Morning mists swathed the spa city of Sulien, mingling with the steam rising from the hot baths and pump rooms.
At this early hour, Orial thought, shivering as she dressed herself, the city seemed like a shadow of itself, the soft rose-tint of its ancient stones dulled to damp grey by the miasmic fogs. Only when the sun had dried the mists would the warm colour of the carven stone begin to emerge and the rose-stone city appear from the fog like the enchanted City of Khitezh in the legends. And by that time she would be occupied with Papa’s patients in the Mineral Water Sanatorium, too busy to witness the moment of transformation she had so loved to watch on her way to the Academie for Young Ladies. But schooldays were over, she was eighteen now and her father’s assistant, working with him in the worthiest of all employments: healing the sick.
The Sanatorium treated a wide variety of patients and complaints, ranging from gout-swollen toes to the many forms of rheumatism. A culvert and elaborate system of pipes drew water from the central source of the hot springs to supply the treatment baths and sprays. Patients attended for an hour or so a day; only the serious cases stayed within the Sanatorium whilst most others took lodgings nearby.
A fragrant aroma of brewing qaffë wafted from the dining room as Orial came hurrying down the stairs. Her father was already seated at the breakfast table, a cup of qaffë (black) in one hand, a pen in the other, annotating the day’s schedule. Orial leaned down to kiss his cheek and sat herself opposite him, surreptitiously adjusting the slipping straps of her clean starched pinafore. Try as she might, she could not achieve the neat appearance of the other nurses in the Sanatorium; a stray lock of hair, a wayward strap, a loose button, all usually contrived to work against her. And Dr Jerame Magelonne was insistent that all his staff should be immaculately turned out.
Freshly baked buns, yellow and fragrant with saffron, steamed in the basket; she split one and spread it liberally with butter, watching the butter melt into the warm dough before taking a bite. The fun was in wondering when your teeth would crunch into the knob of sticky loaf sugar hidden in the golden centre of the bun. She watched her father reach for a bun, split it, butter it, eat it – and all without once looking up from his Sulien Chronicle. A smile began to twitch at the corners of her lips. How did he manage it?
‘Singular,’ Dr Magelonne muttered. ‘Very singular.’
‘What is so very singular, Papa?’ Orial rose and refilled his cup with qaffë, then leaned over his shoulder to scan the columns of black print.
‘This wave of piety sweeping through our neighbours in Allegonde, both the capital and the court. We shall not see Prince Ilsevir in Sulien this season; it says he has been miraculously cured by praying to the Blessed Mhir – and in consequence, has abandoned his life of pleasure to devote himself to matters of the spirit.
‘Apparently he has ordered all the opera houses and theatres to be shut down. Not before time, in my opinion. Opera’s a mindless, vacuous entertainment, fit only for those stupid enough to part with their money.’
‘Opera,’ Orial echoed wistfully.
‘And wholly unsuitable for young girls of an impressionable nature!’ Dr Magelonne said sharply. Orial retreated, nodding resignedly. This was an argument she would never win – and she had learned long ago not to pursue it with her father.
It was well known in the Sanatorium why Dr Magelonne vehemently resented any mention of music. When Orial’s mother Iridial died, he had forbidden the playing of any music in the house. Orial understood. He had worshipped Iridial, who had lived and breathed music. Her death had almost destroyed him. The very sound of music would surely provoke memories too painful to be endured, so not one note was to be heard in the Sanatorium and there were no music lessons for Orial. Indeed, at her father’s express wish, she had been given different tasks to occupy her at the Academie for Young Ladies whilst the other pupils received instruction in musical accomplishments. Yet whilst Orial dutifully plied her embroidery needle or dabbed at a water colour, she’d often caught strains rising from the music room below. And, oh, how she’d yearned to join in that distant sweet harmony…
‘At least we are a more phlegmatic people than our hot-headed neighbours.’ Dr Magelonne drank down the last of his qaffë and neatly folded the newspaper. ‘There is always some kind of ferment seething in Bel’Esstar. Let us trust they do not try to bring their religious fervour over the mountains.’
‘So what is to be done today?’ Orial asked, returning the conversation to more neutral ground.
‘The usual rheumatic complaints… neuralgia… and a stubborn case of gout. Nothing out of the ordinary, my dear.’ Dr Magelonne sighed. ‘We have to accept that the days of Sulien’s glory have passed. When I was a boy, the Prince’s father regularly crossed the borders to take the waters and all his court came too. But Ilsevir’s interests lie elsewhere. He doesn’t wish to while away his days in a fading spa resort.’
‘Poor Papa. Longing for a complex and challenging case… and obliged to pass your days curing fat gouty old gentlemen!’
‘Who all believe a couple of glasses of spa water a day will cure them. At least it gives me time to work on my treatise,’ he said abstractedly.
A bell jangled in the courtyard. Orial jumped up. The first patient of the day had arrived.
‘My cap. I’ve forgotten my cap.’ She went hurrying up the stairs to find the starched white cap and, standing in front of the mirror, attempted to pin it on straight.
It was three days now since Orial had experienced the vision of flames, and since then she had not returned to the Undercity. It was the first time she could remember feeling reluctant to go back. Most days she contrived to slip away unnoticed from the Sanatorium to her mother’s shrine for an hour or so. Only there could she practise the art which she had taught herself. The art which she loved above all other. The art forbidden to her.
Music.
So far she had contrived to keep her obsession secret. But of late she had begun to fear her fingers would betray her. She would find herself unconsciously tapping out the latest melody she had composed on the wall of the laundry room as she stood in the queue to collect warm towels. Or nimbly running figurations up and down the treatment slab as she waited to help peel away the hot mud packs from a patient. She could not stop. The music simply flowed from her as naturally as water flowed from the hot springs. It had become as much a part of her life as breathing. Concealing it from Papa was becoming more and more difficult. And she hated to have to resort to deception.
Up here in the cool Sulien daylight it was easy to rationalise what had happened. A dream. A waking dream. She must have become drowsy, practising down there in the dark, she must have nodded off for a few moments – and dreamed the fire, the flames, the searing pain.
It was foolish to stay away for fear of a vivid dream.
Towards four o’clock Dr Magelonne came out of his office with a letter in his hand. She saw her opportunity.
‘Shall I take that to the post for you, Papa?’
‘Thank you, my dear. I wouldn’t normally wish to remove you from your duties at the Sanatorium but this is important…’
As long as she was back by the time the Sanatorium closed its doors to day patients at five, he would not worry. And she could post the letter in a matter of a few minutes.
Orial tied her cape ribbons about her throat, seized the letter and almost danced out of the Sanatorium courtyard into the street.
Free!
*
A stranger could lose his way under Sulien – and never see the light of day again. But Orial had been coming to the Undercity alone since she was a child. The underground labyrinth that the ancient city’s builders, the Lifhendil, had constructed held no terrors for her. She had studied the plans of the labyrinth in the Museum and had discovered her own secret ways in the dark.
Few people ventured below ground now, only the ingenieurs who maintained the vast subterranean reservoirs, the Priests and Priestesses of Elesstar who officiated at funeral rites, and the bereaved who, like herself, came to light candles at the memorial shrines. Only once a year was the Undercity filled with people – and that was the Day of the Dead.
As a child, Orial had never feared the dark. To her, the Undercity was a place of hidden wonders. She did not believe the stories of blood-sucking ghouls who haunted the shrines, looking for live victims. She had seen the occasional brown rat in her explorations… and that was all.
She had come to love the ancient wall-paintings that decorated the Undercity. She had spent hours gazing at the flaking colours applied by long-dead artists of the Lifhendil until she felt she knew the people pictured there almost as well as those in her everyday life above. She had even given them names, characters: this tall, dark-skinned young man, with fishing spear and tuft-eared hunting cat slinking at his heels, was Black Heron the Hunter; these two laughing girls, arms interlaced, were Ylda and Nanda, the best of best friends (Orial had always longed for a close companion of her own age but Papa had never encouraged it). The Lotos Princess, her favourite, sat singing and playing a gilded cithara to a rapt audience. The painter had depicted the irises of her eyes with exquisite attention to detail: even with the fading of the centuries, it was still possible to see in the splash of lamp-light the tiny brush-strokes of rose-pink, purple and gold flecking the blue.
Rainbow eyes.
Orial passed the Princess and her entourage and entered the vaulted hall of the Reservoir of Blue Dragonflies.
Tall fluted columns rose out of the deep waters to support the roof, each column carved with lotos leaves. And every wall was covered with a frieze of water-meadows and rushes.
The Lifhendil sense of perspective and scale was a little skewed here, Orial thought, for the sapphire-winged dragonflies that darted across the water-meadows were painted the same size as the slender men and women who were pointing to them. The Lifhendil had portrayed themselves as tall, elegant, slim-waisted. Men and women alike wore their hair long, bound back in elaborate fillets and ribboned braids. The coloured gauzes that draped their bodies were as vivid as the jewel-colours of the dragonflies: sky-azure, crimson-garnet, grass-green emerald.
As Orial passed by her fingers drifted over the inscriptions that bordered the friezes. The people who inhabited Sulien nowadays had no way of translating the unknown language of the Lifhendil. The names of the dead were lost. The purpose of the Undercity was unknown. Ancient artefacts were unearthed from time to time in back gardens or foundation trenches when new houses were being built – but nothing had yet been found to shed any light on the practices or beliefs of the city’s builders.
Orial skirted past the Lotos Chamber and slipped through the Hall of Green Ninufars. All was dark – and all was still, not even the black waters of the funerary reservoir stirred. No ingenieurs were dredging the surface of the waters today, no Priests preparing for a funeral…
The sudden low murmur of voices took her by surprise. She crept on – and saw a gleam of light.
Light in Iridial’s shrine. Lantern-light.
She shrank close against the wall, wondering who could be in her mother’s shrine, fearing tomb robbers, necromantists.
The lantern-light cast distorted shadows. Flapping of torn wings, rotted cerecloths… In sudden panic, Orial dropped her own lantern.
A figure materialised in the doorway, frozen, as if listening.
No. It could not be. The dead do not return. And yet…
‘Who’s there?’ The voice was light as a woman’s, sibilant with fear – yet the stance and costume were those of a full-grown man whose hair was dyed a startling crimson. This was no ghost. Orial snatched up the lantern and made straight for the doorway.
And the stranger saw her.
‘Iridial!’ The whispered name went echoing up into the dark vaults, faint as the drift of incense smoke. ‘But they said you were –’
‘N-no.’ Orial shook her head. Her heart was beating too fast. ‘I am called Orial. Her daughter.’
‘Iridial’s daughter? But – I thought –’ The stranger was still staring at her.
‘Who are you?’ Orial asked, recovering her self-possession. ‘And what are you doing down here?’
‘So like her,’ murmured the stranger.
Orial felt a shiver, chill as melting snow, trickle down her spine. No one had ever mistaken her for her mother before.
‘Who are you?’ she repeated. She had the oddest sensation that the stranger was blocking the entrance to the shrine so that she should not see what lay beyond. And suddenly she wanted to see, to know what he was trying to conceal.
‘Orial Magelonne,’ said the man in his curiously light voice. ‘Daughter of Jerame Magelonne. Does your father still work in the Sanatorium?’
‘He runs the Sanatorium.’
‘Praise be,’ said the man. ‘Because –’
A groan, low and ragged, issued from the shadows of the shrine behind him. Orial froze.
‘What was that?’ she whispered, and tried to look over the man’s shoulder. ‘Who’s in there? Who are you hiding?’
The stranger shifted, trying to block Orial’s view. He placed his hands, heavy with ornate jewelled rings, on her shoulders.
‘Can I trust you, Orial?’
‘Trust me?’ She stared up into his eyes suspiciously. But all she saw there was weariness and desperation.
‘Cra… mois… y…’ It was a man’s voice, faint and racked with pain.
‘You can trust me, I swear it. On my mother’s name,’ Orial said swiftly.
‘Now tell me what’s wrong.’
The stranger beckoned her into the painted chamber.
Another man lay in the corner of the shrine, half-propped against the wall. His head lolled forward, face covered by his dishevelled hair.
‘He needs urgent medical attention.’
‘But why did you not bring him to the Sanatorium? Why down here?’
‘It’s a long story.’ The stranger knelt down beside the man, dabbing rather ineffectually at his forehead with a handkerchief. ‘We had to be sure.’
Orial knelt on the other side; the man’s breathing was shallow and she could see sweat glistening on his pale, stubbled face. His body seemed to exude a sour odour – the stale fearsweat overlaid with another, more pungent, smell. The smell of charred flesh…
‘Sure – of what?’
‘Is it safe, Cramoisy?’ the man whispered.
‘Safe from the officers of the Commanderie?’ asked the stranger he had called Cramoisy.
‘The Commanderie?’ Orial repeated, not understanding.
‘We are refugees from Bel’Esstar. Artists persecuted by Girim nel Ghislain’s regime. Surely you have heard of Girim nel Ghislain?’
Orial shook her head.
‘My father read me an article about Prince Ilsevir’s conversion, but I have never heard of this Girim nel Ghislain before.’
‘There! I told you!’ Cramoisy said to the man. ‘Now are you satisfied? We’re safe.’
‘Safe…’ he repeated, and his head slumped back against the wall.
‘He’s wounded?’ Orial ventured. She was swiftly calculating how she could bring help – and not betray her secret. Someone was bound to ask what she was doing down here when she had been sent to post a letter.
Cramoisy nodded.
‘Badly wounded?’
‘This is no ordinary man, Orial Magelonne. He needs the very best medical care available.’
‘But what is wrong with him?’
Cramoisy drew back the cloak which he had draped over the man’s body. The sickly odour of burned flesh grew stronger. Orial stared.
‘His hands?’
Makeshift bandages swathed the man’s hands. Even in the flickering light Orial could see that the white gauze was stained where some fluid had leaked through, clear and yellow as varnish.
‘The Commanderie torched the Opera House,’ Cramoisy said. ‘His scores were inside. He insisted on going back in to try to rescue them. We tried to hold him back –’
‘A fire,’ she repeated softly, hardly hearing what Cramoisy was saying. She looked from her own hands to the clumsy bandages.
White fire flickers from her clawing fingers, the bones broken sticks of charcoal against the flamedazzle…
Coincidence… or premonition?
Cramoisy reached out and clutched hold of her; Orial felt the jewels in his rings bruising her arms.
‘Do you think your father can help him? I’ll pay anything he asks. Anything. It’s just – if he loses his hands – he’s a musician, Orial. A composer.’
A composer. A real composer.
‘My father hates music. Even the mention of it,’ she said.
‘But if he’s a physician, he’ll have taken an oath – an oath to treat the sick, the wounded. No matter who they are, what they have done.’
Orial considered. Her father’s voice, coldly accusing, resonated in her mind.
‘Musicians. How could you disobey me, your own father. Orial? After all my warnings?’
‘Orial, I beg you…’ Cramoisy’s eyes had filled with tears.
Orial looked again at the man with the burned hands. The pale face drifting between unconsciousness and waking was young, she saw now, he could not be so many years older than she. And for a moment she felt the anguish of his situation as acutely as if it were her own. Young, gifted, with all the promise of his life to come, blighted by an act of crazy, selfless bravery.
‘Wait here,’ she said, starting to her feet. ‘I’ll go and fetch help.’
‘Well, where is this new patient?’ Dr Magelonne demanded, coming out of his office. ‘I hope our visitors from Bel’Esstar realise that I do not normally treat outside Sanatorium hours.’
‘They’ve taken him to your consulting room, Doctor,’ said Sister Crespine crisply.
Orial hovered apprehensively in the shadows as her father strode down the corridor. Spring was late this year in Sulien and the staff were still obliged to light the lamps by five in the afternoon. As Dr Magelonne reached the doors to the consulting room, Orial saw Cramoisy rise from the chair where he had been waiting.
Dr Magelonne stopped abruptly.
‘What are you doing here?’ he said in a low, tight voice. ‘You know you are not welcome, Cramoisy Jordelayne.’
‘I come not for myself,’ the man said, drawing himself up to his full height, ‘but for my friend Amaru Khassian. Please help him, Jerame.’
‘I won’t have you near my daughter. I won’t have you corrupting her. God knows what malign trick of fate has brought you two together –’
‘I came here because I could think of no one else who could help. No one else with the expertise.’
‘I don’t want to hear your blandishments.’
‘I can pay,’ Cramoisy said with chilly hauteur, ‘if that is what is concerning you.’
Dr Magelonne looked at him without speaking.
He’s going to refuse, Orial thought, anguished. He’s going to send them away.
‘You’d better wait here,’ Dr Magelonne said. He opened the door to his consulting room and shut it smartly behind him before Cramoisy could follow.
Orial saw him surreptitiously dab at his eyes with his kerchief. She ventured out of the shadows and approached.
‘You are shivering, sieur. You must be cold and hungry after so difficult a journey. Can I offer you a dish of tea?’
Cramoisy nodded.
‘That’s most kind of you. But – are you not afraid that I might corrupt you, child?’
‘Please take no notice of my father. He doesn’t mean to be so abrupt.’
The patients’ parlour was deserted but coals still glowed in the grate. Orial hurried down to the kitchens and ordered a tray of tea with sponge fingers and seed cake.
By the firelight, she poured the tea into the delicate porcelain bowls.
‘Sugar? Lemon? Do try Cook’s sponge fingers… they are excellent dipped into the tea.’
Cramoisy cupped the bowl in his fingers and raised it shakily to his lips, sipping at the hot liquid.
‘Have you lodgings for tonight?’
‘I must wait to hear how Amar is first.’
Amar. Orial could still hardly believe it.
‘Is he really Amaru Khassian? The composer of the opera Firildys? The Cassalian Canticles?’
‘The very same,’ Cramoisy reached for a sponge finger.
‘And you are –’ The light, musical voice, the smooth, hairless cheeks… Orial was sure now that she was in the presence of one of the fabled castrato opera singers of Allegonde.
‘His Firildys.’ Dark eyes met hers conspiratorially over the painted rim of the tea-bowl.
‘The Jordelayne!’ Orial clutched her hands together in excitement. ‘The Diva! The toast of Bel’Esstar!’
‘So my fame travels even over the mountains?’ A slight smile flickered for a moment on the singer’s lips.
‘That was how you knew my mother.’
‘Your mother, Orial, taught me everything I know. Without her I’d still be singing in the back row of the chorus. Your mother was – an inspiration.’ Cramoisy reached for another sponge finger. ‘You were only five when I last saw you. You don’t remember me, do you?’
‘I had no idea. I – I –’ Orial tried to scry into the shadows of the past. Five years old. Just before everything had begun to fall apart – and her life was changed irrevocably.
‘I was nineteen. At the start of my career. And I came all the way across the mountains to study with the greatest singer of the age: Iridial Magelonne. Do you know what they used to call her? The Sulien Nightingale. Her sudden fatal illness… so tragic. She had so much to live for.’
Cramoisy’s eyes, warmed by the coals’ glow, gazed into Orial’s. ‘So much to give.’
A thousand questions came bubbling up into Orial’s mind. Here at last was someone who had known her mother. Someone who seemed not only prepared but eager to talk about her. Maybe Cramoisy could provide answers to some of the mysteries that shrouded Iridial’s death. Mysteries that haunted Orial. She knew she had never been told the whole truth. She had a right to know what had really happened. She was hungry for information – and yet apprehensive of what Cramoisy might reveal. Was the past better left undisturbed?
She leaned forward and lifted the teapot.
‘More tea?’
A turbulence of notes swirled about Khassian’s brain with the violence of an autumn storm. Music so wild, so visceral it shook him to the roots of his soul Soon the page was spattered with a myriad black dots as he feverishly dipped his pen in the ink again and again
But as he scribbled on, desperate to capture the notes before they whirled away into the darkness, the black dots began to move on the page. He rubbed his eyes. Tiredness must be playing tricks with his sight. But no. The notes were milling around, a horde of tiny insects, crawling off the page on to his hands.
He tried to shake them off but still they came until his hands were covered in a coating of milling black insects. And the more violently he shook his hands, the tighter they seemed to cling.
He could feel the tug of tiny serrated mandibles, nibbling into his fingers, his palms, stripping away the flesh –
He was being devoured, eaten alive by his own creation.
In desperation he began to scrape his hands against the edge of the desk but only gobbets of raw flesh came away. He could see the white, bloodied bone beneath –
His mouth opened in a scream, a rasping scream of denial.
‘Noooo!’
‘Try to lie still, Illustre.’
Blinking in the lamplight, Khassian saw faces above him, faces he did not recognise. A man of middle years, his brown hair peppered with grey, was gazing thoughtfully down at him through gold-rimmed spectacles; a woman in a starched cap stood beside him.
‘Who – are you?’
‘My name is Jerame Magelonne.’ The man’s voice was quiet yet authoritative. ‘You are in my Sanatorium in Sulien.’
The nurse was unwrapping Khassian’s bandages, peeling away layer after stained layer. Beneath lay something claw-like, a raw, red mess of tissue oozing yellow liquid. A few charred flakes of skin still adhered to parts of the claw, others had stuck to the bandages and come away as the slow unravelling had gone on.
‘Tsk, tsk!’ Dr Magelonne clicked his tongue against his teeth in disapproval. ‘Pus.’
‘What – are you – doing?’ Khassian said in a gasp.
‘Lie back, Illustre.’
‘What’s happened to my hands? They shouldn’t look like that.’
‘Please lie back, Illustre.’
Sickened, Khassian sank back, fighting a sudden surge of nausea. He had always been squeamish, disgusted at the mere sight of blood, and hated himself for his weakness. ‘What’s gone wrong?’
‘A little infection, that’s all,’ Dr Magelonne said briskly.
A little infection? The smell of the oozing flesh told Khassian that the physician was not being wholly honest with him.
‘I’m going to drain the pus, Illustre. This may prove a little uncomfortable. Steel yourself.’
The doctor’s probe sliced into his flesh. The pain of cold metal sang with a white and whining purity, honed steel drawn screeching across glass.
And then the cacophonous storm came whirling back and tipped Khassian into a howling vortex where all was chaos and darkness.
Orial sat gazing at her hands in the firelight. Slowly she raised them to the blaze until the flames lit the pale, flawless skin with fiery gold.
White fire flickers from her clawing fingers. The skin is blistering, flaking away in flecks of flame –
She shivered.
Not my hands, but his.
Amaru Khassian was a stranger from a foreign country. She had never seen him before in her life. And yet here in Sulien, at her mother’s shrine, she had experienced his agony as the conflagration in distant Bel’Esstar seared his hands – as if it were her own.
What drew him here?
She saw again the pale face, the blank look of loss dulling the dark eyes that stared into hers.
What links us?
She gathered the tea-bowls on to the tray and set out towards the kitchen.
‘The situation is grave, Diva.’
The door to her father’s office stood open.
‘Very grave. It is possible,’ and Orial heard her father lower his voice as she went past, ‘I may have to amputate.’
‘Amputate his hands!’ The Diva’s rich voice rang out, echoing the length of the corridor. ‘But you can’t! He’s a composer – a keyboard player.’
Orial stopped, shocked.
‘When did he sustain the injuries?’
‘Three nights ago.’
‘And how long have you been on the road?’
‘We’ve been travelling since the night of the fire. Friends smuggled us out of Bel’Esstar in disguise.’
‘If he’d seen a physician straightaway, then maybe there might have been some hope… But infection has set in. Wound fever. If it spreads, it will kill him.’
‘And if we’d stayed to find a physician, he’d have been lynched for certain. Or burned alive for heresy. I believe that was their intent. Burn the Opera House – and all the heretics inside. Are you going to condemn him too, Doctor?’
‘Of course I’ll do all I can. Do allow me a certain professional pride, Diva.’ Orial heard the stiffness in her father’s voice; Cramoisy’s words had stung him. ‘I have the most advanced techniques at my disposal here in the Sanatorium. But there will be no miracles. The Illustre has suffered a very serious injury. Even if we can save his hands, I doubt that he will ever be able to play a musical instrument again.’