Then, more gently still, he handed Belamae the viola d’amore. He wanted this Lieholan to know the heft of it, to run his hands over the flaws in the soundboard, to ask about the intricately carved earless head above the pegbox, to pluck the top-strung gut and listen for the resonating strings beneath . . .
Belamae received the instrument as he had the sheet music, giving it a moment of thoughtful regard. But almost immediately a sneer filled his face, and he slammed the viola down hard on the stone floor, shattering it into pieces.
The crush and clatter of old wood and the twang of snapped strings rose around them in a cacophonous din, echoing in the Chamber of Absolutes. Divad’s stomach twisted into knots at the sudden loss of the fine old instrument. The d’amore wasn’t crafted anymore. It was as much a historical artifact as it was a unique and beautiful instrument for producing music. And of all the aliquot instruments, it had been his favorite. At Divad’s mother’s wake, his own former Maesteri had played accompaniment on this viola while Divad sang Johen’s “Funerary Triad.”
He sank to his knees, instinctively gathering the pieces. Above him he heard the viola bow being snapped in half. The instrument’s destruction was complete. Divad’s ire flashed bright and hot, and escalated fast. His hands, filled with bits of spruce and bone points still tied with gut, began to tremble with an urge he hadn’t felt in a very long time.
With what composure and dignity he could maintain, he gently laid the splintered viola back down and stood. “You ungrateful whoreson. Get out of my sight. And by every absent god, pray I don’t forget myself and strike the note of your life. Mundane as I might now find it.”
He then watched as Belamae left the room, his student having failed to even try and understand absolute sound. Or perhaps the failure had been Divad’s. Belamae hadn’t been ready, he told himself. That much was true. But Divad hadn’t had a choice. He’d known the lad would feel duty-bound to return home. Still, he never imagined it would go this way. Looking down again, he grieved at the ruin of a beautiful voice—the viola—broken, and appearing impossible to mend.
TWO
MORNING FROST CRUNCHED under my boots as I crossed the frozen field. Several weeks of barge, schooner, overland carriage, and bay-mount had brought me from Recityv to within walking distance of the battle staging area. And more importantly, the captain’s tent. I’d left within the hour of my last meeting with Maesteri Divad, which still played in my mind like a vesper’s strain sung by an unpracticed voice. All sour notes misplaced by bad intonation.
I was able now, finally, to leave the memory of it alone, though. Mostly because of the dread that began to fill my gut. I didn’t know what to expect. I’d hoped to see my ma first, and my sister, Semera. To have some news. To offer some comfort. Probably to receive some of the same. But long before reaching Jenipol, I’d been intercepted by two tight-lipped drummel-men. It’s easy to spot men who make percussion a trade—their arms show every sinew. They escorted me here. That had been an alarmingly short ride. Our enemies had pushed deep into the Mor Nations.
The last twenty paces to the tent, my escorts fell back. That didn’t do much for my state of mind. I paused a moment at the tent flap, noting where the frost had condensed into droplets from the heat inside the tent. Then I took a long breath and went in.
The air carried the musky smell of warm bodies after a fitful night beneath thick, rough wool. That, and the odor of spent tallow. Four men sat staring down at a low table in the light of two lamps burning a generous amount of wick. They all looked up at me as though I’d interrupted a prayer.
As I started to introduce myself, the man farthest back nodded grimly and said, “Belamae. I didn’t think you’d come. Or I should say, I didn’t think the Maesteri would permit it.”
His name escaped me, but not his rank—this man held field command. I could tell by the deliberate and careful scarification on the left side of his neck in the form of an inverted T. Four horizontal hash marks crossed the vertical line. They weren’t formal signifiers of rank. The Inverted T was a kind of music staff—an old one, a Kylian notation. The number of lines across it indicated the number of octaves the man had mastered. Which would include complete facility in all scales and modes across each. It was breadth as well as depth. More than simply impressive. A second scar-line beneath the bottom one meant he could make good use of steel, too.
The men at his table had similar neck scars, but all with one fewer hash. One of these craned his head around, the act seeming to cause him considerable pain. I could see that he’d lost the service of one eye but took no care to cover the wound. A flap of lid hung like a creased drape over the hole.
The one-eyed man looked me up and down the way a tiller does a draft horse just before plow season. “Doesn’t look like much. Neck is thin. Skin’s soft. He’s not used to making sound on open air. He’ll quit in three days. Doesn’t matter if he’s Karll’s boy. I don’t believe none in loinfruits.”
A third man looked on, carefully appraising, but in a different way. The fellow looked up for a moment, as though framing a question. When he stared at me, his gaze was focused, the way Maesteri Divad’s became when he watched for truthful answers and understanding. “Do you want a sword?”
I stared back, somewhat puzzled. “That’s not why you sent for me.”
The last man at the table did not speak, but instead invited me forward with a nod. As I drew close, I saw what the four had been studying. Not terrain or position maps. Not inventory manifests. Not even letters of command and inquiry sent from the seat of the Tilatian king.
Across the table were spread innumerable scores. These leaders of war were sifting sheet music to prepare for the day’s battle. In my few years away from home, I’d learned this was uncommon. The Tilatians might be the only people to do it, in fact. And even among my own kind, it hadn’t been done in more than three generations.
Coming a step closer, and as I looked into the faces of the men around the table, it wasn’t the carefree good humor of conservatory instructors that I saw. Lord knows I’d come across a cartload of those in my travels as a student from Descant Cathedral. No, these were sober-minded men, reviewing the language of song written for an unfortunate purpose. The tent held the cheerless feel of an overcast winter sky.
Sullen, I thought. Bitter maybe. But sullen for sure.
“Nine of ten bear steel into battle. There’s no shame in that.” The field leader sniffed, refocusing on a score laid out in front of him. “But you’re right. That’s not why we ask you here. Sit down.”
I pulled forward a thin barrel and sat next to the captain, as he set before me a stack of music. “What?”
“I’m Baylet. This is Holis, Shem, and Palandas. These,” he gently tapped the scores piled loosely before me, “are airs we send to the line. Tell us which one you’ll use.”
A chair creaked as Holis, the man with one eye, leaned forward, turning a bit sideways to have a good view of the stack.
“We’ve already selected morale songs to encourage those who carry steel,” Baylet added. “Holis has a good eye for that.”
The men exchanged scant looks of mirth, as if the joke were as tired as the men themselves.
“Shem’s put aside for later a song of comfort and well-being. Something he wrote himself.”
“Calimbaer,” I muttered, recalling the class of Mor song that accompanied medical treatment.
Baylet looked across at Shem. “He’s also found a good sotto voce for Contentment.”
I knew that class of song, too. Two classes really. Sotto voce, an incredibly difficult technique to master, in which singing happened almost under the breath. But Contentment . . . it was a type of song sung to one who is beyond help, one who can only be given a spot of peace before going to his final earth.
Holis and Shem produced the music Baylet had spoken of, and dropped it on top of the pile before me. I fanned them out and began to scan. The morale song read like a blaze of horns—written for four voi
ces with two soaring lines above a strong set of rhythmic chants beneath. I could hear the mettle and resolve in my mind as I tracked the chord progressions.
Shem’s Calimbaer was an elegant piece composed of few notes, each with long sustain. The movement was languid and would be rendered in a thick legato.
But it was the sotto voce piece that really got to me. I sat poring over the note selection, which made brilliant use of the Lydian and Lochrian modes, the composition effortlessly transitioning between the two. It had me taking deep relaxing breaths. Parts of the melody, even just scanning them, instantly evoked simple, forgotten memories. In those moments, I recalled the marble bench on which I sat the first time I kissed a woman. How cool it had been to the touch, contrasted with the heat in my mouth. I then remembered kneeling in my mother’s garden, dutifully clearing the weeds, when I spontaneously created my first real song, or at least the first one I could still recall. And last to my mind came the memory of lying awake, scared, in my first alone-bed, until I heard the comforting, safe sounds of adult voices talking in the outer room.
Baylet swept those selections aside and tapped the original stack again. “Mors who have influence in their voice.” He gave me a pointed look. “Mors like you. Have each been sent to different lines so that only the Sellari will hear their song. And suffer by it.”
The field leader then began to hum a deep pitch, a full octave lower than any note I could reach. The sound of it filled the tent. He gently lifted the topmost score, written on a pressed parchment, and placed it in my hand. When he stopped singing the single note, the silence that followed felt wide and empty, like the bare-limb stretches of late autumn.
He let that silence hang for a long moment before saying, “This is what they will sing today. They have already set out. You should choose quickly.”
It wasn’t the urgent request or the song he’d sung or the lingering sotto voce that left me in a panic. I put the score aside and began to leaf through the rest of the stack. While I got the impression that the chests I saw in the shadowed corners of the tent carried more music, the fifty or so here would prove to be enough.
Some were reproductions on newer, cleaner paper that still smelled of ink. Most of these were Jollen Caero songs, very old. Jollen was a composer thought to have come down out of the Pall when my Inveterae ancestors had escaped the Bourne. Any other time, I would have liked to study these longer; the melodic choices were as unpredictable as the vocal rhythms. Other selections had been transcribed on parchment that looked like it had seen the field before—ratted edges and smudges where dirty thumbs had held them. Many of these were as interesting as the Jollen songs but for an entirely different reason: their composers were not generally known. And until now, I’d never seen the full scores—only snippets had survived in the forms of childhood rhymes and song-taunts. Seeing the full context for phrases I’d sung here and there all my life left me feeling a bit ashamed and naive.
Before I’d left to study with the Maesteri at Descant, I could have read maybe half of these scores. Back then, I was fluent in six different types of music notation. Now I could read more than thirty. Some of the music here was just that, music only. No lyrics. The Lieholan singing these scores was free to sing them using vowels of his choosing, so long as he didn’t attempt to sing actual words.
Other songs in the stack were nothing more than lyrics, but so familiar that any Lieholan worth his brack would know them. The harder part with these came in the language. They hadn’t been translated. I counted at least four different languages: early Morian, a difficult Pall tongue, lower Masi, and a root language we knew as Borren. Most Lieholan would perform these phonetically, singing words they didn’t understand. For my part, having spent four years at Descant, where language study went along with music training, I could make out the meaning in the lyrics. These were terrifying words. There’d been little effort at rhyme in them. The worst was a litany of tragic images with no narrative or resolution. It might have been the darkest thing I’d ever read. Something I couldn’t unread.
I scanned from one sheet to the next, moving from standard Mor notation, to the subdominant axis approach typified on the necks of the men around me, to a symbol-centered system that referred to a mandola neck, to the more elegant Petruc signifier, where slight serifs and swoops on a handful of characters gave the singer all the information he needed to render the pitch. I liked the Petruc system best. Those delicate strokes could be added to written language, allowing the lyrics to become the central part of the piece, while subtle Petruc ornamentation on its letters carried the melodic direction. Originally, it had been created as a code, back during the War of the First Promise.
Probably the most interesting music, though, was a pair of songs written in an augmented Phrygian mode. They were unattributed, but the parchment was old and the Sotol music notation fading some. This music would require vocal gymnastics to carry off, and two voices besides. Though separately composed, they were clearly a call-and-response orchestration. In my mind I could hear where notes sounded together and where vocal runs built tension on top of beautifully dark counterpoint. I wanted to sing this song, whose first bridge was the only portion I had ever heard, and then only the caller side of the arrangement.
All of them I’d heard or sung, if only in part. But the familiarity was precisely the problem and the thing that alarmed me.
When I’d made sure there was nothing unfamiliar, I looked up and locked eyes with Baylet. “You haven’t brought the Mor Refrains with you?”
Holis laughed, the squint of his eyes as he did so pinching the lid of his eyeless socket into a pouch of skin. “I see now. You think that’s why we called you back. To sing the Refrains. Ah, sapling, we’ve had it more bitter than this, and not fallen to such foolish desperation.” His one remaining eye widened, the way it might if he’d happened on some realization. “But your asking tells us something about you, I think.”
The captain knocked on the tabletop once to silence them. “The field men have already marched. Are you rested enough? And is there one of these you know by rote?”
My heart ran cold. They meant to send me to the field . . . today. I stood there, struck dumb for a long moment before nodding.
Baylet seemed satisfied and stood. He motioned for me to follow, and I’d just started after him when a hand caught me tightly by the wrist. I looked down to find Palandas holding me. His grip seemed unusually strong for a man his age.
“The best song, when singing the end of someone, is the one you can make while watching him die.” He moistened his lips with his tongue. “That’ll be one you must know awfully well, my young friend. Since your voice will have to carry on when the rest of you would rather not.”
Palandas held me until I nodded my understanding, which I did without any idea what he really meant. He let me go, and I followed Baylet through the tent flap and south across the frozen field. The promise of sun had grown in the east as a faint line of light blue.
We gathered our mounts at the tree line, and the field leader led me south and east through an elm and broad-pine wood. For the better part of a league we rode. As the trees began to thin, he pulled up and dismounted. I slid from the saddle and stood beside him. The shanks of our mounts steamed in the morning chill.
Finally, I couldn’t hold it back any longer. “Why haven’t you brought the Mor Refrains? The letter I received made it sound dire.”
“War is always dire,” he said flatly.
“I came through Talonas, Cyr, and Weilend. All burned. All empty. My history isn’t strong, but I don’t remember us ever losing three cities to those from across the Soren.” My breath plumed before my face as I spoke. “Asking me to leave Descant. I assumed you needed someone—”
“Your training is complete then?” Baylet asked, one eyebrow arching.
“No,” I admitted. “But the Refrains haven’t been sung in so long. I assumed you’d want someone—”
“The Refrains have never been sun
g.” His voice held a pinch of reproach. “The first Mors brought them out of the Bourne to keep them from being sung. Which the Quiet would surely have done, if they’d ever gotten their hands on them.”
“It’s why the Sellari come,” I said, stating the obvious. “It’s why they’ve always come. If we fail, they won’t hesitate to sing them.”
Baylet turned to face me. His stare chilled me deeper than the frigid air. “Then don’t fail.” He pointed ahead. “Twenty Shoarden men wait for you at the tree line.”
Shoarden men. As a child, I’d thought Shoarden simply meant “deaf.” Later, when I began to study the Borren root tongues, I learned that it meant “to sacrifice sound.”
“Shoarden,” I muttered to myself.
“Most Lieholan aren’t skilled enough to have their song resonate with a specific individual or . . .” he looked away to the south, where the Sellari camped, “group or army or . . . race.” He looked back at me. “It’s a technique of absolute sound. A technique you’ll possess once your training at Descant is complete. Until then, your song affects any who hear it. So, some of the men sacrifice their hearing in order to guard Lieholan in the field. They take the name Shoarden. Today, I’ve assigned twenty such men to you. Beyond the tree line, a thousand strides or so, the Sellari eastern flank is camped. They’ll come hard. Don’t let them through.”
He’d apparently said all he meant to say, and quickly mounted.
I struggled to remember the thing I’d wanted to ask him. A hundred questions about the Refrains clouded my mind, but I mentally grasped it before he rode away. “My da.”
Baylet held his reins steady, staring ahead. “His sword sang, Belamae. Any man who stood beside him in battle would say the same.” He then turned to look at me. “Karll was a friend. Proud as hell of you. He’d be angry with me for sending for you. But a son has to . . . Quiet and Chorus, son, if I’d lost my da I’d want to return murder on the bastards. Thought you’d want the same opportunity. Besides that, we need you. We’re outnumbered . . .” His eyes, if it was possible, looked suddenly stonier. “Don’t fail.”
The Sound of Broken Absolutes Page 2