“Oh, no. Not the Ruggluff bride?”
“Ser?”
“There’s a planetwide alert for her. I should have known.”
“Why would a toad want a musician wife? How is she to play inside a bubble?”
“He’s an innovator, and wants to turn over the old order on Linkan. To that effect, he’s ordered a bubble big enough for the bride and her instrument. No one else’s wives perform for company, but he took the notion after watching too many netcasts from other cultures. It was supposed to be a bold political move and cement his popularity for the next election, but it falls flat if the bride escapes. The Federation of Fair Traders was in favor of the change, as perhaps it would lead toward more freedom for the Linkan brides.”
“But Ser, the girl—”
“Whoever aids the Ruggluff bride will have to pay a price.” He set down his food sticks and picked up a half-polished lump of wood. He frowned.
“How high is the price, Ser?”
His gaze rose, and his brows lowered. “Such an act could damage me politically,” he said. For the first time I saw the power of his actual profession, fair trader and financier, on his face, and knew that the person he had always been toward me—a slightly bumbling, pleasant, undemanding, often absent master—was perhaps a construct, not his true character.
“Must we return her?” I asked/Alanna asked. He had never interfered in a rescue before; but we had never rescued anyone politically important before.
“Do they know you have her yet?” he asked.
In the kitchen, Alanna projected the marketplace over the table again, with the searchers marked. They were spread wider through the place, though most of the shops were closed for evening. A concentration of red-tagged searchers had collected around Kalenki’s Tea House.
Alanna zoomed the spy-eye closer and turned up audio. Kalenki himself stood at the door, talking to six of these men. He offered them tea. “A woman in an unmarked robe?” he said. “No one like that left here. Ask at Sook’s, across the square. He caters more to the transient trade.” He pointed.
“Sif?” Gwelf touched the back of my hand.
“Alanna is searching,” I said. “So far, they don’t know who has her, but they’re getting closer.”
In the kitchen, Alanna rose from the table, and gestured for Milla to follow her into the living room.
“I can’t decide whether I should meet her or ignore her,” Gwelf muttered.
Music sounded from the living room. Alanna had unlocked the keyboard that was in the house when we bought it. Neither of us played, so we usually hid it in the wall. Now Milla sat at it and ran her fingers over the keys, waking answering sounds.
Gwelf groaned and rose from his workbench. “I guess I’ll have to meet her.” He glanced toward his half-eaten supper. “Next time, call me when you’re hosting one of these rescues, and I’ll stay out until you’ve sent her on her way. I can deny knowledge.”
“Alanna can hack the house records and make it so you were never here,” I said.
“Of course she can,” he said, and sighed. He snapped the code that dimmed the lights in the room and left, with me on his heels. We went to the living room, where Gwelf often entertained with Alanna at his side and me handling refreshments.
Milla was playing a third song now, an interleaving of hopes and fears. I wavered, afraid of the fears the song showed me, bonds and lashes, and the hopes that were hardly better, images of clawing through tearable sky to something Milla couldn’t imagine but only hoped would be better. Ribbons of loneliness wove through the song.
“Come, Sif,” said Gwelf; he stepped over the threshold into the living room, paused to look back at me. I was frozen, trapped in the living lace of the music. Alanna, inside my head, was intrigued by how I heard it, and able to resist its call.
At Gwelf’s voice, Milla’s hands stilled on the keys and she turned, her face panicked. She lifted a hand to raise her veil, fumbled it so it hung half across her mouth.
“Child, you’re wearing my sign; you may as well be unveiled before me, at least until we straighten out the question of who you are.”
“Gwelf,” said Alanna, “why are you here?”
He glanced at me. Alanna and I had never known how aware of our bond Gwelf was; we had found it prudent not to ask. But now I knew he knew, had perhaps always known.
Perhaps that explained why he slept with other women. Alanna had betrayed him first, by our bond, even though it wasn’t physical. My heart softened toward him.
“I heard music,” he said.
“Ser Gwelf says there’s a planetwide alert out for Ser Milla,” I said. Planetwide did not mean very wide; all settlements on Haladion were new, with Risen the largest, when you combined its population with that of the spaceport. A few other small towns had sprung up, some of them with different social structures. This was a planet ripe for strange cults to take root in it, but so far they hadn’t discovered it, despite the fact that it was a good stopover point on six major trade routes.
Alanna said, “There was a lot of activity about her being missing, but not right away. She wandered in the marketplace a while without attracting notice.”
“I left a simulacrum with life signs in my cabin,” said Milla. “But then I was so stupid with hunger and nostalgia . . .”
“It was not that so much as the unmarked robe,” I said. “Everybody will have noticed. They’re not always motivated to tell what they know to strangers, but it sounds like your husband-to-be has enough money to bribe everybody.”
“If you return now, perhaps the penalty won’t be steep,” said Gwelf. “They can chalk it up to youthful spirits.”
Tears seeped from her eyes as she stared at him. I heard again the box song, though she didn’t touch the keyboard. It had moved into my head, ready to trap me whenever appropriate. Alanna came to my side and took my hand.
With a glance at our linked hands, Gwelf said, “Sif. Tell me what’s so terrible about this fate.”
“They’ll lock her in with her gift,” I said, and realized my own cheeks were wet. Inside, I was still trapped in my father’s high-tech prison, pummeled every day by the sounds he chose—he knew I was sensitive to them, but he didn’t understand what they did to me. He only saw the outward signs—that I was made pliant and would do what he wanted, not that I was broken in spirit, losing part of myself every day. He never heard what I heard in that pounding military music, the feet of soldiers walking over the hearts of children and the death of dreams.
Every day I was trained in the art of soundstrike, vocal skills that armed me; I carried no weapons but my voice. Every day he tried to teach me to look at people as targets. Every day I listened to other music in the archives and heard life stories, from lullabyes to dirges, jump rope rhymes to the songs of starships.
Alanna brought the bondfruit one day when I lay on my bed and wouldn’t move, even to eat. “It’s experimental, from the labs,” she whispered as she massaged my arms. “There’s a resonance component. Animals who eat from the same batch of bondfruits at the same moment synchronize their activities. The scientists haven’t used it on humans yet. I got a matched set. If we each eat one at the same moment—” She slipped the small hard fruit into my mouth, positioned it between my teeth, used her palm under my chin to hold it steady. She put one between her teeth, too, a green thing the shape of an olive. “It could kill us,” she whispered. “I could make you bite it by pushing your teeth together, but I want you to do it yourself. I’m going to count to three. Bite on three, and so will I. Maybe it’ll work, and maybe it won’t.”
I don’t know where she got the strength to do it. I hadn’t responded to anything she said that day; I didn’t even twitch when she worked my muscles too hard and it hurt. Yet she trusted.
She counted. We bit. We were both sick for a week afterward, but when the fever went down, we had our connection. Our lifeline.
Soon after that, they shut down the bondfruit experiments.
&nbs
p; “What’s so bad about being locked in with your talent?” asked Gwelf. “Doesn’t that give you time to refine it?”
“Some kinds of talent are cold bedmates, unkind companions if you can’t get away from them. It could kill her.” I had cut out the talent my father had been force-training me in. I still had faint scars on my throat.
“I see,” he said. “Well, then, I suppose we have to do something else.”
Alanna released my hand and went to kiss Gwelf.
“Do you have a plan?” Gwelf asked us.
“No.” I wondered why he kept asking me questions. It was all strange to me. Alanna made the plans.
“We could marry her ourselves and pay off Ruggluff,” said Gwelf.
“Oh, Ser, I’m afraid it must be a lot of money,” said Milla.
“Money is not the problem,” said Gwelf. “It is maintaining face, and encouraging him to take the same steps with a different wife so that the proposed social reforms don’t fall apart. We could manage that somehow, I suppose.”
I turned to Milla. “I have asked you this question several times already, and gotten no answer. Who do you want to be, if you are not the Ruggluff bride?”
“I don’t want to be a musician,” she said. “That was always my mother’s idea, since I was very young. She made me take the lessons and told me to write music. She entered my works in competitions. If I wrote songs that won, we ate good food for a couple of weeks. She made me get better at selling myself. That’s not a part of myself I want to work with anymore. But I never had time to find out what I like.”
“How musically knowledgeable are the toads?” Alanna asked me.
“I never noticed they had any particular taste, except for their own vocal stylings. In the bubble, I had access to music libraries imported from other cultures, but I didn’t hear anything indigenous except mating songs,” I said.
“So—any musician might do? The woman who plays evening music at Sook’s, whose rescue we’ve been contemplating for a month?” asked Alanna.
She and I smiled at each other. Cassie, at Sook’s, played for tips; Sook didn’t pay her, but he let her use the keyboard. People who went to Sook’s for the evening didn’t care about music, so she didn’t make much. She had run away from a worse place. Haladion was a good planet for runaways if you had a marketable talent and knew how to live off the land, but her skill wasn’t very useful, and she had no wood-craft. She might like to disappear to a place of plenty using someone else’s name, and she looked a bit like Milla.
Alanna says I always forget the important things. I remember what was important about this rescue. It woke many ghost wounds in me. When we succeeded in freeing Milla from the chains of her music, some of my wounds healed.
I washed the sigil from Milla’s robe. Gwelf took it down to town, found Cassie in her secret roof home (Alanna liked watching the town through the focus window, and knew where most of the homeless lived), and consulted with her. Cassie was happy to get room, board, and a chance to entertain an uncritical audience. She didn’t like sleeping out in the weather.
Milla shadows me through the mansion these days, trying everything I do, waiting for a new trade to call her, one she’ll choose for herself. The keyboard is locked back in the living room wall, but I remember the three songs I heard Milla play, whether I want to or not, and sometimes my ghost voice, the one that could kill, sings them. Only Alanna hears, and she doesn’t let them hurt her.
THE EYE OF HEAVEN
Chris Pierson
“You should leave this place before they come,” said Sir Kettigar. “You don’t need to be here.”
Torl ignored the old knight, thrusting the shovel into the mud again, leaving a hole that immediately began to fill with water. He’d been burying men in the rain all day, and he was filthy: muck soaked his clothes, his face, his long black hair. The stuff was everywhere. He’d been blowing it out of his nose, tasting it in his food, pouring it out of his boots.
He hurt, too—right down to his bones, in a way he never did after drilling at swordplay or tilting at the lists. The shovel was heavy, the dirt heavier—and then there were the bodies to lay in their graves. He was doing his back no favors, as the shooting pains in his spine attested. But this had to be done. A day’s aching was preferable to the stink.
The fort at Car Bandoth had become a charnel house, full of bodies that baked in the midsummer sun, then moldered in the rain when the storms came in. Torl had spent hours gathering the corpses of men he’d known, with whom he’d shared a bottle of Dantish wine or played against at nines-and-fives. Now Torl dug, and dragged, and dumped the black, bloated, fly-blown things that had once been the fort’s garrison into the holes. Then he covered them over with filth. No prayers from him. He was too tired, too stricken with grief to think of the god. Ardai, on his throne of pearls and silver, had never seemed so distant.
He poured a last shovel of mud over the body of Baron Norral, the keep’s captain-at-arms, tamped down the wet earth, and stopped to wipe muddy water from his stinging eyes. Twenty-three graves so far dotted Car Bandoth’s courtyard, and nine more to go. Night was coming on. Torl would sleep hard—dreamless, if Ardai was kind. But first he had to finish, even if he had to work by lamplight.
He glanced to his right. Sir Kettigar sat upon a low stone wall, his armor gleaming as lightning split the sky above. Thunder shook the keep and Torl flinched, but the old knight didn’t notice. He scratched his braided white beard. He drummed his fingers on the hilt of his sword, laid across his lap. But he didn’t help; it wasn’t his place. Kettigar was a protector of the realm, sworn to keep the kingdom of Mallos safe from its foes. Mucking in the earth was beneath him.
“That’s what squires are for,” Torl muttered, hefting the shovel again.
Seven years he’d trained under Kettigar, following the old knight from city to town, battlefield to tournament, carrying his arms and armor, cooking his meals, grooming his horse. He’d hated the old man at first: Kettigar was a hard master, and had an arrogant streak a league wide. But time, and at least a dozen battles where the old man had saved him from being cut in half, had tempered that. He’d grown fond of Kettigar, crusty and black-humored though he may have been.
At the moment, however, Kettigar was getting on his every last nerve.
“I’m serious, lad,” the knight said. “There’s no reason for you to stay. Norral’s last messenger will have reached the Blue Citadel by now. Queen Burlas will send a replacement garrison. This fort takes at least twenty to man properly. You can’t do it alone.”
“I’m not alone,” Torl said, and grinned. “I’ve got you.”
Kettigar’s lips puckered. “Be serious, boy. You’re just punishing yourself because the plague didn’t kill you. Go find safety. Take your horse and ride.”
“And leave you here alone?”
The old knight shrugged.
Torl shook his head. “You won’t be rid of me that easily. Now, I don’t imagine you can grab a shovel and help me?”
Kettigar spread his hands. “I wish I could, lad. Truly.”
Torl bowed his head, leaning on the haft of his shovel. Gods’ blood, Kettigar could be infuriating—even now. “Leave me alone, then,” he grumbled. “I’ve got work to do.”
He expected an answer, but got none. When he looked over at the wall, the old knight was gone, with no sign at all that he’d been there—not even footprints in the mud. A chill feeling made Torl’s skin shiver.
He looked toward the next corpse, wasted and already turning green. The flies had left it alone, but decay couldn’t be stopped. He knelt down beside it, stared long at the scarred and bearded face of Sir Kettigar.
“Well,” he muttered. “Your turn, then.”
It was hard to see his master like this, quiet and still after so many years, lying in the mire in the armor of his longfathers—the armor that had protected him all this time, but hadn’t been of any use against his final enemy.
Torl shut his eyes, fee
ling a hurt deeper than any toil could inflict. He still didn’t pray. There didn’t seem to be any point. Kettigar was dead, ignobly so, and the god didn’t seem to care. Ardai could go to the six hells, for all he cared.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, and though Kettigar’s ghost had disappeared, Torl was sure his master heard him. “You deserved better than this.”
He stabbed the shovel into the muck again, and began to bury his master.
They’d come to Car Bandoth at the command of the queen herself, riding up the rocky coast to the kingdom’s northernmost spur. They’d brought dire news with them: peace talks with the realm of Veyarre, across the windswept straits, had “gone ill.” To put a somewhat less fine point on it, they’d been a disaster. Talks had turned to threats, threats to violence . . . and violence to a bloodbath. When it was done, the Veyarri emissary and his men had lain dead on the throne-room floor, along with two of Her Majesty’s sons and seven other men of the court. The queen herself would have fallen in the melee, too, if not for Sir Kettigar’s sword and shield.
So now, unlooked for, war was at hand. On both sides of the water, armies were massing. Hostages were being hanged. And men were on the lookout for signs of attack. That was why Kettigar rode north: Car Bandoth was the best post for watching for the Veyarrim. Perched on a high spine of chalk, overlooking the gray waters, it gave vantage enough to see Veyarre’s southern shore. From its six tall towers, a man with good eyesight could spot any movement on the strait’s far side. If the enemy launched an invasion, the men of the fort would know at once, and they would kindle the Eye of Heaven.
The Eye was ancient, old enough that not even the sages knew who had built it. Many learned men thought it was a remnant of some ancient empire lost to history; the common folk claimed elves had built it when they still walked the world. But no one knew for certain. All they knew was that the beacon was strong in magic—more powerful than even the queen’s mightiest wizards.
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