“There’s magic in it,” Kelrob whispered back. “True symbolic resonance. I’ve never felt or seen anything like it before.”
“Things work differently in the Umberwood. Less interference from outside.” Raising the jug, Jacobson drained it to the quick and set it on the casement, beside one of the flickering gourds. “Tamrel should be here shortly. He comes with the rising of the moons.”
Kelrob pressed close to the glass. “What does he look like?”
Jacobson smiled. “You’ll hear him before you see him.”
Kelrob wondered how a single minstrel could be heard over the collective swell of drum and chant and madly fluttering flute, but said nothing. Leaning forward, he opened the window and bent his ear to the wind, cold though it was, tickling and chilling the innards of his ears. Jacobson fetched his jacket, and settled an unsolicited blanket over Kelrob’s shoulders. Together they watched in silence, limbs twitching in sympathy with the music, hearts beating in perfect, rapid time.
At length, threading through the cacophony like a tendril of mist, Kelrob discerned the plucking of a lute. It wove itself amongst the throbbing music of the revel, a thread stitching together disparate cloths, culling terrifying order from terrifying chaos. Kelrob felt his breath hitch, and he leaned forward, nearly toppling the gourd from its perch. He had heard many of the great Wonder-Workers who specialized in music: Hilenos with his golden strings and pastoral illusions, Rogas the Blind whose lips spilled forth comedies and tragedies and plays of morality like regurgitated wine, Falstar the Maker who crafted life-like dolls that became animate at the sound of his music, moving through dance and re-enactment with only the faintest artificial jerkiness. The music that now reached Kelrob’s ears surpassed all these men, made their grandest efforts sound hollow and virtueless. In the thrum of that distant but approaching lute was no petty illusion or wasted recitation of old concepts, but a thing new-born and strange, yet ancient beyond reckoning.
Jacobson straightened slightly at the sound of the lute, drawing a deep breath into his lungs. “That would be him,” he said to Kelrob with a sideways smile.
Kelrob merely nodded. He watched the forest with ravening eyes, half-doubting that the maker of such music could have corporeal form. A distant, superstitious segment of his mind warned him of faery seduction, of youths lured into reedy pools or barrows from which there was no return. Silly thoughts, to be driven aside; but then the memory of the starling returned, its eyes burning malignantly as it wounded itself to brokenness. Nothing on this night seemed impossible or unreal. The lanterns glittered in the trees, swirling and laughing, a tide of spirits rejoicing in the dark.
The throng of revelers stilled their frivolity, and bent as one to heed the sound of the lute, fast approaching. The drums died into a supporting rhythm, the flutes fell into quicksilver cadence, all working to accentuate the plucking of those unseen strings. At that moment the pale moon Ilian broke from above the treeline, her silver light gilding the leaves and throwing bright pools of illumination between the broken trees of the clearing.
Revealed in that light was a man, or something that resembled a man. He stood at the lip of the clearing, still half-obscured by the sheltering trees, his hands dancing over the strings of a pale-wooded lute. The revelers parted silently, reverently, some falling to their knees and shuffling backwards with cries of joy. A new chant began, a chant with clear words that Kelrob could discern. They trembled in his ear, and in his soul forever afterwards:
Lord kiss us once more, fill us with song
For the work is heavy and toil is long
Our shoulders, bent with wearying years
Our faces dark and marked with tears -
O Lord of Song, bestow thy kiss
Work thy power, bring thy bliss
For the dead are come and will not rest
‘Till the sun is new-come to his crest.
Tamrel listened to the chant, his fingers silent on the strings. When it was concluded he swept a bow and stepped forward into the moonlight, his long pale legs barely seeming to brush the earth. Kelrob stared at him transfixed, his own body and breath forgotten. Tamrel was tall, willowy, a green wand sprouting up from the earth. His slim torso was clad in a tunic of leaves, and berry-laden branches sprouted from the silver fall of his hair. Raising the lute of pale wood, he began to pluck at the strings and, for the first time, to sing; his voice was shockingly alien, and Kelrob started back from the window, the spell broken for a moment by its own sheer power. The minstrel’s lips remained stationary as he sang, and Kelrob realized he was wearing a full-face mask of cherubic porcelain. The polished lips were smiling, the eyes lightless almond slits; Kelrob started as Tamrel raised his frozen face and stared up to the mage’s window, meeting his gaze. The lute hummed furiously, the voice raised in a wordless wail, and Kelrob bowed his head, pressing his forehead to the casement. He heard a thump beside him, saw from the corner of his eyes that Jacobson had fallen to his knees. The wicker charm swung wildly about the bed, undid its thong, and flung itself to floor with a clatter.
The song was working in him. Kelrob could feel his muscles rejuvenating, his exhaustion and reticence dissolving. He began to twitch and moan, rubbing his body against the casement, an erection burning beneath his robes. The flames in the grate rose into a seething pyre, blasting the room with heat; the gourds grinned madly as flames licked between their jagged teeth. Kelrob started laughing, and couldn’t stop, his body convulsing with pure carnal joy. Raising his head he saw the spirits in the trees, roiling and cackling, and knew that they were here to feast on his vicarious sensation. Opening the energy of his body, which was reaching a fever pitch, he spilled himself forth into the night, into the garish lantern-grins and their attendant spirits, into the prone bodies of the revelers, bowed in homage to the Lord of Song, and into the Lord of Song himself, who stood quivering at the heart of the maelstrom.
Tamrel bowed his gratefulness. Striking up a rousing song he approached the House of the Setting Sun, entered it. Kelrob fell back in his chair, panting and laughing, his body caked in luscious sweat. He could hear Tamrel’s music echoing up the chimney-stones, bursting from the hearth in tandem with the flames. Looking over to Jacobson, who was lying in a fetal position on the floor and shaking, he said, “I’m going downstairs.”
Jacobson raised his head from beneath his arms. Kelrob saw that his eyes were filled with phantoms, the accumulated dead of his long years.. “Aye,” the big man said, and dragged himself to his feet, limbs convulsing as the forest drums resumed their thunder. Together they left the room and staggered downstairs.
The air was golden with lamplight, the air thick with the smell of ale and hard cider. Fires flared in the clearing outside, light pouring into the House of the Setting Sun through the hide-covered windows. Kelrob stood at the bottom of the stairs, jostled by the surging crowd, Jacobson a solid presence at his side. Other scents revealed themselves to him, blood and sweat and the salt-tang of semen; the mage retched faintly, repelled by the frantic press of bodies. He thought for a moment about fleeing back upstairs and locking the door, but his new-stirred blood drove him onward through the crush of humanity, stepping over the bucking, straining bodies of fornicators and feasters until he could see Tamrel glistening on the inn’s simple wooden stage.
The House of the Setting Sun was heavily decorated for the evening. The altar above the hearth had been restored and embellished; a fresh ox-heart glistened on a bronze plate, transfixed on a stake of greenwood. Offerings were spread over tables and amongst the rafters, bowls of vegetables and pitchers of drink that Kelrob instinctually knew were for the slaking of the spirits. Stalks of wheat plastered the walls, rustling in the collective body-heat, and strings of plaited hair dangled down from the ceiling, interwoven with ribbons and the withered umbilici of last year’s births. Ale was flowing freely from a line of hulking kegs along the far wall; Kelrob was heartened to see Kirleg and Meela h
anding out the endless tankards of draught, their daughters sitting pale but intact in a shadowed vestibule at the back of the bar. Tasy the minstrel was there too, looking excessively wan, his hands swathed in thick linen bandages. His face, though, was pure and clean of pain, his blue-tinged lips curling in a magnificent grin as he watched Tamrel bend over his lute, lost in a moment of tuning. The air swirled with the fumes of tobacco and hashish, weaving a vaporous crown above the minstrel’s masked head.
At last Tamrel looked up, the black eye-slits of the mask peering over the crowd. “Good Sowen,” came his voice, light and birdlike, a captivating flutter of the throat. “My name is Tamrel.”
The revelers stilled in their drinking and laughing and copulation, turning their eyes as one towards the stage. Utter silence fell. Kelrob raised a hand and clutched unconsciously at Jacobson’s sleeve. He waited without breathing, without thinking, his ears savoring that lovely voice as it died away into the caverns of his mind. He knew he would never be able to remember it, let alone speak of it to another being who had not heard.
Tamrel chuckled, a musical note of mirth. He strummed at the marble-pale lute, the strings shivering eagerly, and raising one leg braced his long elfin foot on the knob of his knee. “Your ancestors are near,” he said, plucking a menacing descent of notes. “They thirst for blood, and flesh, and the hot particles of breath, for none of these they have, but they remember.” He played a quick surge of chords, raised the lute on high, and touched the pale wood to his lifeless lips. “Memory,” he said in his piping voice, “is all. It is the life beyond life, the seed within the seed. Even now I feel the bodies of those writhing and sacrificing in the great Black Circle, the possessed wings of the ravens as they soar above that lovely necropolis. I will go there when I have finished with you, and sing the True Songs that can only be sung in places yet sacred. Those who wish to follow may. For the night is come again when mortality withers on the vine, when flesh fades into darkness. All you have,” he said, with a sharp snap of his silver locks, “is song.”
The crowd sighed, a lament and a lifting burden. Kelrob was surprised to find the air escaping his lungs, leaving a void within. He waited on the lip of ecstasy, tossed between being and nonbeing, his blood surging hot and riotous in his veins. Dimly he was aware that the spell-bound memories locked in his mind were bubbling to the surface, coming dangerously close to expression, but it was a far-off concern, an ugly dream to be ignored.
Tamrel raised his masked face and sniffed at the air. “There is foreign magic here,” he said. “Base magic, false magic. It beats in the wood, the stone, the ale. It nests in clouded minds, keeping them from truth.”
Suddenly the ugly dream was very real. Kelrob stumbled back and bumped into Jacobson, looking frantically for the exit. His flesh, so immaterial a moment before, was suddenly in threat of being torn apart by vengeful nithings. And perhaps rightly so.
Tamrel sniffed again, and brushed his fingers against the lute-strings. “Poor creatures. I will banish this deception.” So saying he played a mad flurry of sympathetic notes, a welling and a cleansing. Kelrob felt his obfuscating enchantment flicker and vanish, not dismantled so much as dismissed. He stared in awe and terror at Tamrel, stumbled backwards a few more steps, then stood as if in thrall to view the inn’s awakening.
Several men in the assembled throng twitched as the spell was tugged from their minds. Kirleg’s daughters grew paler, and Tasy cried out, clutching his wounded hands against his chest. Kirleg looked like a man woken from a long slumber, blinking shards of distorting glass from his eyes. Meela was silent, but her eyes went wide, face frozen in an expression of bemusement.
I still have their memories. He’s undone the spell, but all they see is a black hole where once was a brawl. Kelrob hunkered down in the crowd, trying to make himself unseen. He felt suddenly wrong, out of place, a serpent in the sacred garden.
Tamrel plucked a slow ascending scale. “Now look to me,” he said, “free of any bondage.”
The moment of tension eased as the crowd turned once more to their Lord of Song. His magic was stronger, strongest; Kelrob felt his knees buckling in relief. Or was it in desire to praise? He had worked so long and so intimately with the chromox that he had grown muffled to the flesh, forgotten the strange crisp nakedness of the world. Kelrob shivered with embodiment, the flush of his fear commingling with a re-mounting of ecstasy. Rising to the balls of his feet he peered over the reverent crowd, waiting - and longing - for Tamrel to strike another note.
Tamrel began singing a slow winding song, his voice clicking and humming inhumanly over the lute’s sleepy cadence. They were nonsense sounds, concoctions of birdsong and insect mutter, of sparks leaping and dying above a blaze, of grain hissing in legion praise of the wind - Kelrob found himself mouthing the sounds, though his vocal chords were insufficient to express them properly. He stared at the minstrel, the laughing creature, from whose frozen lips tumbled such rich alchemy, and felt his knees finally give way. He fell to the floor and choked on sensation, fingers splayed against the ale-wet earth.
The song changed, rising to a loping crescendo. Kelrob felt his body twist, and he was on his feet, laughing wildly. Though wholly unaccustomed to the practice he threw himself into dance, tearing at his clothing as he joined the throng in their revels. A mug of ale was pressed into his hand; he drained it in one long gulp, the foam spilling down to coat his chin and stain the front of his robes. A stick of smoldering hashish followed, a drug which Kelrob had never deigned to imbibe. A low narcotic grown in the fields by dirt-grubbers, a nithing’s substitute opiate: Kelrob took a long, desperate toke, the smoke scalding his throat and settling in his lungs like a dank resin. He exhaled, then coughed, and passed the stick to the man on his left. It was Jacobson, the drunkard’s face contorted into a manic leer. He drew on the stick several times, winked at Kelrob, and pressed the hashish back to the mage’s lips.
Kelrob drew again, coughed wildly, the spasm turning to laughter. His mind was moving with the music, twisting with colors and anthropomorphic forms. He watched as Tamrel danced about the makeshift stage, the bright leaves of his tunic fluttering as he gave voice to growls and moans of unspeakable sorrow. There was a language amid those grief-stricken evocations; unbidden there came to Kelrob’s mind images of great towers crumbling and sinking into the sea, of white horsemen carrying grave tidings, of ravens dropping dead in flight. The mage sucked in his breath, but remained in the vision, watching as bright spires of adamant and beryl were torn from the earth by sorcery unnameable, riven by sorcery unspeakable. He saw the familiar stars wheel endlessly in the sky over a rich, primal world, where strange fires kindled nightly in the skies and beneath the seas, where magic ran deeper than blood, where gods danced on black mountaintops beneath a multitude of moons, the echoes of their revelry seeping into the dreams of men. It was all too much, too much; with a wild cry Kelrob threw back his head, hungering for the vision. He felt the air of another age rich in his lungs, heavy with faery-haunted fragrance and sepulchral dust.
There was a bright city in that country, its towers cast of precious ores that shone like flame in the light of a swollen primordial sun. Kelrob bent his inner eye to its gem-paved streets and turrets of burnished platinum, saw palaces and temples wrought of gold and fountains of liquid light that poured brilliancy into fonts where the thirsty could bend to drink. Drawing close to one of these fountains, Kelrob found himself amid the inhuman inhabitants of that place. They had long slender bodies and tapered limbs, and walked with an ungulate bobbing as if moved by a strong, unfelt wind. Their hands were long and tapered, their fingers profoundly jointed, each bend of flesh adorned with gleaming circlets of metal. Their faces were thin, framed with flowing silver hair; their eyes were slanted and utterly black. As they moved they spoke, but their colorless lips remained stationary, the musical words cohering in the long thin tubes of their necks. Kelrob watched as they gathered around the foun
tain and had their fill of the quicksilver liquid, lapping it up like thirsting cats. They spoke as they drank, of things wonderful and terrible, of ill omens in the void of space; the conversation quickly swept beyond Kelrob’s comprehension. He stood in mute observation as the beings wiped their mouths on silken handkerchiefs, leaving sparkles of residual light, and wandered from the square, leaving him alone with the fountain and its murmuring bounty.
Kelrob stepped up to the fountain’s lip. He could still hear Tamrel’s music, but it was an echo in the high hills, a paean trickling from one of the city’s innumerable temples. Bending over the pool of liquid he looked at his own distorted reflection, pale and hideously human. He knew, somehow, that he needed to drink from the fountain, but he feared the light-liquid, feared that it would sear away his lips and innards and mind.
His right hand cupped. Slowly he reached down and let the liquid flow into his palm. It was warm, sussurant, and tickled a little; Kelrob restrained a giggle. Lifting the liquid, which gleamed like a shard of the sun in his hand, he pursed his lips and bent to taste the Draught of True Knowing, that antithesis of Lethe which all true dreamers seek.
A shudder ran through Kelrob’s mind. He choked and staggered back, the liquid spilling through his fingers to patter with merry musical cadence on the garnet cobblestones. Memories came roaring back to his mind, tearing asunder the vision; Kelrob watched the city crumble as he had watched the towers of beryl and adamant crumble, their majesty sunk in the ruined veins of time. In their place sat Salinas on his throne of bodies, the foliate mask obscuring his face. He pointed at Kelrob, and the mage cried out in agony, the crude magic of control sliding into his body like blades of fire-heated steel. He danced for Salinas’s amusement, carved holes in his own flesh, bowed and scraped and tried to cry out for mercy, but his voice had been shackled, his tongue rendered mute. He was aware of others dancing beside him, mere shadows, their collective torment stolen and sealed away like a poisoned seed in his mind. With growing horror he knew that he could no longer contain their memories, that to do so would kill him.
Scott J Couturier - [The Magistricide 01] Page 8