"I take few students," she said, letting her voice drift back to him. "Most of them are children."
"I know," he said. "I was one of them." She turned then, slowly, circling her jeweled walking stick. He remembered her eyes: they had not changed, except possibly to grow more human with age. They fascinated him as a child, their gray so pale they looked luminous, sometimes seeing with alarming clarity, at other times blinded, it seemed, with light. He still found them startling.
"I no longer remember names," she said, frowning slightly. "There were so many of you."
"It doesn't matter. I only came to pay my respects, Magister Iridia. If that would please you."
She turned again, still slender, upright, in gray silk much darker than her eyes. Her hair, which he remembered as pale gold, had grown ivory. She kept it drawn back, coiled and pinned; he remembered her pins, an array of them that changed constantly. She had smiled in those days. Now her face had settled into grave and bitter lines, the expression she found least need to change.
"You have a pleasing voice," she answered, making her stiff and regal way toward her favorite chair. "Tea, Kira."
Seated, she pointed with her stick at a second chair. The dark-eyed Kira, who, a decade or two younger than her mistress, still remembered how to smile, nodded encouragement at him. He glanced around the room as he sat. It was small and quiet, with heavy draperies and carpets. Its furnishings were good but sparse; she kept no signs of her profession in that room except a small brass gong engraved with the chimera of Iridia House breathing fire at a flock of birds. Some of the flock were fleeing the firestorm; others fell, burning and unrecognizable, like bright leaves. A black-lacquered hammer lay beside the gong.
She caught him gazing at the scene on the gong. She said dryly, "A memory. Now, of course, the chimera is just that: a dream of power. Or perhaps I should not say such things to you. But I do not think Pellior House would come to me."
"I have no relatives in Pellior House," he assured her. "I barely have a connection to Berylon itself. I have been away for many years."
"But you were here as a child."
"I was born here," he said. "I came to the Tormalyne School to study with you when I was very young.
Until—" He gestured toward the gong, a movement which seemed to arouse both memory and curiosity in her. Her eyes changed, saw past and present at once.
"So you remember the Basilisk's War." He was silent, waiting. Kira came in, set a tray between them: cracked porcelain cups as delicate as old bones, a pot that seemed nearly transparent with age. Reve poured, handed him a cup, and a lemon wafer that was slowly petrifying. "I had to leave the school because of that," she added, growing unexpectedly reminiscent, trusting him with her past. "For some years I stopped teaching. I hid with one relative or another. Iridia House on the whole fared much better than Tormalyne House, though a decade passed before the family ventured back into Iridia Palace. But I was afraid…"
"Of what?" he asked gently. She lifted her astonishing eyes to his face.
"I had been in love with Arioso Pellior's cousin Demi. We had planned to marry. Then Pellior House tore Berylon apart, and Iridia House chose to fight for Tormalyne House. It was a disastrous alliance. Demi played the lavandre." She took a sip of tea. "We played duets. Until he came to me secretly one night, furious, weeping, cursing my House, cursing his love for me, promising to run away with me in one breath, then swearing fealty to his House in the next. He made me promise to wait for him, until Berylon was peaceful again. He left me his lavandre. I did not see him again for six years, until his wedding day, when he rode in procession through the streets to Marcasia Palace to claim his bride. Then I realized it was safe for me to come out of hiding; no one of Pellior House had any interest in me at all. So I began to teach again."
"Do you still have his lavandre?" he asked after a moment. Again expression changed in her eyes; he glimpsed the ghost of a smile.
"He came for it one day, years after his wedding." She sipped tea. "Now tell me what took you away from Berylon, and what brings you back. Perhaps," she added, musing, "you are Mistas? His hair was dark, I remember."
"No."
"A delicate boy with such big, dark eyes… Talented, too. I don't know what became of him. Did you leave because of the war?"
"During the war, yes. I barely knew what war was, or that there was a world beyond Berylon." He paused; his eyes strayed back to the chimera, the fire, the fleeing birds. "We went north, to a place where no one knew us. This is the first I have seen of Berylon since then."
"And you came back because…?"
He set his cup down carefully on a small table. "I came to seek my fortune. I know that is a younger man's work. But I have nothing to lose. I came to see you because you are among the few things that still remain of my early life here."
"What," she asked curiously, "do you remember?"
"Of you? I remember the pins you wore in your hair. One in particular, shaped like a dragonfly with blue filigreed wings."
She stirred slightly; he heard her frail breath. "Demi gave me that. What else?"
"The room at the Tormalyne School where you taught. The walls were butter-colored marble, and always cold."
"Yes."
"And there were two niches in the walls beside the window. One held flowers, the other a man's head carved of white marble. I have forgotten his name."
She opened her mouth, hesitated. He saw her blink, and then her eyes held his again, too clear for expression, blind, he thought, with light. "His name was Auber Tormalyne." She lifted her cup an inch, set it down without drinking, still gazing at him.
"I used to imagine that his eyes moved when I wasn't looking at him. That he watched me play, having nothing else to do but use his eyes and his ears and his mind."
He heard her breath again, a long sigh; she put cup and saucer on the table, blinking again. "Yes. I remember his face now. Tell me what I taught you. What instrument."
"You taught me several."
"Yes. Which one do you remember most clearly?"
"The bone pipes. You taught me how to hear beyond what is familiar to us. Just because we hear silence, you said, does not mean there is no music. You taught me to play within the registers of silence." She was silent, absolutely still, as he remembered she could be. He added after a moment, "In the north, I learned to play the picochet."
"Ah." She moved slightly, a sigh of silk. "The peasant's voice."
"I learned to love it."
"It became your voice." She stirred again, leaning back in her chair, her tea ignored. She watched him, her eyes half-closed now, hooded. "What will you do in Berylon?"
"I will do what I must. Perhaps you know someone who will help me. Or something."
"Perhaps. Iridia House has recovered from its struggles, but not easily; as you see, I do not live in luxury. You must not expect too much from us."
"I expect nothing," he answered. "But I have learned to do many things. In the north. I learned that if you pick up a stone and lay it on another stone, and lay another stone on that, you will have a wall, and then a room, and then a house. If you have enough strength and enough stones."
"If your stones do not slip and crush you."
"There is always that risk."
"And you came to me—"
"Because you listen to silence. Perhaps you hear what others pay no attention to."
"How could I, living as I do, in these simple rooms, with few but children and Kira to speak with?"
"I came to you," he reminded her. "I don't believe anyone who ever learned from you has forgotten you."
She straightened, reached for her walking stick. The jewel in its knob, catching light as it moved, left a streak of fire in his eyes before her hand closed over it. She pushed herself to her feet.
"Come," she said. "I will show you what I have."
He followed her to a closed door on the other side of the room, half-hidden behind a dark fall of drapery. She opened it. Ag
ain he was surprised by light. The velvet over the long windows had been drawn aside; light burned and winked and slid like satin across the instruments that lay across tables and chairs, hung along the walls, leaned within the window seats. Scrolls and sheets of music were piled in untidy stacks on shelves, on the floor. Some of the instruments were very old, he saw: the horn made out of a massive ivory tusk, patterned with painted eyes around its finger holes; the set of pipes made out of human bones; the gourd rattle with the big bellied, dreaming woman embracing it, becoming it, nearly smudged away.
He saw the picochet leaning against a little, elegant spinet inlaid with scenes of courtly dances. The picochet looked worn. It had been painted once, probably during endless winter evenings; shadowy wolves leaped across the soundboard, vanished into darker wood.
She closed the door behind them, and then slowly, curtain by curtain, shut out the light and muffled the noises from the street below, until they stood in twilight, within the silence of unplayed instruments. She did not bother to light candles. He wondered if she saw catlike in the dark, or if she saw more now with other senses.
She said, "Auber Tormalyne spent some years in the hinterlands; he brought back a collection of very strange instruments, which he gave to the school. Like the picochet, they were viewed as curiosities, generally offensive to the ear, and relegated, at his death, to a storage room, where, after a hundred years, they grew cracked, dusty, and even more difficult to listen to."
"But you listened to them."
"Demi and I found them, once when we were looking for a place where no one would be likely to disturb us. I could not keep my hands off them. Demi grew impatient with me, and left me there, screeching, whistling, drumming—they were like neglected children to me, all crying out for human touch, human breath, crying out silently to be heard. I became all their voices…" He drew breath, soundlessly, he thought, but she heard even that; he felt her regard like a touch. "I taught myself to play them, alone in a musty storage room, stumbling my way through their hearts. They began to speak slowly; I was clumsy with them, I hardly knew what I was doing… There was no one in the school to tell me about them. What I learned, I taught. Not to all of my students, surely. But to a few, a very few. Most of them did not survive the war between the Houses."
"I did."
"Yes… And what did you learn in the north, besides the picochet?"
He picked up a wooden flute, cracked with age, very plain, without a carving or a stain of color on it. "I learned that this flute is played only among women, and only at childbirth or to the dead. Its outward simplicity suggests the humility which the player brings to the playing. The seam of gold hidden within it honors the beauty of its voice."
"Will you play it?"
He shook his head. "I may touch it, but if I play it, I will be haunted by all the dead women who heard it played for them."
She was silent; he could not see the expression on her face. "I didn't know," she said at last, "that it is a woman's instrument. That explains why I have glimpsed only women's faces."
"When?"
"Sometimes when I play it in a dim quiet place, like this. What else?"
He touched the glazed clay drum painted with flowers and with eyes out of his nightmares. "That the spirits of the dead become trapped within this drum. To free them, you must play it until it shatters."
She stood very still, so still that he would not have known she was there but for her voice. "Have you played it?"
"Yes."
"I never knew what to drum with. Wood and metal sounded wrong, glass is too fragile, my hands made no sound—"
"It is played with bone."
"Have I confused the dead with my playing?"
"Very likely."
She moved then, made her frail but unerring way through instruments and ghosts, to find something lying behind the closed curtains on a window seat. In the sudden flick of light, he glimpsed one she did not pick up: a small pipe whose finger holes glowed sullenly in the shadows, from the fires within the bone. He made no sound, he knew, but still she glanced toward him, before she let the curtain fall, as if she heard his thoughts within his silence.
"Can you play these?" She handed him a small set of pipes bound together, the smallest no bigger than his finger and stained red, the others gold. He lifted them to his lips; sounds bloomed out of them, fell gently, like tossed flowers. "No," she said patiently, as if he were still her student. "Not like that."
He gazed at her, wondering at what she had discovered in that forgotten storage room. "Yes," he said finally. "I can play them not like that."
"I played them once for Demi, in the storage room. I stumbled then into their true voice. It was like being very drunk, he said, on music. We dreamed awake, and had the same dreams. The city disappeared around us, the wood swallowed it, the moon rose in the storage room. We swam naked in a river flowing through the floorboards. Strange people or talking animals joined us… We found ourselves back in the storage room at dawn; we were still naked and our heads were wet. We could not find our clothes. We stole magisters' robes out of a closet; Demi ran home barefoot through the waking streets… That was the last time I played them for anyone. Our spirits were trapped in it by war, and he and I did not survive."
"It is ancient. Its voices change with every player, and it is very susceptible to suggestion."
"And if you played it like that?" she asked. "Now?"
He laid it down, very gently, on the spinet; he did not answer. Instead he asked her, "Do you always play these in the dark?"
"Is it?" she asked surprisedly. "I scarcely notice shadows. I can't bear too much light. I see more with my hands and my ears and my memory, these days, than my eyes. I hear the power and the ambiguities in your voice. I saw your face very clearly, when you sat in that chair. In here, in the dark, I can see it even better. I can see it best in your voice."
"Then should I ask you for the instrument I want," he said steadily, "or should I just take it so that you will not know?"
She found his eyes, held them so long he thought she saw through dark and blood and bone into his future. She turned to the spinet, stood with her back to him, pressing one key down softly, again and again, while he walked to the window where what he wanted lay among some yellowing scrolls. He slipped it carefully into his shirt. He could feel it against his heartbeat: a small, warm, deadly secret.
She said then, her head still bowed over the spinet, "That will be the one I could never play. I heard the scrolls shift as you lifted it. Why could I never get one note out of it?"
"Because it only plays one song," he answered. "And in your graceful and courageous life, you have never heard it." She turned then; he caught her fragile hand, lifted it to his lips. "Thank you, Reve Iridia."
"Will I see you again?"
"I hope so. If I play this right."
"Or not at all," she whispered, her hand pushing down across the keys, again and again, as he left. Their jangled protest followed him out, reached him, still warning him as he passed beneath the window, as if her spirit, caught within the notes, would struggle there until he freed them both.
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Chapter Six
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Luna pellior stood on a high tower in Pellior Palace, watching the moon rise over Berylon. It drenched the ancient city with a pearly light; it gazed, with an austere and bone-white eye, down the stone streets, into windows open to catch the faintest brush of night air. In the gardens below, a bird sang to the moon among the orange trees. She waited for Brio Hood. He came silently, but she heard him before he wanted her to. His shadow, she might have told him, brushed too carelessly across stone. Still, she did not move before he spoke. Then she turned, smiling at him, the brittle collection of bone and cold shriveled thought that no one ever noticed, even after it was too late.
He bowed, then raised his head, his eyes steady as a hunting animal's on her face. He
seemed not quite human; she wondered, now and then, if her father had made him in his secret chamber. But there were those who wondered that about her: her father's golden other, the self he had fashioned to take his place when he tired of his own body. His apprentice, his mistress of mysterious arts, his muse.
"She is nowhere," Brio said.
"Then my rose killed her."
"No one dead came in or out of the tavern. No weeping, no black ribbons at the door. Nothing. She is gone. There is some wizened creature who hardly speaks, to serve there in her place."
"How strange. Maybe I accidently turned her into something else. I need to know, Brio, if I did as my father told me. Or if I made mistakes. He won't be pleased with me if she is still alive. And Taur won't say. He holds yes and no in his mouth like jewels; he won't swallow one or spit out the other."
McKillip, Patricia A. - Song for the Basilisk Page 12
