I scrambled to my feet and lurched toward, I hoped, the passageway. Bones clattered beneath my feet, rattled against rotting wood and rusted strings, striking a hollow music. Spinning blindly in the dark, I realized I had left father's harp behind, and knew at once that I could not find my way back to it.
A second voice caught me standing stupidly in the same place, huddled in my cloak, expecting the fangs, the monster's fatal poisons. At the new sound, I jumped, flinging my pitiful knife away into the darkness, where it clattered much too loudly against the rock wall.
'Est Sularis Oth Mithas…'
And then, behind me, or what I thought was behind me, another.
And, beyond that, another voice, and yet another, until I spun about dizzily, buffeted by voices, by echoes, by wandering sound from centuries before. For not only did the voices of Southlund and Coastlund mingle in the darkness with a chorus of High Solamnic, but the ancient ritual language seemed to change as I heard it, traveling from voice to voice, each time its pronouncements varying slightly until I realized that the last voices I had heard were another language entirely and that I had followed a passage of familiar words, familiar sounds, back to a voice that was entirely alien, speaking a tongue as remote as the Age of Might, as the distant and unattainable constellations.
You can find the truth, another voice said — softer, more familiar.
I followed the familiar voice of the druidess L'Indasha Yman, my shoulder brushing against stone and a cool liquid draft of air rushing into my face, telling me I had found a passage… to somewhere else.
The voices were ahead of me now, ahead and behind, contained, I suppose, by the narrow corridor. Some shouted at me, some whispered, some vexed me with accents curious and thoughts fragmentary…
…
…
…
…
…
I stopped. In the last of the voices, somewhere behind me in the corridor, the old words had sounded. I forgot them all — the druidess, the erasing wind of the plains, the medicine and bawdy songs — and turned about.
In the midst of a long recounting of herb lore I discovered that voice again… the bard's intonation masking the accents of Coastlund. I followed the northern vowels, the rhythmic sound of the verse…
And I was in another chamber, for the echo swirled around me and over me, and I felt cold air from all quarters, and a warmth at a great distance to my left. The voice continued, louder and unbroken by noise and distraction, and it finished and repeated itself as an echo resounds upon echo.
I held my breath, fumbled for pen and ink, then remembering the monster, sniffed the air for acid and heat.
It was indeed Arion's 'Song of the Rending,' echoing over the years unto this cavern and unto my listening.
So I waited. Through the old narrations of the sins of the Kingpriest, through the poet's account of the numerous decrees of perfection and the Edict of Thought Control. I waited as the song recounted the glittering domes and spires of Istar, the swelling of moons and the stars' convergence, and voices and thunderings and lightnings and earthquakes. I listened as hail and fire tumbled to earth in a downpour of blood, igniting the trees and the grass, and the mountains were burning, and the sea became blood, and above and below us the heavens were scattered, and locusts and scorpions wandered the face of the planet…
I waited as the voice echoed down the generations, from one century to the next to the third since the Cataclysm, awaiting those lines, not letting myself hope that they would be different from the ones in the leather book in my pack, so that when the lines came, they were like light itself.
Down in the arm of Caergoth he rode:
Pyrrhus Alecto, the knight of the night of betrayals
Firebrand of burning that clouded the straits of Hylo,
The oil and ash on the water, ignited country.
Forever and ever the villages bum in his passage,
And the grain of the peasantry, life of the ragged armies
That harried him back to the keep of the castle
Where Pyrrhus the Firebringer canceled the world
Beneath the denial of battlements,
Where he died amid stone with his covering armies.
For seventeen years the country of Caergoth
Has burned and burned with his effacing hand,
A barren of shires and hamlets,
And Firebringer history hangs on the path of his name.
I sat on the cold stone floor and laughed and cried quietly, exultantly. I waited there an hour, perhaps two, as the 'Song of the Rending' ended and began again. I wondered briefly if this were the echo of Arion himself, if I was hearing not only the words but the voice of the bard my father had killed a generation back.
I decided it did not matter. All that mattered was the truth of the words and the truth of the telling. Arion's song had marked my grandfather as a traitor, but it had preserved the land, for what bandit or goblin would care to invade a fire-blasted country? Orestes's song had rescued Alecto's name, at the price of flame and ruin and his own life. So when Arion's song returned again, I was ready to hear it, to commit it to memory, to wander these caves until I recovered the light, the fresh air, the vellum or hide on which to write the lines that would save my father's line, my line.
It did return, and I remembered each word, with a memory half trained in the listening, half inherited from a father with bardic gifts. For the first time in a long while, perhaps the first time ever, I was thankful for who he was, and I praised the gifts Orestes had passed on to me.
And then, with a whisper that drowned out all other voices, at once the beast spoke. It was a dragon!
Oh. And it seemed not at all strange now to fall to the monster without struggle or issue, to rid myself of the shifting past and the curse of these scars and their burning, and to rid all above me of the land's torture…
So I stood there, ridiculously clutching pen and ink, and though it was already darker than I could imagine darkness to be, I closed my eyes, and the alien heat engulfed me, and with it the evil smell of rust and offal and old blood. The jaws closed quickly around me as I heard a man's voice, saying,
I have killed Arion, and the burning
Will never stop. The land is cursed. I am
Cursed. My line is cursed. I die.
And then, like a last sudden gift, a woman's whisper:
There is power in all words, and in yours especially.
It was the hot fetor that awakened me. I gasped and coughed and closed my eyes immediately to the fierce and caustic fumes.
I was sitting upright in very confined quarters.
Slowly I tested my surroundings, my eyes clasped tightly against the foul biting mist. I stretched my arms, and to each side I felt slippery leather walls.
