It came, clearest from the bowels of the manse, but not confined to it. The ground trembled, the ground spoke. And it spoke with a child’s voice, attenuated, high—the sound of a child, who could not yet speak, pleading and crying. Another voice joined it, a woman’s voice, low and loud and hoarse; terrified. They screamed together, woman and child; the one being slowly killed, and the other, forced to watch it all.
Miri turned her face to the heavens in white rage; in a mix of emotions that she could not even name. The air carried the sounds; the people in the streets beyond stopped, as frozen as she.
It went on. And on. And on. And then: a voice.
Ah, I fear she’s dead. Come, little mother, you can hold what’s left if you like—your son is waiting his turn at the altar.
Silence. Pain too profound for weeping.
Mirialyn ACormaris was white, except where her nails had pierced her palms. She met the eyes of the bardmaster in horror.
Sioban Glassen’s eyes were so dark the brown seemed dissolved into the blackness of pupil; it was almost as if she stared into the deepest of night, with no light at all to guide her. Her face was gray, her hands were shaking; the horror that Mirialyn felt seemed suddenly weak by comparison, although why, the ACormaris could not say.
The bardmaster’s lips moved, deliberately, slowly, but the sound that left them was taken by breeze, by bardic will, by the working of talent; Miri heard no word.
• • •
Jewel’s fingers didn’t fit into her ears, but she tried to put them there; her hands, cupped tight, were not enough to stop the voices. But once heard, the silence wasn’t enough either; memory played them again and again, demanding some response, some action other than cringing or crying or screaming in chorus.
She hated Devon ATerafin, for he worked, and continued to work, all the while the child died—and the dying was long.
“It isn’t real,” he said, through teeth clenched so tightly his voice was unnatural. “It’s an illusion, a delusion—don’t give in to it.” His face, pale, was beaded with sweat, and his shoulders hunched as if against a gale—but he continued with his work, clinging to it.
But it was real. There was nothing illusory about it. She knew it for fact, and the knowledge, harsh and terrible, would not let her slide into Devon’s beliefs.
The first time, two days ago, it had not been so bad; the cries had been distant, and only when working in the stairwells and underground was the full force of the torture made evident. Yesterday, it had grown loud enough that it could be heard no matter where in the ruins of the manse you were—and today . . .
“Put it down, Jewel!”
She looked up at the sound of her name—at the sound of the name she despised—and saw Devon’s face.
“Put it down,” he said again, but not so frantically.
She held a shovel. There were clods of grass and dirt all round her feet, and a shallow hole before her. When she had started to dig it, she didn’t know. But it wasn’t big; hardly large enough for a small squirrel, let alone a child. A child.
I’m not a child, she wanted to tell him, but she couldn’t speak; her throat was full of words and fear and the self-loathing of helplessness. He took the shovel from her hands and threw it to the side without bothering to see where it landed.
I lived in the streets, she thought. I saw worse than you could ever imagine, you pampered lordling. But she looked up into the collar of his shirt, the rolled edge of his cloak, and she wasn’t so certain anymore; she felt the curve of his arms around her as the world blurred. The boy was whimpering; he was calling his mother. His mother was trying not to scream, trying not to terrify him.
“They have to be stopped,” Jewel said. “They have to pay.”
“They will,” Devon answered, his lips close to her hair, her ears. “I swear it by the turning, and by every life I ever have.” He lifted her, swinging her legs lightly over his arms, although he was not an overly tall man. “Come. This is not the place for you.”
She threw her arms around his neck, not in an embrace, but rather in the sudden abandonment of responsibility that marks childhood, and not until she heard the new sound did she raise her head.
• • •
Devon stopped walking, although he did not put Jewel down. They both looked toward the ruins of the gutted manor. There, in a thin line around it, stood men and women of indeterminate age; they wore different styles of clothing, and different colors, but it was clear that they served a single purpose here.
Sioban.
“Who are they? What—what are they doing?” It was Jewel’s voice, but so quiet and so tentative that it hurt to hear her speak.
“They’re from Senniel,” he told her, bowing his head to answer.
“Bard-born?”
He nodded, although he didn’t know it for fact. The Astari did not have many connections in the bardic college—the bards were notoriously poor at keeping information to themselves. No matter who it was given to there, the truth, embroidered by song and a change of name or two, always seeped out in song. And in song, there were none to challenge the master bards that Senniel produced. None.
As if to prove the truth of this, the bards began to play, their fingers against the strings of their varied instruments a quiet resistance.
Jewel gained her feet almost shyly, but held on to Devon’s arm; together they made their way across the broken ground, listening to the music that in no way masked the screams of the dying.
• • •
“What can we do?” Gilliane’s voice was strained, although her playing never faltered. She was an elderly woman who had done her traveling apprenticeship on the southern border during the Annagarese campaigns; it had hardened her, in some ways—but not so much that she couldn’t feel horror.
“We can drown them out,” Tallos offered.
“We could,” Sioban said, her bard-voice strained from overuse. “But for how long? They grow louder by the day, and if all of the bard-born singers in the Empire were gathered here, we couldn’t sing them to silence for—” She stopped as her words caught up with her. For how long? How long?
“You’ve an idea,” Alleron said, testy as was his wont. He had a reputation to preserve, after all; he was the most feared master in all of Senniel, and it was to him that the youngest and most prideful of the newcomers were sent.
“Not a good one,” she answered softly. The screams grew in the silence, wrapped around words that were still recognizable.
“It’s better than nothing.”
“We can Sing them to sleep.”
“You’re right,” Alleron snapped. “It’s not good.”
“Then come up with something—anything—else.”
There was no silence to think in, no silence in which to gather thought. And then, the youngest of the master bards spoke, his voice cool and measured.
“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 Sleeping them will end it? They’ll be woken again, sure as sunrise—it’ll be that much the worse; the hope, and then, more torture.”
“Alleron.” It was Tallos—and he, AMorriset. The master subsided. “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?” His face grayed. “And 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.”
He spoke with the voice, and the voice was heard. It reminded everyone present—any who needed the reminder—that to become AMorisset meant something.
“Alleron,” Gilliane said soft
ly. “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.”
“I’d give them death, if I could,” the master said, his voice as quiet as it ever was.
“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,” Alleron said, speaking through teeth that would hardly open. “But it must be better than allowing that.” Pale, he dropped his head into the edge of his harp. “Sioban, forgive me. I—I will speak Sleep.”
“It’s already done. Come. Let us begin.”
Some of the men and women who had been playing set their instruments aside; some did not. The use of the voice did not require music; it did not, in fact, require song, although many of the bardic masters had been taught with song as the medium.
What it required was will, and the peculiar focus of talent, of self, that only the bard-born could call upon.
The members of the Order of Knowledge came first from the bowels of the building that was their study; they moved with the skittish nervousness of fear, of strain. Only Meralonne was calm as he approached the bardic masters, and he bowed stiffly and formally.
“The field is yours,” he told Sioban, for all that she was no longer listening. Her face was turned inward, toward the burned ruins, her brow creased in concentration and sorrow. She was the bardmaster; she spoke first, fashioning with her voice the essence of sleep, of the desire for sleep, of a weariness so all-encompassing that not even pain could stand against it.
Tallos joined her, speaking second as was his right; he whispered of dreams, the hidden fount by which the night ruled, the landscape of the impossible, where horror could at any second turn into familiarity and beauty.
Alleron sang; his was the voice of a stern and wise parent pointing the way to bed and sleep, by turns threatening and cajoling.
And when Gilliane sang, she sang of deserved rest, of the softness of sheet against skin, of the comfort of arms against back and shoulder. Of the end of war, when finally, and fully, one could take one’s rightful rest.
We are with you. We are watching. We stand guard.
Sleep, precious children, sleep.
One by one the bard-born took up the chorus and verse of the command, weaving into it, as they must, the parts of it that were themselves and their own experience.
So when the youngest, and the last, of Senniel’s bard-born masters spoke of endings, he did not speak of sleep.
Into the darkness, he sang of darkness, and his voice rose above the voices of the bards of Senniel College as if they were sparrows, and he the matchless eagle. He called power, his voice was the very thunder; all who spoke shuddered a moment as they heard the force of his words.
He spoke of killing.
He spoke of claw in eye, of sword through heart, of the snap of bone at the back of the neck; he sang of deaths in endless number—quick and rapid, sudden; he told the assassin’s tale, not the torturer’s.
Behind each word was force, for those to hear it.
The master bards of Senniel College spoke to the humans who were waiting to die or worse, contained by chain or spell or barrier in untold, unseen number. Kallandras spoke to the kin who presided over the ceremonies.
Each found their audience.
The pleading stopped in mid-word, first child and then mother, never to be resumed. A great beast howled, loud and long, with a voice that contained the wildness of forests at the dawn of time, forgotten except in nightmare. A cacophony of human voices erupted, abruptly broken by the sounds of wings, some great bird landing.
Abraxus-karathis! Stop!
The roar grew louder, and the cries fewer; among them, one or two voices were raised in a wail of song, a tremulous giving of thanks, a terrified peace.
STOP! I COMMAND YOU!
But the bardic voice passed into darkness, just as the sound of the dying passed out of it, magnified by the unknown and unseen. The creature that heard its call heard little else; the voice of an angry Lord did not have the command that Kallandras’ determination did.
The beating of wings grew louder; thunder clapped air in the storm beneath the barrier. A snarl, a growl; the utterance of a challenge so old words could not contain it.
And beneath it, quiet but distinct, a chuckle.
Very clever.
• • •
Mirialyn ACormaris watched the bards as they tended to Kallandras. The youngest—and easily the most attractive—of the master bards lay upon a thin pallet, his eyes wide and unblinking. The land was once again quiet; the bards of Senniel had paid their price and done their duty. For now. The members of the Order were assembled, waiting upon her instruction; she nodded, and they departed to once again comb through this emptied den of changeling nobility. All save one: Meralonne.
“Bardmaster Glassen?”
Sioban shook her head wearily. “I’ve never heard his voice so strong.” In spite of herself, she shuddered. “No, Kalian. Lie back. That’s an order. You’ll catch the fevers if you don’t rest now, and you’re no mage to handle them well.”
“No mage handles the fevers well,” Meralonne said gravely, staring at the wan bard. “Might I speak with him?”
“He needs rest, not—”
“Sioban.”
She met Kallandras’ piercing eyes and then shrugged, wilting as this last responsibility was removed from her. Standing, she winced; she’d almost forgotten what her knees were like in this kind of air. Who are you, Kallandras? She looked at him a moment, and he met her gaze unflinchingly. Better not to ask, not now. Later would do, if there was one. She stood back and gave his care to the mage.
“You did well,” Meralonne said, kneeling.
“What happened?”
“What you intended, if I heard the voice correctly. The torturer descended upon his intended victims and slaughtered them outright. No torture, no games; just the death. And the death does not provide the God with all that he requires.”
“You . . . heard the voice.” Kallandras smiled quietly, and then the odd smile dimmed. “They will not stop,” he said.
“No. The creature was not allowed to kill them all before he himself was destroyed; the game of sacrifice will continue. But not, I think,” he said, looking toward the silent house, “today.” He caught Kallandras’ hand in his own; the movement was unexpected. “The bards are weary, but at peace for the moment.”
“I heard them,” Kallandras whispered. “I heard them so clearly I had to shout to hear myself.” He closed his eyes.
• • •
“We do not understand the nature of the barrier,” Meralonne said quietly, for perhaps the hundredth time. “We do not know how it was made permeable to sound, but not light, not spell, not any other physical intrusion. The barrier is not a magic that we use.”
Mirialyn and Devon ATerafin listened quietly; there were two other observers in the audience chamber, but they observed from the shadows, unremarked on by the three. And each of the three knew who they were and why they were present: Duvari of the Astari, and his boy, come to seek the information that would protect the Crowns.
Devon spoke softly. “They magnified the sounds they wished us to hear.”
“It was not only those on Cordufar that they wished to speak to,” Miri said. “You were occupied, Devon—but I came through the front gates. I was close enough to them when the noise started that I could see the reaction of the people passing by on the streets.” She grimaced and dropped a small sheaf of papers onto the room’s only desk. “These are the reports that made it to the magisterial guards. Because of the nature of the reported crime, and the severity of it, the reports were passed immediately to the Courts of Reymaris, and through th
em, to the Kings’ Swords.” She ran a hand over her eyes. Before either Devon or Meralonne could ask, she said, “There are just under fifty of them.”
“Cormaris’ blood,” Devon said softly, sitting on the desktop.
“I spoke to the members of the Order involved in the excavations—your pardon, Meralonne, but you were in council with the Exalted at that time—and the screams were growing in volume almost hourly. Sigurne believes that at the end of less than two weeks, a third of the city will be able to hear what the demons are doing in their pits, should they choose that method of . . . attack again.”
Meralonne raised a platinum brow. “You managed to get that definite an opinion out of Sigurne? I am impressed. Oh, you most certainly can trust it; in fact, she is wont to be conservative when she estimates.” He smiled softly. “Matteos Corvel—a mage of the first circle as well—calls her the dormouse.”
“That sounds like Matteos. But Sigurne’s of the first circle, isn’t she?”
“Yes—and part of the Magi as well. But she is unassuming to the point of invisibility at most times; she rarely states an opinion, chooses no side of a debate or argument—but she is meticulous in her honesty. And yet, of all the Council, Sigurne has been the one most diligent in her duties at the ruin of Cordufar, the one least put off by the feeding of the God.”
“Of all the Council save one,” Devon said quietly. “But we stray. The ploy of the bard-born is unlikely to work a second time. From what I understand of the bard-born, I’m surprised that it worked the first time.”
“True.”
“Do you think they’ll try again?”
“This may surprise you, ATerafin, but I’m not so well-versed on the strategy and tactics of the demon-kin that I can readily answer that question.”
“My apologies. I believe that the kin are a summoned creature—and only the mage-born would have that ability.”
Meralonne bristled at the implication. “It is a forbidden art.”
The Sacred Hunt Duology Page 103