I began with a dire shout-song, a rough-throat cry I simply made up as I went. Then every third beat I switched, singing the song of the Sellari. I sang faster, the two songs beginning to come in a strange syncopation. And each time I changed, different men screamed, different bodies dropped.
I felt another hammer strike me. But it seemed somehow far away, and only hit me in the elbow—maybe breaking it, but that pain felt distant, too.
The real pain came each time I sang the notes of the Sellari song. The large sphere, now twenty strides away, amplified the music and reflected it back toward me. It didn’t deflect the song from striking at the hearts of the Sellari. But it more than doubled the personal cost of the resonation I felt. The pain grew fast, much the way one’s palm begins to burn when held close above a candle flame.
But I did not stop. The alternating songs wove in and out of one another, reminding me of waves rolling onto a shore and back.
Then, again, sometime later, all motion stopped. Heaps of bodies lay across the field, some stacked three deep around me. When I ceased to sing, silence returned to the world.
My face and hair, and all my clothes were drenched with blood.
I thought I heard the distant song of mockingbirds in the poplar trees. I couldn’t be sure. My ears rang with the remnants of my own music. In those first moments of stillness, my cynicism, and the terrible ache that only singing destruction would assuage, began to plague me again. So once more, I wished for someone to hate. Looking far ahead, I saw several thousand Sellari stepping tentatively from the shadows. I started to smile. Then stopped.
Walking slowly toward me, across the bloodied field, came a line of Sellari women . . . and children.
At this new sight, I felt my mind break. That was the only way I could explain it.
Behind them strode fresh Sellari bladesmen and archers.
I watched them come, sensing an awful truth. This was not simply an invasion force. They’d come to occupy the Mor Nations, bringing with them their families, which they’d now turned into a walking shield.
A distant pluck and hum sounded, like a chorus of cellos being tuned. A moment later the sky darkened with arrows whistling toward us. Questions vied inside me. Could I let fly my own weapon, and sing the Sellari song into the bodies of the innocent? On the other hand, could I let them rain down death on my own people?
My struggle seemed endless, but in truth lasted only a moment. I felt my song rising, and hated myself for it.
Belamae?
The name came at me as though I stood at the bottom of a deep, dry well.
Belamae? It’s over. Can you hear me?
I felt my body being shaken, but ignored it, my song touching my vocal chords, ready to be loosed.
Belamae? A sharp crack on my cheek stalled my song, and I was suddenly staring into Baylet’s concerned eyes. “Are you all right?”
Confused, I slipped to one side, looking south to the line of poplar trees. Nothing. The field still lay quiet with thousands of the dead. But there were no archers. No women. No children.
“You found their song,” Baylet said, his voice solemn.
I only nodded, slowly realizing that my mind had conjured a need to sing out Vengeance again. Oh dear merciful music, what I was prepared to do.
I fell to my knees and buried my face in my hands, weary, ashamed, relieved . . . changed. Song had become something I would never have imagined. A burden.
I also thought I finally understood what it would truly take to sing Suffering.
And I meant never to do it.
TWELVE
WHEN THE DESCANT doors were pulled open, Divad looked out on an emaciated, disheveled figure. If he hadn’t been told in advance, he might not have recognized Belamae. But it would not have been because his returning student looked as if he hadn’t eaten in weeks or that his cloak was tattered and reeked of his unbathed, filthy body. Rather, his face was changed, his aspect. The useful intent in his eyes had gone away.
Everything about him gave Divad the feeling that he’d come here only because he didn’t know where else to go. Belamae made no attempt to enter, or speak. He didn’t even look up, simply staring downward, his hands hanging at his sides.
He looked too fragile to embrace, so Divad gestured him inside. The heavy doors closed with a deep, resounding boom. In the lamplight, he hummed a very low, very soft note. It was brief, but enough to resonate with the change that had gotten inside his prodigy. He gave a sad smile that the boy did not see, and turned, motioning Belamae to follow.
He walked slowly, without speaking, knowing that the soft resonant hum of Suffering that could be heard in the very stone of Descant would reacquaint the lad with the purpose of this place. That’d be a good start to righting his sense of things. The boy had a form of what the early Maesteri called Luusten Mal. Sound poisoning. It was a rather simplistic way of referring to it, but accurate in its own way.
Divad considered returning to the Chamber of Absolutes, where he’d first tried to impart a sense of absolute sound by way of aliquot strings and the viola d’amore. Instead, he turned down a different hall, and went up four levels by way of a spiral staircase, where the granite steps had been worn enough to resemble thin smiles.
Eventually, he led Belamae into his eastern-facing lutherie. He came to the worktable where he’d spent so many hours over these last many cycles, carefully repairing the instrument his student had destroyed.
He lingered a moment in the clean scent of spruce shavings made by recent work
