"I play the glaur," said Quyance, "and when the Hulorn was assembling his orchestra, he hired me. I was delighted to have the chance to participate in such a historic performance, even though I frankly couldn't understand why a master like Guerren Bloodquill had chosen to spend his talent on such a work. His genius was manifest in every phrase, but the effect was so unpleasant."
"We noticed," Tazi said.
Despite the pain of his injuries, the horn player gave her a wry little smile. "Actually, we didn't have inanimate objects turning into man-eating plants during rehearsal. Still, odd things did happen. Stacks of boxes falling. A rack of costumes catching fire. A rat dancing on its hind legs. A layer of frost in a hallway. And Bors the drummer-strong, young, healthy-keeled over dead. His heart just stopped for no reason at all.
"Given Guerren's sinister reputation," Quyance continued, "I suspected that the music was responsible. I told the Hulorn of my concerns, but if anything, my report made him more eager than ever to have the work performed. I didn't entirely understand him, but he seemed to believe that the opera might contain an arcane message sent down the ages from Bloodquill specifically to himself. A communication that would lead him to some mysterious 'destiny.'"
"Ah, yes, Andeth's destiny," Shamur said. She and Tazi lifted Quyance clear of the dead plant and helped him to a bench in the corner. "He's been seeking it for years, with never a clue as to what it will involve. Though I think we can rule out wise decisions and responsible governance."
"Well, when I persisted in my objections, he discharged me," Quyance said, "and before I left the palace, I purloined a copy of the score. I'm not merely a performer, you see." He drew himself up a little straighten "I'm also an initiate of Milil and a scholar of music in both its exoteric and esoteric aspects. I hoped that if I studied the opera, consulting the texts I've collected over the years, I might find out exactly what was going on with it, and I felt I had a duty to attempt precisely that."
"What did you come up with?" Tazi asked.
"Something more terrible than I could have dreamed. Guerren wove a sort of ritual into the score, which, when it reached its conclusion, would create a permanent region of primal chaos here on the earthly plane."
As a rebellious scapegrace of a girl, Shamur had seldom cared to study, but, gifted with intelligence and a good memory, she'd often assimilated her lessons more or less despite herself. Now she recalled her philosophy tutor explaining that on those levels of reality where chaos, a fundamental force of the cosmos, reigned unchecked by the counterbalancing principle of law, all things were possible, and therefore, nothing was stable or permanent. Under such conditions, human life could not long endure.
"Why in the name of the Abyss would he want do that?" she asked.
Quyance dredged up another weary little smile. "Well, the tales do say that he was mad. But perhaps it was intended as a weapon. You make your enemy a gift of the opera, he has it staged, and it destroys him. In any case, it was only tonight that I finally discerned its purpose. I raced back here, slipped in through a side entrance… but you know the rest."
"How big a region of chaos are we talking about?" Tazi asked, restlessly toying with her knife.
"I can't be altogether certain," Quyance said, "but I think it might engulf the entire city."
A chill oozed up Shamur's spine, and the music jangling in the air seemed to laugh at her. She pushed horror to the back of her mind and forced herself to concentrate on practicalities. "There's one thing I still don't understand. During rehearsal, you people must have performed the opera from start to finish. Why didn't the ritual take effect then?"
"It draws power from starlight," the little musician said. "That's why Guerren specified that it be performed outdoors at night. We always rehearsed inside, to avoid the winter cold."
"The important question," Tazi said, "is how do we stop it? The difficulty is that it senses we're trying, and every time we approach the performers, the magic grabs us and flings us back here."
Quyance shook his head. "I'm afraid I have no idea."
"Perhaps I do," Shamur said. "Tazi, we saw the violet sparks filling the amphitheater, and spilling out across the grass, like a ground fog. And when we descended into the cellar, we didn't find as many oddities down here."
"The plant was a fairly impressive oddity," the black-haired girl replied, "but still, you're right."
"Doesn't all that suggest that the magic is most potent at ground level? Conceivably most aware at ground level? Perhaps it we came at it from above, we could sneak up on it."
Tazi frowned. "Maybe, but I can't imagine that buying us more than a second."
"What if we used that second to sap a measure of its power? Then it might not have the ability to displace us."
Shamur told the girl the specifics of her plan.
Tazi grinned. "It sounds completely harebrained to me. Let's do it."
They hastily made Quyance as comfortable as possible, then returned to the ground floor, where they discovered that in their absence the chambers and corridors had rearranged themselves into a veritable labyrinth. At last they found their way back to the foyer.
Here they yanked down one of the tapestries-a panorama of life in Selgaunt, with merchants trading, watermen ferrying passengers and cargo about the harbor, beggars begging, and the like-and cut it into manageable, blanket-sized pieces, which they then rolled and secured to their backs with strips of fabric. Shamur wondered fleetingly just how many hundreds or thousands of fivestars the hanging had been worth.
Considerably less than the entire city, one could be certain.
"I intended to find one of the staircases that would take us to the roof," she said, "but given the alterations to the interior of the building, that could take hours even if they still exist. It makes more sense to go up the outside." She smiled at Tazi. "Given your facility with a lockpick, I suspect you know how to climb."
The girl blinked. "Ah… yes. But do you?"
"I'll race you to the top."
The two women hastened out the door, then started up the wall beside it. Ridges in the stonework bit into Shamur's bare feet, but the discomfort was a small price to pay for the pleasure of conquering a vertical surface in the dead of night, and she almost wished the ascent could be more of a challenge. Thanks to the Hulorn's abominable taste and the excess of ornamentation it had produced, she found easy hand- and toeholds nearly every inch of the way.
"I've been thinking about what you said," Tazi remarked, climbing along beside her, just the slightest hint of exertion in her voice.
"What?"
"That we shouldn't go for help, because the music might just put any newcomers to sleep, or turn them into snails. How do we know it isn't going to turn us into snails before we're through?"
"We don't," Shamur said. "That's part of the fun." She grasped the black marble balustrade of a balcony. For a moment it felt like solid stone, but when she trusted her weight to it and started to pull herself up, it turned to mush in her fingers, and she fell.
Tazi cried out. Shamur glimpsed the ground four stories below, waiting to smash her plummeting body to pulp. She clutched desperately at the wall and grabbed a fragile bit of cinquefoil molding. It crumbled, and she dropped once more. Certain it was her last chance, she snatched for the narrow protuberance at the top of a cornice.
To her own surprise, she managed to catch and hold on to it. Her momentum dashed her against the wall, and there she clung, heart pounding, her fingers with their torn nails and her wrenched arms and shoulders throbbing.
Tazi peered down at her, then asked, "Was that part of the fun, too?"
Shamur grinned, made a lewd gesture at her, and, once she'd caught her breath, climbed upward again.
The Uskevren women reached the roof without further mishaps. An expanse of fish-scale tile studded with chimney stacks and spires, it rose and fell with a confusion of domes, gables, hips, and pitches.
Shamur rotated her shoulders and swung her a
rms, trying to work the soreness out. Tiles groaned and rattled. She turned, her hand dropping to the hilt of her broadsword, and a warrior whose immobile face, hauberk, and greatsword were all made of pale stone lumbered stiffly from the darkness. She drew her blade*****
The lantern in his upraised hand, Thamalon peered about the benighted forest clearing. Standing behind him, Shamur silently lifted her skirt and removed the broadsword she'd concealed beneath it. It would have been simplicity itself to drive the blade between her husband's broad shoulders, but that had never been her way. Besides, she wanted to watch his face as he breathed his last.
"All right," he said, puzzlement in his voice, "where is this marvel you insisted I must see?"
"In my hand," she replied.
He turned, and his brows-still black, unlike the snowy hair on his head-knit when he beheld the weapon. "Is this a joke?" he asked.
"Far from it," she replied. "I recommend you draw and do your level best to kill me, because I certainly intend to kill you."
"I know you haven't loved me for a long while," he said, "if indeed you ever did. But still, why would you wish me dead?"
"Because I know," she said.
He shook his head. "I don't understand, and I don't believe you truly do either, you're ill and confused. Consider what you're doing. You have no idea how to wield a sword. Even if we did fight-"
She deftly cut him on the cheek. "Draw, old serpent. Draw, or die like a sheep at the butcher's."
For an instant he stared in amazement at her manifest skill with her weapon. Then he stepped back and reached for the hilt of his long sword.
*****
Something slammed into Shamur and knocked her staggering along the edge of the roof. One heel came down on empty air, and the weight of the rolled pieces of tapestry on her back tried its best to drag her over into space, but with a convulsive effort, she managed to throw herself forward onto the tiles.
She realized that, transfixed by her vision, she'd frozen, and Tazi had had to give her a push to keep her away from the stone warrior. She pivoted back toward the confrontation.
Smiling, Tazi advanced and retreated with such surefooted panache that one might almost have imagined she was fencing on the level floor of a training hall, not fighting on an incline where any loss of balance could result in a fatal fall. Her adversary crept after her clumsily. Guerren Bloodquill's music had granted it a sort of life, but here so high above the ground, not to the same degree as the gorgon. It hadn't transmuted the creature's substance into flesh.
Unfortunately, that very fact rendered Tazi's long sword all but useless. It rang and rebounded without leaving a scratch, or at least none large enough to see by moonlight. Meanwhile, other animate rainspouts and statues, some in the form of humans and others bestial, were converging on the scene. Once they surrounded the girl, her superior agility would no longer suffice to keep her safe from harm.
Shamur sprang up and rushed the stone warrior, who turned and swung his sword in a sweeping horizontal cut. She dived beneath the blow and rammed into him, wrestling him backward until he toppled over the edge of the drop.
She nearly went with him but caught herself in time. He shattered on the ground below with a satisfying crash.
"Don't bother to deny that you nodded off on me that last time," said Tazi, a little out of breath.
"Well, perhaps for a moment," said Shamur. "Our friend there advanced on me so slowly, I got bored."
The two women scrambled up the roof. Meanwhile, the stone noose around them tightened, the gaps between the living statues closing one by one until, Shamur observed, none remained.
"All right, then we'll break out," she said. "Help me pull down the fox." The statue in question was an anthropomorphic character from a fable, walking on two legs and clad in a foppish doublet and plumed hat. He carried a yarting in his hand, brandishing the stringed musical instrument like a war club.
The Uskevren women sprang at the fox, and, narrowly dodging both a swing of the yarting and the attacks of the figures on either side, grabbed him, dumped him on his upturned nose, and ran over him. Glancing back, Shamur saw the statues awkwardly turning to pursue. A couple lost their balance, toppled, and rolled rumbling down the roof.
Now that she was no longer in immediate peril, she wondered at her last vision. It certainly hadn't been an episode from her past. Was it possible it had been a glimpse of the future?
No, of course not, because the Thamalon in the glade had spoken the truth. She'd never loved him. Sometimes she'd felt that she despised him. But certainly never enough to kill him, the head of her house and the father of her children. Surely the experience had only been a meaningless phantasm.
Better to forget it, then, and concentrate on the task at hand. The mob of statuary was still hunting her and Tazi, and similar menaces shambled through the darkness ahead. Silently darting and freezing, availing themselves of the cover provided by the complex topography of the roof, mother and daughter managed to make their way toward the Hunting Garden unseen, even when they passed so near their foes that they could have reached out and touched them. Shamur grinned. She'd always enjoyed a good, perilous game of hide-and-seek.
Her pleasure shriveled when the music swelled. Bizarre as the chords and rhythms were, she, who had sat through hundreds of operas, could nonetheless discern that the performance was building toward a climax and she and Tazi were running out of time.
"Come on!" she whispered. "We have to hurry!" She strode forward. Something hissed, and the tiles gave way between her feet, creating a crater three yards across. She toppled helplessly forward until Tazi grabbed her, and, with a grunt, yanked her back to safety on the rim.
The hissing continued. Looking about, Shamur saw that holes were spontaneously opening all across the roof, with no discernible pattern and in such abundance that one could easily believe the whole surface might disintegrate in a matter of minutes.
"I never thought I'd say this," Tazi remarked, "but I may have had enough excitement for one evening. I'm ready for this chore to get easier."
If one of the holes opened directly beneath the women and dropped them down inside the Palace, they'd suffer broken bones at the very least. Before they resumed moving, they needed to discover some sort of warning sign that a given section of tiles was about to collapse. Finally, after several seconds of scrutiny, Shamur observed a subtle shimmering, nearly indistinguishable from the gleam of moonlight, which seemed to presage dissolution.
"Follow me!" she said.
Leaping, zigzagging, and backtracking as necessary, she and Tazi managed to avoid the yawning craters, but it was impossible to do that and keep away from the living statues at the same time. They had to rely on pure speed and agility to see them safely past their enemies. Sometimes these barely sufficed. An alabaster harpy with gilded wings clawed at Shamur, ripping her gown at the shoulder and lightly scoring the flesh beneath.
At last, when so much of the roof had already collapsed that the remainder resembled a spider's web, the Uskevren women reached the eastern edge. Without breaking stride, they leaped into space, grabbed branches of two of the nearest trees, and hauled themselves onto secure perches. A stone axeman clumping along in pursuit stared after them in seeming frustration, then dropped from sight when the tiles eroded beneath him.
Shamur looked down and gasped in dismay. The cloud of violet sparks was brighter than ever, and it was pulsing like a living thing, extruding arms of light and pulling them in again. She suspected that in another minute or so the tendrils would stop withdrawing. The mass would expand and expand until it drowned all Selgaunt in death and madness.
Recklessly, for there was no longer time for even a modicum of caution, she and Tazi scrambled through the treetops like squirrels, working their way to the limbs that overhung the front of the amphitheater. Once in position, they unslung the rolls of tapestry from their backs, spread them, and dropped them over certain of the singers and instrumentalists below. If the gods we
re kind, the squares of cloth, by cutting the performers off from the starlight, would so weaken the magic that it could no longer fling the interlopers away.
Tazi jumped down among the orchestra and started wresting the players' instruments from their grips. Shamur leaped onto the stage and moved to club the singers with the flat of her blade.
She silenced a tenor, then a mezzo-soprano, and still Bloodquill's sorcery hadn't displaced her. Tazi was right, she thought, grinning, it's a daft scheme, but by Mask, it's working!
Then a portion of the cloud spiraled high into the air, coalescing into a vaguely manlike form. The giant raised its huge, luminous fist, and she stood motionless, sneering, daring it to attack. Its hand plummeted, and she sprang aside. Despite the spark creature's insubstantial appearance, the blow shook the ground. She kept her feet, and, before the colossus could poise itself to attack again, she clubbed a member of the chorus who was just floundering clear of a section of tapestry.
Shamur repeated the same maneuver several times, until at last, when she and Tazi had silenced the majority of the performers, the giant's form dissolved. Though Shamur didn't feel any wind, the violet sparks whirled like dust caught in a cyclone, then guttered out. The few musicians who were still playing stumbled to a ragged halt. With the glowing cloud and the music gone, the night seemed profoundly dark and quiet.
"Yes!" Shamur crowed, swinging the broadsword over her head. "Yes, yes, yes!"
She saw the people in front of her blinking, shifting, shaking off their collective stupor. She saw Gundar in the front row and realized that her old scar was clearly visible through the tear in her sleeve. In a moment, the dwarf was bound to notice it, and he'd know she was the same woman who'd robbed him so many years ago.
It was imperative that she prevent such a discovery, and yet…
She'd denied her true nature for a quarter of a century. Wasn't that enough? If fate had chosen to release her from her dreary masquerade, then fine, let it end!
She stood paralyzed, suspended between duty and desire. Gundar gave his head a shake, rubbed his eyes, and began to turn his head in her direction. Then a layer of cloth settled on her shoulders.
The Halls of Stormweather s-1 Page 9
