This, of all things, struck a sour note—I’ve been walking for years. I just want to rest. No voyages for a while, no more trying to chase the horizon. At the same time, I can’t imagine staying in Heyrland for the rest of my life. I don’t know that I can imagine staying anywhere for the rest of my life. I only ever meant to stay here a few months—a few more months, now. And then I’ll drift off somewhere else. Maybe just the next town over. Maybe go inland to some border town on the marches of Vinte or Bramandon. Somewhere quiet, where no one will bother me—no, but that’s not right. You can’t be invisible in a small town. I’d better go to another capital, then, when I’m done here. “What if I don’t want to go?” I said quietly.172 We just looked at each other for a long, long time.
“As long as I’m paying you,” she said, “you’ll do the work you’re assigned. No?”
“Yes.”
“So if I say you’re coming with me on the voyage, then you’re coming with me. End of story.”173
“There will be other voyages, won’t there? I can go on the next one. I don’t think I’ll be up to leaving in the fall.”
She smiled. “Of course you will be,” she said. “You’ve been working so hard lately. You’re just tired. We’ve all been working hard. You’ll feel better after a rest—the king-tide is coming, and likely some storms, and you’ll get a lovely holiday then. You can curl up at home and nap or read a book; that’s what everyone does. You’ll have plenty of time to relax, and I expect by the fall you’ll be feeling as antsy and fretful as the rest of us. You’ll want to get out of the house and have some adventures.” She patted my shoulder. “Trust me, heerchen. I know how you young mannen are. And I know how you are specifically. You’ll want to wander again, and if I don’t arrange some outings for you, you’ll wander right over the edge of the world and then I’ll never see you again. Can’t be having that.”
I didn’t reply. I returned my attention to the translations she’d requested earlier.
Maybe she’s right. Maybe I’ll be fine after the storms pass. And I know that one day I will wake up and feel my feet itching for the road again, just as she says. If I leave, then I’ll be alone again, and I won’t belong anywhere. So perhaps she’s right to be thinking of the future, to plan for a way to let me wander a little—with a purpose, even—and then to come back. To come . . . home, I guess. I suppose if I stay long enough, eventually this will begin to be home. How long will that take? A year? No, longer than that. Three years? Five years?
But . . . maybe she’s not right. Maybe I won’t feel any better by autumn. If she tries to force me to go with her, I don’t have to, not really. Not if I’m willing to sacrifice belonging—I’ve done that before and survived, and I could do it again. I’ll just leave.174 I’ll go somewhere else. I don’t need this job. I can do something else. I can go somewhere else. I can be someone else.175
I can stop Chanting next week, if I want to. Maybe.176
Maybe not. I don’t think I can get away from stories, and I don’t think I’d want to. They’re too deep in me now, in my blood and bones, and tangled in my hair like brambles.
Maybe I don’t know what I want.
At the end of the day, I rushed out of Sterre’s offices onto the street and let my feet take me where they would.
Which was, apparently, to Mistress Chant.177
* * *
164. It is so strange to look at this from my position. I was here for all of it, I saw the whole thing, but you tell this story bit by bit, in pieces as things happened. It gives me a strange warping of perspective—like the sort of eye-bending vertigo you get when you look up into a very large, very tall dome or vaulted ceiling inside a temple.
165. I’m getting tired of writing some variant on, “Seriously? Really?” every time you say something like this, so from now on just assume that I’m doing that every time.
166. I don’t know how you can accuse me of being pushy when Mevrol de Waeyer was right there, haranguing you and making wild improbable promises.
167. Greed, deception, conspiracy. How else do you think?
168. She was awfully presumptuous, wasn’t she? I hope you eventually did something about that. Before the end of things, I mean, before you walked out of the city or wherever it is you’ve gone. But I suppose you must have—you did come around towards the end, you did change your mind and do the right thing. And I suppose you would have had to fight with her to get her to allow that.
169. People like her, you can’t give them a soft refusal like “I’d rather not.” You say “No thank you,” and then you hold firm. You didn’t owe her anything. All she was doing was paying you for services. She shouldn’t have tried to run your life or demand that you attend her on voyages.
170. Yep. It is.
171. Can you hold on a moment? I need to go bang my head against the wall again.
172. Attaboy, Chant.
173. Is this how normal people live? People who aren’t Chants? Do they really just sign their souls away to people like de Waeyer? You should have been more firm with her. She’s not your superior. In the old days, she would have been very polite to her local Chant—she would have been a little scared of you, scared that you might become angry with her and turn Shuggwa’s Eye upon her. She would have respected you in the old days.
174. Good.
175. See previous note in regards to sighing heavily and at length.
176. Do it, then. I dare you.
177. Oh, it’s that day. I wish you’d be more clear about the passage of time! It’d be more fun to anticipate my next appearance rather than being ambushed by it, but you have a tendency to ambush people with things, don’t you?
THIRTY
I found Mistress Chant at the Rose and Ivy, as she’d told me. Her cart was stationed on one side of the innyard, and I saw her younger apprentice sitting on the back steps of it, plucking at the strings of an instrument shaped like a tiny lute with a long, reedy neck. “Hello,” I said. He looked up at me and blinked.
“Oh, it’s you,” he said. He had the glossy black hair and the accent of southeastern Map Sut. “Chant’s been waiting for you to visit.”
“Here I am. Is she around?”
“Inside,” he said, jerking his head towards the door of the inn. “Do you hate her?”
“No,” I said quickly. He quirked an eyebrow at me. “Does she think I do?”
He shrugged. “She thinks you’re mad at her. She’s frustrated with you. And she told me not to speak to you, but . . .” He used his free hand to brush down the front of his torso as if he were sweeping off dust in one long movement—a se-gko, the gesture of politeness or greeting in Map Sut, and I was a little amused to see it. In time, he’ll give up the ways of his homeland, just as I did, and adopt and discard local customs as often as he changes his shirt. “I’m Lanh Chau.” No surname, I noticed—an orphan, I supposed.
I sketched a short bow in the Heyrlandtsche custom—his se-gko hadn’t been terribly formal, so my bow wasn’t either. “Pleased to meet you.”
“Arenza thinks you’re handsome.”178
“Arenza is . . . the other one?”
“Yes. My apprentice-sister.”
“It’s very kind of her to say so,” I said awkwardly, not sure what else I was expected to say.
“She told me she was going to flirt with you if she met you again.”179
I laughed awkwardly. “Perhaps you could find a moment to drop a word in her ear. . . . I wouldn’t want her to be embarrassed. My preferences don’t run to women, you see.”
He nodded thoughtfully. “I’ll tell her. So do you just tell stories?”
“Isn’t that what a Chant does?”
“Chant says it isn’t, not necessarily. She says there’s lots of different things in the world that need to be collected and remembered, and one Chant can’t attend to all of them. She says that we can take specialties, if we want.”
I felt a little dizzy—culture shock. I thought I’d gotten over that
a long time ago, but I suppose that was when I still had Hrefni culture sticking to me. Now it’s just Chant culture, or what I thought Chant culture was, if we even have something that can be called that. “What do you mean by ‘specialties’? I don’t think it’s right to decide something isn’t important or worthwhile. . . .”
He gave me a flat look. “Chant says it’s better to concentrate on one thing and learn everything about it.”
“So what’s your . . . specialty?” I asked. He was just a kid—young for an apprentice too, maybe twelve. I didn’t feel right making arguments against his philosophy. He wasn’t my apprentice.
He tapped the belly of the instrument that wasn’t a lute. “Music. When I’m a Chant, I’ll go all over, collecting songs from people instead of stories. Chant says that’s good, because people forget about songs a lot.” He gave me a meaningful look, judging me from my toes to the top of my head. I expect he got that look from his Chant.
“That’s a little limiting, don’t you think?” I said before I could stop myself. Apparently I was arguing with him after all. “The way I was taught, Chants should leave themselves open to receive any kind of thing, whether it’s stories or songs or secrets.”180
“But you don’t know songs.”
“I know some songs. Everyone knows some.”
“You wouldn’t sing at the party, though.”
“I don’t know them well enough to perform in a setting like that. I haven’t gone out of my way to learn them or practice them, that’s all. It hasn’t come up—I learn what comes up.”
Lanh Chau frowned at me, then shrugged. “You think my way is limiting. I think your way is unfocused and lazy.”181 I was taken aback, and after that he seemed to have dismissed me from his attention entirely. He plucked away on his instrument, and I wandered in a daze into the inn.182
I spotted Mistress Chant almost immediately. She was sitting quite near the door, playing a hand of cards with her other apprentice, Arenza, and a couple patrons of the inn.
My Chant never approved of gambling. He didn’t hold with money-dealings of any sort, not on a personal level. He’d carry coin if he had to, but that was very rare, and he always tried to get rid of it as quickly as possible. He had so many friends in every land we traveled to that there was always someone willing to do us a small favor, and Chant was an expert in playing small favors off one another like movements in chess until he had a big favor in his hands, like getting a ship’s captain to allow us passage to wherever we needed to go, even though the best we could hope for was a corner of the crew’s berths, and not even a hammock to curl up in.
Remembering the intricate dance of favors as I watched Mistress Chant play her hand probably made me more inclined to be sociable. A friend can be a lot of things—a shelter, a savior, a tool.183 A friend is a good thing to have, even one who seems to half-hate you.
So I pulled out a chair and sat down, and Mistress Chant glanced at me, and then glanced again and blinked, wide eyed. “Brother-Chant!” she said, more brightly than I’d expected. Part of me had thought she’d launch right into excoriating me for some other perceived failure or shortcoming. “What a pleasant surprise.”184
“Hello. I was in the area, and . . . I thought we could talk. You said . . .”
“So I did, so I did.” She introduced me to the other people at the table—a pair of nietsen, Maarsi and Annan (I noticed instantly that they were married and seemed to be having a silent, ongoing spat, but Maarsi was sorry and Annan was about to forgive them); a vrouw, Cilla; and a Vintish woman, Liliane. I don’t think Mistress Chant was very close with any of them. She was just being polite because one or more of them had something interesting to tell her and she was going to tweak it out of them.
I saw my old master do it a thousand times. I could have recognized the play from across the room by her posture alone.
Chant sent Arenza off to get something for me to drink, and offered to deal me in to the next hand, which I declined. “Are you sure? Well, perhaps we had better wrap the game up, friends.”
“What, already?” Liliane said.
She shrugged. “I wasn’t expecting my colleague to visit, and I have so been looking forward to having a conversation with him.”
Sociable, I reminded myself. It can’t hurt anything to make a friend. Maybe it’s all been a funny misunderstanding and we’ll find some common ground in our ways.185
I watched them finish up their game, and then Chant drew me outside, back to the cart. Arenza followed in our wake, quiet and expressionless and watchful. Chant knocked on the side of the cart as we came up. “Lanh Chau, fetch out a couple cushions, would you?”
He flung from the door several battered, stained ones, clearly intended to be thrown on the ground and unceremoniously sat upon, and Mistress Chant and Arenza nudged them into the shadows in the space between the cart and the inn wall, as if they intended it to serve as the receiving parlor in a fancy house. A moment later, Lanh Chau hauled out a large brass bowl, roughly the size of a soup tureen but perfectly round, with gently curved walls. “No need for that,” Mistress Chant said. “Put it away.”
“But I’m cold.”
“You’re going inside in a minute,” she said, nodding towards the inn, its open doors spilling warm light and noise across the yard.
Lanh Chau looked taken aback. “I don’t get to stay?”
“No.”
He burst into a flurry of rapid Sut in a dialect I couldn’t make any sense of whatsoever. From context and the odd, trip-trapping, tongue-twisting rhythm, I’d guess it was some variety of thieves’ cant.186 In any case, Mistress Chant understood him perfectly well and responded just as nimbly, and at last he huffed and picked up the bowl. “Can I show it to him first?”
Mistress Chant gazed impassively at him.
“I’m going to show him,” Lanh Chau declared. “He’ll be interested. I bet he hasn’t seen one before.” There was a wooden baton lying in the bottom of it; Lanh Chau clanged it against the side of the bowl, producing a pure, resonating sound like a struck bell or a gong, then ran the baton steadily around the lip of the bowl, chasing the vibrations so they went on and on and on, unceasing. Within moments, a faint glow began to pool at the bottom of the bowl, like sunlight on an inch of rippling water. The glow grew brighter until we could have read printed text quite comfortably, and a few moments after that I noticed a cozy warmth emanating from it as well—not as warm as a fire would have been, not nearly warm enough to cook on, but a delicate, springtime-sunshine kind of warmth. And the whole time Lanh Chau went on with the slow, steady circles of the baton around the lip of the bowl while it sang and sang.
“Bet you haven’t seen anything like that, have you?” Lanh Chau asked, greatly satisfied. “They’re rare.”
“No, I haven’t,” I said politely. “It’s lovely.” But it was a little like the dragons in Xereccio187—the beauty didn’t strike my heart in the way it should have. “A fine and wondrous item.”
“A gift from the king of Inacha,” Arenza said.188 “We find a great many uses for it.”
“Better’n candles,” said Lanh Chau. “Your arm gets sore after a while, though. And the light and the warm don’t last. They stop when you stop.” He set down the baton, and indeed the light faded out after a few heartbeats. He eyed me. “You don’t look impressed.”
“I’m very impressed,” I assured him.
“You don’t look it.” He glanced at Mistress Chant and said something else in that unusual dialect of Sut. She answered, and he looked me up and down again, dubious as all hell.
“Enough now,” Mistress Chant said. “Enough bragging and peacocking. You showed him. He’s impressed. Away with you both, and leave us to talk.”
“I don’t mind if they stay,” I said.
“See?” Lanh Chau said. “It’s fine. I want to listen.”
Mistress Chant narrowed her eyes at him. “If you must,” she said slowly. She added something in that Sut dialect—it sounded sh
arp, nearly a rebuke, and the only words I managed to snatch from the tangled snarl of unfamiliar language were “aware” and a phrase that I thought might have been one I knew—just pronounced with a funny accent—which could have meant, depending on context, reversal, torque, perversion, to tilt one’s head, tacking a ship, or a fencing volte.189
Lanh Chau grumbled in reply but nodded and perched on the steps of the wagon. The iron lantern that hung above the door shivered with the vibration, making the shadows and patches of light on the ground fly and flicker until they settled once again like a flock of sparrows.
“Arenza?” Mistress Chant asked, turning to her. “Are you going inside, or are you going to argue with me too?”
Arenza considered this slowly and with great deliberation. “I’ll argue with you,” she said after a few moments of intense thought. Mistress Chant sighed.
“I really don’t mind,” I said. I thought that if she was going to yell at me, she might modulate herself a little in front of her apprentices.
“We might as well sit,” she said flatly. “So, Brother-Chant. You finally grace us with your presence.” She pointed imperiously to one of the cushions, which I took.
“I’m not here to fight,” I said. She only glanced meaningfully at Lanh Chau, who nodded.
“So what are you here for, then?”
Perhaps I should have let her send Lanh Chau and Arenza inside. They watched as silent and still as they’d been listening to Mistress Chant’s stories at the salon. It was unsettling, almost creepy. I tried not to look at them and cleared my throat. “Just to talk, I suppose. How . . . have you been?”
Lanh Chau murmured something in Sut, a more standard dialect, which I managed to make out: Is that the best he can do?
She gave him a sharp look. “We’re fine. Getting settled in.”
“Oh—you’re going to be staying a while?” I didn’t know how to feel about that. Nerves and frustration and despair and, strangely, relief. I could make a mess of this conversation but still have enough time to try again if I had to, if I really wanted to. Again and again until I got it right.
A Choir of Lies Page 14