Song of the Beast (19 page)

His speech was hesitating, yet in every pause he would watch me, casting his pale eyes on me and then away again. I kept working and let him spin it out. “Your cousin, King Devlin, has a son ...”

In that pause he did indeed see my interest sparked. I could never forget Donal, the infant who had shown me the truths of innocence, purity, and undemanding love to weave into my music.

“... nineteen now. A fine youth by all accounts. Leading troops in the Gondari war.”

No surprise. I'd heard as much in Camarthan.

“... but no one understood why the king and the prince did not smite the Gondari, as their forces are superior. We've learned that the Gondari have taken the young prince hostage.”

Hostage! Donal ... my cousin's child and so my cousin, too ... the infant grown to fair youth, held in squalor and bitter cold, murderous heat and unending terror, surrounded by savage bellowing and the vomit of fire, day and night. Absolutely without hope. If his father attacked the Gondari, the youth would be chained to a post and seared with dragon's fire—not charred to ash in an instant, but left to die slowly in agony as long as they could make it last. And if Devlin held back, his son would languish in his prison forever until he died coughing up blood, or shivering with untended fever, or banging his head in madness against the stone walls while the dragons screamed their triumph. Stalemate. Forever.

In that instant I understood what was the “favor” that Devlin was going to ask of me on the night of Callia's murder. He believed I could free his son. He thought I could sing and make the dragons let Donal go, as had been done in Aberthain. No wonder he claimed he didn't know what had been done to me. No wonder. He had been so agitated, so tentative. He was going to go ahead and ask ... until I said I didn't know what I'd done. At that point he couldn't ask without revealing what he'd been determined to destroy. To keep his dangerous secret, he'd had to sacrifice his son.
Fires of heaven, Devlin ...

Until that moment I had not actually believed what the Elhim told me I had done, that my music had somehow made the dragons grow restless and disobey the commands of the bloodstones. I had been sure it was all a mistake, a devastating, life-destroying misunderstanding. But now ...

I looked upon Nyura's pale face, not thinking of him at all, but of my cousin's child in a prison more hopeless than Mazadine. I could not hate Devlin enough to rejoice in such devastation. I closed my eyes and envisioned the trusting, helpless infant I had known in an hour of purest joy. “Would that I could sing for you,” I whispered. “If there were a god to hear me, I would beg his grace to sing you free.”

The sound of horses brought me back to the present. Nyura was riding away toward the caverns, no doubt insulted by my long distraction. The bridge builders were arriving with a team of horses dragging a load of huge timbers down the road. I greeted them, and then drove slowly back to the rockfall to get another load. After working until sunset, I moved to the woodshop and smoothed rough timbers into usable planks until I could not lift the drawknife one more stroke.

Though the work drove me to exhaustion as I wished, never could I rid myself of the image of Donal trapped in horror. Uninterested in Elhim society, I did not return to the cavern, but bedded down in the woodshop, as had been my custom for the past weeks. Deep in my dreams that night I heard the bellowing dragons, no music in their cries, only wild and savage murder to the ears of a youth standing at the threshold of manhood without hope. The dragons screamed, haunting and dreadful, until I woke shaking in the dark corner of the woodshop and glimpsed a slender figure outlined against the dim glow of the banked fire. The figure had an arm upraised, and glittering in the light of a flaring ember was the deadly blade of a knife on a course for my back.

Chapter 14

I launched myself at the lower half of the slender silhouette, shooting up one hand to hold the dagger-wielding arm at bay. We toppled onto the sawdust-covered floor, but my assailant writhed and struggled and squirmed out from under me. I hadn't enough hands to hold him still, yet keep the knife a safe distance from my vital parts. Fortunately my legs were longer than my attacker's arms, and I was able to plant a foot firmly in his gut. A pained grunt followed and a massive expulsion of air, debilitating enough to relax the hand holding the knife and allow me to back away crabwise from the cloaked and hooded figure. My arms felt like water.

Not sanguine about any further combat, I pulled myself up to get away. But I was desperately curious and reached out to flip the hood from my opponent's face. At the same moment he raised the knife again with a furious growl. The better part of wisdom commanded me to depart, even in ignorance, so I ran.

My morning excursions in Camarthan served me well as I streaked through the moonlit meadows and wood-land. By the time I reached the great cavern, I had left pursuit behind and given a bit of thought as to what I was going to do next. On consideration, waking my hosts to say one of their number was trying to murder me seemed unproductive and unwise. Instead I sank to the ground in the shadows, flattening myself to the cliff wall just beside the mouth of the cavern, thinking I might see who would come slinking through the doorway while honest people slept. With surprise on my side, I could drag the villain before his own people and have evidence of my accusation.

But as the hard, brittle stone dug uncomfortably into my back, the damp grass soaked my breeches, and my blood lost the heat generated by midnight attacks, I began to laugh. I rolled onto all fours, a position that stretched and eased my wretched back, and I laughed until tears dripped from my face onto the soggy ground. Anyone who came on me in that time would have thought me mad.

You can't let go, can you?
I said to myself.
Was there ever such a cowardly fool as you, Aidan MacAllister? To run away from a shadow who offered you nothing but what you have already? What dead man fears a knife? And what idiot thinks a villain will come walking through this door when there are undoubtedly fifty other entrances hidden in these cliffs? Why do you hold on? Let it go, fool.

If my midnight visitor had renewed his assault at that moment, I would have bared my breast and guided his blade with my grotesque fingers. But no one came, and at some time I collapsed into a sodden heap and slept until first light, when fingers began poking at me.

“MacAllister! Aidan! Dear god, are you all right?” A hand clamped my wrist and probed about my head—seeking a pulse or an injury, no doubt—then rolled me onto my back before I was awake enough to prevent it. My inadvertent groan at that painful posture only intensified his efforts to locate a wound, so he pulled open my shirt and would have ripped it right off of me if I'd not gathered my foggy wits.

“I'm all right. Please don't.” I pushed the hands away and sat up to greet Davyn, whose wide-eyed fright was yielding to a flush rosier than the dawn light.

“I thought ... seeing you out here like this ...”

“It's a long story,” I said, “and not one I care to publish. Not very flattering to my Senai warrior heritage.”

“But—”

“I'm all right. I'd rather talk about breakfast. I don't think I ate anything at all yesterday, and as it seems I'm inescapably attached to living for today, at least, I might as well get on with it.”

“Of course. Yura was just lighting the fires when I came out.”

We ate Yura's breakfast porridge, thick, hot, and satisfying. Then, leaving Davyn still mystified, I took myself to the stables and the rock pile and the bridge and the woodshop. I worked hard enough that I could not entertain a single thought except how to persuade my body to do what I demanded of it. And when I buried my face in the straw-filled mat in the corner of the woodshop late that night, I held the faint hope that I might never wake again.

I did, of course, to another dark figure lurking in the shadows, but this time instead of using a knife, my visitor beckoned me with his voice. “Wake up, slugabed, and come with me. We need to talk.”

“Don't want to talk,” I mumbled into my pallet. “Use the knife. I shouldn't have stopped you last night.”

“It doesn't matter what you want, Aidan MacAllister.”

At last someone was being honest with me. But as I recognized the voice as Narim's, I decided that such a judgment was premature.

“So talk,” I said. “Tell me something that is absolute truth.”

“You are not dead.”

I bleated in disbelief. “You're a fool,” I said, and pulled my blanket over my head.

“That is certainly truth. But not because of what I just said. One could as easily say that
you
are the fool, mourning the loss of your gods. The gods are still there. You just don't know their names, and for a Senai to admit such a thing is beyond the capability of the species.”

“I've seen no evidence to contradict my belief,” I said. “Not in a very long while.”

“Ah, my friend, you are still lost in the darkness. How much more wondrous are gods who can create such beings as humans and dragons and Elhim, than your paltry deities who speak with borrowed voices.”

“I do not deny that I am and have been a fool.”

“But a live fool. Come with me and let me prove my contention.”

“Why should I?”

“For Callia. She deserves a reason for her death.”

I stared at the pale-eyed Elhim who crouched in the darkness like a wolf waiting for the last embers of the watchfire to die away. “Bastard.”

“If that's the worst you have to say of me before we're done, I'll count myself fortunate ...”

Silent and furious and wide-awake, I pulled on my boots.

“... but then, of course, it is impossible for an Elhim to be a bastard. Our young have only one parent, so we know nothing of marriage or nonmarriage, thus nothing of bastardy. We've never really understood the insult intended.”

The moon hung low in the west as we hiked for two hours across the valley, following an obscure track that wound its way between slabs of layered rock until breaking out onto a desolate hillside. Somewhere in the dark expanse of scrub and grass, sparse, stunted trees, and broken bits of reddish rock shone a faint, steady light. We headed for it as directly as one could without being a goat, and it soon resolved itself into a lantern, held aloft by none other than Davyn.

“So you've agreed to try this?” he said anxiously. “We'll be with you the whole—”

“Well, he didn't exactly,” said Narim. “I bullied him into it a bit.”

“Bullied? Ah, by the One, Narim. What have you done?”

“He wanted only truth. Complete truth. I told him he wasn't dead. That was about as complete as I could get. Telling, bullying, truth ... He's not going to believe anything until we show him.”

“But Narim—”

Davyn was interrupted again, this time by a muted rumbling as of a distant storm or a blustering wind heard from inside a thick-walled fortress. But the stars shone cold and still, growing in brilliance as the moon sank below the western peaks. Our cloaks and hair lay unmoving in the quiet chill of midnight.

“Is the woman already in place?” asked Narim uneasily.

“Yes. But we've time. You must prepare him.”

I stood still, arms folded, determined to go no step farther until I heard an explanation. Narim screwed up his face at Davyn, then motioned for me to sit down. I found a convenient rock that put my face at a level with his.

“Someone tried to kill you last night,” he began.

“Was it you?”

He looked startled at my question, and if the light had been better I would have said he turned red. But Davyn had taken the lamp up the hillside and was scrabbling about a pile of crumbling rock. “No. No, it was not ...” An edge to the way he said it told me that he was quite capable of killing, and would have no qualms if he believed such an action necessary. I listened more attentively after that. “... but I know who it was, and the attempt has made us change our plans. Move before we're ready. We weren't going to do this for a few weeks yet.”

“Who was it?” I didn't want to lose the critical answer.

“I'll not tell you that. It's of no importance. There are those of us—some, not all—so blinded by fear that they can no longer see possibility. To them, safety dictates that the world remain as it is. They believe you represent the extinction of the Elhim.”

“But why? I've told you—”

“That is, of course, the most important part. The why. Something has given them pause, a reason to disbelieve your saying. They know you're the only one capable. They've only to think back to the first time you heard a dragon's cry in your uncle's garden.”

Now it was my turn to be surprised. “How in heaven and earth do you know of that?”

Impatiently Narim cut me off. “We know everything about you from the day of your birth until the day of your arrest. Elhim have sources of information everywhere, and we used every one of them to learn of you. We know what you told your singing masters that first night, and what you told your mother, and how you lived the next three years and every year thereafter. Don't you see? We'd been waiting for centuries for someone with your gift. In the days when we were friends, the dragons told us there were a few—a very few—people who could touch their minds. ‘Nandithari' they called them—Dragon Speakers—who could understand their speech even when they were in their wildest state at year's end. They told us that those rare beings had an open and quiet heart, ones who could listen so well they could distinguish the sound of one bird's flight from another. When we heard you sing, we knew you were such a one.”