Song for the Basilisk

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “So they will kill you, if they find you,” Caladrius said grimly. “They will let me watch.”

  Hollis turned to him, his face blanched, startled. “Why is he killing old men?”

  “He is obliterating Tormalyne House. Anyone with a ghost’s connection to the House. Anyone who spoke the name once forty years ago. Anyone who thought it—”

  “Even the magisters?” Hollis asked incredulously.

  “Everyone.”

  Hollis was silent. He eased away from the curtains finally, leaned back against a stall leg. His eyes were hidden, but Caladrius felt his thoughts, heard them, a high, mad, distant piping like the keening of wind over a barren world. He felt it in himself, his own bones singing, trying to shape something other than bone. The raven looked out of his eyes, night black and still, called through his thoughts in its own harsh language to the dead.

  “What do we do?” Hollis asked. His eyes, meeting Caladrius’s finally, held an odd, brief reflection of fire, as if the music smoldering in him had flared. Caladrius swallowed a raven’s word, feeling a claw of sorrow enclose his heart. “The music failed, in there. It was not strong enough against him.”

  “It would have killed him,” Caladrius said succinctly. “It was not strong enough against Luna Pellior.”

  Hollis blinked. “Luna. She didn’t—”

  “She pulled those basilisks out of stone. And now she knows your face. Above everything, I wanted to keep you safe.”

  “You could have told me what you were going to do,” Hollis protested. “What you were thinking. That you were planning to die in the middle of Giulia’s opera.”

  “You could have told me.”

  Hollis shook his head, still amazed. “I didn’t think it would work. I knew the tale. But I didn’t know it was true. I thought if it didn’t work, no one would notice another pipe in all the music. And if it did—”

  “Then they would kill you instead of me. You thought I would stand there idly and let that happen.”

  “I didn’t—I wasn’t thinking, beyond that. I just saw the pipe and took it to kill a basilisk.”

  “Yes,” Caladrius breathed. “So did I.” He wished suddenly, intensely, for Hollis to be far, far away, bored and safe in some land baron’s court. “I always thought you took after your mother instead.”

  “How could you think anything else?” Hollis asked reasonably. “You never knew my father before.”

  “Where did you find that pipe?” his father asked.

  “In the music school. There’s a storage room full of odd instruments somebody brought out of the hinterlands.”

  “Auber Tormalyne.” Caladrius mused a moment. Hollis watched him, toying with a puppet with wings and a lion’s face partially crushed under a fleeing boot.

  He said tentatively, following Caladrius’s thoughts, “It’s a source of power, the hinterlands. So the tales say. But there’s no time to learn. And they’ll look for you in the music school.”

  “They’ll look for me everywhere. I learned to play a few things…With all the visitors roaming the streets and those of Tormalyne House fleeing their own houses, it will be easier to move among them. We should separate, though.”

  “No.”

  Caladrius yielded reluctantly. “No.”

  “We made a monster to kill a monster and that failed,” Hollis pointed out. “What other kind of music is there to use against him?”

  “I’ll find out.”

  “According to the tale, there is no other music we can play now. No other song.”

  “Then that,” Caladrius said evenly, “is the song that I will play.”

  “What about her? The basilisk’s powerful daughter? Do we kill his children, too?”

  Caladrius’s mouth tightened; he looked away, evading the answer, evading memory. He did not evade Luna, who stood in his thoughts, building her tiny, golden cage to trap a bird in it, leaving the mirror for him to see himself. He spoke finally, softly. “She knew my name.”

  “Griffin Tormalyne?”

  “That, too, very likely. She understood the name Caladrius. She knew why I had come there.” He paused, seeing again her brilliant, ambiguous smile, her secret eyes. “She could have killed either of us,” he said, struck, and oddly surprised. “She knew me and she let me leave. She attacked the basilisk instead.”

  He heard the guards then, gathering across the street. They waited, silent, motionless, but the guards did not sweep through the square again. They would wait for night, Caladrius guessed, and seize whatever prey the stalls lured into them. The guards scattered again, in groups down side streets and alleys. There was a low, wordless mutter, at once strange and familiar. And then light fingers tapped against the cloth.

  “Rain,” Caladrius said, amazed by it in that city of stone and light.

  “We can’t stay here,” Hollis said tersely. “They’ll search again and drag us out of here like caged hares. But where can we go?”

  “Wait until dusk. I know someone…”

  She received them without surprise, out of the dark and grieving streets, her eyes silvery as the moon, and as opaque. “Reve Iridia,” Caladrius said, dripping and weary at her threshold. “My son Hollis.”

  She gestured. They entered; Kira closed the door quickly behind them. “I heard,” she said, “you played a song for the Basilisk.”

  “They are searching for us everywhere,” Caladrius warned her.

  “I know that, too,” she answered calmly. “You played my fire-bone pipe for Arioso Pellior. He did not die, but neither did you. And now Berylon is again at war with itself.”

  “Only with my House.”

  “But the other Houses watch for their moment…Brandy, Kira. And supper for them.” She turned her lucent gaze to Hollis suddenly. “You played, too,” she breathed. “I hear it in you. So that is why you failed. You played for one another, for life instead of death.” They were both silent, staring at her. She turned away, tapped herself to her chair. “That’s what I hear,” she added, seating herself. “Sit down.”

  “We dare not stay. For your sake.”

  “You can stay long enough to eat. And to tell me what you have come to borrow now, since you dare not stay.”

  “I must get into the music school.”

  She pondered, the jewel on her cane glittering restlessly like an eye. Kira brought them brandy in glass goblets so thin they seemed blown out of air, and fragile, seamed plates of cold roast fowl and bread.

  “The school is locked and guarded,” Reve said. “One of the magisters came here to tell me. The magisters have fled. Those still alive.” She fell silent again, her eyes filmed with memory and moon cold. “The Basilisk is loose in Berylon. How can you get into the school without him seeing?”

  “You told me how.”

  Her face shifted oddly, trying to remember, he realized, how to smile. “So I did. But can you play that well?”

  “I’m desperate,” he said simply.

  “Despair might work, as well as love.”

  Hollis had stopped eating, “Play what?” he asked uncertainly. “And how well? What could possibly get us through stone?”

  “Music travels,” Reve Iridia said obscurely. They heard shouts, then, in the street, the crash of breaking glass. Caladrius touched Hollis, pulled him out of his confusion.

  “We must go.”

  Hollis rose, still chewing. “Yes,” he said bewilderedly. “But where?”

  “I’ll listen in here,” Reve said. “I have no desire to find myself in Auber Tormalyne’s storage room. It’s far too cold.”

  Caladrius paused, lifted one of her butterfly hands from the cane, and kissed it. “Thank you,” he said.

  She freed her hand, laid it against his face. “Play as I taught you,” she said austerely. “You used to play to please me.”

  “I will.”

  He crossed the room, took a candle from a sconce, and pulled aside the hanging. Hollis, speechless, carrying a chicken wing, followed him into t
he dark. Caladrius shed light onto the silent, gleaming instruments, until he found what he looked for: the set of pipes bound with threads of brass, the smallest no bigger than his finger and stained red, the others, varied in size to span his hand and painted gold. Hollis looked at them, at him.

  “Now what?” he asked tersely.

  “Now hold this,” Caladrius said, and gave him the candle.

  The first notes fell like silver ribbons of rain, like blown petals, bright falling leaves. He played those things until his breath warmed the pipes, and they fit into his hand like another hand holding his. The room slowly darkened; Hollis’s breathing wove into his piping, his heartbeat. The dark flowed around them, one fiery eye open, illumining Hollis’s eyes. Velvet blurred, walls swirled, opened to the night. He heard the vastness of the hinterlands within the pipes and played that, a black plain beneath a dome of stars, the only colors in it the small, still flame, and Hollis’s unblinking eyes. He heard Hollis’s thoughts.

  Where are we?

  We are nowhere, he answered. We are sound. We are within the pipes.

  He fashioned a path for them across the plain. Somewhere the earth was hard as stone, somewhere it rained; on this plain only stars fell, burning white, into the small red flame, into Hollis’s unblinking eyes. The horned moon rose before they crossed the plain; it caught a tear of fire from the candle as it passed, let it streak, a burning star, across the plain, through Hollis’s eyes. He blinked. Wind, like a long, exhaled breath, rolled across the plain. Caladrius smelled the sea.

  He stopped playing, recognizing the place where he wanted most to be. In that small, still light, the walls took shape again: pale marble now, with no windows anywhere. Around him, on long tables, instruments, each with its own language, waited to speak.

  Hollis murmured something. Caladrius listened for a long time, no footfalls disturbed the silence within the school; nothing was played; no one spoke.

  He put the pipes down, very carefully.

  “Wait for me,” he whispered. Hollis looked at him incredulously, as if Caladrius thought he might play himself back into the pipes and go elsewhere. He sat wordlessly on a bench, still holding the candle.

  He was still there in the same position when Caladrius returned, though he had set the dwindling candle into its melted wax. “I went through it,” Caladrius said softly. “There’s no one here. Except—”

  “Except.”

  “The dead.”

  “Is—” Hollis’s voice caught.

  “I couldn’t see faces. We’ll know in the morning.” He stopped, blinking, feeling the gritty weariness like burned-out stars in his eyes.

  “Where,” Hollis breathed, “did you learn to play that?”

  “Somewhere in the hinterlands. Where all the magic was trapped. By the first bard.” He gave Hollis one of the blankets he had taken from a bedchamber. “You know the tale,” he added, too tired to think any longer.

  “I know the tale.” Hollis moved finally, stumbling a little as he rose. “It’s the first one the bards teach. No one ever said it was true.”

  “Arioso Pellior knows.”

  He lay awake watching light and shadow flicker over the odd, silent shapes of music, until Hollis fell asleep. And then he rose and began to play.

  Three

  In the rainy dark, the city burned more slowly. Fire was a sullen red crescent to the west, eating into rooftops, warehouses, barges moored on the moat water. Giulia, watching from behind a basilisk’s mask as she huddled beside Hexel in a group of stranded villagers, scarcely felt the rain now. It had fallen lightly but steadily since dusk. The dress she had worn for the basilisk’s birthday, a fine dark silk, was torn and muddy. She had pulled garish, flimsy curtains off some stage to cover herself; they, too, were soaked.

  She watched for Justin in every movement, every flicker of shadow. They were at the Pellior Bridge, not far from where he lived. Like the other magisters, she and Hexel had gone at first to the school, the one safe place they knew. The magisters and students who had not attended the festival had already been driven out of the music school. Instruments had been thrown into the streets, music scattered like leaves. Those who protested, who fought, had died in the street. A vision of an old magister in his black lying on the cobbles with one arm hugging his broken lute haunted Giulia. The doors of the school were chained shut; guards stood at every corner. Someone had pounded the faces of the stone griffins flanking the doors into dust.

  For a long time she could not speak. She could only move at the sound of Hexel’s voice, at his touch. He led her through streets she had never seen, through crowds of frightened villagers and weeping children, past crazed, yawning doors of wheat and ribbons out of which guards dragged astonished and fearful people: a plump woman with white hair whose hands were powdery with flour, a short, thin man still marking the page, with one finger, of the book he had been reading. What happened to them, she guessed; she could not watch.

  Now they sat on the bank beside the Pellior Bridge. The gates of the bridge were closed and guarded. Wagons choked the streets, as farmers and villagers, trying to flee, waited for the gates to open. Others huddled beneath the bridge along the river. Some had tried to swim across; the guards’ quarrels had found them unerringly. They floated now, pale stains in the billowing torchlight. The torches had been lighted along the city wall and on the bridge to mid-river, to illumine escape. The far half of the bridge was dark.

  Hexel had been speaking for some time, she realized; she had not understood a word. Now she heard her own silence; she roused a little, turning her dark, plastered head to look at him behind the mask. He was staring at the deep water, its smooth, glassy flow lightly roiled now and then by powerful forces beneath the surface. She spoke his name. He looked at her, then back at the water suddenly, and spat. Startled, she felt the first harsh sting of tears. He took the mask from her, crushed it into a mass of thread and feathers, and tossed it into the water.

  “I’m sorry,” he said heavily; for what in particular she was uncertain. She wiped a fallen tear, left a streak of mud on her face.

  “It wasn’t your fault. Music doesn’t kill.”

  He clutched his hair with both hands and pulled, then shook his head at the water. “It shouldn’t,” he answered bitterly. “I was careless. And now look at us. Locked out of the school, hiding in the mud. We threw a stone at the sleeping basilisk and it opened its eyes.”

  “Maybe he is dead,” Giulia suggested without hope.

  “His son is stupid, but no less ruthless. And he hates music.” He paused. “I suppose the prince might, too, by now. What was that pipe they played?”

  “I don’t know. I think Hollis took one from the storage room. I can’t guess where Caladrius got his. The hinterlands, maybe. They meant to kill, with that music. So music can. Kill.” She pulled the light, frayed cloth tighter around her arms, shivering. “Justin warned me.”

  “About what?”

  “Playing music for the Basilisk. I thought he was wrong. That no harm could come when no harm was intended.”

  “The harm was not in the music but in the tale. In the telling. I played with a life and exposed its secrets so carelessly. How was I to know that there was any truth at all to such a hackneyed tale? The stranger who returns to the city to reclaim his heritage, the lost heir…I pulled in the librarian’s life only to make it less worn, something to inspire my music.” He touched his eyes and groaned. “I probably killed him.”

  “He was alive when I last saw him. They both were. He and Hollis.”

  “Who is Hollis?”

  “His son, I think.”

  “I knew it.”

  A child began to cry beneath the bridge, a thin, hopeless wail no soothing could quiet. Someone passed among them with a dogged, heavy tread, carrying a basket. A raw potato dropped into Giulia’s lap, an onion into Hexel’s. He held it up, studied it morosely.

  “Where did they get the arms?”

  “I don’t know,” Gi
ulia said tersely. The sight of her demure chorus flinging off their robes and drawing swords in the middle of her work left her still stunned. “It must have been,” she added, “what Justin was apologizing for.”

  “What?”

  “The night I saw Caladrius in that marble bust of Auber Tormalyne.”

  “You recognized him?”

  “I recognized Tormalyne House. But—” She lifted a hand helplessly, let it fall. “Justin had vanished, and I was so busy…How could they?” she asked in disbelief, wringing the potato with both hands, and rocking a little in the mud. “How could they have been so senseless—”

  “Desperate.”

  “That they would attack Arioso Pellior in his own palace?”

  “It was brilliant. He was unprepared, nearly unguarded, surrounded by—”

  “They could have dropped a cobble on his head when he paraded past the school.”

  “And if they had missed him? He would have destroyed the school.”

  “So they did. And so he did.” She wiped angrily at another tear. “And now I don’t know what any of us are going to do, or even if Justin is still alive.”

  “You could go back to the provinces,” Hexel suggested. “They’ll let you leave.”

  “After they finish their slaughter.” She looked at him suddenly, trying to see his profile in the flickering light. “Hexel. Would they let you leave?”

  “I would not be caught dead in the provinces.”

  “But can you leave? Or will they hunt you, too?”

  “I have some vague connection to Iridia House.” She breathed again until he added, “On one side.”

  “And on the other?”

  “I believe the vague connection connected itself to Tormalyne House.”

  “Oh, Hexel.”

  “I had forgotten it,” he said calmly. “It’s obscure; my family fought for Iridia House during the Basilisk’s War. It hardly matters. How long would Arioso Pellior let the teller of that particular tale live anyway?”

  “What will we do?” she whispered numbly.

  He shrugged. “Change the ending of the tale. I never liked it, anyway. It was a fantasy.”