Darksong

by Isobelle Carmody

  The Song, the watcher whispered to itself, in wonder. The man had found the Song at the heart of Chaos!

  But now, the man had ceased to think about the music. The watcher entered his mind. He had stopped in front of a tall tower of shining glass which offered a multi-faceted view of the sky and of clouds tinged with pink, thinking that the building – revealing nothing of its own interior or substance – was an appropriate location for the offices of the ubiquitous Harrison Bonn. The urbane musical agent was both transparent and elusive, as if he offered nothing of his true self because he did not exist. Many times, that was what the musician had felt about him.

  He remembered his first meeting with the man, who had then only just begun to represent Hard Goth, with whom he played sessional work on albums. He knew that Harrison had no real interest in him except in so far as he could add lustre to his bankable stars. But lately, unintentionally, he had begun to gain attention, despite being fleetingly named on Hard Goth’s disks. More than once, reviewers had singled him out and, not so long ago, unforgivably, it had been suggested by a music critic that weaker sections in the songs of Hard Goth were given substance by his own clarinet performance. After that review, he had been dropped for a time, but reviewers had noted his absence and the next two disks had done badly. He had no illusion this was because of his own absence, nevertheless it had confirmed to him that he brought something intangible to the band’s treatment of songs.

  The man smiled wryly into his own eyes in the mirrored lift, reflecting that the decision to use him again on albums and now even in occasional concerts had not met with the approval of Gabriel Vesey. The lead singer of Hard Goth disliked him and made no secret of the fact. But the record company did not like the reviews or the falling sales, and Vesey was enough of a big spender to need their backing. So they had begun using him again on a few tracks. Until the previous week when Harrison Bonn had called him up.

  The smile had been evident even down the phone line. ‘Pete, the boys are putting together another album and they want you in on the whole thing this time. You’ll have a serious credit on the sleeve.’ Harrison had not anticipated a refusal. Why would he refuse such an offer?

  For a moment he toyed with the idea of refusal. ‘When do they want me? I’ve promised to go away for a week with Ruth and the boys …’ That had not been true, because Ruth had made it clear that it would be better if he did not come to stay at her parents’ country home, and they had already left. The boys had only hugged him before they departed because their mother had directed it. He felt sad at the memory that he had waved them off for the holidays with relief.

  ‘They’ll need you this week and next week for rehearsals, and the tracks will be laid down next week,’ Harrison had said sharply.

  ‘Yeah, all right,’ he had said after indulging himself in a slight pause.

  Now he pressed the buzzer beside the small polished plaque announcing: Harrison Bonn, Musical Agent, wondering what warranted a summons to the inner sanctum. Maybe they had heard the disk and wanted to slice him out. The lift opened and he found himself on plush, baby-blue carpet facing nothing but a baby-blue desk behind which sat a pretty woman with baby-blue nails and a silver latex dress that looked as if it had been painted onto her. She wore a stud in her nostril and two small glittering metal posts through one eyebrow.

  He introduced himself, wondering why he didn’t feel more nervous.

  ‘Peter Cade?’ the receptionist purred with the merest hint of a question, though she knew his voice and name.

  ‘I have an appointment with Harrison Bonn,’ he said quietly, knowing that she was capable of refusing him entry. She enjoyed the little opportunities for tyranny in her job, and exercised them often and with feline elegance. The last time he had come, the office had been primrose yellow and her hair had been the same colour. Today the hair was shining black and perfectly, geometrically straight.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said dismissively, as if she had had to hunt for his name in some lesser diary. She knew exactly how important each client was and how far she could go. At last she condescended to let him go through a pair of shining metal doors that guillotined shut behind him, and the lift ascended unnoticeably to the penthouse, unctuously bidding him good afternoon before allowing him out. On the wall opposite the lift was a huge painting of a desert glowing under two moons, one green and one blue. In the shadowed lee of two hills was a patch of purple flowers and, within the man, the watcher was startled to find itself looking at a depiction of the surface of Acantha in the light of the two moons, Aden and Onyx.

  The man stared at the painting for a little, before crossing to Harrison’s receptionist who sat behind a cube of transparent crimson plastic on a stylish ergonomic chair of electric blue. She was a lissom, red-haired sylph with long black fingernails, each stamped with a Chinese letter in gold. Her irises were white to match her skin-tight cat suit and stiletto boots. Contact lenses, of course, but they gave him a start because they made her look blind.

  ‘Please wait,’ she said coolly. From experience, the man knew that he would not be offered a chair or coffee and that he would be made to wait at least twenty minutes. He suspected this was Harrison Bonn’s policy to keep him in his place, but maybe it was the receptionist’s idea. It was weird how receptionists always seemed to have a better idea of where he stood than he did.

  Usually he stood patiently by the desk, but today he wandered to the far end of the room where a curtain of heavy pale-green silk fell from the ceiling to the floor. There was a window behind it and, on impulse, he heaved the heavy cloth aside and peered out at the city below.

  ‘Peter Cade!’

  He was startled to hear the jovial voice of Harrison Bonn, and turned to find the musical agent approaching him with a hundred-watt smile of welcome. Could it be because of the comments of a late-night show host about his abilities, he wondered? Ruth had told him about it in the scathing amused way she had of undermining anything connected to his music.

  ‘Harrison,’ he said, and accepted the proffered hand. The musical agent’s hand was as softly boneless as his personality.

  ‘It’s good to see you, Pete. I’ve been meaning to tell you to drop by for some lunch. I suppose you’re wondering what this is all about.’

  This was new. Harrison had never offered any social interchange before, though he did so now as smoothly as if it were usual for him. The man glanced over to the secretary but she had chosen to look inscrutable.

  He said, ‘I thought maybe it was to do with the letter I wrote you asking about the composer who wrote the music for Hard Goth.’ In fact he doubted very much that this was why, since he had written the letter over a month before and Bonn had not even acknowledged it.

  ‘Ahh,’ Harrison said, and he gave the secretary a sly wink that clearly discomposed her. ‘You want to know who E. Flanders is. You and half the musical world. I am afraid I can’t tell you any more than that she is a recluse who …’

  ‘She?’

  ‘If you wanted to write a letter, I could pass it on. She is travelling with her sister at the moment …’

  ‘Perhaps I could meet her sister?’

  ‘You did meet her,’ Harrison said with a flash of bizarre delight. ‘Or at least, you saw her. I brought her to the studio when you were doing “Horseman of the Apocalypse”.’

  The man frowned to find that the image of a tall lovely blonde girl with a reserved face and warm gentle eyes floated across his inner eye. They had not met, if that had been the sister of E. Flanders, but they had exchanged a brief look. He had wondered what someone like her was doing in a styrofoam palace like Caliban Studios.

  ‘I see you do remember,’ Harrison leered. ‘She asked about you as a matter of fact.’

  The man was startled but he kept himself from asking the obvious question because he disliked the avid look in Harrison Bonn’s eyes. He noticed how flat the other man’s gaze was. Like the eyes in a poster that only looked real.

  ‘So how
do you feel about doing more with Hard Goth?’

  The question was placed casually, as if he was being asked if he would like a glass of juice. ‘You mean on recordings?’

  ‘Disks and concert tours. There is actually a big charity concert coming up in a few months. Your name would be on the posters and in all of the publicity.’

  ‘Hard Goth are going to do a charity concert?’ He couldn’t help sounding shocked and Harrison Bonn grinned as if he had won some sly competition.

  ‘Let us say that, as their manager, being associated with this fundraising is winning them a lot of friends and increasing their profile substantially. You might have heard of the project the charity benefit is for – a group called the Third World Credit Company.’

  ‘I’ve heard of it, but I still don’t get what you are talking about. It sounds a lot as if you’re asking me to join the band.’

  Harrison Bonn spread his pale fleshy hands wide. ‘The band needs a fresh look and adding a new face to the line-up is a sensible move.’

  ‘Gabriel agrees?’ He could hardly believe what he was hearing.

  Harrison Bonn offered a wide flat smile. ‘Gabriel doesn’t hire a dog so he can bark himself. It was my suggestion. He’s a smart guy, though, and he can see that he will look clever in taking you on board given all of the bright press you’ve been getting this last year. Of course your name would be in lower case to start with and you would be presented as a sort of guest of the band for this charity bash, but if you go down well, we can alter your image and – boom – you’ll be right up there.’

  ‘Image?’

  ‘Yeah. You’ll have to synchronise visually with the boys. But don’t worry, we’ll get an expert to make you over slowly so it won’t seem too prefabricated. You could even have a hair transplant over time.’

  The man wanted to laugh. ‘I don’t think I am the hair-transplant type.’

  ‘Yeah, you’re right, baldness is cooler. Maybe you could go totally bald.’

  ‘Harrison …’ He intended to say that he had no desire to join the band, and that he was actually thinking of putting his own group together, but some incomprehensible inner prompt, so strong that it was almost as if someone had spoken inside his mind, stopped him. ‘Let me think on it,’ he said at last.

  Harrison opened his mouth and then closed it quickly as if something was in danger of escaping. ‘You do that, but don’t think for too long. There are a lot of good musos out there hungry for this kind of chance.’

  So why come to one that the lead singer hates? the man wondered. But he only said, ‘You’ll be the first to know,’ and felt an eerie sense of deja vu, as if he had said those words in exactly the same circumstances before. He turned to leave and caught the receptionist staring openmouthed, her white, blind-looking eyes wide and blank with disbelief.

  On impulse, he stopped just before the open jaws of the lift and turned back to Harrison Bonn. ‘By the way, what was the first name of the composer?’

  Harrison hesitated fractionally, then shrugged. ‘Ember. Ember Flanders. The sister is Glynn.’

  He nodded and entered the lift. On the way down, he said the names and shivered with a queer feeling of premonition.

  The watcher segued. It had no idea why it had prompted the musician not to refuse the offer, unless it, too, had been prompted. There was only one person or entity capable of that. Wind. Or whatever Wind had become in dying. But what did the mystic know that made it so important to make a musician join a band?

  ‘Wind?’ it called, but there was no answer.

  25

  My brother set about preparing for the coming of the Unraveller, that

  he might thwart the treachery of the Chaos spirit, for he expected it.

  ‘Such is the nature of the Chaos spirit,’ he told me, ‘and things must be

  judged according to their natures.’

  THE ALYDA SCROLLS

  Seated in a curtained carriage, perfumed and bathed with her fresh-washed hair loose and spread lavishly over the red silk dress, Ember found herself thinking again of the dramatic events of the early morning.

  ‘Are you insane?’ Fridja had demanded incredulously of Bleyd, upon hearing his suggestion that Ember pretend to be a songmaker bound for Darkfall to offer herself at the Darkfall landing. ‘The whole of Keltor seeks the visionweaver, and you would have her sing in public in an Iridomi night garden?’

  ‘I did not say that she would sing in public,’ Bleyd responded. ‘Only that we would offer her for such an engagement. I tell you she has the right clothes and even an a’luwtha.’

  ‘Alene soulweaver’s a’luwtha,’ Virat said.

  ‘Yes, and what can that mean?’ Fridja muttered. ‘A soulweaver does not gift her instrument unless she has seen her own death.’

  ‘Or unless she meets one who is more gifted than she,’ Bleyd said. ‘If you would hear Ember’s voice, you would not wonder at the gifting …’ Bleyd began, and Ember, horrified at the thought that he might reveal her resemblance to Shenavyre, stepped into the room and let the door close behind her with a bang.

  Seeing her, Bleyd flushed then paled. ‘I was just saying …’

  ‘I heard,’ Ember said coolly, walking over to join them. ‘I am prepared to be offered to the night garden hostess as a songmaker, though what she will make of the fact that I carry Alene’s a’luwtha, I do not know.’

  ‘I doubt that she would recognise it,’ Fridja said, although she looked unconvinced. ‘But even with an a’luwtha and the right clothes, the hostess of the night garden will want to know why you offer yourself in such a hasty and ill-prepared way, and why ever would we complicate matters by trying to pretend that Ember would offer herself at the Darkfall landing?’

  ‘My plan is this,’ Bleyd said. ‘We scribe to the night garden hostess that Ember is Enora, an Acanthan travelling incognito to Myrmidor to offer herself at the Darkfall landing. Last night Hella was telling me of Jurass’s law against girls offering themselves to the misty isle and it could …’

  ‘But what use is an Acanthan with soulweaving tendencies to a night garden hostess?’

  ‘Hear me,’ Bleyd insisted. ‘Enora the Acanthan was training as a songmaker at the academy at the insistence of her parents who refused to accept that she had a calling to be a soulweaver. Finally, in desperation, she ran off, but her family sent ruffians after her to bring her back, for fear of what would happen to them if a member of their family flouted Jurass’s laws.’ He looked at Ember. ‘You reached Vespi safely and bought passage for Ramidan, but the hired ruffians caught up with you there. You got free of them but not before they robbed you and took your purse. You encountered me – maybe I rescued you from the ruffians. It was I who proposed that I pay your passage to Iridom, where you would permit yourself to be offered to an important night garden for a single performance in order to earn coin enough to pay me back, and afford a passage to Myrmidor. The haste is explained by the ruffians who will be arriving on the next ship to come from Vespi. I will scribe that if the hostess will not meet us, I will offer you to her competitor. That will give her almost no time to react between receiving our chit and seeing us.’

  ‘What if she guesses that this mysterious songmaker is the missing visionweaver?’ Fridja asked.

  Bleyd looked triumphant. ‘Why? Who would think that we would come here of all places? And they will not connect a songmaker with the visionweaver because Ember never sang upon Ramidan. I am right, am I not? Tareed would have mentioned it to me.’

  She had nodded reluctantly.

  ‘There you see. And no one will see either of us because we will both be masked as is required by –’

  ‘– the festival laws.’ Fridja gave a gusty sigh. ‘The plan sounds solid enough, if a bit wordy, but what is the point of it? If the hostess does agree to receive you, neither of you will be free to search the place or gossip with the servitors if you are there for business. Even if a couple of myrmidons accompanied you as servitors, they would be expect
ed to attend upon you the whole time, not roam about the night garden.’

  ‘I was not imagining a search,’ Bleyd said. ‘I was thinking of slipping a small amount of szerim into the glass of the hostess as we negotiate the terms for Enora’s performance, and as soon as it takes effect I will question her about Bukanic and Duran, under the cover of Ember’s songmaking. When the drug begins to wear off, I will instruct her to forget all that has been said and the meeting will proceed to its natural end. We will leave with or without a contract, with the hostess unaware that she has been interrogated. If she employs Ember, who then fails to appear that evening, she will assume that the ruffians caught up with a rebellious Acanthan daughter. Of course, none of this will work if we can not obtain szerim, but surely here …?’

  ‘Anything is for sale on Iridom,’ Fridja said pensively. She turned to Ember. ‘And are you still willing to do this, having heard the particulars of Bleyd’s plan?’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ Ember said.

  Ember shifted in her finery as a feeling of being watched disrupted the unravelling of memory.

  It was Bleyd of course, seated opposite her. Impossible to see his expression behind his mask, but his eyes devoured her. She wondered if he was now regretting involving her in his plot to rescue Duran. Of course he believed that no real harm would come to her if she was exposed as the missing visionweaver, so long as he made it clear that she was not in league with him. But he had no idea just how much there was to expose about her.

  She let her eyes fall to her hands folded neatly in her lap, pondering her own willingness, given her last attempt to offer herself as a songmaker without ever imagining she would have to perform. Partly, Bleyd’s plan sounded good, as Fridja said, but the most important thing was that it might be the only chance of finding Duran. She had been moved by the irrational but powerful feeling that she must tell her story to Duran as she had been told to do, or she would not reach Darkfall in time to be healed. As ever, once the tumour had begun to affect her, some part of Ember became fey and almost transparent. In this state, she was prone to make strange intuitive leaps and links in her thinking and come to unexpected, sometimes apparently impossible conclusions. But rather than finding that she had been wrong, this inexplicable mode of thought had often led to the truth. So she did not question her certainty that Duran’s wellbeing was connected to her own.