'We rarely have the opportunity, not since the Betrayal. They are always difficult. Such clear thinkers. Not like…' She paused.
'Morgan. I know. All fire and emotion. Will she talk?'
'She talks all the time. Just not about things that we want to hear.'
As if to demonstrate, Cassandra raised her head and spoke to us, her eyes still closed.
'It is a series of mathematical thirds, iterated and then reiterated across a platform of subsonic patterns. I would call it beautiful, I think, in other circumstances.' Finally, she opened her eyes and looked at me. A little surprise. 'Eva?'
I didn't answer her, and in time she shut her eyes again. The singers did not stop. Lesea plucked at my sleeve, and I happily turned away and followed her into the hall.
'So you see she is well,' the Chanter said. Her voice was strangely the same breathy whisper here, amidst the din of the Song, as it had been in the quiet garden above.
'I need to speak to her, still. Alone.'
'No,' she said, and her voice raised a little, gaining an echo and a vibration that unsettled me. 'You do not. You are here for other purposes, Eva Forge. I feel the dissonance in your blood.'
'Oh, that's just distaste, lady. Now get her out of those chains and give us a little privacy.'
We stood, staring at each other in the cacophonous hallway, unmoving. Finally, she nodded and motioned me away from the door.
'She is in ritual now. I will not interrupt that. But we may sit, and talk this through.' She turned and walked down the hall. When I followed her, she glanced over her shoulder. 'Can I get you something to drink?'
'Whatever you've got,' I said. 'And plenty of it.'
* * *
What they had was black wine, served in crystal that hummed between my fingers. We drank it in the quietest room I had been in since I had entered this damned building. The walls were three feet thick and the door was like a tombstone, rolled aside by pistons as thick as my waist and then sealed from the inside. Still I could hear that music, running through my bones.
'How do you people stand it?' I asked, my face buried in the wide mouth of the wineglass. 'It's like living on the monotrain.'
'Hm. Yes, I suppose it would be. But this is something you grow to love.' She paused to drink. When she raised the glass to her mouth, the fluted chimes of her mask shuffled aside. Her lips were painted black, and she had the most delicate bones. She was careful not even to breathe when the mask was retracted. 'You would have loved it, I think. Had you been born to the right path.'
'We don't choose our paths, Lady Chanter. Not any more than they choose us.'
'How very fatalistic. Appropriate for a warrior, I suppose.'
I drank my wine and listened to the music in my bones. She tried to start a couple conversations, but I wasn't liking it. This place wasn't for me. It wasn't for Cassandra, either. Lesea was halfway through describing something about octaves and the high calling of the Chanters when a noise played its way through the horrible chorus, a noise that gave even the good Lady Lesea pause.
To me it just sounded like more of the Song, at least at first. The background noise of earthquakes. But then I noticed the Chanter had stopped talking, and was sitting perfectly still with her head cocked to one side, wineglass halfway to her mouth. Then I noticed that the chorus had kicked it up a notch, rising in waves and tides of pure noise.
Something tore through the chorus, like a jagged line of fire in a forest of dry grass. The Chanter dropped her glass and stood. The mask of chimes snapped open, revealing a perfect mouth and teeth white as tile and sharp as knives.
'Stay here,' she said, and her voice ripped from her throat like barbed honey. 'I'll be right back.'
I stumbled at the sound of her voice, my glass tumbling to the floor, warm black wine splashing across the plush rug. I slid boneless from my chair, my skull vibrating, my fingers numb. By the time my eyes cleared the room was empty, and the door was sliding shut.
I struggled to my feet, using my sword as a crutch, leaning against it as I swayed in the wake of Lesea's impossible voice. Even I could hear the chaos in the Song outside. A great deal of divine violence was being done, at octaves that barely registered to my mortal ears. I dragged myself to the door, checked to see that it was locked, and slid back to the floor with my back to the wall. Time for the trick.
The bullets clattered as I dropped them to the floor, emptying the cylinder with a flick of my wrist. I loaded two blanks, special rounds we kept to scare the hell out of crowds. Two rounds.
'Morgan, god of war, lord of the hunt,' I intoned. 'Your breath is smoke, your mouth is the grave. Your skin is fire.'
My skin stiffened and then sprouted the tiniest scales, blackening as the invokation spread across me. It wouldn't last long, but I didn't need it to. I held the bullistic next to my ear, said a little prayer for Barnabas and Cassandra, closed my eyes, and pulled the trigger.
Sharp pain, and then the sound of the world was sucked away into a humming maelstrom of silence. Quickly I switched hands before I lost my nerve, held the gun next to my other ear, and pulled the trigger. A lesser noise, but still great pain. I stood. My eyes were burning with powder. The scales had flashed away in the heat, but my face was blackened with powder. Warm, thick blood poured out of my ears. The world around me was silence. I could still feel the Song in my bones, but not in my head. I flicked the two rounds onto the ground, reloaded my bullistic, then exchanged weapons and invoked a silent rite of guidance.
In absolute, deafening silence, I opened the door and stepped out into chaos and fire.
11
Oman lay outside the door. His mask lay shattered by his face, and there was blood coming from his mouth. I stepped over him and walked down the hallway, in the direction I had come from. I found the source of all the violence just around a corner.
Even deaf to the Song, I could still feel it, feel the tension in its octaves and the crashing rhythm of its power. Before there had been a serene majesty to it, but now it was swollen with fear and violence. Whatever the Chanters were weaving, it was born of desperation.
I came around the corner and found that the Chanters' dome was being unmade. Some great power had split the dome in half, and the two sections were grinding together. My half of the building was sinking. Above me, I could see the floors that had once been parallel to my own, crumbling as they rose up into the air. Looking down, I could see the cracked heart of the building, the ornate wooden chamber of the Song, where the Elders of the Cult held watch over the ancient hymn. Smoke rose up from that chamber. On all sides, black water from the lake was spilling into the structure.
And with the water, hordes of the coldmen. They remained limp as corpses as the water carried them sloppily over the moat's edge, pouring into the building, spilling out over the floors and hallways that were suddenly revealed to the sky. They became animate only as they reached stone, dragging themselves to unsteady feet, then drawing out their blades and rushing into the structure. None had reached my floor yet, but they seemed intent on gaining the heart of the building, where the Song warbled and raged.
This was unexpected. I had come to try to convince the Chanters to turn Cassandra over to my custody. Failing that, I was going to steal the girl, and consequences be damned. At the worst, I was concerned that the Betrayer might try to assassinate her while she was in the hands of Alexander's people. Since Simeon had arranged his meeting with an Alexian friend, it seemed likely that the Cult of the Betrayer had infiltrated Alexander's power structure. If they could lead an Elder of Morgan into a trap, surely they could arrange to have a prisoner of the Chanters killed without causing too much of a fuss.
But this? There was more force here than had been used to kidnap the Fratriarch. Surely the girl wasn't more
