“In all my years in Lol-Than’s palace, I had never seen a foreigner. I had heard stories, of course. Tales of strange, white- or black-skinned people who came from the east and were so uncivilised their very presence in the Merchant King’s domain was insulting and only tolerated because of the value of the cargoes they carried. The party that came to treat with Lol-Than were certainly strange to me with their odd clothes and impenetrable language, to say nothing of their clumsy attempts at etiquette. And to my amazement, one of them was a woman, a woman with a song.
“The only women allowed in the presence of the Merchant King were his wives, daughters or concubines. In my homeland they have no role in business and are forbidden from owning property. Through the interpreter I was given to understand that this woman was of high birth and to refuse her admittance would be a grave insult to her people. The likely profits from whatever proposal these foreigners intended must have been great indeed for Lol-Than to allow her entry to the audience chamber.
“The interpreter continued but I could barely follow his words, the woman’s song filled my mind and I couldn’t help staring at her. This was a beautiful woman, brother, but beautiful in the way a leopard is beautiful. Her eyes glittered, her black hair shone like polished ebony and her smile was one of cruel amusement as she heard my song.
“‘So the slant-eyed pig has a Singer of his own,’ her song said, the hollow laughter that coloured it making me tremble. She was powerful, I could sense it, her song was stronger than mine. Shin-La may have been able to match her but not I, the rat had met a cat and was helpless before it. ‘What can you tell me, I wonder?’ she sang in my mind, the song plunging deeper, reaching into memory and feeling with brutal ease, dragging up all my hate and my scheming. My intended betrayal seemed to make her exultant, fiercely triumphant. ‘And the Council told me this would be difficult,’ she sang. Her gaze lingered on mine for a moment longer. ‘If you want the Merchant King dead, tell him to reject our offer.’ Then it was gone, her intrusion into my mind withdrawn, leaving behind a chill of certainty. She was here to kill Lol-Than if he refused whatever they proposed, and she wanted to kill him, the outcome of the negotiations meant nothing to her. She had travelled across half the world for blood and would not be denied it.”
Ahm Lin’s face was tense with remembered pain. “Sometimes the song lets us touch the minds of others, in all the years since I must have touched thousands, but never have I felt anything to compare with the black stain of that woman’s thoughts. For years afterwards I had nightmares, visions of slaughter, murder practised with sadistic precision, faces screaming or frozen in fear, men, women, children. And visions of places I had never seen, languages I couldn’t understand. I thought I was going mad until I realised she had left some of her memories with me, either out of indifference or casual malice. They faded over time, mostly. But even now there are nights when I wake screaming and my wife holds me as I weep.”
“Who was she?” Vaelin asked. “Where did she come from?”
“The name spoken by the interpreter was a lie, I sensed that even before I heard her song, and the memories she left gave no clue as to name or family. As for where she was from, it meant nothing to me at the time but the delegation presented greetings from the High Council of the Volarian Empire. What I’ve learned of the Volarians since leads me to conclude she would have been most at home there.”
“Did you do it? Did you tell the Merchant King to reject their proposal?”
Ahm Lin nodded. “Without a moment’s hesitation. Shocked as I was, my hatred was undimmed. I told him they were full of lies, that their scheme was an attempt to spend his treasure and save their own. In truth I had barely any understanding of what they had proposed or if their word was true. As always, however, he trusted my verdict implicitly.”
“And did she keep her word?”
“At first I thought she had betrayed me. Lol-Than gave them his answer the next morning, after which they boarded their ship and sailed away. He appeared to be in fine health and gave every impression of remaining so. Disappointment and fear crushed me. For the first time I had lied to the Merchant King. Surely, I would be discovered and an ugly death would follow. A month passed as I worried and fought to conceal my fear, and then Lol-Than slowly began to sicken. It was nothing at first, a small but persistent cough that of course no-one would dare to mention, then his colour became paler, his hands began to tremble, within weeks he was coughing blood and raving in fits. By the time he died he was a wasted bundle of bone and skin that couldn’t remember its own name. I felt no pity at all.
“He had a successor, of course. His third son, Mah-Lol, the two older brothers having been quietly poisoned in early manhood when it became clear they lacked their father’s acumen. Mah-Lol was truly his father’s son, highly intelligent, exceptionally well educated and possessed of all the cunning and ruthlessness needed to sit on a Merchant King’s throne. But, to my great delight, he knew nothing of my gift. Lol-Than’s illness had left him in no state to enlighten his son as to the nature of my role at court. To Mah-Lol I was simply an unusually trusted secretary, and he had his own man for that. I was consigned to a bookkeeping position in the palace stores, moved from my fine quarters and paid a fraction of the salary I had received before. Apparently, I was expected to kill myself in shame at my fall from royal favour, as many of Lol-Than’s now-redundant servants had already done. Instead, I simply left, telling the guard at the palace gate that I had an errand to run in the city. He barely glanced at me as I walked out. I was twenty-two years old and a free man for the first time. It was the sweetest moment of my life.
“Freedom brought a change in my song, made it soar, seeking out wonders and novelty. I followed its music across the breadth of Mah-Lol’s kingdom and beyond. It guided me to a stonemason in a small village high in the mountains, who, lacking sons or apprentices, agreed to teach me his craft. I think he was disturbed by the speed with which I learned, not to say the unusual quality of my work, and he seemed relieved when it became clear he had no more to teach me and I moved on.
“The song guided me to a port, where I took ship to the east. For the next twenty years I travelled and worked, from city to city, town to town, leaving my mark on houses, palaces and temples. I even spent a year in your Realm, carving gargoyles for a Nilsaelin lord’s castle. I never wanted for anything, in lean times the song guided me to food and work, when times were fraught it sought out peace and solitude. I never questioned it, never resisted it. Five years ago it guided me here, where Shoala, my most excellent wife, was struggling to keep her late father’s shop going. She had the skills but richer Alpirans don’t like to deal with women. I’ve been here ever since. My song has never signalled a need to move on, for which I am grateful.”
“Even now?” Vaelin wondered. “With the Red Hand in the city?”
“Did your song raise its voice when you first heard the sickness was here?”
Vaelin remembered the despair he felt at Sister Gilma’s likely fate but realised it hadn’t been coloured by the blood-song. “No. No it didn’t. Does this mean there is no danger?”
“Hardly. It means that, for whatever reason, this is where we are both supposed to be.”
“This is…” Vaelin fumbled for the right words. “Our destiny?”
Ahm Lin shrugged. “Who can say, brother? Of destiny I know little but to say I’ve seen so much of the random and unexpected in my life as to doubt there is such a thing. We make our own path, but with the song’s guidance. Your song is you, remember. You can sing it as well as hear it.”
“How?” Vaelin leaned forward, discomfited by the hunger for knowledge he knew coloured his voice. “How do I sing?”
Ahm Lin gestured at the workbench, where Vaelin’s partly carved block still sat, untouched since his first visit. “You’ve already started. I suspect you’ve been singing a long time, brother. The song can make us reach for many different tools; the pen, the chisel…or the sword.”
&nb
sp; Vaelin glanced down at his sword, resting within easy reach against the edge of the table. Is that what I’ve been doing all these years? Cutting my path through life? All the blood spilled and lives taken, just verses in a song?
“Why haven’t you finished it?” Ahm Lin enquired. “The sculpture?”
“If I pick up the hammer and chisel again, I won’t put them down until it’s done. And our current circumstance requires my full attention.” He knew this to be only partly true. The roughly hewn features emerging from the block had begun to take on a disturbing familiarity, not yet recognisable but enough to make him conclude the finished version would be a face he knew. Perversely, the arrival of the Red Hand had been a welcome excuse for delaying the moment of final clarity.
“It’s not advisable to ignore one’s song, brother,” Ahm Lin cautioned him. “You recall the harm I did when I called to you the first time? Why do you think that was?”
“My song was silent.”
“That’s right. And why was it silent?”
The King’s fragile neck…The whore’s dangerous secrets… “It called on me to do something, something terrible. When I couldn’t do it my song fell silent. I thought it had deserted me.”
“Your song is your protection as well as your guide. Without it you are vulnerable to others who can do as we do, like the Volarian woman. Trust me, brother, you wouldn’t wish to be vulnerable to her.”
Vaelin looked at the marble block, tracing the rough profile of the unformed face. “When the Red Falcon returns,” he said. “I’ll finish it then.”
Twenty days after the Red Falcon’s departure the sailors rioted, breaking out of their makeshift prisons in the warehouse district, killing their guards and making for the docks in a well-planned assault. Caenis was quick to respond, ordering two companies of Wolfrunners to hold the docks and drafting in Count Marven’s men to seal off the surrounding streets. Cumbraelin archers were placed on the rooftops, cutting down dozens of sailors as their attack on the docks faltered in the face of disciplined resistance and they went reeling back into the city. Caenis ordered an immediate counterattack, and the brief but bloody revolt was all but over by the time Vaelin got to the scene.
He found Caenis fighting a large Meldenean, the big man swinging a crudely fashioned club at the lithe brother as he danced around him, sword flicking out to leave cuts on his arms and face. “Give up!” he ordered, his blade slicing into the man’s forearm. “It’s over!”
The Meldenean gave a roar of pain-fuelled rage and redoubled his efforts, his useless club meeting only air as Caenis continued his vicious dance. Vaelin unlimbered his bow, notched an arrow and sent it cleanly through the Meldenean’s neck from forty paces. One of his better feats of archery.
“Not a time for half measures, brother,” he told Caenis, stepping over the Meldenean’s corpse and drawing his sword. Within the hour it was done, nearly two hundred sailors were dead and at least as many wounded. The Wolfrunners had lost fifteen men, among them the onetime pickpocket known as Dipper, one of the original thirty chosen men from their days in the Martishe. They herded the sailors back into their warehouses and Vaelin had the surviving captains brought to the docks. Forty men or so, all with the blunt and weathered features common to sea captains. They were lined up on the quayside, kneeling before him, arms bound, most staring up with sullen fear or open defiance.
“Your actions were stupid and selfish,” Vaelin told them. “If you had reached your ships, you would have carried plague to a hundred other ports. I have lost good men in this pathetic farce. I could execute you all, but I won’t.” He gestured at the harbour where the many ships of the city’s merchant fleet were at anchor. “They say a captain’s soul rests with his ship. You killed fifteen of my men. I require fifteen souls in recompense.”
It took a long time, with boat-loads of Realm Guard hauling at the oars as they towed the vessels out of the harbour and anchored them offshore, spreading pitch on the decks and dousing the sails and rigging with lamp oil. Dentos’s archers finished the job with volleys of fire arrows and by nightfall fifteen ships were burning, tall flames fountaining embers into the starlit sky and lighting up the sea for miles around.
Vaelin surveyed the captains, taking dull satisfaction from the grief in their weathered faces, some with tears gleaming in their eyes. “Any repeat of this foolishness,” he said, “and I’ll have you and your crews lashed to the masts before I burn the rest of the fleet.”
In the morning Vaelin found Governor Aruan at the mansion gate. There was no sign of Sister Gilma and an icy claw of fear gripped his insides.
“Where is my sister?” he asked.
The governor’s once-fleshy face was sagging from worry and a too-sudden weight loss, although he showed no sign of the Red Hand. His gaze was guarded and his voice flat. “She succumbed yesterday evening, much more quickly than my daughter or her maid. I recall my mother saying that was how it was with the sickness, years ago. Some last for days, weeks even, others fade in a matter of hours. Your sister wouldn’t let me near my daughter, insisted on caring for her alone, my servants and I were forbidden from even venturing into that wing of the mansion. She said it was necessary, to stop the spread of the sickness. Last night I found her collapsed on the stairs, barely conscious. She forbade me from touching her, crawled back to my daughter’s room on her own…” He trailed off as Vaelin’s expression darkened.
“I spoke to her yesterday,” he said stupidly. He searched the governor’s face for some sign he was mistaken, finding only wary regret. His voice was thick as he voiced the redundant question, “She’s dead?”
The governor nodded. “The maid too. My daughter lingers though. We burned the bodies, as your sister instructed.”
Vaelin found himself gripping the wrought iron of the gate with white-knuckled fists. Gilma…Bright-eyed, laughing Gilma. Dead and lost to the fire in a matter of hours whilst I tarried with those idiot sailors.
“Were there any words?” he asked. “Did she leave any testament?”
“She faded very fast, my lord. She said to tell you to keep to her instructions, and you will see her again in the Beyond.”
Vaelin looked closely at the governor’s face. He’s lying. She said nothing. She just sickened and died. Nevertheless, he found himself grateful for the deceit. “Thank you, my lord. Do you require anything?”
“Some more salve for my daughter’s rash. Perhaps a few bottles of wine. It keeps the servants happy, and our stocks are running low.”
“I’ll see to it.” He unclasped his hands from the gate and turned to go.
“There was a great fire in the night,” the governor said. “Out to sea.”
“The sailors rioted, tried to escape. I burned some ships as punishment.”
He was expecting some kind of admonishment but the governor simply nodded. “A measured response. However, I advise you to compensate the merchants guild. With me confined here they are the only civil authority in the city, best not to antagonise them.”
Vaelin was more inclined to flog any merchant who made the mistake of raising his voice within earshot but, through the fog of his grief, saw the wisdom in the governor’s words. “I will.” For some reason he paused, feeling compelled to add something, some reward for the governor’s kindly lies. “We will not be here long, my lord. Maybe a few more months. There will be blood and fire when the Emperor’s army arrives, but win or lose, we will soon be gone and this city will be yours again.”
The governor’s expression was a mixture of bafflement and anger. “Then why, in the name of all the gods, did you come here?”
Vaelin gazed out at the city. The light of the morning sun played over the houses and empty streets below. Out to sea the ocean shimmered with gold, white-topped waves swept towards the coast and the sky above was a cloudless blue…and Sister Gilma was dead, along with thousands of others and thousands more to come. “There is something I have to do,” he said, walking away.
He foun
d Dentos atop the lighthouse at the far end of the mole forming the left shoulder of the harbour entrance. He sat with his legs dangling over the lip of the lighthouse’s flat top, staring out to sea and sipping from a flask of Brother’s Friend. His bow lay nearby, the quiver empty. Vaelin sat down next to him and Dentos passed him the flask.
“You didn’t come to hear the words for our sister,” he said, taking a small sip and handing the flask back, grimacing slightly as the mingled brandy and redflower burned its way down his throat.
“Said my own words,” Dentos muttered. “She heard me.”
Vaelin glanced down at the base of the lighthouse, where numerous lifeless seagulls bobbed in the water, all neatly skewered with a single arrow. “Looks like the gulls heard you too.”
“Practising,” Dentos said. “Filthy scavengers anyhow, can’t stand them, bloody noise they make. Shite-hawks my uncle Groll called ’em. He was a sailor.” He grunted a laugh and took another drink. “Could be I killed him last night. Can’t rightly remember what the bastard looked like.”
“How many uncles do you have, brother? I’ve always wondered.”
Dentos’s face clouded and he said nothing for a long time. When he finally spoke there was a sombre tone to his voice Vaelin hadn’t heard before. “None.”
Vaelin frowned in puzzlement. “What about the one with the fighting dogs? And the one who taught you the bow…”
“I taught myself the bow. There was a master hunter in our village but he wasn’t my uncle, neither was that vicious shit-bag with the dogs. None of them were.” He glanced at Vaelin and smiled sadly. “My dear old mum was the village whore, brother. She called the many men who came to our door my uncles, made them be nice to me or they weren’t getting in her bed, any one of them could have been my dad after all. Never did find out which one, not that I give a dog’s fart. They were a pretty worthless bunch.