The Killing Song: The Dragon Below Book III

by Don Bassingthwaite

  “The broshamas of the Bonetree held the wisdom of the clan,” Ashi said, answering her smile, “but I would have been huntmaster if I hadn’t turned against Dah’mir, and a huntmaster needs her own wisdom to see what’s in the hearts of the clan.”

  Singe stepped back from Dandra and shook his head. “Ashi, I think I’ll almost pity House Deneith if they try to tame you. They aren’t going to know what they’re getting.”

  Dandra’s smile turned into a laugh, and she struck out at the wizard with a cry of mock outrage. He caught her blow on his arm, but let out a hiss of very real pain. He twisted his arm, and Dandra winced as she saw the pink of rain-diluted blood on his wet sleeve. “Sorry.”

  “It’s where Erimelk grabbed me.” Singe loosened the laces at the cuffs of his shirt and pulled back the sleeve. “Twelve moons! Look at that!”

  His skin was marked by two red handprints, the skin bruised and broken in innumerable fine pricks, as if someone had beaten him with a bristles of a stiff brush. Singe looked at her. “Was that some kind of psionic power?”

  She nodded. “I’ve seen something similar. It’s a little bit like the long step, but used as a weapon—under the psion’s touch, tiny portions of matter or flesh are displaced in space. It’s a weak power, but it can do a lot of damage.”

  “It hurt a lot,” Singe complained. He wiped at the red marks with a towel, but the rain had washed away all but a tint of blood. There wasn’t even an open wound. Singe cursed again. “Why would a scribe have a power like that?”

  Dandra frowned. “I didn’t know he did. When Tetkashtai knew him, he was more interested in his work than in developing the power of his mind.”

  “I’ll bet he wasn’t insane and attacking people in the street, either,” said Natrac. “What do you think was wrong with him, and why was Nevchaned covering it up?” He looked up. “Do you think it could have something to do with Dah’mir?”

  No one said anything for a long moment. Dandra suspected that she knew what they were all thinking, even if no one wanted to be the first to say it. Erimelk was clearly mad. Dah’mir wanted to drive kalashtar mad. It was too much of a coincidence to be dismissed, but it also meant that the dragon had already started his move against the community.

  On the one hand, that might make it easier to present their belated warning to the kalashtar elders. On the other, maybe there was a reason the elders were trying to keep Erimelk’s madness quiet. Dah’mir intended his mad kalashtar as servants for the Master of Silence. He wouldn’t want them roaming free. If that was the case, maybe Nevchaned—and the other elders—were working with Dah’mir. The idea chilled her.

  “I think,” she said, “we need to know more about what’s happening here before we approach the elders with our warning, so we know we’re talking to the right people.”

  Singe, scratching his whiskers in thought, nodded agreement, but Ashi frowned. “How do we do that?” she asked.

  An idea took form in Dandra’s head. An idea that didn’t particularly please her. “We don’t,” she said. “I do.” Singe’s hand paused on his chin, and he looked at her sharply, but she shook her head and continued. “Natrac was right. Kalashtar will say things around another kalashtar they won’t say around strangers. Especially if they think it’s a kalashtar they already know.” She touched a hand to her chest. “Like Tetkashtai.”

  Singe’s fingers fell, but he didn’t dismiss the idea. Dandra could see him turning it in his mind, and when he spoke, she noticed it wasn’t the plan that he questioned. “Can you do it?” he asked. “You’ll be facing your people on your own.”

  She drew herself up. “I thought we’d decided that the people who matter are here.”

  He smiled at that. “When will you do it?”

  “Tonight. There’s a place—a kind of meeting hall. The kalashtar will be expecting me to visit after a journey anyway. I’ll be able to find answers to rumors there.” She gestured around the apartment. “You can stay here if you want.”

  “I think I’d go crazy just sitting and waiting for you,” Singe said. “I’ve got a better idea. There’s a small House Deneith enclave across the city in Deathsgate district I want to visit. It’s a Blademarks recruiting hall. I told Geth to send a message there when he got to Zarash’ak. We took long enough getting here ourselves that one might be waiting now.” He looked to Ashi. “Do you think you’d like to go? You’d get to see more of the city, and there shouldn’t actually be any members of Deneith proper on duty this late—you could get a little more exposure to Deneith without any risk of discovery.”

  Ashi’s grin was so wide the two small bone hoops that pierced her lower lip turned sideways. “Try and keep me from coming!”

  “That’s why I asked you.”

  Dandra turned to Natrac. “Are you going to go too, or stay here?”

  The half-orc paused in the act of drying himself, then continued. “Neither,” he said.

  Singe narrowed his eyes. “What are you up to?”

  Natrac gave a sigh, stopped, and glanced up. “Let’s just say that Dandra’s not the only one with places she has to go to alone,” he said. “I used to have contacts under street. They might still be around. If they are, they may have heard something. But I can’t be sure that they’re still around or that they’ll be inclined to help us.” He looked at them all. “I know you can all handle yourselves in a fight, but the best thing to do in the places I need to go is not to start a fight in the first place.”

  Dandra exchanged a glance with Singe and nodded. “If you think that’s what’s best. Can you at least tell us where in the city you’re—?”

  “No,” he said, stopping her. “And don’t try telling me that whatever I’m hiding, it doesn’t matter to you. This is a part of my life I don’t want back. Give me a chance to rest and dry out—I’ll go and be back before dawn.”

  She frowned at him. “Can I wish you good luck?”

  Natrac grunted. “I’ll take that.”

  They all changed into dry clothes and lay down to rest, but when they rose, Natrac had already slipped out. There was an extra key to the door hidden inside a crock. Dandra brought it out and gave it to Singe. He embraced her without a word, then he and Ashi departed. Dandra took a brief look around the apartment and left as well.

  The rain had stopped, but the streets of Fan Adar were still empty. Dandra walked from the light of one everbright lantern to the next without seeing anyone—or, thankfully, any sign of another one of Dah’mir’s herons. The need to watch for them reminded her of the time after her first escape from the Bonetree mound, when she and Tetkashtai had fled across the Shadow Marches, trying to evade the herons, Bonetree hunters, and dolgrims Dah’mir had sent in pursuit.

  It was, in fact, too much like her nights on the run. Unease stirred in her. Had the streets always been this quiet, or did they just seem that way because she was—possibly for the first time ever—utterly alone? Singe wasn’t there to support her. Tetkashtai, her constant counterpart since the moment she had awakened to consciousness, was only a memory. There was no one.

  She wasn’t sure that she liked it.

  Sound came as she crossed a walkway and descended a broad ramp to a sunken courtyard. The courtyard itself was empty except for a statue of a kalashtar woman, her crystal eyes raised to the skies, but on its far side, a short flight of stairs rose again to the porch of a low building—the community hall called the Gathering Light. Warm light and noise escaped from the building—the light making golden lines around edges of the building’s doors, the noise drifting on the air in a haze of half-heard music and speech.

  Dandra crossed the courtyard, put a foot on the lowest stair, hesitated for a moment, then pressed her lips together. You can do this, she told herself. What is it compared to what you’ve already done? She raised her chin, continued up to the porch, and pulled open one of the doors.

  In her heart, she’d half-expected all activity in the hall to pause as she walked through the doorway and thos
e gathered within turned to stare at the stranger in their midst. Her entry, however, attracted no more than idle curiosity. A few people looked up to see who had arrived. Even fewer gave her a second look. A very few, friends of Tetkashtai—or of Medalashana or Virikhad—waved in greeting. Dandra waved back but stayed near the door, trying to look as if she were searching the hall for someone while she took stock of the environment and tried to decide what to do next.

  The main chamber of the Gathering Light was long and, for a structure in Sharn, relatively low. Doors to the side opened onto stairs that led up or down to storerooms and private meeting rooms. During the day, the community hall served a variety of purposes, from cultural education to physical training to quiet political and philosophical discussions. With night’s fall, however, the hall had come alive in its main purpose as a social hub of the community. Kalashtar and Adaran humans—far more of the latter than the former—mingled through the chamber, falling into clusters to share conversation, glasses of pale tea, and bits of hot food plucked from pots wrapped in braided straw. Around the outside of the room, they stood. Closer to the middle, they sat. In the very center of the long hall, a low circular stage had been set up. Four musicians sat on it, playing the wind and string instruments of Adar, and anyone who felt like it had joined in with their song. Music and speech clashed and broke over the crowd like waves on a beach.

  The scene was familiar enough from Tetkashtai’s memories, but as she scanned the crowd, Dandra became aware of an odd tension in the hall. The clusters of people seemed tighter and perhaps less inclusive. Conversation was low and close, less animated than it might have been; yet the people who sang did so with such force and emphasis that it seemed as if they were trying too hard. Singe’s comments about a feeling of fear on the street came back to her. The kalashtar and Adarans gathered in the hall might not have seemed afraid, but they were far from being as relaxed as they should have been.

  The longer she stood still and silent by the door, the more people were beginning to notice her presence and to stare at her with an ill-concealed wariness. She forced herself to move further into the hall, trying to spot someone to talk to, someone who might be able to tell her what was going on …

  Then the choice of who to talk to was taken out of her hands altogether. “Tetkashtai—” said a voice at her side.

  The fear and tension that had stretched tight in Dandra snapped. The voice, so close and so unexpected, was like a blow. She leaped away, psionic power lifting her up to hover a handspan above the ground, ready to dart or glide in any direction. She’d left her spear in the apartment, but she was never defenseless. The humming chorus of whitefire rose around her, and the people closest to her yelped and scrambled away from the sudden display of power. The young kalashtar man who had spoken her name flinched back, his eyes startled. For an instant, he and Dandra stared at each other in mutual alarm.

  Dandra could feel her heart hammering in her chest. Now she really was the center of attention in the hall. Song and conversation had ceased. It took an effort to still her pounding heart and release the fiery power that had come so easily to her mind. The people her display had disturbed stared at her with open suspicion. “I’m sorry—” Dandra started to say and then caught herself. Tetkashtai had never apologized for anything. It hadn’t been in her nature.

  “Sit,” she said to the nearest person. “It was nothing.”

  Conversation resumed. Feeling somewhat less uncomfortable, but now vaguely guilty, Dandra sank back to the floor and faced the young man. He was just barely an adult. His face still had a youthful softness, but at the same time, his appearance was distinctive. Unlike most in the Gathering Light, his black hair had been cut short in the Brelish fashion, and he wore Brelish rather than Adaran clothing, including an open vest dyed a rich sky-blue. The wide leather bracer stitched with copper wire that wrapped around his left forearm was likewise Brelish in design, but it was the smooth black gem—a psicrystal—set into it that brought a twinge of recognition to Dandra’s mind.

  Not every kalashtar was capable of creating a psicrystal, and she had a dim recollection of a young kalashtar, his hair still long, proudly showing Tetkashtai the black crystal he had fashioned. The name of the newly-formed crystal, Cano, clung to Dandra’s memory, but it took a moment longer for her to put a name to the kalashtar. When she did, she blinked. “Munchaned,” she said. “You’re Nevchaned’s son.”

  “Call me Moon.” Munchaned’s voice had a self-conscious firmness, as if he were daring her to call him anything else—or as if he were trying to cover his moment of childish fright.

  Dandra forced herself to keep a smile from her face. “All right, Moon. What do you want?”

  “Nevchaned wants to talk. He sent me to collect you.” He jerked his head toward one of the doors that led to the Gathering Light’s private rooms.

  Dandra’s eyebrows rose. “Nevchaned wants to talk to me?” she asked. “How did he know I was here?”

  “The elders like to keep track of what’s happening around them when they meet. I’m the honored elders’ errand boy of the night so I get the privilege of fetching you.” He looked at her. “Are you going to come or not?”

  He sounded like he would be just as happy if she didn’t. The thought was more than tempting to Dandra. Suspicion rose in her. Nevchaned and the kalashtar elders were here, and they wanted to talk to her?

  She clenched her jaw and nodded. Moon looked disappointed by the answer but turned to push his way through the crowd to one of the hall’s side doors.

  On the other side of the door was a short flight of stairs; at the top of the stairs was a wide landing and another door. Moon knocked heavily once and opened the door without waiting for a response. “Tetkashtai,” he announced.

  Dandra caught a glimpse of a dozen or so kalashtar men and women looking up from their discussion. Nevchaned rose out of the crowd. “Thank you, Munchaned,” he said. “That will be all.”

  “Can I go now?” Moon asked.

  Nevchaned’s face darkened. “You have a duty tonight.”

  Moon’s face took on nearly the same color as his father’s. He stepped away from the door and squatted down on the landing outside. Dandra found herself liking the young man. She might not have been able to say anything about it to him, but she could sympathize with a feeling at being trapped within kalashtar customs and expectation. She turned to him and murmured, “Keep fighting, Moon.”

  He glanced up in surprise, but she kept going past him, stepping into the meeting room and closing the door behind her.

  The warm air smelled slightly of jasmine, as if a single blossom had been left in the room and then removed. The kalashtar elders sat in silence on low, wide Adaran-style benches of dark wood with curled arms and a scattering of thin cushions. The atmosphere should have been calm, conducive to debate and the making of important decisions. It wasn’t. The room felt close, the faint scent of jasmine annoying. The clean lines of the benches were simply stark and barren as trees in winter—and for all that the silent elders attempted inscrutability, their eyes were dark and haunted.

  It was probably the last emotion Dandra had expected to see from them.

  Nevchaned bent his head over hands spread wide in welcome. “Kuchta, Tetkashtai.”

  “Kuchtoa,” Dandra said. She took control of the fear that gnawed at her and forced herself to look around the room, trying to see past the haunted eyes of the elders and guess at what was going on in their minds. It seemed as if more than a few of them were trying to guess the same thing about her. Several glanced away as Dandra’s gaze met theirs; others faced her boldly, maybe even accusingly. Dandra shivered and raised a barrier around her thoughts.

  Her reaction to the tension in the room must have been obvious. Nevchaned gestured swiftly to a chair that had been placed before the benches and to a low table bearing a white teapot and several glasses. “Please, sit,” he said. “You’ll take tea?”

  “Yes.” Dandra sat as Nevchane
d poured tea so pale it was barely tinted with color. He passed her the cup and Dandra took a polite sip. The tea had even less taste than it did color, but she forced herself to nod in acknowledgment of Nevchaned’s hospitality. He wasn’t the most senior or significant elder present—Dandra recognized a wiry woman named Selkatari and a quiet scholar named Hanamelk, both leaders of the community—but it seemed as if he had been appointed as the voice of the elders in dealing with her.

  What would Tetkashtai do in this situation? Dandra lowered her cup. “You didn’t summon me here to drink tea.”

  Nevchaned showed no surprise at her bluntness. “We wanted to thank you for subduing Erimelk,” he said. “Your Aundairian friend—he’s not badly injured?”

  “He’s fine.”

  “And your journey to Zarash’ak? It was good?”

  Dandra couldn’t quite bring herself to answer the question. Tetkashtai’s journey to Zarash’ak had been a disaster. She clenched her teeth and gave Nevchaned a direct look that was as much herself as it was Tetkashtai. “You’re dancing around something, Nevchaned. Are the elders really that interested in travel stories? What do you want?”

  A murmur blew through the room. Dandra saw Selkatari’s face turned dark. Nevchaned stiffened and looked around. His face took on the slightly vague look of someone reaching out with kesh. Other elders seemed to respond to the silent communication. Hanamelk gave a slow, deep nod. Nevchaned turned back to Dandra.

  “We want to know why Erimelk might want to attack you and your friends,” he said.

  Dandra fought down her suspicions of Dah’mir’s hold over the kalashtar. “We were in the wrong place at the wrong time, I suppose,” she said. “Erimelk looked like he could have attacked anyone. What happened to him?”

  Nevchaned hesitated—and when he spoke again, he didn’t answer her question. “Tetkashtai, did he do or say anything unusual in the attack?”