by Tanya Huff
“I was twelve then.” Jelena glanced up, met his gaze for an instant, and returned her attention back to her slippers. “I’m over fourteen now.”
“What was it you wanted, Onele?” Theron asked, taking pity on his granddaughter.
“It’s not important, Father. It can wait until tomorrow.” The Heir herded her daughter back out into the hall. “As I said, I didn’t realize you had a guest. Good night, Gerek.”
He bowed again. “Good night, Highness.”
“I think we can take it as read that Jelena still has that crush on you,” the king mused. “I had hoped she’d outgrown it in the interim.”
“I would never take advantage, Majesty.”
“Don’t be an idiot. Of course you wouldn’t.”
When he was gone, Theron shook his head. “I’m getting old, my dear. I forgot to warn him about looking into the assassin’s eyes. Suppose this Gyhard decides to leap into his body?”
“I’m sure Magda will warn him. And if not, Gerek’s obviously made himself familiar with the situation. He’s a smart young man. He’ll be fine.”
* * * *
*I don’t like him.*
*Why not?*
*Isn’t it obvious? He likes you too well.*
Vree turned to look at Gerek, who stood smiling down at his sister as she told him for the eighth time that afternoon just how much she didn’t want him around. *Obvious?*
*He’s continually staring longingly into your eyes. When you look like he does, you know how effective that can be.* If he’d had teeth, he’d have ground them. As it was, Vree felt a muscle tighten in her jaw. *Remember, I can feel your response.*
*Look at him; a corpse would respond.* Which was as much reassurance as she was going to give. Bannon had needed to be told constantly he was the center of her world and she had no intention of setting that up again. Either Gyhard trusted her, or he didn’t. *It seems like he’s getting to you more than he’s getting to me.*
Watching Gerek through Vree’s eyes, Gyhard wished he could jump across one of those longing looks and throw the arrogant little shit right out of his body. You just pray, he thought, shielding it carefully, that I never manage to convince Vree just how perfectly your body would fit me because all it would take is one little shove.
Six
The Imperial Ambassador stared down at the golden sunburst sealing the parchment package that had, moments before, been placed on his desk. “Didn’t I just receive one of these?” he asked the empty office. When no answer was forthcoming, he sighed and rubbed at throbbing temples with his fingertips. Two messages directly from His Imperial Majesty during the same quarter were unprecedented during his tenure as ambassador. That it had been sent up the coast on one of the sleek little ships kept for moments of extreme diplomacy did not reassure him in the least.
Muttering “Fear, fire, flood,” under his breath, he reached for a horn letter opener and slid the blade beneath the seal.
His Royal Highness Prince Otavas will be arriving in Elbasan shortly on the Imperial Navy vessel, Deliverance.
The rest of the package primarily contained lists of the prince’s preferences in food and drink and accommodation.
“Will be arriving shortly? Oh, that’s useful.” Shaking his head, he stood, scooped up the papers, and headed for the door. One of his attaches—a career civil servant as opposed to the distant Imperial cousins who made up most of the rest of his staff—fell into step beside him as he left the room.
“His Royal Highness Prince Otavas will be arriving in Elbasan shortly,” he said as they moved together down the hall. The attaché turned enough to see the ambassador’s face. “Shortly?” she asked.
“Funny, that was my response. I’m on my way to inform Their Majesties—if I change quickly, I can catch the end of the morning audience. You take care of things here and see about the status of our suite at the palace—I’ll need to be accessible to him. And find a reasonably responsible translator close to his own age. I don’t imagine he speaks much Shkoden. He’s traveling by sea, but I’ll let King Theron’s people deal with the Harbor Master. The last time I tried, I very nearly disrupted trade all up and down the coast.”
“Hardly that bad, sir.”
“You weren’t there, Tysia.” He threw her a smile as he turned down the corridor leading to his private apartments. “You weren’t there.”
A few moments later, as his valet hurriedly dressed him in official robes, he pondered the implications of the sudden visit and began to work out how best to use it to the Empire’s advantage. If he were very lucky, when the prince arrived, he might be informed exactly why His Imperial Majesty had decided to so abruptly send his youngest son to Shkoder.
And if not, he sighed silently, lifting his arms so that the folds of the saffron undertunic could be adjusted, it might be best to keep King Theron’s sentiments in mind and remember that nothing coming out of the Empire is ever exactly what it seems.
* * * *
On one knee, both hands pressed against the earth, Jazep stared through the trees at the cluster of buildings. The extended families who made up the settlement called it Fortune, after what they hoped to take out of the silver mine they jointly worked. He hadn’t been here for about six years but, by risking a light trance, he could touch the recall and compare it with what he could see.
Although a few small cottages had been built, it appeared that most of the people continued to live communally—a sensible way to conserve heat during the long, hard mountain winters. The kitchens should have been busy with the preparation of the evening meal, but no smoke rose from any chimney. The only sound he could hear was the high, thin crying of an unhappy baby.
Jazep closed his eyes for a heartbeat and fought with the still, small voice in his head that told him to leave as quickly as he could, to not face this thing alone. He’d been walking without kigh since dawn; the earth had been as empty of their presence as the settlement was of visible life. Without their guidance, he’d spent the day feeling crippled and lost but kept continually moving in the direction all his senses told him to stay away from. Whatever it was he followed, it had to be stopped.
Now, it seemed he’d finally caught up to it. Until this moment, his greatest horror had been the thought of another emptied grave and a kigh brutalized as Filip’s had been, but as he lifted his eyes to a flock of buzzards circling the buildings, he began to realize the terrifying possibilities.
Had there been kigh, they would have warned him he was no longer alone.
A strong arm wrapped around Jazep’s chest and callused hand clamped tightly over his mouth. After the initial, involuntary jerk, he twisted enough to find himself staring into the frightened face of a pale young man.
Bard? The young man mouthed, hope beginning to dawn.
Jazep nodded.
Be quiet. When Jazep nodded again, he removed both hand and arm and stood. He stared, wide-eyed, as Jazep rose and shrugged back into his pack, then he motioned for the bard to follow.
The woman waiting at the makeshift shelter lowered her club and sagged against a tree as the two men came out of the underbrush. “I thought they had you,” she whispered, relief not quite enough to banish the fear. “I thought they had you.”
“Evicka, he’s a bard.” The young man crossed the clearing and took hold of her shoulders. “A bard!”
Evicka straightened and looked past him to Jazep. Her face began to lighten with a sudden incredulous joy; then, just as quickly, the shadows returned. “A bard,” she repeated. “What is one bard going to do?”
“What does he have to do?” Jazep asked quietly.
* * * *
“The old man wandered in yesterday morning. I never thought anything that old could be alive.” She pushed her hair back off her face and laughed bitterly. “Maybe it can’t. Anyway, he came and we fed him and sat him in the sun because, well, we’re all enclosed in the Circle, aren’t we?” Again the bitter laugh. The young man reached out and closed his hand ar
ound her arm. She covered it with her own and went on. “Johan had taken down one of the deer that’s been stripping our gardens, a big buck, so tough they practically needed the picks to take it apart, but after long enough in the pot, well, anything tenders up and it was venison stew for last night’s meal. Everyone ate in the big hall—stupid to let that kind of bounty go to waste and with a dozen cousins off to Bicaz with a load of ore there was lots to go around—but me and Krisus had just been joined a few days and well, we were in one of the cottages. We didn’t eat any of the stew.
“About full dark, they woke us up. Everyone was sick. First the old and the young, then everyone else. By the turn of the night, six people were dead. A couple hours later …” She paused and swiped at her eyes. “… everyone.”
“We thought at first the meat had been diseased.” Krisus took up the tale when Evicka fell silent. “The only ones in the whole place who weren’t sick were us and Amalia’s baby—she’s still on the tit. Even Great-grandfather had a bowl of the broth. There wasn’t anything we could do. We don’t have a healer.”
Evicka spread her hands. “We just watched them die. Then …” She shook her head and tried again. “Then …”
Jazep thought he understood the terror that kept her from going on. “Then you watched them live again?”
Two pairs of shadowed eyes locked onto his face. “How did you know?”
He couldn’t tell which of them had spoken. Maybe they both had. “I’ve been following the thing that did it, trying to stop it before …”
“Too late.” Hysteria hovered around the edges of Evicka’s interruption. “And it isn’t a thing, it’s the old man. And he Sings. We heard him.”
“Sings?”
“Yeah, like a bard. He took hold of my brother’s hand, my brother’s dead hand, ’cause I’m telling you I watched Justyn die, and he Sang, and my brother came back. Or at least part of him did.”
… and he Sang …
Jazep scrambled to his feet and made it to the edge of the clearing before expelling the contents of his knotted stomach all over a bush. He retched until there was nothing left and then he retched some more. When he finally straightened, they were both watching him blankly; their concern had been used up on greater things and nothing remained for a bard who’d just realized he’d been following not a thing, but an old man—an old bard.
Wiping his beard on the back of his hand, Jazep turned and murmured, “How many?”
“Don’t know. We ran. You couldn’t stay around them.”
As far as we know,” Evicka said, shoulders hunched against a chill only she could feel, “we’re the only survivors. Us and Amalia’s baby—and we’re not going nowhere without her.”
“Except we can’t go back. We’ve tried, but we always end up going around, finding ourselves on the other side without knowing how we got there. It’s like your head was pushing you aside from something, something it doesn’t want you to see.”
Jazep stared at them in amazement. At the moment, they were the bravest people he’d ever met. “You tried to go back?”
“We aren’t going nowhere without Amalia’s baby,” Evicka repeated, then her lower lip started to tremble and her eyes filled with tears. “But she’s been alone all night and all day and we can’t get to her and she’s just three months old and she’s probably dead by now, too.”
“She’s alive.” Jazep used just enough Voice to leave no room for doubt. Evicka, wrapped in Krisus’ arms, looked up. “I heard her crying. She’s not happy, but she’s alive.”
“But we can’t get to her.”
“I can.” Trembling with anger and fear combined, he knelt and began unbuckling his instrument case.
* * * *
“This is as close as you can get before your head starts pushing you away.” Evicka’s fingers dug into Jazep’s arm. “What are you going to do?”
He settled the drones on his shoulder. “First I’m going to get their attention, then I’m going to Sing the dead to rest.”
“All of them? All at once?”
“Yes.” There were times when Jazep felt limited Singing only a single quarter, but this wasn’t one of those times. All his life, he’d followed where the earth had led, and the earth kigh were tied to the turning of the Circle in unmistakable ways. When the old man had Sung the kigh back into the dead of Fortune, he’d ripped them out of the Circle. They were lost, like Filip’s kigh had been, and like Filip’s kigh they needed to be shown the way home.
And then; then he’d deal with the old man.
“Deal how?” asked a little voice in his head.
He didn’t have an answer, so he ignored it. “I want you two to stay out here until I stop Singing. We know the old man is dangerous so let me take care of him before you move in.”
Krisus shifted in place defensively, wanting to be the one who rode to the rescue and, in spite of himself, resenting the bard for being able to do what he couldn’t. “What are you going to do? Sing to him?”
Sing to him … The old man was as much out of the Circle as the dead he abused. Perhaps … Jazep reached out, took hold of the idea, and gathered it close. Perhaps the old man, too, was lost.
“Yes,” he said gently, as fear and anger fled to be replaced by sorrow so overwhelming his knees nearly buckled beneath its weight. “That’s exactly what I’m going to do. I’m going to Sing to him.”
The late afternoon sun threw long shadows through Fortune as Jazep walked out from under the cover of the trees and onto the rutted track. He felt as though he were pushing against an invisible wall; each step requiring more effort than the one before.
I know the path, he told the wall, fingers moving purposefully up and down the chanter, blowpipe clamped between his lips. You cannot keep me from following it. The walking dead are to be pitied, not feared.
The resistance ceased so suddenly, he stumbled and nearly fell. Both Krisus and Evicka had described their failure to approach the settlement as having had their heads push them aside. It was personal horror and disbelief that had to be overcome, Jazep realized, living kigh simply preferred not to deal with the dead returned.
He would have preferred not to deal with it himself, preferred that whatever it was that had driven the old man so far out of the Circle had never occurred but, as it had, he had no choice.
The call of the pipes rose up into the unnaturally quiet air and, as the bard followed the track between the first two outbuildings, the dead began to answer.
Filip had been crushed in a rock fall and buried three long days in the heat of Second Quarter. The people of Fortune had been poisoned and so it was harder to see the seven drawn, one by one, through the door of the largest building as dead. They moved with a careful deliberation, as though they’d had to relearn the use of arms and legs and they wore identical blank expressions that would, Jazep assumed, grow more identical as death began to wipe away physical differences.
Why these seven had been chosen out of all the poisoned dead, he had no idea.
He could feel their kigh, confused and frightened. Although they hadn’t wanted to die, neither had they wanted to return, thrust back into shells of lifeless flesh. Jazep felt no terror, only the pity he’d earlier assumed. The thought of the desperate loneliness that would allow the old man to commit such an injustice, to drag other lives so brutally out of the Circle, nearly broke his heart.
Spitting out the blowpipe, he took a deep breath and began to Sing. His voice, deep and resonant, filled the spaces between the buildings and gently covered the dead. He Sang of their life the way it had been, drawing on the recall of his last visit, adding to it the story Krisus and Evicka had told. He redefined the individual paths of their lives and then he walked them to the one path all life followed around the Circle and he Sang them home. It was so very simple, it was the most powerful Song he’d ever Sung.
One by one the bodies began to fall as each kigh took up its journey, once again.
As the afternoon deepened i
nto dusk, the last of the walking dead remained standing above the empty husks of her companions. Jazep could feel her kigh being torn, needing to go, needing to stay, and he paused in his Song to better listen to hers.
Had he not been a bard, he might have missed the baby’s cry; it had grown so weak and faint it barely made it out of the building. The woman turned toward the cry, stretching out a graying hand. When she turned back to Jazep, her face as expressionless as before but her pain impossible to mistake, he Sang of how Evicka and Krisus had overcome their fear for her baby’s sake, that although she couldn’t stay, her baby would never lack for love or protection.
The dead cannot cry, but her kigh wailed its sorrow as it fled and her body faced her baby when it fell.
Tears streaming down his face and into his beard, Jazep Sang the Circle’s welcome. He could feel its comfort enclosing him and had to force himself to put that comfort aside. Shaking himself vigorously, feeling as though he’d just emerged from a trance state deeper than any he’d ever reached before, he let the Song trail off to silence.
There were still no earth kigh about, but he could deal with the implications of that later. Before he did anything else, he had to get to that baby.
He’d taken only a single step when he saw the bent and ancient figure emerge from the shadows. He’d thought, when Evicka had said she hadn’t believed anything so old could live, it was merely youth defining the parameters of old. He was wrong. Although the old man was alive, his kigh was somehow as trapped as the kigh of those he’d killed to hold.
Their eyes met over the distance. The old man’s face was wet and twisted with longing. Much as the young woman had reached for her child, Jazep stretched out his hand toward him and opened his mouth to Sing again.
*NO! NO! NO!*
It slammed into his awareness, a kigh too far gone in insanity to reach.
Not the old man’s kigh.
Then who?
Jazep screamed, felt muscles tear as his back arched impossibly far. He clawed at the air as the attacking kigh clawed his spirit. Red and black waves of pain ripped through his head. Worse than his pain was the pain of the other kigh. He could feel every tortured nuance tearing through him again and again and again.
