Great Octave’s estate, Singing City, Pechacan, Empire of Songs
175th day of the Great Star at morning
Death stalked him.
He’d promised Betsu he would wait a month before leaving, but he was half convinced he wouldn’t live until duskmeal, let alone another two weeks. Something had happened, something momentous that had changed the song, driving it out of its usual beautiful strength into something … lustful.
It had taken hours to settle, imperious as ever, but there was a wildness to it even now, two days later, an edge of danger, as if it danced on the very cusp of madness and the Singer was unable to tame it. Or perhaps he did not want to.
Tayan hadn’t seen Enet since it had happened and none of the slaves would answer his questions or allow him anywhere but the few rooms he’d been granted access to and a small part of the gardens. He ate and sat and walked in silence, in isolation. He didn’t know what had happened, and without the usual excursions the Great Octave had taken him on, he had nothing to distract himself from wild speculation.
Since Betsu’s departure, Enet had taken him into the city most days in a blatant attempt to overwhelm him with Pechaqueh society. They’d visited gardens and fighting pits, markets including flesh markets, where she pointed out how they selected the appropriate profession for the new slaves, and they’d visited temples to admire the murals of holy Setatmeh and Singers past. He had seen much and learnt very little. It was all empty, a formal nonsense intended to cow him into submission, to reinforce the belief that they could never defeat the Empire of Songs and that the proposed surrender was the only rational choice. Even worse, a small, traitorous part of him was beginning to believe it.
Tayan barely slept, and not just because of the nightmares he’d suffered ever since the ritual at the river. The slave’s face, barred with the Drowned’s fingers and claws, bleeding. Each night, the face changed – sometimes it was Xessa’s, other times it was Lilla’s. Once it had been his own. And through it all the song, worming through his skull and bones like a million ants.
But now, finally, she had summoned him to the so-called small room with its views of the garden. Tayan hadn’t seen most of the other rooms, so its size meant nothing other than that it was almost as big as his and Lilla’s entire home.
They sat, a pitcher of honeyed water and fine pottery cups on the low table between them. ‘Is the holy lord quite well, Great Octave?’
Enet jerked and looked at him. Her eyes were bright – too bright – as if she’d swallowed journey-magic, and although she sat apparently composed opposite him, her hands were rarely still. Her fingers twined and curled about each other like a nest of mating snakes and flickers of emotion raced across her face that she seemed unable to control. She kept running her tongue around her gums, as if she had seeds stuck in her teeth. He hadn’t thought she could be so preoccupied, so vulnerable.
‘What? Of course. The great Singer is in perfect health,’ she said, waving a hand in poor imitation of airy dismissal, and that’s when he identified it. Deep inside, behind the walls and masks of power, privilege, and arrogance, Enet was frightened. Terrified down to her bones.
And that frightens the shit out of me.
Something had happened. When the song had veered so wildly out of control, when it had reverberated with fury and lust and a dark, red-edged cruelty that had made his pulse thunder in his ears, something had changed for Enet, too. While she had remained frustratingly vague on the magic that powered the song, he knew enough to recognise that something momentous had occurred. He’d witnessed the hunched shoulders and lowered voices of the slaves, the hurried, anxious whispers as they went about their tasks. He’d seen the ones in the gardens staring at the estate wall as if they could see through it all the way to the pyramid and within, to learn the cause of this change. And what it meant for them.
Perhaps it was the sound of the Singer’s decision to go to war. Perhaps Tayan’s ruse had failed. Enet had assured him that she would tell the Singer and the council that the Tokob and Yaloh had agreed to surrender to preserve their lives, but maybe she hadn’t, or he hadn’t believed her. Maybe what Tayan was hearing now was the call to war, summoning the Melody from their massive fortress somewhere to the south.
Betsu will warn them. They’ll be ready.
But the song didn’t just sound different. It felt different. It was similar to those times he used old journey-magic ingredients whose potency was diminished – he still journeyed, though with difficulty, but when he came back he felt … grubby. On the inside. As if he needed to shuck his skin, turn it inside out, and scrub it clean.
And none of that explained the fear the Great Octave was struggling to hide.
The shaman had become so used to the song in the last weeks that he didn’t think of it any more. The change had reminded him and now it was as it had been those first days inside the Empire: he couldn’t ignore it. It was in everything, flavouring his food and colouring the things he looked at. Affecting his mood. Because this song was victorious; it was triumphant; and it was vicious. It made Tayan want to be vicious. Earlier, he’d even insulted a slave who hadn’t made his cornbread with enough chillies.
As if I’m a fucking Pecha. The shame of it – and the insidious, creeping fear of it – filled him. This is what the song does. I feel what it feels, what it tells me to feel. And it is telling me that I am better than these slaves.
And I am not. But he didn’t like how long it had taken him to remember to add that qualification. He clutched at the yellow marriage cord around his neck, running his fingers over the familiar knots and tiny charms to ground himself. It didn’t help; was he becoming like them?
‘What happened to the song?’ he asked abruptly. His voice came out too loud, too demanding, and he flushed, but again Enet barely seemed to notice.
‘What?’
‘Why is it different? What has happened? Is it some sort of Empire-wide message?’ He tapped his fingers against his knee in indecision. ‘Is it broken?’ he added and Enet flinched.
Her hand jerked up in a short, abortive gesture that nonetheless took in the room and beyond. ‘You live within the song now. It has taken you and woven you into its whole. You are a note within it. Tell me, does it feel broken to you?’
Tayan considered her, fidgeting and afraid and trying hard to hide it. ‘Not broken,’ he said slowly, ‘but not … controlled, either. It no longer whispers; it shouts. Why has it changed?’
The Great Octave forced a derisive laugh. ‘Why would I discuss such things with you?’ she asked.
He took a soft, slow breath in. ‘Because you can’t discuss them with anyone else,’ he suggested and she started, eyes widening and then, an instant later, narrowing with suspicion and contempt.
‘Are we friends now, peace-weaver of the Tokob? Should I confide in you?’ She sniffed and looked away, shaking her head as if at a foolish child.
‘Do you want to?’ he asked and she forced another laugh.
‘I think not,’ Enet said softly, and then straightened, as if reaching some sudden decision. ‘We are done here.’
Tayan’s smile congealed and then slid into polite puzzlement. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘You yourself have said you will surrender, and so the peace-weaving is concluded. I am too busy to waste any more time on you, and have done you courtesy far above your status. You will return home today.’
The change in the song had unsettled him, planting a seed of anxiety in his belly that was swiftly growing. He’d wanted to leave, had spent much of the last two days trying to work out how to escape unscathed, half convinced that he was going to be killed in some ritual to calm the song. Now here she was, pushing him out, eager to see him gone, something like relief breaking like sunlight across her face as she spoke and yet he was … reluctant.
When he crossed eventually back into Yalotlan, he would no longer hear the song. Which was a good thing. Soon after, he’d be back in his land, surrounded by the spirits and his ancestors and his family. His husband. And yet. Tayan felt a part of something greater now, the way he did when he journeyed but all the time. It was powerful and it was seductive and he could no longer imagine what it would be like to not hear the song.
No. No, Tayan. Get a fucking grip.
Deliberately, he thought of Lilla, the tilt of his head when Tayan said something stupid, the curve of his mouth in the dark, the heat of his flesh and the strength of his body. He thought of his laugh, low and infectious and more beautiful by far than this fucking monkey-chatter. That was the real music of his life. The only song he needed was Lilla’s voice.
‘You will be escorted to Yalotlan; I trust you can make your way home from there, carrying your message of surrender as you go and warning the Yaloh who remain in their land to be ready to give it up.’
She leant over the table, so close Tayan could taste her breath. ‘Make sure you stay alive, little Tayan. You’re pretty enough to have tempted me, despite those ugly scars on your leg, and clever enough that I would relish having you in my house again.’
Tayan jerked back as if she’d spat in his face. ‘And what would be my status in this house?’ he asked, folding his arms across his chest to prevent his hand dropping to his scarred left leg.
The Great Octave’s laughter pealed, bouncing from the walls and the elaborately painted stucco, but again it was a little too false to be convincing. ‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, pretty Toko, eh? Everyone starts somewhere, for their own good and the stability of the Empire,’ and she made a collar of her fingers and thumbs and slotted it around her own throat. She laughed again at whatever expression was on his face. ‘But you are a special case, Tayan, because I can see that the song already breathes inside you. You would not be a long time branded, I think.’
She stood and crossed to a second low table, this one scattered with bark paper, ink, and brushes, her energy matching the urgency and brutality of the song. As did Tayan’s, for he had a sudden image of her face purpling as he put his hands around her neck and squeezed.
‘Under the song,’ she added without turning her head and snapped her fingers at her kneeling estate slave.
The man rose from the mats and handed her a report as if Tayan wasn’t still sitting there, numb. ‘The latest numbers from the songstone mines, high one.’
Enet grunted, and two of her slave guards approached Tayan and gestured him out of the room. He looked back as he went, but the Great Octave of the Empire of Songs was deep in discussion with her slave. The man was pointing to a column of figures and speaking with the confidence of a free.
And then he was in the garden, waiting in the early morning rain until four slave warriors hurried out carrying weapons and packs of supplies, including his own. The quartet surrounded him and marched down the path.
The estate’s tall gates creaked open and they swept out into the flow of traffic. It was over. Tayan was alive – and he was going home.