The Stone Knife

by Anna Stephens

  Lilla pushed him into the mud again and an arrow whickered by overhead. ‘Stay,’ he growled and was gone, lunging into the blackness. Tayan lay on the trail for a frenzied eternity as screams and curses and thumps shattered around him, and then he rolled onto his hands and knees. He couldn’t just stay here. He’d find Lilla.

  Someone grabbed him around the neck before he’d moved far and he swung blindly at them. ‘It’s me. Lutek. Follow me and stay low.’

  A body dropped next to him, coughing and clawing at the dart sticking out of their throat. An awful bubbling scream shuddered out of them and Tayan jerked forwards on instinct. He was a shaman; he could help.

  Lutek grabbed a fistful of his grubby tunic and dragged him backwards. ‘Now,’ she growled in his ear. ‘Fang’s orders.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Lilla says to get you out. So move.’

  ‘Where is he? Is he all right?’ Tayan babbled, struggling. Lutek transferred her grip to around his chest and wrestled him away. Into the night. Into the black.

  Away from Lilla.

  ENET

  The source, Singing City, Pechacan, Empire of Songs

  194th day of the Great Star at morning

  Everything she’d read indicated the song would only need blooding very infrequently, anywhere from once a year to every few months, only collapsing into discordance when another offering was needed to strengthen it.

  Between offerings, the song would roar triumphant, filling its people with might and determination. It would strengthen the Melody marching to war; it would increase the loyalty of the slaves and the reverence they held for every Pecha. The song would increase crop yields and prevent blight and disease. The blooded song would make the Empire invincible and with that might Enet could hasten the waking of the world spirit. All the books said it.

  The books were full of shit.

  A mere three weeks since the Singer had blooded the song and already it was growing dissonant. Hungry.

  Perhaps it was only the Singer’s anger. The news from the north was uncomfortable – despite the reinforcements Pilos had authorised from Xentiban, the Empire continued to lose territory and building materials and slaves in Yalotlan. The Singer was keeping as close an eye on the calendar as she was, keen to see whether the Tokob peace-weaver’s guarantee of surrender would prove true. Enet knew it would not.

  She hadn’t let Tayan leave because she’d believed his little story. She’d sent him away because he’d asked her to confide in him – and the temptation had nearly overwhelmed her. To confess everything she’d done, everything she was working towards, to this pretty enemy shaman. An unburdening she could not possibly afford, but that she craved nonetheless.

  The High Feather promised the Melody would be ready to set out by the date the Singer had divined as auspicious, but until then, they were being beaten, and the holy lord was ill pleased. He twitched and half turned towards her as they walked in the gardens on the pyramid, and Enet projected thoughts of humility and love, clearing her mind of all else.

  It wasn’t enough. Xac roared at the choir standing in the opening to the source. They stuttered into shocked silence, and then fled. Enet knelt among the flowers and put her forehead in the dirt. Singer Xac did not want beauty; he did not want charm or clever excuses. He wanted blood and death and retribution. He wanted to take up club and spear and go to war himself, spilling his own divine blood. Dying to save the holy Setatmeh, the living past, was a price he would pay without thought and his intentions rose like steam from his skin.

  But he couldn’t. All he had was his song – and it was not enough. Unless it was blooded again.

  The song deepened into a mourning dirge, a weight in the hearts and spirits of all who heard it. It spoke of formless, nameless catastrophe and the dread it instilled might feed rebellion among the slaves, spark unrest among the rival families vying to be the next to put forward a candidate for Singer, take the spines from the warriors marching to Yalotlan. The strength she had given it – had given the Singer – was already fading.

  It should not be like this. Not this soon.

  ‘Holy lord, the song …’ Enet began, speaking to the flowers beneath her face. ‘It will worry your people.’

  Xac stamped through the garden until he loomed over her like a storm front. ‘Let it. Let them know my fury. I am their Singer and they will rage when I tell them to fucking rage. Mourn when I tell them to mourn.’ He bent and latched a big hand around Enet’s slender throat, dragging her up onto her toes.

  ‘You wove your stories about enemies in the council, about how Pilos could not be trusted. You warned me to beware Yana.’ He shook her so hard she had to cling to his arm to stay upright, her teeth clicking together. ‘Yet you did not see how the peace-weavers distracted you while they planned to capture one of my kin for torture! Blinded by your own ambition.’

  ‘Holy lord,’ she tried.

  ‘What have you done for me that was not also for yourself?’ he mused. ‘You tell me to beware Pilos when he is the only one of my Spears to do my bidding for my glory, not his own.’

  He hurled Enet through the colonnade into the source. The air in the room flexed, the walls seeming to contract in and then bow back out, struggling to contain his power. The song’s tone changed again, a warning and a promise, and both were full of blood.

  He wanted. The songstone wanted.

  The pale, crystal-flecked stone was the truth and foundation of all life, the very stuff of creation put in the earth by the world spirit. And the Singers were its children, its protectors and the living manifestation of divinity to which all aspired. To sing with the voice of songstone was to sing with the voices of the gods. To be gods.

  And yet our gods can die. Plans can be laid to capture and torture them. Tokob can march down to their fucking river and kill them. Their magic is powerful. Perhaps even enough to rival the Singer’s.

  Enet lay in a tangle of limbs, gasping, but over her own voice she heard a thin keening wail. Panic flooded her and she lunged upwards. Pikte was cowering near the entrance to the source, fists up to his cheeks at the sight of Enet sprawled and – she realised belatedly – bleeding. The boy’s pet monkey screeched on the end of its tether. Enet shooed Pikte out, but the Singer crossed the space between them in a few long strides and snatched him by the arm.

  ‘What are you doing in here?’ he yelled. Pikte only cried harder; life for children of the Singer was pleasant, luxurious. It did not include screams or violence or their mothers being thrown across rooms.

  ‘I’ll take him away, holy lord,’ Enet said as the panic tightened her throat. The Singer grabbed the monkey and snapped its neck, and the boy screamed as if his own body had been broken. Xac raised his hand to him and Enet leapt up, dragging at his arm. The blow that had been meant for her son was loosed on her. She hit the rugs again, her head ringing and her cheek a hot, swollen agony.

  Hauling Pikte by one arm, the Singer crossed to where she lay and squatted, examining her features. She shrank away from him and he flushed in pleasure at her fright, and so she forced herself upright and reached for Pikte’s other arm. ‘Hush, boy. Hush now.’ She licked blood from her teeth, tasting the last of the grit from her tonic – her own magic – against her tongue. It was powerless against the holy lord’s might.

  For now.

  ‘You think me a fucking fool, blinded by the delights between your legs?’ the Singer shouted, wrenching the boy out of her grip. Xac spat in her face and she snarled, fury of her own rising to match his. She was his chief courtesan and mother of his eldest song-born. She was Spear and Great Octave. He had no right to treat her so.

  This is what scheming brings you to, whispered a voice in her head. She quelled it savagely. She could still save this; save everything. Save the Empire of Songs, which was her true and only desire—

  ‘You have steered me false ever since I took the song inside me,’ the Singer said abruptly, tiny glimmers of gold sparking in his skin as the magic
and the song swelled with his anger. ‘I have no intention of naming you my heir, and as of now not even of naming you as one who will ascend with me. You are nothing but a body to enjoy and one that has produced only a single child.’ He shook Pikte hard. ‘A snivelling little shit that is as much use as a Tlaloxqueh vision-dancer. Your mind is weak and the boy you produced is worse.’

  ‘I have not—’ she began, disbelief coating her words. Where was this coming from? How could the firm ground of her status be so suddenly treacherous? Pikte was sobbing and she reached for him on instinct; Xac pulled him against his side, away from her. Taking him from her. ‘I have given you something no one else would. No one else could,’ she said, almost begging. ‘I have done it for you, only you, so that your power knows no limits and your glory will span the world.’

  Enet poured belief and sincerity into her words and into her mind. She believed this. She believed it and he would read nothing different in her.

  Her words were smoke in the breeze, drifting past the Singer and making no impression. ‘I rescind the status of Great Octave from you. There will be no limit put on my power, no leaching away of my authority into the hands of the incompetent and the greedy. No more lies whispered in my ears from your lovely mouth. I rescind the status of Spear of the City from you and name Yana in that place. At least he works for me and not himself.’ Xac’s great muscled chest ran with sweat. Pikte’s sobs subsided to whimpers, his eyes squeezed shut and the flesh of his arm crushed and bruising under his father’s grip.

  ‘Holy lord,’ Enet choked, collapsing to prostrate herself.

  But the Singer wasn’t finished. ‘You are banished from my circle and from my sleeping mat. The boy is cast out. He is no longer song-born. No longer my son. And if you breathe one more word in defence of yourself or of him I will send you to join him. I will seize all your property and cast you onto the street for the Choosers and the beggars to fight over. But not before I ensure you’re not pretty enough to tempt anyone into taking you into their home.’

  Three Chorus warriors stood guard around the source, their usual impassivity vanished as they stared at the scene with shared expressions of horror: Enet was their patron; her fall from grace would be theirs if she so chose.

  Enet could barely breathe, crushed beneath the weight of his pronouncement. With his words she had lost everything, and the work of twenty sun-years, work that had begun long before Xac was made Singer, was undone. She looked at Pikte, at his wide eyes glazed with incomprehension and his smooth, soft skin.

  He would not survive on the streets for more than a day, and although it was a crime to sell Pechaqueh into slavery, there were those who would risk the city’s wrath to have and to break a boy so tender. She swallowed her tears, for they would frighten him, and she made her heart into stone.

  Everything I do, everything I am, is for the Empire of Songs. I am a tool of the holy Setatmeh, honed and working to awaken the world spirit. It is my sole purpose.

  A sob broke from her throat as Enet rose onto her knees, reached behind her back and withdrew a sheathed knife from the waistband of her kilt. A blade of pale quartz; a hilt carved from the leg bone of a jaguar. Sacred and magical and obscene.

  As the song had begun to grow in hunger and the Singer in aggression, she’d taken to bringing it with her, praying it would never be needed but unwilling to risk his wrath if it was. And here, now, in the darkest and cruellest of circumstances, when the very Empire hung by the thread of Enet’s fraying power, it was needed.

  Xac stiffened.

  ‘Upon your word, I have no status among your council or within the source. I do not raise my voice in protest but offer you the stone knife for your glory. Do not take Pikte from me.’ Enet splayed her left hand on the mat and drove the blade down before she could change her mind. The quartz edge bit into her little finger and she let out a hoarse scream, working it back and forth in the joint, severing muscle and tendon, popping apart the bones with a wet crack, pain like lightning arcing all the way up her arm to her shoulder, into her neck. Sweat ran down her cheek and she screamed again as she focused on the hand – not my hand, not mine – and kept cutting until her finger was severed at the middle knuckle.

  She blinked against sweat and tears, snorting through her nose and packing the screams back inside with the pain, and then met Xac’s dumbfounded gaze. Pikte was shrieking and writhing in the Singer’s grip. Would it be enough? The song thrummed with darkness, a bloody need unsated by her pain. Enet looked at her hand and wondered if she had the strength to take another finger. The Singer has that strength and he can have them all if I can have my boy.

  Shuddering, Enet stared at her blood so bright against the pale stone blade. Then she held it out to the holy lord. ‘Spare my son and I gift you my—’

  ‘Not one word or you join him,’ the Singer repeated, excited now. Calculating. His strange amber eyes, product of the magic, glowed almost like a jaguar’s in the dark.

  And yet there was nothing but emptiness in his expression. Emptiness and a terrible hunger that Enet knew, like a twist of a knife in her heart, that she had put there. And it was her fault, just not in the way he thought. She had blooded the song. Now she could do nothing but drink deep of its crimson depths and pray not to drown.

  Enet looked at Pikte and another scream threatened, one that had nothing to do with the bleeding stump of her finger. ‘Please,’ she breathed, too low for him to hear. ‘Don’t.’

  ‘Choose, senior Chooser of the Singing City,’ Xac mocked her. ‘Choose what happens next.’

  Don’t.

  ‘Choose,’ he hissed suddenly and she jumped. Jumped – and chose.

  Enet shuddered, dizzy with pain and cowering at the promise of more to come, pain such as she’d never known and that would never leave her.

  For the Empire.

  ‘You have cast out our son. He will live and die unknown and unmourned.’ She sobbed out breath, sobbed out her heart and her spirit and cast them to the Underworld. ‘I do not raise my voice in protest but offer you the stone knife.’ The ritual words were obscene upon her tongue as she made a tiny, innocent-seeming gesture with the tip of the blade.

  She could not save Pikte. Whether on the streets or here in the source, he was already dead. But she had this chance to save herself and so elevate the Empire into glory brighter than it had ever known. To do the unthinkable in order to reap the unimaginable.

  If she would offer the Singer even this, how could he cast her aside? No other would feed his spirit this way. Only Enet. Only his beloved Enet.

  ‘Nothing you do is wrong, holy lord,’ she whispered as the song began to swell and in her cowardice she did not look at Pikte’s tear-stained face. ‘You are the Singer. You are divine. And I offer you the stone knife.’

  He’s dead anyway. Dead anyway dead anyway dead anyway.

  There had never been anything Enet would not do for the Empire, for the glory of them all and not just herself. For the world spirit. But never had she been pushed so far; never had her choice been so difficult, or felt so wrong despite being right.

  Setatmeh, please. Setatmeh, tell me this is right.

  The Singer snatched the knife from her and she flinched. His power made her dizzy, squashed her to the size of an ant beneath his gaze. ‘Nothing you do or desire is wrong, holy lord.’ The words were foul on her tongue.

  ‘And if I ram this into your eye?’ he breathed. The song rumbled in the background, the lust inside it building.

  Enet swallowed. Do it. Do it and leave my boy alone. Do it. ‘Then I will watch your greatness through the other.’

  The Singer hefted the knife and Enet tensed against the promise of pain. Power surged through the source until the air crackled as if with pent lightning and Xac’s skin flushed golden-red with magic and he tightened his grip on the boy’s arm until Pikte howled, a howl abruptly cut off by the blade crunching through his bird-delicate ribcage and into a lung.

  Enet screamed as her son’s bl
ood splashed her kilt, as agony sank its fangs deep into her heart.

  Her breath shuddered out as rage, lust, hate, and sheer fucking joy boiled along her nerve endings, as the song flexed and her son’s father plunged the knife back into the little body she’d strained to birth, into the soft undulating belly this time. She screamed again, but still it grew, the power, the need, and the release, towering above them all like a mountain and crushing Enet’s grief into nothing, compacting it down small and hard until it was diamond.

  The song roared upwards as it had done with Betsu, and the Singer stabbed again and again, grunts of ecstasy throbbing from his mouth as red, red, red blood poured over his hands, hot and sticky. So much blood in such a small body and every drop of it was wrung from Enet’s own heart; every drop was a knife that flayed her until she was raw.

  Coward that she was, she let go of the diamond of her grief and threw herself headlong into the song until it engulfed her, swallowing any emotion other than those the Singer projected, hiding from the pain behind his lust. She reached out and dipped her palm into the crimson, this last vital remnant of her child. She smeared it across her face and then across the Singer’s, marking them both in their son’s death and life. Hoarse wails tore from her throat.

  Xac reared back in surprise, blinking at the stickiness on his eyelashes, and then he roared his satisfaction and stabbed the stone knife in again and again until the boy was meat and the song careened out of control all across the Empire.

  The Singer lusted, the song lusted, and Enet could do nothing more than exist within that lust. Inside her, the diamond burnt – as it would forever. Her diamond child.

  ‘The song needs this,’ the Singer said when he finally cast the knife to one side and reached bloody hands for her, pulling her onto him. Sickened at his need and her own, Enet took him into her with a sodden, hateful cry of black satisfaction.

  ‘The song needs blood and war. I know this; I know the song. I know what it needs: I and no other. And if the council and the Chorus don’t fucking like it, they can join the boy in death, to my glory.’ He squeezed the stump of Enet’s missing finger, making her scream until fresh tears streaked the gory mask of her face.