Darksong

by Isobelle Carmody

  ‘Dolcy?’

  The red-haired man appointed his swarthy companion, who nodded and said in a surprisingly melodic voice, ‘What I heard was that Alene was trying to put the visionweaver aboard the Stormsong when Asa turned up and ordered her to the palace. The visionweaver went with the rest of them and in the midst of an audience with Tarsin, she visioned the poison in his cirul and stopped him drinking it. I heard she was beautiful under them veils she wears, but terrible pox scarred as well.’

  ‘Tarsin permitted a veil?’

  ‘She wore a half-mask over the scars for the audience.’

  ‘Is she truly dying?’

  ‘Feyt said so, and Alene ought to know. They came back to the citadel to bring her to a ship. The soulweaver wanted her to go to the white-cloak academy on Myrmidor, but I heard it said she wanted only to return to Sheanna to die.’

  ‘Why not send Tareed or Feyt into the citadel with the woman?’

  The man shrugged. ‘Maybe Alene had some vision that made her seize the excuse to come in.’

  ‘It would be ironic if she saw the poisoning attempt and came in to deal with it, never realising that the visionweaver would speak in her place.’ The words coming from Glynn’s mouth had a pensive tone and again her skin prickled with the certainty that she knew the speaker.

  ‘After the visionweaver stopped him drinking the poison, Tarsin refused to let her go. He swore that he would cure her, and offered rewards. That is how things stood when Feyt came to ask us to help save Bleyd. There was no mention of the visionweaver. Feyt asked if we could lay a trail to make it seem that Bleyd had escaped into the wilderness. We were to hide him within the citadel until his innocence could be proven. There was no time to send word to the Shadowman, but it was the first time ever that a soulweaver agreed to let the myrmidons ask us for help. All was arranged, then suddenly, the cell alarms are ringing throughout the citadel. Next thing, we hear that Bleyd is gone from the cells and the visionweaver as well! And neither of them are in the citadel.’

  ‘So Feyt deceived you?’

  The dark man said dubiously, ‘The myrmidon has never played us false before. I think something went wrong and that is why she sent this latest chit asking us to begin a rumour that Bleyd is in the citadel.’

  ‘Which we have done, despite our doubts,’ the red-haired man added.

  ‘You did the right thing,’ the unknown man said. ‘I think we can rest assured that if Bleyd’s disappearance was not Feyt’s doing, she would by now have asked for our help in finding or rescuing him. Therefore he is safe even if something did go amiss with his escape, and I can guess where he is from all you have said. But I need to speak with Feyt as soon as possible. Send a message to the palace.’

  ‘Where do you think the Fomhikan is hiding?’ asked Dolcy.

  ‘If we are being asked to set up rumours that Bleyd is in the citadel, we can rule that out. Of course he would not be in the palace. And since the original trail was supposed to lead legionnaires into the wilderness, he cannot be there. Which leaves only one other possbility.’

  The bearded man’s eyes widened in comprehension. ‘Bleyd would never agree to leave the boy,’ he said.

  ‘As he had been in the cells at the mercy of Kalide for some time, I doubt he was in a fit state to refuse or agree to anything.’

  ‘We can ask a few questions,’ Dolcy said.

  ‘And you can lay a new rumour to ground. Spend coin on it to make it run. Bleyd of Fomhika is to be sighted again in the citadel.’

  ‘Why, if you think he is gone from Ramidan?’

  ‘Because if he has escaped on a ship, the last thing he needs is for the Iridomi on any island between here and Myrmidor alerted to seek him out. That has to be why Feyt asked you to set that second rumour in motion.’

  All at once, Glynn knew whose body she occupied. Solen!

  The shock of the discovery made the dream dissolve.

  segue …

  The watcher segued again in the Unraveller’s world, seeking those in whom the Song could be detected; seeking a common thread that might be used to build a strategy.

  It came upon a balding man, studying a music score and humming it out to himself, a clarinet on his lap. The Song flickered intermittently in the man like a candle near to burning out, and in the music he hummed, though faintly. The watcher allowed himself to merge completely with the man.

  ‘There is some music I keep hearing,’ the man murmured.

  ‘Jeez, I hope so,’ the lead singer’s voice was sarcastic.

  ‘No. I mean inside the other stuff. It’s interesting. See in this first section? Something’s subtly opposing the main harmony …’ his voice trailed off because he could see the derisive expression on the rock singer’s face. No doubt he was thinking that a hired instrument for a sessional recording had nothing to say to him and ought to know it.

  ‘Can we get on with this? I want to get this track down before Christmas,’ he said.

  The bald man noted that the singer looked exhausted – but that was his image so there was no way to discern if, under it, he was also really exhausted. The fact that he always looked that way argued against it being real fatigue. An appearance of world-weariness fitted the dragging sorrow built into the music. Dirge might be a better word for it, or occasional music for the end of the world. Maybe it was even timely, like they said on the covers, because a lot of people were saying the end of the world was coming with the comet.

  Of course, he thought wryly, most of the prophets drank meths and carried their life in two plastic supermarket bags, but what the hell. He almost blew it off, but something in that striving thread he sensed as much as saw in the score would not be ignored. ‘Gabriel, can’t you hear that brighter theme coming in just for a second? We could try to enhance it. It’s getting lost. I could …’

  ‘What I would like to hear is less mouth and more bloody music, given that’s what you’re all being paid for,’ the singer snapped. ‘Now let’s take it from the top just the way we’ve been doing it and forget about brightness. We’re being paid for dark music because that’s what people want …’

  Is it, or is it a case of beggars can’t be choosers? the clarinet player wondered, lifting the mouthpiece to his lips and wetting the reed in readiness for his ten-second burst.

  A moment later the delicate thread in the arrangement was lost in the thumping rhythm that had made Hard Goth a chart stopper. Funeral music, Ruth called it. Despite all of their differences, he was inclined to agree. But it was not the music that the composer had created. He had looked at the name on the copyright line, wondering about the composer. E. Flanders – Elspeth? Erik? Ewan? He’d never heard of the person, though he knew Hard Goth’s music. Better to say, couldn’t get away from it, because it blared from every radio or car CD, every venue and club, and the young people who listened to it wore black, affected exhaustion, and were skinny to the point of emaciation, calling it heroin chic. To think they had started out wearing pink codpieces.

  Well, what was it to him, anyway? He was an agency fill-in lucky enough to be used occasionally by such a big-name band. Ironically, he had been getting more sessional work lately – maybe enough to quit teaching and play full-time. But Ruth wouldn’t hear of it. Too risky. She was right of course, but how it ached him that she didn’t understand what music meant to him. Although maybe that was his fault too, for failing to make her understand, for giving up in the face of her lack of interest.

  His mind drifted back to the music, and he wondered if the songwriter had put that wistful thread of hope in on purpose. It was so subtle, you could imagine it got there all by itself.

  The watcher withdrew, fascinated that the man had recognised the thread of the Song of songs in the original music score, and the way the Song brightened in him when he had been engaged in trying to hear it more clearly. Was it because the auras of the other musicians were streaked with Chaos that they heard nothing? But in the end, both the song-threaded clarinet player and the C
haos-tainted lead singer of the band were atypical. The vast majority of people on this world lay between the two extremes. They might hear the Song, if it were loud enough, or Chaos, if there was nothing else. What they needed was something that would strengthen the Song, but unfortunately the only thing that could do that was the Song itself, or reflections of it – echoes in the minds of those who heard it.

  It segued …

  6

  My brother knew people and he understood power; that is why he gave

  Darkfall into my hands. Because I did not want it …

  THE ALYDA SCROLLS

  Ember was dreaming of a red-haired youth whose face was vaguely familiar. He was sitting on a pile of wood in a small shed with several other teenagers, all male. There was a furtive air among them, evidenced by the hunched commas of their bodies.

  ‘I say we do it,’ the biggest in the group said, a thick-mouthed youth with inflamed pink eyelids and hair so fair that the scalp showed through the strands: an albino. ‘We’ll never get a chance like this again. Knowing the drop time and place is like … it’s like the chance of a lifetime.’

  ‘If we get caught I’ll be sent to a reformatory this time,’ objected a boy with glasses. He was several years younger than the red-haired youth, but his eyes looked old and strangely tired.

  ‘I’m on a good-behaviour bond, too,’ the albino sneered.

  ‘I’m more worried about being caught by Scorpion than by the police,’ the red-haired youth murmured.

  ‘Of course he won’t bring the police into it.’ This from a good-looking teenager, older than the rest, but not by much. He had lustrous black hair, and eyes the dark blue of certain dense sapphires and very deep parts of the ocean. ‘But he’ll never suspect a bunch of kids of trying to rip off a drop.’

  ‘Even kids with records?’ This was the boy with glasses.

  ‘What about this guy who is supposed to pick the stuff up?’ The red-haired youth spoke again and his name floated into Ember’s mind: Sean.

  The dark-haired young man gave them all a slow, delighted smile. ‘What about him? He’ll tell his boss it wasn’t where Scorpion said it would be. Then Scorpion will ask his bag man who’ll say he dropped it as planned. Each one of them will think the other one is lying and they’ll fight it out between themselves.’

  ‘Someone will be killed, Billy,’ the boy with glasses suggested.

  The dark-haired youth gave him a look of contempt. ‘Listen kiddo, there will be that much stuff sold at a concert this size that the drop will be thousands and thousands of dollars in one Bat place at one Bat time. Think how much we’ll make instead of a bunch of crims who probably did a lot worse in their life than steal money. We’re only evening up the odds. Think of us as the finger of God on the great scales of justice.’

  ‘Don’t say that, Billy. It makes me scared for you,’ the other boy said with fearful adoration.

  ‘Cool it, Holy. You stick with me and you’ll go all the way.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said one of the others. ‘It seems wrong to do this after what happened to the Shadow. I mean, that wasn’t drugs but …’

  ‘He was an idiot to sniff glue,’ Billy snapped contemptuously.

  Sean stood up abruptly. ‘I have to go.’

  ‘Are you in then, Birdman?’ Billy rose too, blocking the way out, a playful antagonism in his voice. They were the same height and stood eye to eye, but the dark-haired boy had a wiry, tensile strength centred around sensitive eyes and mouth and unexpectedly masculine hands with big knuckles and long fingers. The dark-haired Billy was frankly beautiful, with a lithe almost balletic grace that was at once both muscular and feminine.

  ‘I guess I’m just wondering who will even the odds on us,’ Sean said gravely.

  The other youth gave a weirdly gleeful grin, as if the red-haired boy had made a particularly brilliant joke. He stepped nimbly aside from the door and waved at it with a flourish. ‘Time to decide which side you’re on, Birdman.’

  ‘You’ll be the first to know,’ Sean said and he opened the shed door and went out, closing it behind him. Inside the hut, the other boys heard him begin to whistle softly as he walked away.

  The shock of realising that he was whistling the song the old man had played on the Greek island woke Ember.

  Blinking up at the play of lantern light on the wood-panelled roof of the cabin, she thought about the red-haired youth. He had lived a few streets away from the home where they had lived with their parents, and she had occasionally seen him on the bus or in the street. Of course dreams could be peopled by strange combinations of the known, the barely known and even the unknown. Once she dreamed she had fallen in love with the old black and white movie star, Alan Ladd. But she had the queer certainty that she had not been dreaming this time. Partly it was because he looked a few years older than she remembered him being, and partly because of how real it had felt. Yet if she had been having a vision of something that had really happened or would happen on her world, why a gang of young delinquents contemplating a crime? Was it because she had known the red-haired Sean that she was seeing him? Or because he had been whistling the song that she had heard before being drawn to Keltor? And what did that mean? Was it possible that someone else was about to be swept to Keltor? Perhaps the boy was actually the long-awaited Unraveller. Tareed had been so sure that Ember’s resemblance to Shenavyre was a sign that the time of the Unraveller was approaching. But what an irony to be counting on a hero and wind up with a boy.

  Ember shook her head slightly, and told herself it made no difference to her whether the long-awaited Unraveller would finally come to Keltor. All that mattered right now was getting to Darkfall in time to be healed, and before her second eye lost its sight. Because that could not be reversed, even if they did manage to heal the tumour.

  The ship listed deeply to one side, and she was glad to be distracted from her sombre thoughts by the need to reposition pillows around the unconscious Bleyd to stop him rolling onto his back. He was oblivious to the storming that was tossing them about and carrying them slightly but inexorably off course, his condition having grown steadily worse despite her efforts. She noted with foreboding that his skin was as pale and clammy as old dough, and his sleep a panting and restless delirium. She was moistening Bleyd’s chaffed lips when the shipmistress came down the wooden steps into the room. ‘He has woken?’ she asked.

  Ember shook her head. Revel examined the wounds and grunted at the suppurating slash marks on Bleyd’s back. ‘I was afraid of this. Well, there is nothing more you can do for him aboard the ship. He will have to be seen by a white cloak on Vespi.’

  ‘But you said we were not to leave the ship.’

  ‘We have no choice,’ Revel said heavily. ‘I can not let him die and the white cloaks will not come to the ship. You must decide if you will go on without him or wait until he recovers. It might be some time.’

  Ember turned aside. She did not want any delay in her own journey but Bleyd, too, had a death sentence hanging over him and finding another ship to carry him to Darkfall once he had recovered might be impossible. Ember found that she could not ruthlessly pursue her own needs at Bleyd’s expense, despite the angry urgings of dark Ember. ‘I will wait for him,’ she decided.

  ‘Very well,’ Revel said briskly. ‘We will not be able to fight free of this storming until the early hours of morning, but we should reach Vespi some time tomorrow. You had best both leave the ship when we dock. The Fomhikan must be taken to the Redleaf healing centre.’

  Ember felt a flutter of panic at the open-endedness of the shipmistress’s plan, but quelled it firmly. ‘How will we leave the ship with Bleyd in this state?’

  ‘I will think on it,’ Revel said.

  Once she had gone, Ember went about heating water to wash the Fomhikan’s wounds again, her mind drifting back to the gang of boys from her dream. Alene had told her that everything that was and had been and would be, lay in the unformed matter of the Void which lapped be
tween all worlds. If she accepted that, then her dream could have come from the Void. On Keltor she had certainly experienced the visions that here were called soulweavings, and which showed events that were past, present or yet to come. Initially she had associated the visions with her tumour, but Alene had told her that she was not the first stranger to develop soulweaving abilities on Keltor. She was curious about these other strangers, although the grim Ember with her unbearable memory of pain and terror, had reminded her that curiosity was a weakness.

  She glanced longingly at the a’luwtha, now packed safely in its padded cloth bag, but this was not the moment for music. She began to bathe Bleyd’s wounds again, thinking of a writer whose name she could not recall, who had suggested that the way to interpret the wild imagery of dreams was to ignore it and focus on the prime emotion of the dream.

  What did I feel in dreaming of those boys? she asked herself. I, who do not want to feel anything.

  Sorrow, weariness, the answer came immediately. These emotions had centred on the red-haired youth, Sean, whom the gang leader had named Birdman. Ember hadn’t liked Billy, for all his dark and lustrous beauty. Perhaps because of his beauty, she admitted to herself. But something in the gangling Sean had moved her and she struggled to find a word for it.

  Dignity?

  She shivered and her skin rose into goose bumps, for it seemed to her suddenly that what she had seen was no less than a turning point in the young man’s life; a moment of choice when his decision would affect all the moments that came after in his life, and perhaps even all the moments in the lives of the rest of the gang, and who knew how many other people. For a moment, Ember felt herself to be trembling on the brink of understanding something utterly vital, then she heard a movement and a hoarse groan and the sense of revelation blurred as Ember looked up to find Bleyd had awakened. His cheeks were a hectic blotchy red and his lips dry and bloodless, but his eyes were clear. ‘I am thirsty,’ he rasped. She hastened to give him water, but he could not swallow more than a few drops before sinking back into the sweat-stained pillows.