Inali shuffled aside to yield her passage. Shoulders hunched, hands clasped before him, almost cringing—he looked more a slave than a desert prince.
Was this the freedom of the Shantren?
“What say you?” The Takhran summoned the woman to Birdie’s cell with an almost imperceptible gesture of his hand. “Is this child the Songkeeper of legend?”
“Surely my lord knows better than I.” Her voice was lower, rougher than Birdie expected.
“Indeed.”
The Takhran’s quiet, flat tone allowed no room for argument or deflection. With an inclination of her head, Zahar turned to Birdie. Hers was an edged gaze that made Birdie feel as though her flesh would be sliced away, layer by layer, until nothing remained, and even her hidden thoughts had been revealed to this woman who had been a Songling. This woman Gundhrold had known.
It brought heat to her cheeks and sparked anger in her chest. Setting her teeth, she matched the woman’s stare and somehow felt that she could see her more clearly. Although no emotion marred the stone-like stillness of Zahar’s face, still there was something about her that struck Birdie as brittle and frail. Like the petals of a sundrop sapped by winter’s frost.
A single note of pity swept through her, but she dashed it aside.
Zahar’s head jerked up. “It is as you say, my lord. She is the one.”
“Yes, yes.” Inali broke in. “I swear to you, by Sigurd’s mane, she is the Songkeeper. She is strong, but with the talav, she could be so much more.” He ventured nearer until he stood between the Takhran and Zahar, but his good hand trembled as he removed his spectacles and wiped the lenses on his vest. “She is lost, afraid, confused—as I was. Please, my lord, can you not aid her as you aided me?”
“Enough, Inali.” Birdie forced the words between her teeth. “I do not want your help.”
Her defiance went unnoticed.
Inali alone gave any indication that he had even heard her. Not one word had either Zahar or the Takhran spoken to her directly. After all this time, all this talk about her importance as the Songkeeper, perhaps she should have realized. She as a person, didn’t matter at all. To them, she was just a thing, to be done away with or used at will.
“Would you welcome such blood within the ranks of the Shantren, Zahar?”
Again, the woman’s scrutiny sliced through Birdie. “Welcome it, aye, but such talk is worthless. She will not bend. Her mind is set.”
The Takhran nodded once, then turned swiftly on his heel and strode away.
“But my lord!” Inali chased after him. “Is not the choosing what you promise us all? Freedom to decide, control of our lives. Should she not have the choice, my lord?”
The Takhran paused midstride and his shoulders settled as with a long exhaled breath, but he did not turn. “He speaks true, little Songkeeper. There is much the Shantren offers. Much you have yet to learn. Do not let the ill-conceived prejudices of a few alter the course of your life.”
“I …” Birdie took a deep breath. Her gaze darted from the Takhran to Inali’s hopeful face stained red in the light of the guttering firepot. “I won’t join you.”
It was madness to consider otherwise.
“She will not yield.” The stone of Zahar’s mask cracked at last, but Birdie saw only disgust. “There is weakness in her, yes, but there is also stubbornness. Unthinking, unreasoning stubbornness, like her father and grandmother before her. She will not break.”
A tremor ran through her at those words.
“Spoken true, perhaps, but break is such a harsh term.” A half turn from the Takhran granted a glimpse of his face and the hint of a thin-lipped smile. “We will seek to enlighten her. Should she prove as foolish and unyielding as the rest of her line, then she may share their fate.”
•••
The sight of the dead chimera broke the soldiers’ rush. A moment’s hesitation, no more, but time enough for Amos to ready his stance before they fell upon him, the longer reach of their swords pinning him against the wall and cutting off escape, while the hound tore past toward Sym. Ordinarily, having one’s back to the wall was a decent method for holding off multiple opponents, especially when fighting injured. But only if one’s weapon had comparable reach.
So Amos did what he did best in such situations.
He leveled the field of contest.
He dropped to one knee and caught the middle soldier’s sword-hand, while simultaneously stabbing up beneath the man’s breastplate into his gut. A twist of his wrist, as the man crumpled, deposited the sword solidly in his own grip, just in time to stand and turn aside a thrust from the second Khelari.
But evading the thrust required him to sidestep out into the middle of the passage, exposing his back to the third Khelari. He felt the rush of a blade through the air and dodged on instinct a second before pain sliced through his upper arm. A shallow cut—he knew the feeling—but no less painful. Gritting his teeth, he charged at his current opponent, striking hard and fast in an effort to force him around and into his comrade, but a crash, groan, and wet thunk sounded behind him in quick succession.
He snatched a glance and saw Sym leaning on her spear over the third Khelari. Teeth flashing, the hound lunged at her, but she smacked it away and gestured for Amos to attend to himself. The glint in her eyes didn’t bode well if he argued.
Back to the fight, he turned. The Khelari rushed at him with a yell, but now that it was a one on one bout, Amos managed to cut him down in a furious barrage of strokes. The man dropped to his knees and then crumpled beside the chimera. Amos’s borrowed sword fell from his grip to clang against the rock underfoot. Breathing heavily, lip curled in a snarl, he stood amidst the carnage and surveyed the damage.
Bilges.
A chimera, three Khelari, and a hound all slain, and that was all well and good, but now both he and Sym were injured, and there was no way to hide evidence of the fight. Anyone who came along would know intruders had been here, might even be able to wager a guess as to where they were going.
And if not, surely the hounds would pick up their scent.
Though all things considered, the way the soldiers had reacted at the sight of them—not a shout of alarm or surprise—it was like they expected to find someone here. Mayhap it was the tunnel collapse that had given them away. Or mayhap it was something more sinister …
An idea floated through his mind, dredged up from the past. Distasteful as it was, he acted upon it without a second thought, dropping to his knees and removing the armor from the third Khelari—a man close enough to his own size and height—and then hastily buckling it on himself. “Gear up, lass.”
Such a disguise wouldn’t withstand any sort of a search, especially once the Khelari found the bodies stripped of armor, but if it made the soldiers think twice about trusting their own comrades, it could gain them a little time.
Time to find Birdie and break free of this death trap.
Fingers fumbling with the last straps, he pushed up to his feet and tiptoed to the fork in the passage. The baying of hounds and shouts of soldiers relaying messages rebounded from the walls, but if he strained his ears, they seemed to be coming more from the right than from any other direction. It only served to fix more firmly in his mind the notion that they’d been heading toward danger . . . not away from it.
“C’mon.” He buckled the soldier’s belt around his own waist and sheathed the borrowed sword, then beckoned Sym into the left-hand passage. “Change o’ route.”
Her dark eyes flickered up at him beneath the shade of the Khelari helm she had pulled over her braids. Somehow she had managed to strap her spear quiver over the bulky armor too. Didn’t aid the disguise, but he imagined he would have about as much luck getting her to leave her spears behind as she would have convincing him to set aside his dirk.
“I thought Inali said to stick to the right.”
“Aye, he did.” A sour taste flooded Amos’s mouth. “But it sounds t’ me like that’s where our pursuers are comin’ from, so either yer helpful young friend doesn’t know this place so well as he thought, or …”
He left the sentence hanging, because anything else was unspeakable, but the fear drove him on at an increasingly faster pace as the passages grew more and more familiar, heedless of all but the need to go on. He had been a fighter for long enough to trust his instincts, and the unsettled feeling that had broiled in his stomach ever since this cursed mission began promised little good for Birdie.
Had he been fool enough to leave her unprotected, as he’d left Artair? Oh Emhran, let it not be true! It was boggswoggling how easily that name he had so often cursed slipped past his lips when the world spun out of his control.
“Hawkness—” Sym called.
He spun around, reaching for both his dirk and sword. But there were no enemies in the passage, only Sym, a good thirty paces behind. She slumped against the wall, head hanging, breath coming in the short, wheezy gasps of someone in pain.
Bilgewater!
Cursing his own forgetfulness, Amos jogged back to her side and hauled her arm over his shoulder. “It’s only a wee bit farther . . . we can make it.”
“How could you know that?”
“Because I know where he’s taken her, an’ it’s not good.” His mouth went dry as he uttered the last words he would have ever hoped to have to utter. “We’re goin’ t’ the Pit.”
•••
Birdie sat on the floor with her back pressed to the wall of her cell, knees drawn up beneath her chin. The bite on her leg had finally stopped bleeding. Congealed blood stuck her leggings to the wound, forming a sort of makeshift bandage. She could feel the dull, throbbing melody pulsing through the stone, and caught the beat of her own heart and breathing gradually aligning with the dreary rhythm as she stared dry-eyed at the iron bars.
The Takhran’s words repeated endlessly in her mind, a chilling whisper.
Their fate.
Since leaving the desert, she had given little thought to the family Gundhrold had told her about. Caught up in all the fighting, running, and planning, all her questions about her family had drifted from the forefront of her mind, forgotten in the mad scramble to survive. The grandmother, father, mother, and uncle she had never known, all taken by the Khelari, all stolen from her by the Takhran.
Had any of them ever attempted this mission?
Soft boots scuffed the rock, and Inali stepped into view outside her cell. The stains of travel had been scrubbed from his face and clothes, and over his desert leathers he now wore the blue robe of the Shantren. It draped his narrow frame like a tent. Without a word, he knelt and slipped a piece of parchment through the bars. The scrap uncurled at Birdie’s feet, revealing the charcoaled lines of her own face.
But in the sketch, a talav hung around her neck.
“Consider it . . . Birdie.”
She tore her gaze from the sketch and slammed both fists against the bars. “I will never yield!” But her voice rang through an empty corridor. Only after she tore the parchment in half, crumpled the pieces, and threw them out into the passage, did she realize that it was the first time Inali had called her something other than little Songkeeper.
The hours passed slowly, time crawling inexorably on, while Birdie shivered and dreaded the fate the Takhran planned for her. A lump settled in her throat, so thick she could hardly breathe, choked by fears so great and terrible she didn’t dare whisper them to herself, even in the solitude of her cell.
Her mind drifted to her friends and the perils they faced, no less terrifying than her own. Amos and Sym, Ky and his beloved Underground, the griffin. She had flung her arms around Gundhrold’s neck when she bid him farewell, as if even then, she had sensed the finality of it, while he whispered words of peace and encouragement in her ear. So confident of the outcome, of who she was and what she would become.
But it was Inali’s assurances that had led her here. The false promises of a pawn and a traitor. Even now, his words from the Hollow Cave echoed in her ears, declaring her the Songkeeper who would release Tal Ethel and save Leira from the Takhran’s rule. How could she hope to untangle the truth from the lies?
It was true that the Song had rescued her in the past. On the Westmark Bridge, the beach of Bryllhyn, and the deck of the Langorian ship …
If only she could summon it now.
“You must listen, little one.” The words Gundhrold had spoken in Brog’s donkey shed—ages ago, it seemed now—crept to the forefront of her mind. “Listen.”
And oh how she listened. Eyes closed, head lifted, breath held. If she could have silenced the traitorous beating of her heart for but a moment, she would have. Then finally she heard it. Soft, gentle, little more than a whisper of hope or a glimmer of starlight in the endless night.
It did not rise in answer to her summons.
“I am the Songkeeper,” she whispered, clenching her fists so hard her arms trembled.
Still the bars did not snap, nor did the stones crumble to allow her escape. There was no explosion of strength within her. No force that leveled her enemies. Her straining ear caught only the whisper of the Song, and even that seemed almost drowned by the tendrils of the broken melody creeping through the stones to surround her like an errant mist.
She was a prisoner still.
Abandoned again.
30
“I don’t like this. An’ I don’t mind sayin’ so, either.”
Ky only half glanced up at Paddy before returning to his work. “Me neither.” He trailed the singed end of his stick across the stone in front of him, marking a few more lines into his drawing before frowning and smudging half of them out with the tip of his finger. When it came to slinging, he was your man.
But an artist he was not.
Still, volunteering to serve as lookout had its perks. He’d managed to surprise Cade, skip battle drills run by Slack, and swing a perch in the battlements that granted a bird’s eye view of the whole countryside. Of the courtyard where Slack had the runners sweating despite the cold, the north keep walkway where Commander Thallus berated his forces with a voice that rivaled an earthquake, and the too silent earthen breastwork where the Khelari had set up a hasty encampment. Just the sort of view one needed to plan an attack.
Judging by the ravens wheeling overhead, the Khelari thought so too.
“It’s too quiet, isn’t it?” He squinted against Tauros’s noonday rays bouncing off the white road and the snow heaped alongside. “Just doesn’t sit right.”
“I don’t mean the Khelari.”
Something about Paddy’s voice made Ky sit up straight and focus. The freckles stood out on Paddy’s face like a spattering of mud as he darted a glance across the walkway and down into the courtyard. “Goin’ behind Cade’s back like this . . . it just feels wrong.”
Was that all?
“We’re not going behind Cade’s back. Just not telling him yet. With any luck, Migdon will bring help, and all our planning will’ve been for nothing.”
“Luck?” Paddy snorted. “Shure.”
Ky couldn’t fault his skepticism. The way things had been going, if the Underground had any luck at all, it was bound to be of the bad variety. Still, they had managed to stumble across one or two fortunate breaks along the way. Like Cade hitting it off with Commander Thallus. Somehow, he’d managed to talk the old dwarf into handing over four mounted crossbows and sending dwarves to install them at strategic points along the south keep battlements.
Under Cade’s direction, no less.
If nothing else, it kept Cade out of their hair and might just give them a bit of an edge when the next attack came.
“What’s that?” Paddy gestured at the mess of lines Ky had scrawled on the battlement.
“Bat
tle plan . . . of sorts.” Nothing Paddy, the Underground’s mapmaker, had been meant to see. He rubbed his hand across the lines, smearing them into a meaningless black smudge. “Just scribbles really. Thinking through what I’d do if I were the Khelari.” He dusted his hands on his fringed trousers. “So, did you get it?”
“Shure, I got it.” Paddy fished around in his jacket pocket and produced a leather pouch that he carefully deposited in Ky’s hand. “Had a grand old time convincin’ that commander to part with it too. Care to tell what you need ryree powder for?”
“Well, the way I figure it, the walls are bound to be the weakest part of our defense. Not enough of us to guard every inch, and the gate’s inaccessible so long as we hold the pass.” He jerked his chin toward the massive wooden gate on the south side of the circular keep. “They’ll have to come up over the walls. Once they gain a footing, we’ll bail and set off our distraction, leaving us free and clear to walk out the main gate.”
“Walk out? What sort of distraction were you thinkin’?”
“Couple ryree packets in bonfires spaced out across the ramparts and at the top of both sets of stairs.” Might not be quite so brazen as trying to sneak past the Khelari in a coffin, but the plan had a nice, bold Migdon-ish feel to it. Ky figured it would make the dwarf proud. “We can set a fuse, like Hawkness did with the packets in the Underground—two would be best, one for each of the wall-top stairs, so we can light them on our way down. Reckon that’ll do the trick.”
Paddy pursed his lips and rubbed a hand across his chin. “An’ what, you an’ I set this up all by our-handsome-selves?”
“Nah, I recruited Meli and Syd too. They’ve been hunting supplies for me all morning.” Paddy elbowed him, but he kept talking. “Don’t worry. They won’t get in trouble. We’ll need to lay the fuses out and build the bonfires beforehand and make sure—what is it?”
“Movement in the Khelari camp.”
Songkeeper Page 30
