Chanters made a sign and escorted the boys away. Owen gave me a look, then went with them. I was alone with the creepy Chanter girl and her mask of chimes.
'You have been to the Chanter's garden before,' the woman said in her breathy, muffled voice.
I shook my head. 'No. Never had reason to come around.' We entered the inner court of the castle, and even I'll admit it was a beautiful place. Topiaries and pebble-lane mazes that wound around marble fountains and statues that looked like dancing chandeliers… it was eerie. Nightmare in a tactical fight, too. I'd hate to try to hold a line among all the hedgerows and tiled canals. 'Nice place, though.'
She gave me a strange look, muffled surprise wiped away with a blink.
'Never had reason. I suppose not.' She kept her hands in the sleeves of her robe, but I could see her fists bunching under the fabric. 'No need for Morgan in a place like this.'
Our path led us away from the gardens, then opened onto a shallow lake with a bed of copper. There were rafts on the water. I squinted at them, and could barely make out short, thin men with large heads working the lines.
'Are those Feyr?' I asked.
'They are visitors. Let us call them guests.'
I looked beyond the lake and saw marble walls and guards, if Chanters with ornate poles could be called guards.
The woman noticed my attention. 'They can leave when they want, whenever they are able. We guard against them, that is all.'
'They're that dangerous? Those guys are all around the city.'
'What they are is not dangerous. What they are doing… Never mind. It is no matter to the House of Morgan. You are here to see the Amonite, yes?'
'Yeah. You cracked her yet?'
'Cracked, no. But we have begun a conversation that may lead to the story we need.' She led me away from the lake and into a building, finally. All these open spaces inside walls felt so unnatural to me. 'Is that why you are here? For a progress report?'
I hadn't really thought about that. I was there to pry Cassandra out of the Chanters' creepy little hands and get her back to the Strength. I don't know when my thinking on this had changed. When I had started feeling more in union with the Amonite than the Healer. It wasn't like I didn't trust Owen. Completely.
'I'm here to see her, to make sure she hasn't been mistreated.' I adjusted the holster on my belt. We were in a long, arched stone tunnel. The air was cool and wet, and I thought maybe I could smell the lake. 'There have been threats.'
'We don't threaten, Paladin. That is not our way.'
We walked in silence, our boots crunching on the gravel path. She and I meant different things by threat, I think. There was more to the process than physical violence. It was the kind of thing that could be ugliest when it was pretty.
'Eva. My name's Eva Forge.'
She glanced over at me, a little surprised, then nodded. 'As you say. '
'And I suppose you don't have a name?'
'Names are part of the Song, and should not be given away.'
I grimaced and stuffed my fists into my robe. 'Now you tell me,' I muttered.
She shrugged and gave a light, lilting laugh. 'We will each have our advantages in this, Eva. That is the way of these things.'
There was no more talking. This tunnel led to another, which led to another. We crossed brackish ponds and moist fern gardens, passed under open skies and stone ceilings until we came to a final dark moat, and a castle at the center. I looked down and saw that this was lakewater, deep and black.
'All these walls and paths and buildings, and your final barrier is open to the lake?' I asked.
'There are other barriers. There is more to this place than walls and gardens, Eva.'
'And I still don't know your name, and you're throwing mine around like a shuttle. Harsh.'
'Lesea,' she said. 'This way.'
The bridge was narrow and slick, as though it was carved from a single rib of the world's biggest fish. Lesea went first, her hands held slightly out as if for balance. The building that I had mistaken for a castle was really just a dome, spiked with towers like the head of a mace. The door was a disk of iron that rolled aside on geared teeth at the Chanter's signal. Soon as it was open I could feel their damn Song, itching into my blood. The water of the moat rippled away from us. We hurried inside and the door settled shut with a gasp of air pressure. The Song was louder in here, but not in a way that you could hear. The air vibrated with the Chanters' words, pure as honey and sharp, like a broken chime, beaten into a knife. This is why they got their own island, kids. The city folk wouldn't put up with this on their streets.
The domed building was really just a series of airlocks and pressure chambers, and each opened door layered on the discomfort in the air. I could actually hear it, now, could feel it in my bones and in my teeth. The articulated sheath seemed to cringe on my back, like a crushed spider. It was the hardest thing not to just draw steel and start shooting. Anything to drown out that mad Song.
The Chanters come from a narrow arc of Alexander's life story. An unhinged time. Becoming divine had been tough on the three brothers, and they each dealt with it in their own way. Alexander's place in the divinity meant he was particularly sensitive to the pain and sickness of men, and his initial reaction was to try to heal all of it. Noble, but foolish. Morgan did not try to win all the battles, only the one before him. But Alexander locked himself up and tried to sing a song of healing that would spread around the whole world. To say that he failed would be… well, polite. He went mad. The song he tried to form ended up forming him, as he tapped into deeper and older powers than he could ever understand. When he broke free from it, the song continued, and became the subject of worship for certain of his followers. They etched it, and it cut them, and together they became the Chanters.
I always felt like the Song was getting the better part of that conversation, between scion and invokation. It seemed as if the Chanters had to form their whole lives around this thing that they barely understood, much less controlled. They got farther and farther away from their service to Alexander, and became more and more their own thing. A separate thing. But the power that this service gave them, my Brother. I didn't think Amon's captive Cult was going to invent something to replace them anytime soon.
We stayed far enough away from the central chorus, where the Elders of the Sect kept the Song, trading off watches to rest their voices and their minds. The visitors' chambers were in the perimeter of the dome, though still too deep for my comfort. They weren't really built for comfort though, I guess. Lesea led me down a long hallway of circular doors, each vibrating like the stops in a pipe organ. I just kept my eyes forward, my hands at my sides. The woman next to me seemed completely at her ease, of course, and I saw that an unnoticed tension had left her face. She looked a bit drunk, actually.
Cassandra's door had its own little hallway, and the drone grinding out from it was something I could feel in my lungs. Lesea paused before she opened it and looked at me over her shoulder.
'Your shields will not help you in here, Paladin. But I would brace yourself, nonetheless.'
I gritted my teeth and clenched my fists into knots. She nodded, then opened the door.
Cassandra was in chains, draped from heavy iron manacles and a collar. She was on her knees, her head bowed, her eyes closed. I would have thought her asleep if she hadn't turned her head at our entrance. There were four Chanters with her, one at each of the cardinal points, three men and a woman. They were singing through her, the drone of their voices whipping her robe and hammering her bones. And yet she looked calm. In the whining harmony I could hear a voice, nearly subsonic. Asking questions, about the Fratriarch, the Betrayer, the kidnapping. The murders. Not direct questions, just bringing up images and then abandoning them, like a dream that you forget with your first breath in the morning. Yet these dreams were carried on hammer blows. They spoke at the level of thoughts and spirit. I caught myself mouthing what I knew of the Fratriarch, intoning the story of our first meeting, our first fight, our first lesson together. The last time I had seen him. That I was worried he was dead, that it was my fault.
Cassandra was silent, cocking her head to listen.
'She is unique in this,' Lesea whispered to me, though I wasn't sure she was even talking anymore. 'We have never sung a song like her.'
'Do you question many Amonites?' I asked, each word a gasp.
