TWOLAS - 02 - The Ships of Merior Read online

  The change came with such masterful subtlety, Medlir alone could name the moment when senseless strings of syllables converged into order and meaning. Carried on exuberant melody, three stanzas passed before any guest of the mayor's noticed the first prick of satire; another appalled interval before they connected the tales in the balladry to familiar names and faces. Distilled from six months of gleaned rumour, Halliron's art exposed with rib-tearing viciousness the secrets of boudoir and council chamber, affairs of the heart and affairs of ambition that flaunted the rank lust and incompetence that riddled the channels of city government.

  The foot stamping faltered and quieted. Husbands glared at unfaithful wives, or elbowed each other aside to glower and curse at rivals who had made them dupes and cuckolds. Society listened, transfixed by the sick fascination of seeing their neighbours reviled; and breathless in dread lest their own reputations become next in line to be sullied. For the corruption exposed within his precinct, and for his laughably faithless marriage, the city alderman squirmed as if he sat nude on live coals. Paralysed, silent, held spellbound by the song's provocative suspense, the best blood of Jaelot hung on each verse while one after another, their best-respected families were raked over by Halliron's gilded tongue.

  A masterbard's enmity could call down an unkind legacy. For a city that ignored codes of justice, for the slights and denigration of his station, Halliron laid bare explosive internal hatreds that would either heal themselves swiftly by cautery, or else linger on, to malign and poison lives and factions unto generations yet unborn.

  The last ecstatic measures laced the air to shimmering harmony and trailed away into quiet. The bard dropped his leg from the cushion. He swept down his instrument, stepped smoothly forward and bowed. The. chatter of chair legs as the Jaelot's Lord Mayor sprang upright stuttered like a rip across silence.

  'How dare you,' he gasped in strangled outrage. 'How dare you dishonour my guests so!'

  'You've had a song to epitomize your city's hospitality,' said Halliron, his beautiful voice harshly dry. He held his dignity and his ground as the mayor slammed his fists on the trestle, and pink-ribboned tablecloths ruffled by the force jolted platters and clinked with slipped crystal. 'My art is no coin to be coerced and exposed to public ridicule. I have matched to the letter the measure of your demands.'

  His statement snapped away the song's last veil of poisoned, hypnotic fascination. Citizens stabbed raw in the throes of betrayal shoved from their seats, gesticulating and fired to angry talk.

  Spurred by the temper of their fury, hampered from action by two halberds, Medlir cursed in despair from the stair head. Any use of his shadow mastery to extricate Halliron would force full exposure of his identity. Constrained by horror, unwilling to seed broadscale bloodshed by letting his name draw Lysaer's armies, he snapped the leather and cord he had twisted like a whip across the eyes of the left-hand guardsman. The man fell back. Medlir side-stepped the blind thrust of his weapon. The other halberdier assigned to hold him had been a friend he had sparred with; aware he was unarmed, that one dropped his polearm, rushed, and locked arms in a vice-grip to pin him.

  The savagery of their scuffle passed unnoticed as the men at arms near the mayor converged to seize the Masterbard. Before they could close, their heavyset captain dealt a brute-fisted swing launched solidly out of his shoulder.

  Halliron twisted by reflex to shield his priceless lyranthe. The blow struck him behind the temple, flung him staggering backward. Tripped by the stool, he overbalanced and fell. The crack as his frame smashed through split rungs entangled with Medlir's wordless cry. Splintered wood spun across tiles, for the suspended span of a heartbeat the only motion in the room. Then the packed ranks of guests erupted into noise and pandemonium; except for Halliron, who lay stunned and still, his jewels like flecks of dropped flame. A streak of scarlet meandered through his silver hair, while the lyranthe his fragile flesh had shielded nested unharmed in the silk-clad hollow of his shoulder.

  Blanched and distraught in his chains, Dakar alone held an untrammelled view as Medlir pitched free of the guardsman. He arrowed through the pack of outraged bystanders, jabbing knuckles, elbows and knees into velvet-padded flesh with a viciousness jarringly out of character. More than one dandy sprawled moaning in his wake; weeping ladies nursed bruised arms or wrists.

  Bent to his knees beside his master barely seconds after the injury, Medlir unpinned Halliron's ribboned collar and probed with shaking hands for a pulse. 'Hurry. send a man for a healer and a litter.'

  Instead he received the bite of armoured hands as the mayor's halberdiers caught him up on both sides and hauled him headlong to his feet.

  From the dais, the Mayor of Jaelot met his shouted protest with narrowed, furious eyes. 'I'll have entertainment that befits my wife and guests. You will play in your master's stead. Carol for us sweetly as a lark, or else get no litter, and no healer. Just the executioner's sword for the lot of you.'

  Breathing in terrible, deep gasps, his eyes distended in an expression no man could read, Medlir snapped hard against the guards' hold.

  The mayor's captain slapped him. 'Be sensible, lad. What's a night's performance worth? Surely less than the lives of your mentor and friend.'

  On the scaffold, his fists dragged white-knuckled against his fetters, Dakar watched in sick anger as the shoulders under grey linen shivered still beneath the gauntlets of the guardsmen. Medlir's face was turned away; given the man's oblique nature, the Mad Prophet had no means to measure his response to threats outside mercy or decency. Since Halliron's satire had broken no promise, grounds for further trust were now forfeit. Ill-tempered as a cornered mastiff in the public throes of stung pride, the Mayor of Jaelot would see bloodshed before he backed down and embraced either reason or compromise.

  Arrested in sadistic curiosity, onlookers edged reluctantly aside to admit the servants who converged to sweep up the stool's scattered fragments. One hardly more than a boy disentangled the lyranthe from Halliron's slackened grasp, while a sandy-haired coachman fetched from outside bent to the chore of shifting the old man from the hall.

  The sight of his master being hefted like a slab of skinned beef, and the further provocation of a cherished, rare instrument at the mercy of a stranger's inept handling at last unlocked Medlir's voice. 'For the Masterbard's life, and the prisoner's, I will play.'

  The Mayor of Jaelot stroked his fat belly and smiled. Head turned to track the brute who shouldered his unconscious master, Medlir did nothing to acknowledge his liberty as the guardsmen's restraint fell away. Controlled beyond emotion, or else simply dazed, he held his sight on the side door until the burdened coachman vanished. Then he surveyed the breadth of the hall. Seacold and lightless, his gaze brushed past his flushed and vindictive audience: the men in their shimmering dazzle of jewels; ladies who wetted lips with pink tongues, their feathered trains and ostentatious finery jostled awry in the press. Defined by an incandescence of candle light, the mayor's guests crowded and whispered among themselves, thrilled by the prospect of a spectacle.

  Murmured comments tracked Medlir's smallest move. Exposed through a private and merciless anguish, the slight-boned minstrel weathered the inimical regard of Jaelot's bluest-blooded society. In a shirt oddly tailored and tight-laced at the wrists, his simple dress like dull mould against the flower-petal brilliance of silks and velvets and brocades, he reclaimed the lyranthe from the mayor's servant. Then he backed four steps and perched his hip against the rough-cut boards of the prisoner's scaffold. As if he were the only one breathing in the room, he set his hands to silver strings and nervelessly restored them to pitch.

  The sweet-struck vibrancy of his tuning cracked the queer limbo of tension. 'He's trying to stop his hand from shaking,' a heckler ventured from the sidelines. The joke raised high-strung laughter.

  More jibes, some voices shrill with the tight, high ring of damped hysteria. 'No, look, he's checking to see that his fingers haven't jammed from stage fright.'
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br />   Medlir adjusted a peghead, patient as tide, deliberate as formed ice in a frost crystal. Like his master before him, he launched into song without any pause for introduction.

  The lyranthe strings whispered, sighed, then rippled into melody like the plangent tap of autumn rain. The musician did not choose satire for vengeance. His freerunning arpeggios sparked through sniggers and barbed sarcasm like pearls flung off a snapped string. Notes round and perfectly spaced and wholly without sting or anger framed a statement so powerfully at odds with the antipathy of his listeners that its overture became an act of daring.

  Dakar, who was nearest, was first to feel the tingling thrill of true magic raised through a masterbard's art. The tune thrummed in waves through his bones, its siren pull too sweet to deny. Reft beyond will and deprived of his anger, he bent his head to chained wrists and shed defeated tears against the post. Medlir did not play in rancour. In bruised and demented compassion, he spun cadence to settle and heal; and then, when he had commanded attention by the sheer depth and majesty of his pity, he struck silver strings a glancing, sliding stroke and racked sound through a sharp change in key.

  Like the curl of a breaker against rock, the blend of chord and notes framed a statement that forced the doors of the mind. Between the wolf-pack animosity and blood-lust; over the sour human drive to belittle and mock to hide smallness, the music cast a glittering net. In lifting, soaring, unfolding purity, Medlir flung out like jewels before beggars his eulogy for Halliron.

  A masterbard's gift could encompass a spirit, weave its essence in a tapestry of sound. So the lyranthe could be used to heal, to ease a stricken consciousness into death, or to summon back life and awareness for a week, or an hour; or to shape final tribute in grief. Medlir possessed as inexorable a perception. He used his talent now as Dakar had never heard him, his harmonies set in moving counterpoint as stark as clean sunlight over snow. In complex and awesome exactness, he unveiled before the citizens of Jaelot the nature of the bard they had tormented. He made them see Halliron through his own eyes, as a generous spirit of moral courage who had sacrificed his heart to humanity through his song, at the cost of love and hearthstone for himself.

  Shame cut Jaelot's perpetrators sharper than satire, deeper than their most visceral fear. Mourn with me, the notes cried; weep for what may have been destroyed. Then tears did fall, thick enough to blind, hot enough to scald, fast enough to fleck bright silk and velvet with a diamond spatter of pure sorrow.

  The lyranthe rang with a power to wound and to bind, but did neither; its strains became a gift that turned to scourge breathing flesh in exultation. Pressed shaking against the oak post, Dakar felt the vibration of each fresh stanza ring through the steel of his chains. What mage-sense he owned showed the answering resonance Medlir's gift carved from the earth and the air. The very candle flames danced and dipped in their sconces in tribute to Halliron Masterbard; and still the song poured out, the minstrel lost in the throes of his art like a man drowned senseless by revelation.

  Bent over flying fingers and the shimmering leap of silver strings, open body and spirit to a music that packaged his grief in bright sound, Medlir played. Half-unhinged from his senses, he more than struck notes. He became the chord, the spun line of melody shaped between hands and heart. He heard, like a ripple through darkness, the jarring stew of pain that was Jaelot; and beneath that dissonance, another measure reawakened by his playing: a time-lost whisper of smothered melody that neglect had nearly cancelled out.

  The fragment's poignancy tugged at his sensitized nerves. Since the part of him that was s'Ffalenn prince and Shadow Master feared to end the song which was all that stayed him from violence, he plunged on to embrace the thready remnant. His fingers as willing servant reclothed its hidden measures in new sound.

  The dawning emergence of changed theme raised the elements to primal awareness. Snatched into unexpected rapture by the harmonics called from substance and flesh, Medlir experienced a flash-fire bolt of inspiration. He yielded in consent before its riptide of insight: and the song that lurked dormant in the stones of old Jaelot quickened in rebirth and possessed him.

  Chained by steel that chimed and warmed in shared resonance, Dakar experienced a chest-bursting joy that tore a cry of sheer wonder from his throat. He looked up, startled to awed disbelief; for the strains that thrummed from Medlir's strings in a golden-white bloom of roused power were bitterly, fearfully uncanny. Somehow the bard's talent had tapped the lost measures the Paravians had danced in past celebration of the solstice.

  Like a reed plucked to sound by a squall wind, the musician added voice to his instrument; and at the centre of the mayor's palace, in a blistering sudden flare of mage-light, the spirit forms of Riathan Paravians resolved to retread the old patterns. No mortal present failed to see them. Pale in form as spun gossamer, clothed in the glimmering coils of earth-force that spindled into focus to frame them, unicorns wheeled in ethereal splendour through the spell-caught weave of the music. The spectacle was one to steal thought and stop the breath; to cauterize sight in grace and beauty. Ecstasy like reunion came paired with fierce heartbreak, a grinding, insufferable grief of recognition, that amid all the kingdoms of Athera, no living marvel existed to match these creatures whose ghost presence mirrored perfect purity.

  'Ath, oh Ath, let them go,' Dakar pleaded.

  His hurt was shared by every man, woman and child in the feast hall; from petty-minded, mollified old gossips to the most grizzled captain at arms; from the richest of merchants to the meanest scullion, no one was exempt. The guardsman who had struck down Halliron wept on his knees in appalled disgrace. Pride vanquished, the Lord Mayor of Jaelot clung sobbing and bereft in the arms of his sorrowfully humbled wife.

  Consumed by a rapture too deep for mortal flesh, the musician who was instrument and kindling for a reconfigured invocation of the mysteries noticed none of his oppressor's punctured vanity. Long since, he had surrendered self-awareness to the consuming demand of true song. His playing framed the air and the earth, shocked out surging vibrations.

  Dakar sagged appalled against his fetters. Wiser than Jaelot's enthralled citizens, he knew the solstice rite once held by Paravians served a purpose beyond celebration, As a boy before Desh-thiere's conquest, he had witnessed the ritual that husbanded magnetic power into arrows of turned force, to flow diverted from their lanebeds and channel across latitude and enrich the green-growing hills. Arrays of stone monuments, live trees, and natural landmarks had guided the energy's current, a balanced network of markers that Jaelot's trammelled heritage had long since defaced or paved over.

  In dismay akin to terror, the Mad Prophet felt the nexus summoned back by Medlir's playing swell to an ascendance of poised force. The mystery would answer the song's call and reclaim its seasonal passage without regard for mortal folly and the structures raised through ignorance in its path.

  'No,' Dakar shouted. 'Medlir, damp your strings!' His warning went unheard.

  The only man blind to the grace of the spirit-forms, the only one tone rendered deaf, the musician bent still to his playing, his being now locked in alignment with the intricate lilt of the dance. While the key changed register to impel the litany's consummation, the Mad Prophet looked down in desperation. He saw in an awesome, gut-twist of dread that Medlir's brown hair had transformed to raven's-wing black.

  False identity had seared off like wax before the unalloyed blaze of pure energies. In shocked recognition, the Mad Prophet beheld the spirit's unveiled form.

  Then impotent rage rammed him hard against his chains and he screamed the name of Arithon s'Ffalenn. Around him, the song reached crescendo. The surge of primal forces burgeoned into climax with no trained hand to turn or guide them; not, Dakar agonized, as a thousandfold layers of intonation pealed showers of clear sound from the elements, that the act of mage or man could now stifle that mighty flux to silence.

  The axis of the song unfurled power in streaming vectors that ploughed up a fountainhead
of floor tiles. Ribbon streamers flagged and snapped. Columns and kiosks swayed; the gaudy, painted ornaments and cherub-studded arches crashed over in puffed dust and smashed plaster. Fanned by warped air, pummelled by chaos as feast tables overset and fine crystal chimed and shattered, Dakar cowered against the humming fibres of an oak post that impossibly quickened and sprouted leaves. Sieved through by the bone-hurting chord of grand harmony, he barely heard the screams as panic overwhelmed the mayor's company. Guests and servants shoved, clawed, and knocked each other down in mindless stampede to reach the doorway. Their flight mowed through puddled wine and spilled food, and trampled the gems and crumpled feathers of cast-off masks. Neither were the honoured officials at the head table spared as they scrambled back in shrieking terror from a dais whirled into sudden flame.

  Over the stink of smeared meats and the angry orange glare of slagged glassware ripped winds as untamed as a squall line; and yet unutterably kinder: every breath drawn in panic enriched living flesh like a tonic. The stone walls that shocked into cracks and the tapestries that unravelled in burst threads did not unbind in destruction, but yielded before the surge of renewed lifeforce that yearly called flowers from frost, and sprouts from the germ of quickened seed.

  Somewhere between cursing Arithon and shivering with the exultation of the elements, Dakar divined the reason for the backlash: underneath the mosaic in the recessed expanse of floor, the mayor's grand ballroom held the masked-over heart of the ancient, sixth lane power focus. Its rune rings captured the rising earth force and burned through the veneer of grout and masonry. Long-buried patterns reconfigured in lines of smoking char. To touch the ash over such sigils bare-handed would bring no sensation of heat. But terrified citizens dared not halt in mid-flight to examine what seemed like black sorcery. In shrieking, unstrung fear, they poured through the vestibule, into town streets that offered no haven.