Song of the Beast

by Carol Berg

  Chapter 5

  The refuse heap where Narim had told me to wait lay next to a butcher shop. The hot days had brought the foul mess to such ripeness that even the most abject wretches of Lepan avoided the place. As I crouched beside it in the lingering evening, I did my best to stifle my coughing and get a decent breath without inhaling, a more difficult feat of breath control than anything I’d done when I was singing. If I’d had anything left in my stomach it would not have stayed there, and with enormous regret I considered my glorious bath that seemed far more than half an hour past.

  Count to a hundred, I told myself. If they’re not here by then, I’ll go. There’s bound to be a boat to steal somewhere along the river, or a wagon going south. But even as I glared at the rats sitting boldly on their treasure trove of rotting rubbish, I knew I could not leave Callia and Narim to the searchers. No one else was going to die for me. Count to a hundred and I would retrace my steps up the steep embankment to the butcher shop roof and across a half dozen rooftops to the inn where the Elhim was trying to persuade Callia that she had to abandon her life or die. Just as I was about to start back, I heard voices in the lane.

  “Vellya’s pigs! What charnel house is this? Only for you, Narim, would I dump a good customer and come to such a place. The soldiers wouldn’t have bothered me at all if they’d found me with an assistant magistrate.”

  “Quiet, girl! There are things you don’t understand.”

  “I daresay—Oh, there you are!” The flushed, buxom Callia in her shabby green satin bustled past the waiflike, chalk-skinned Elhim. She brushed her hand over my clean-shaven face and examined the rest of me thoroughly. “You look right fine. Maybe there’s something to this bathing. Now what’s all this about us getting killed because of you? My place has been searched a deal of times. Found it more profit than trouble. Searchers always have money—for bribes and all—and they like spending it on fun instead.”

  “I’m sorry,” I rasped, looking helplessly at the Elhim. He folded his arms and looked amused.

  “So you’ve got a tongue, do you? Just like a Senai to use his first words in a month to tear up a woman’s life.” Callia set her hands on her hips and screwed her face into a frown. “I’m not going anywhere until you tell me why you’re so important.”

  “If you want her to do as you say, you’re going to have to trust her,” said Narim. “She’s a businesswoman and isn’t going to abandon it lightly. And you’d best make it quick.”

  I think he just wanted me to confirm what he’d guessed, but I wasn’t ready to do so, so I gave Callia only the most important detail. “When they took me ... before,” I said, struggling to get out so many words at once, “they killed everyone in the house where I lived ... everyone close to me: servants, friends ... everyone.”

  “Why would they do—” Shouts and screams and an explosion of orange flames from the way we had come interrupted her. Callia gaped at me. “They’ve fired the Drover! Who, in the name of Tjasse, are you?”

  “He’ll tell you all about it later,” said the Elhim. We took off jogging down the dark twisting alleys of Lepan, past deserted shops and dimly lit taverns, past muddy sties, stables, and smithies reeking of coal and ash, always taking the downward-sloping ways that would lead us to the slow-moving Lepander River. Few souls were about in the night. Drunks sprawled in corners, lost in blissful stupor. A growling beggar whose face was ravaged with seeping burns lunged at Narim from a dark doorway, and the Elhim had to struggle fiercely to get away. A few late revelers staggered out of a tavern, but no one else prowled the dark lanes—not at first. The Elhim was taking us to a friend’s dinghy tied up down by the docks. If we could just get through the town fast enough ...

  But every hundred paces I had to stop and cough, allowing the stitch in my side to subside, persuading some meager reserve of strength to seep back into my legs. I had tried to keep my body from atrophying completely in prison, but with poor food, little space, and the pain of constant injury, it had been impossible. “Sorry,” I gasped for the hundredth time as I bent double, leaning on an empty bin behind a fishmonger’s stall. The heavy, ripe air and the steepening pitch of the cluttered lanes told me we were nearing the river, but I had tripped on a rusty wagon tongue and couldn’t get moving again. Torches had flared into life all over the sleeping city. Shouts and the pounding of feet and the clangor of armed men on horseback came from every side, the noise grating in my head. “Go on. I can’t. ...”

  Callia grabbed a dark apron from someone’s washing and wrapped it about her like a shawl. Glancing over her shoulder nervously, she tugged at my arm. “Come on. Can’t leave you after all this trouble. I’m shiv’d if I’ll let you get away without explaining.”

  “Look, Callia,” said the Elhim, “head down past the slave docks. Go north until you come to the old customs house. There’s an alehouse just past, and an alley between. Down the alley you’ll come to some stone steps leading down to the river. The boat will be at the bottom of the steps. Wait for us there. We’ll be less noticeable if we go separately.”

  Callia must have been wickedly afraid, for she didn’t argue at all. She only laid her hand on my cheek and said, “A life for a life. Be there.” Her breath was sweet and only faintly tinged with cheap wine. Silently she slipped into the shadows.

  “Now you,” said the Elhim. “We’ll take it slower. It’s not far. But listen to me ... if we get separated or the boat’s gone or something happens to me, find your way to the Bone and Thistle on the Vallior road. Ask for Davyn and tell him I’ve sent you. He’ll help.”

  The distance to the rendezvous may not have been far, but our journey was very slow. We cut through the ramshackle riverfront district, constantly forced to backtrack. Parties of armed men roamed the city, asking questions of clusters of sleepy residents.

  “Murderer on the loose,” they were saying.

  “A Senai gone mad from dragon’s breath, I heard.”

  “Madman. Fired the Drover ’cause he didn’t like the ale! Copped a whore and said he’d gut her if he didn’t get his money back.”

  Narim, his back flattened to a stable wall, whispered in my ear, “At least they aren’t saying you were dissatisfied with the woman. Callia would be most disturbed at that.” I was too tired to appreciate his humor.

  Roving bands of ruffians were taking the opportunity to harass people in the streets. In one alleyway we stumbled over a dead Elhim whose face was pulp, bloody clothes half ripped from the slender, mutilated body. His purse had been cut from his belt. Narim was no longer smiling when he locked my arm in the vise of his fingers and dragged me onward.

  Staying low, we scuttered across a wide lane, ducking into a stinking alley that sloped sharply downward. Its far end opened onto a broad embankment choked with weeds and rubbish, overlooking the dark, foggy ribbon of the Lepander.

  “Down there,” whispered the Elhim from just behind me, nudging me toward a broken stone path that led down the embankment. “Go on down to Callia. I’m to leave a token so my friend will know who took his boat.”

  I nodded, praying my watery knees could get me down the stone steps. Somewhere in the yellow fog, water rippled into a backwater with a soft plopping noise. The steps seemed to go on forever. But eventually my searching foot sank into mud instead of jarring on stone. Across a muddy strip was the vague outline of a dinghy bobbing gently beside a plank walkway, dark against the dark water. No sign of Callia—not until torches flared behind and before me to reveal a broad-shouldered man with a hard, cruel mouth holding the terrified girl by the throat, a knife pointed at her eye. Before I could move, a thick, hairy arm was clamped about my own throat, and my right arm was twisted behind my back.

  “Well, well. Senai nobles are keeping low company these days. Don’t you know you can get crabs from bitches like this?” said the one holding Callia. I didn’t have to see the red mark on his wrist to know he was a Dragon Rider, and a very angry or very drunk one, unable to control his inner fire. Orange s
parks spit and hissed wherever he held the girl close to him. She whimpered softly. “We’ll protect you, Senai. Our sovereign will appreciate that his family’s seed is not being dispensed in such unworthy vessels.” Then, with no more thought than plucking a fowl for his supper, the Rider whipped his knife across Callia’s throat and shoved her to the ground. Mud spattered her cheek, the eyes that had sparkled with so much life fixed in terrified surprise.

  “Bastards!” I cried in my useless, croaking whisper. But outrage produced no magical surge of strength to prevent my ending ignominiously with my own face in the mud. While they wrenched my arms behind me and locked manacles on my wrists, black despair descended into my soul. If it had been in my power to will my heart to stop beating, I would have done it ... especially if I could have taken every villainous Ridemark warrior with me.

  “Didn’t teach you well enough, did we?” said the murderer, wiping his bloody knife on my cheek. “We’ll tell Goryx not to be so dainty with you this time.” With heavy boots and the dragon whips they carried at their belts, he and his companion proceeded to give me a taste of what they had in mind. But they had no more than gotten started when they abruptly stopped again.

  Shouts and heavy blows continued, but they had little to do with me, for which I was immensely grateful. My bonds made movement impossible, even if I’d had the strength to try or the fortitude to ignore the fresh indignities that had been laid over my already battered self. I was barely lucid enough to keep myself from drowning in the mud. But the proceedings were very odd. The Elhim could not be putting up such a fight as I heard. Somehow in my groggy confusion I envisioned an irritated Callia standing up in her green satin, the blood trickling down the front of it from her gaping throat, and throwing the heavy bodies into the river with a resounding splash. Or perhaps the splash was my face falling into the mud as I slipped into insensibility.

  I didn’t want to open my eyes. The terror that I would see nothing but darkness was so absolute as to allow no other thought to pass through my mind. In the same way I dared not move lest I feel the damp straw, or the manacles about my wrists and ankles, or the iron walls so close about me that I could touch all four plus ceiling and floor at once. I dared not breathe lest I smell the stink of my fear and the foulness of my den of living death. Desperately I fought to stay on the far side of the boundary between sleep and waking. Better not ever to wake up. Better not to know.

  “... not yet ready for visitors. But I thought you ought to see ...” The whisper came from the waking side, but learning who it was meant opening my eyes.

  “By the Seven!” Vaguely familiar, that shocked, angry voice. “They’ll pay for this. Do what you can. As soon as he’s fit to talk, send for me.”

  Clothing rustled and footsteps receded—furious footsteps on wood floors—then water dribbled close by my ear. Warm wetness on my naked back, stinging at first ... then soothing ... and on my face and my arms. Mumbled cursing as the gentle ministrations touched my hands. Sometime in between I was rolled onto my back, a position I could not bear after seventeen years of constant lashings. When I heard a dismal moan and concluded it was my own, the invisible spirit crooned comfort—a spirit that, from the sound of it, was surely embodied in an elderly gentleman.

  “Only a moment, laddie; then we’ll have you over again. I can see it would pain you. Let me get you cleaned up and make sure we’ve left nothing untended; then we’ll send you off to sleep away your hurts.”

  My eyelids were still too heavy to open and became more so once a spoonful of something sticky-sweet slid down my throat. So I let myself continue the dream that rather than fouled straw, I lay on cool, clean linen sheets, and not on a stone floor, but on pillows as soft and embracing as a new bride. And I dreamed that it was not Goryx, but a gentleman minister of Tjasse, the goddess of love, who tended my wretched body.

  Moonlight teased at my eyelids, peeking through a tall window beside the bed. By the way my limbs were tangled in the pillows and the way my stomach rumbled in hollow annoyance, I surmised that this night was not the same as the one on which I’d been brought to this delightful place. A candle gleamed softly from a silver holder sitting on a carved wood mantelpiece. The light revealed a large bedchamber furnished with comfort and elegance to match the delicious bed. Across an expanse of shining wood floor, a white-haired gentleman sat in a cushioned chair, snoring softly, his head resting on his hand.

  I shifted my position carefully in preparation for sitting up, pleased to feel a noticeable improvement in my overall well-being. I was attired in a fine linen nightshirt, loose at the neck, no sign anywhere of the torn and muddy clothing I’d been wearing by the riverside.

  About the time my legs dangled off the edge of the bed, the gentleman woke with a jerk and promptly knocked off his spectacles. “Bother,” he mumbled as he picked them out of his lap, gave them a wipe with a handkerchief clutched in his left hand as if left there for exactly such a purpose, jammed them back on his nose, and looked up to find me watching him. “Oh! I say ... good. Good, good, good. How are you then?”

  “Better,” I said, managing to get the word out without my stupid stammering, though my voice was still hoarse and harsh, scarcely more than a whisper. The sound clearly bothered him, for he jumped up, grabbed a flat wooden stick from a tray of physician’s implements, and stuck it down my throat to take a look, setting off my lingering cough. Then he felt around my neck with his fingers and peered at me closely.

  “They didn’t ... cut you ... damage your throat on purpose when they did these other things?” His lip curled as he said it.

  I shook my head, a cold sweat rippling over my skin. Such mutilation had been a looming horror in the darkness, and, practically speaking, if someone wanted me silent, it would have been far simpler than what they’d done. But Goryx always said that if he damaged my throat, I could not demonstrate my obedience sufficiently. Of course, by the end it didn’t matter.

  “There’s some redness, a little swelling. This cough most likely. I’ve given you something for that. But this other ... the sound of it ...” Without knowing more, I wasn’t going to help him. He peered over the top of his spectacles. “Lack of use. That’s it, isn’t it? They’ve had you locked up and forced you silent. He said something about that.”

  I acknowledged his guess, though it seemed based on real information and not just insight, like the Elhim. The Elhim ... The physician was certainly not one of the strange pale race, but I wondered. “Narim?” I said.

  “What’s that?” The old man poured red wine from a crystal decanter and handed me the glass.

  “Do you know Narim?”

  “I know no one by that name. Was it the girl? A girl was found dead beside you.”

  I ignored his question and gazed at the wineglass, envisioning Callia’s face as she relished her wine, just like she relished everything her impoverished life had brought her.

  “You knew the poor dead girl?” He spoke respectfully. Didn’t call her a whore, though it had been written all over her for anyone to see.

  “She was my kind rescuer. As are you. Thank you.” I raised the glass to him ... and to Callia ... and drank deep, promising myself that her short life would not be forgotten.

  “It’s my pleasure. You—Well, clothes are laid out for you when you’re feeling up to it. Washing things on the dresser. I’ll arrange for dinner to be sent. My master is most anxious to speak with you, but I’m insisting you take things slowly, so we’ll hold him off awhile yet.”

  I cupped my hands to my chest and bowed my head in appreciation, noting how when his eyes flicked to my hands, his mouth hardened into a grim line. “Gentle Roelan, preserve us,” he mumbled as he left the room. He knew who I was.

  I was tempted to follow him out the door and discover who was his master, my benefactor. But the bed was far too comfortable. I drained the wineglass, set it on the physician’s tray, and sprawled out on my stomach once again.

  Fine smells ... roasting fowl ... hot b
read ... My eyes blinked open. A covered silver tray sat beside the bed exuding fragrances that made my stomach do back flips. The candle on the mantelpiece had burned down a third of its length. An hour had passed. Though my physician friend was gone, I didn’t think I needed to wait for him. With a glutton’s delight, I plunged into the tender roast fowl, stewed apples, delicate cheeses and pastries.

  The decanter of wine had been refilled, and I required a good measure of it as I awkwardly coaxed a silver razor to scrape two days’ growth from my face. When I’d last looked in a glass, I had been twenty-one, impossibly healthy, and filled with the unutterable joy of spending my life doing what I loved most. I had been immeasurably graced by the gods, and everyone had always said they could see it in my face. Now I was thirty-eight or thereabouts and had touches of gray in my hair and the reflection of Mazadine in my eyes. It was a dead man who looked back at me.

  Lacking a dead man’s luxury of immobility, I donned the simple full-sleeved shirt of dark blue, the black breeches and hose, and the good boots that had been left on a chair. All were exactly my size except for the breeches, which had to be belted in considerably to accommodate the lack of meat on my frame. I’d probably lost a third of my weight in prison.

  Only after I’d poured another glass of wine and sat in the physician’s chair by the cold hearth did I notice the harp that lay on a round table next to the door—a small harp, just the size I had carried when I traveled, its polished rosewood frame glowing richly in the candlelight. I moved over to stand beside the moonlit window—as far from the harp as I could get—and tried to ignore the resounding silence that was in the place where my heart used to be. It was perhaps not a good time for my cousin, the king of Elyria, to walk into the room.