Pish.”

  “What is opera without passion?”

  “Art.”

  “Hexel—”

  He ran a hand through his hair, dislodging debris. What he listened to evidently spoke beneath the surface of the water, sang within the needles of light, for his eyes did not move from it. “But without her, what do I have? It is not a love story, now…”

  She sighed. Light bore down at her, drying the streak of mud on her face; she felt sweat trickle through her hair. Hexel was growing light-headed with hunger, she decided. He did not babble in exasperation, or smolder with impatience; he remained composed, as calm as if he did not truly recognize the heat, the flies, the swamp of smells they sat in. His eyes were red, his chin stubbled, his clothes stained with dirt and sweat. If his despair had turned to music, to fantasy, then he was fortunate; her hunger had not.

  She rose stiffly; he paid attention to that. “Where are you going?”

  “Maybe someone will want my awning. In trade for food.”

  He reached absently into his pocket, produced a coin. “Try that instead. Leave me the awning.” As she stared at him in annoyance he put it over his head, shading his eyes, and disappeared again into his musings.

  She searched the crowd, moving slowly, her head bent, trying to look as if she spent her life growing corn and shearing sheep. She traded his silver for a couple of roast potatoes, a half loaf of drying bread, some malodorous cheese, and a third of a skin of wine. She searched faces as she returned to Hexel, but found no one she knew.

  Hexel had not moved since she left him, though the awning had slid over one eye. She straightened it and pushed the skin into his hand. “Drink,” she said, settling wearily down, and showed him what she carried in her skirt. He drank and then his eyes went back to the river; watching it, he chewed a potato thoughtfully. She lay back, watched the changing of the guard along the bridge. The new rank looked as tired as the old, grim and unshaven, their uniforms rumpled, stiff with sweat and blood.

  “That is,” she heard Hexel say sometime later, “the only solution.”

  She closed her eyes against the fury of the dying autumn sun.

  Hours later Justin woke, stared groggily at a marble face with one eye and half a mouth. In the perpetual dark of the workshop, stubby candles illumined coffins where, for lack of better accommodations, a few of the wounded of Berylon lay. They had been found in piecemeal fashion, the night before: stumbled over, or heard moaning on a doorstep. Those who could talk revealed a connection, however ancient or tenuous, to Tormalyne House.

  Justin, lying under a workbench, wiped marble dust off his face and rolled upright. He found bread almost as hard as marble and a cup of sour wine, into which he dipped the bread. He tried not to taste what he chewed. Nicol, who never seemed to sleep, left the side of an old man calling fitfully for his wife, and came to speak to Justin. His lean face had gotten leaner, Justin noticed; the skin pulled so tautly across it that he seemed more hawklike than ever. His eyes glittered, bright and fierce with weariness.

  “You have got to find him,” he said to Justin.

  Justin nodded, his mouth full. He had spent most of the previous night searching for both Griffin Tormalyne and Giulia, who were not in his rooms, or at the Griffin’s Egg, or at the Iridia Bridge, or the Tormalyne Bridge. No one was at the Tormalyne Bridge, he had discovered; no one alive, anyway. The gates were shut; guards watched from doorways and windows along both sides of the street. He had nearly walked into their sight; they were that eerily quiet, looking for tremors in the shadows, listening for steps. Near dawn, slipping home, he had been able to pick up gossip. The prince was ill; Marcasia House and Iridia House were watching like cats to see if he would live or die; Griffin Tormalyne had not been found. The warehouses around the Iridia Bridge had been permitted to burn to the ground so that guards could more easily watch the crowds massed there. The city gates would remain closed until the Griffin was given to the Basilisk.

  He would search at the Pellior Bridge for Giulia, Justin decided. He would walk in the dark among the sleeping, whisper her name, see what he could find besides a curse. He still had no idea where to look for the missing Griffin.

  “Unless he’s locked himself in the music school,” he suggested.

  Nicol read his mind. “They searched it before they locked it,” he said tersely. “As we saw. What about his lodgings?”

  “I looked.”

  “What about the bard Hollis?”

  “Nowhere.”

  “I suppose Griffin would not still be in Pellior Palace.”

  Justin shrugged. Anything seemed possible. “They didn’t notice him before
. Maybe Tormalyne Palace.”

  “They searched it.”

  “Then it’s searched. They’ll guard it, but they may not go back into it.”

  Nicol thumbed a brow, looking, for once, uncertain. “Would he have escaped across the Iridia Bridge during the confusion of the fires? Or taken refuge in one of the other Houses? It seems strange that he has made no attempt to find us.”

  “Maybe he’s safer without us,” Justin said dryly.

  “We’re all he has left of a House,” Nicol argued.

  “Maybe he didn’t come back to rebuild the House. Maybe he just came back to kill the Basilisk.”

  Nicol fixed him with a bird’s unwinking stare. “Find him,” he said, “and ask him.”

  It was one thing, Justin thought moodily, easing his way toward the Pellior Bridge, to acquiesce to the relentless urgency of Nicol’s gaze. It was entirely another to be alone in the dark streets doing what was promised. He idled in the shadows of an alley across from Tormalyne Palace, studying it for a long time until he could make out slight movement near the main doors. He watched half a dozen guards pass through the gates, another half dozen come out, walk toward Pellior Palace. He could not tell where those inside had gone; earlier, at dawn, he had seen no one guarding the loose bar in the fence.

  Griffin Tormalyne had hidden himself in plain sight for weeks. He survived in places no one expected him to be because they were so obvious. A handful of guards would not be likely to notice him in Tormalyne Palace, which was a huge, cold mausoleum, empty of everything but ghosts. It seemed at once obvious, and unlikely. So, Justin decided, he might well be there.

  He continued his erratic, covert path to the Pellior Bridge, to search for Giulia first. She could not talk to birds, or summon monsters; she had no defenses against history. That she might be dead inside the music school, Justin refused to consider. That she might be languishing in Arioso Pellior’s dungeons for the crime of inciting her opera chorus to rebellion, he could concede possible. But he did not want to dwell on it. As he neared the river the restless, desperate noises of hungry animals, the smells, the numb silence of waiting, rolled over him like smoke from the fires. He stopped, sensing the density of humans packed around this bridge, the enormity of his search. Fires burned here and there, drawing him on: he could at least look where he could see.

  He lost track of time along the river. He walked beyond night, it seemed, in mud and stagnant smoke, whispering a name while he tried not to wake sleeping children, or step on burly farmers lying prone in the mud. The night was made of strangers’ faces, hands, arms, partially lit by fire, feet he stumbled over. Eyes came clear sometimes, dark, expressionless, watching him. Once or twice, someone spoke at the name, seizing his heart. But it would be some other Giulia, who answered cautiously, listlessly, not expecting to be looked for. The moon watched him as well, a narrowed eye above the river, shedding little light upon the matter.

  He tripped over someone’s leg, received a weary curse. “Giulia?” he said mechanically; his mouth was dry, his voice hoarse with her name.

  “Under the awning,” the voice muttered.

  “What?”

  “Giulia.”

  “Giulia?”

  “Yes,” she said out of sleep, hearing her name spoken from behind doors opening abruptly down a long marble corridor. Justin fell to his knees in the mud as she rose up out of it.

  “Giulia?”

  He felt her arms, and then her mouth, whispering his name, over and over. “Yes,” he said, his face wet, not knowing which of them wept. “You’re alive.”

  “So are you. Justin, Justin—”

  “I’m sorry about your opera.”

  She pulled back from him a little, trying to see him in the dark. He heard a sniff turn into a laugh of mingled amusement, astonishment, and despair.

  “My opera…Justin, we’ve been here for days. I think. What should we do? Where can we go?”

  “We?”

  “You stepped on me,” the voice breathed. “I wrote that misbegotten opera.”

  “You did,” Justin whispered, trying to see the magister who had produced Griffin Tormalyne out of his music. He eased down, drawing Giulia with him, and said, more softly still, “Wait. Until it’s quiet around us. And then I’ll take you out of here.”

  An hour later he worked their way slowly, silently along the bank to the street, under the moon’s slitted, midnight gaze. Past the carts and animals, the streets were dangerously quiet; he set a painstaking pace through alleys, gardens, over fences. The moon watched as they crept, shadow by shadow, toward Tormalyne Palace. Or he thought it was the moon, which had been at his back before, and not nearly so full.

  He stopped so suddenly that they all collided. The moon, it seemed, had taken residence in Tormalyne Palace.

  He swallowed dryly, finally recognizing light in a place unlit for thirty-seven years. “Griffin Tormalyne,” he breathed. He heard Giulia start to protest, stop. They stared at the upper windows, that loosed a silvery glow like a reflection of the moon. Hexel spoke first, his voice thin as a cat hair in the silence.

  “Can we get in?”

  “But,” Giulia whispered.

  “There is no safe place anywhere in Berylon,” he reminded her, “If he is signaling—”

  “Or the guards. A trap, maybe.”

  “Who would be stupid enough to walk into it?”

  No one answered. They began to move again, toward the beckoning light.

  Six

  Caladrius stood in the dark beneath Tormalyne Palace, trying to see. His wrists were bound by chains and cuffs of metal: gold, memory kept trying to persuade him, though in that place metal would be rusted iron by now. He recognized the air dense with horror and pain; he had no idea how he had gotten there. He had wakened abruptly out of some dream of terrible loss to find Hollis gone. A ring and a charred bone lay on his empty bed. Caladrius had recognized the ring. He had stumbled then into another dream. Someone had stolen his heart; he had to find it quickly, quickly…Searching had led him to Tormalyne Palace, into that deadly room where, as far as he knew, Brio Hood still lay moldering on the stones at his feet. Why he had not been seized by the Basilisk’s guards, and who had chained him to the wall, he could not remember. But he guessed.

  He gripped the chains that held him, seeing her eyes in his mind: the Basilisk’s eyes. He remembered the flick of magic in her fingers that had brought the stone basilisks alive to save her father. An agony of impatience and dread burned through him. He wiped sweat out of his eyes on one arm and tried to think. He could not believe that Arioso Pellior would be content to let him starve to death in the silence of Tormalyne Palace: He would want to watch Caladrius die. Perhaps Luna wanted something from her father, for which she would trade Griffin Tormalyne. But why she had taken Hollis, and left Raven Tormalyne’s ring and his fingerbone like a message, Caladrius could not imagine. What was the message? he wondered starkly. The message was fire. The message was death, to the Raven and the Griffin. But what did she want with Hollis, if she had Caladrius himself? To present Griffin Tormalyne’s heir as a gift to her father? The thought left Caladrius breathless, weak with fury and terror. His heart had been stolen, he would give anything…

  As if she heard his incoherent, piecemeal thoughts, she stood before him in the blackness. He did not see her; he only sensed her: someone else alive in that death-ridden place.

  Her voice came out of the dark, cool, composed, as if she strolled through a garden. “I have taken your son.”

  “I know,” he said numbly, feeling the blood beat painfully behind his eyes.

  “What will you give me for him?”

  “Anything. Everything.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I will give you my name. I will give you my life. If you will let him leave Berylon.”

  “I have your life,” she reminded him.

  He closed his eyes, gripping the chains. “Then what can I give you?” he pleaded. “You must want somethi
ng. Or you would have given me to your father. You would not have brought me here.”

  “Oh, yes,” she agreed softly. “I want something.” She let him see her face then, luminous and beautiful, smiling and not smiling. He sensed her power, something vast and elusive, unpredictable, like the power in the hinterlands.

  “Take it,” he begged her. “You have my heart. I will do anything, give anything, if you set him free.”

  She was silent, studying him; he could not guess her thoughts. She turned away from him finally. “Follow me,” she said, and he felt the weight at his wrists melt away, as if he had only imagined it there. She moved ahead of him through the dark; he saw her easily, moving surely, gracefully across damp, sagging flagstones, through the maze of rooms. He felt the blood pound again behind his eyes. She knew the place where he had been born as if she had claimed it for her own.

  She spoke as they finally reached the marble stairs beyond the wine cellar and began to climb. “You saw your father die.”

  “Yes.”

  “You recognized his ring.”

  “Yes.”

  “Where were you?”

  He swallowed, his mouth as dry as ash. “In the hearth.”

  “Why did you wait so long to return to Berylon?”

  “I thought I was dead.” She turned to look back at him. He added tautly, “Another child burned and was mistaken for me. So I found it easier to make the same mistake than to remember what I had seen.”