roads and sometimes in the empty irrigation canals. The slow rain of falling ash gave the place a surreal, hellish aspect. It was a wonder that anything had ever grown here.
All of this because of the lack of something so simple: water. Corinn could still scarcely believe it. In Calfa Ven, where she spent as much time as she could, showers appeared out of cloudless skies. The rivers bubbled with water. Floods were the concern, not drought! And a good thing, too, for it was the bounty of that place that had sparked the idea that led her here this afternoon. That and Dariel's charitable work. And, of course, her study of the song. Nothing was more central to her life now than the study of the Giver's tongue.
From the first moment she held The Song of Elenet in her hands, on the day that Thaddeus Clegg had brought it to her as a blood gift, she had been changed. It had awakened strength within her, cunning that she had always had but had never used, determination that she knew lay within her but that she spent a lifetime shying away from. It was because of the book that she was able to ally with the league, the Numrek, Rialus Neptos-all of whom she had needed to destroy Hanish Mein. And the song had promised her that more, much more, was to come.
At night, with her servants dismissed and her doors barred, she had opened the book and fallen again and again into the moving, languid words that were not words. It was a wonder every time; and for the first few years it had been enough just to see the words come alive and to hear them inside her head. When they gave her permission to open her mouth and let them out, she had discovered new joy like nothing she had known before, joy as complete as the moment Aaden had slipped free of her and been laid on her chest.
Aaden was part of the song, in a way. Only he had ever witnessed her singing. She had called up small things for him: glass beads and smooth stones at first, gourds that made rattles, simple toys, and then insects, butterflies, red-breasted birds, and tiny ring-necked snakes. The things she had brought to life were but trinkets, she knew, but singing them into existence exhausted and sometimes frightened her. That last creation had been strangely, benignly terrifying.
When her voice faded that afternoon in her chambers on Acacia, the swirling of sound and shimmering light that had gathered around the object finally dissipated. And there it was, the thing she had spun out of words. A thing that 'nobody had ever seen before,' as Aaden had requested. The two of them had stared at it in silence. It was a furry creature the size of a six-month-old child, but it did not have legs or arms. It had a trunk but the bulk of it was a head of sorts, vaguely feline, with no sign of ears, no whiskers. Its fur was so fine it swayed in waves at even the slightest motion, changing color as it did so, as if each strand had within it yellows and reds and blues and every shade in between.
For all this, its eyes were its most distinct feature. They were completely round, and when it blinked, some sort of lid passed from one side of the eye to the other, and then back again a few moments later. With each blink, it seemed more and more sentient, as if it understood something new about them each time that membrane slid from one side to the other.
The mother and son stood watching the creature for just a few short moments. The entire time, it watched them as well, cocking its head and looking from one to the other, waiting. When Corinn began the song to unmake it, she was sure she saw something like disappointment in the creature's eyes. But that may have just been the spell, for within a few breaths the invisible ribbons of sound moved around it, slipping over and through its form and rubbing it from existence.
Aaden's voice had seemed inordinately loud when it broke the silence after the unmaking. 'Why can we never show anyone?'
'Because such things are only for you and me to see. This is our great secret, remember? No one else knows; no one else can know. In the song is all the power we will ever need. The knowledge of creation and destruction. In the song is power that the world has not truly seen in uncorrupted glory in twenty-two generations. It's my power. Mine alone, but it will be yours in times to come.'
They were far out into the fields when they again drew up to the contingent of Talayan merchants. The city was a prominent but distant barricade to the north. Heat shimmered around them, blurring objects even at middle distances. They had stopped at the edge of a massive square basin. It was elevated above the plains around it, hemmed in by thick earthen walls, and carved down into the earth. There were gates at each of the four sides, with plates that could be raised and lowered. Beyond the gates, irrigation channels stretched off in each direction. It was meant to hold a great body of water, but, like the landscape all around it, it was completely dry.
One of the engineers-several had met the group, along with a few laborers, even some children who stood at a slight distance, nearly naked and silent-explained that a deep spring had once fed the tank. She could see the hole in the center of the square. It had been a steady source of water for hundreds of years. There were a few others like it throughout the fields, but those had run dry much earlier.
Corinn asked, 'Water from this tank can be distributed throughout the entire irrigation system?' The engineer began to say that it had never done that, but Corinn cut him off. 'Could water from this tank be distributed throughout the entire system? I asked to be brought to a tank that was central to everything. Is this it?'
'As near as there is to that, yes,' the engineer said. 'Some channels would have to be modified, perhaps embankments reorganized.' The man looked to his companions for help. They offered none. 'I am not sure, Your Majesty, what you-'
'You have answered me,' Corinn said. She slipped down from the saddle and touched the ground. She looked immediately composed, her cream-colored trousers-deceptively cut to look like a dress-as unwrinkled as when she began the ride. She bent and plucked a pebble from the ground, studied it, and then enfolded it in her palm. 'I'll have you all wait for me here. No one is to approach me while I'm in the tank no matter what happens. Understand?' She was answered first with silence, and then with a quick barrage of half-formed questions. She cut through them, glancing up at her son as she did so. 'Aaden, that means you. Numrek, you stay here as well. I'll be back in a moment.' With that, she stepped over the rim and began a careful descent into the tank.
She had to catch herself from falling several times, slamming her palm down against the coarse earth as her feet slipped, careful to keep the pebble trapped in her other hand. It was a deeper pit than she had realized. On reaching the bottom, she glanced up at the figures gathered at the rim. They seemed very far away. Aaden raised his arm to wave at her. She turned and walked on. Again, it took her longer than she expected to reach the center of the tank. She felt the men's eyes on her the entire time.
The heart spring was a scar in the ground just wide enough that she could have leaped into it and fallen to its depths. It was simply a hole with jagged edges that quickly faded to shadow. Looking at it, Corinn had the momentary feeling that it was the puckered maw of some wormlike creature, stuck fast in the rock-hard soil, begging for moisture. She moved up close to it, planted her feet, and sang. She opened her mouth and exhaled the first words that came to her mind.
It was as if the song had been in the air already, and she had joined it midflow the moment she began. She knew the right words, the correct notes, and the tempo and rhythm and duration and inflection at precisely the moment it came into and left her mouth. She did not remember what she had sung once it was past, nor did she anticipate what she was going to sing. There was no linear progression. She was not following the notes or words as written on a page. She was the song, changing with it each moment.
And the song was beautiful. She knew it was. She knew that nothing else since the world's creation had captured beauty so perfectly in sound. She felt her body pulled and swayed with the ribbons of god talk that eddied around her. They caressed her, tugged at her, pulled away bits of her being and floated them on the air and returned them to her, changed. While she did not control the song, she did infuse it with her intentions. She explained-using the words that came to her unbidden-what she wished, what she asked for, what she needed. She sang this into the song, and she could feel understanding between her and the swirling music grow.
At the point that she felt the impulse to, she lifted her arm, opened her hand, and let the pebble fall into the well, singing the entire time. A breath of heated air surged up from the well, as if the worm creature were coughing itself to life. Corinn took a half step back, steadied herself, and sang through it without faltering. A few moments later, the well sputtered, gurgled, coughed again. She felt a spray of vapor rise out of it and evaporate instantly in the sun. She sang on.
The water, when it finally bubbled out of the hole, was thick with soil. It seeped into the thirsty ground. For a few moments it seemed as if the lip of the hole would drink it all. But soon the water began to roll forward, carrying dirt and ash before it, a stain on the ground that the watchers must have seen clearly. It flowed in all directions. Corinn felt it touch her toes and grab at the hem of her trouser skirt. She kept singing. She heard the merchants exclaiming up on the rim. A Numrek shouted her name, but she kept singing.
