Acir saw Khassian poised on the edge of the swollen river. He saw him glance back – caught the look of defiant triumph – then throw himself into the waters.
Acir was pulling off his jacket as he ran forwards, kicking off his boots as he vaulted over the railings. He paused a moment to scan the bank for a branch, a loose railing, but there was nothing.
Khassian’s head rose once above the churning waters at the centre of a swirling vortex – and then it sucked him down.
Acir took a breath – and plunged into the torrent.
The shock of the ice-cold water almost knocked the breath from his lungs. He went under – chaos of black water, white spray – then kicked upwards again, reaching out blindly for Khassian’s current-tumbled body.
His hands caught hold, his arm crooked about Khassian’s neck, dragging the head above the water.
Don’t fight me. Don’t fight me now.
The water tore at him, tugging Khassian’s body as he fought to pull it to the shore. It was a limp weight now, dragging him down, he was struggling to keep a hold on it, he was losing feeling in his fingers, they were numbed with the icy cold –
The river had become a lethal adversary – he fought it for possession of Khassian. If he lost the fight, they would both drown. He took in a mouthful of water, coughed it out, spluttering…
One foot grazed against the muddy bank. He scrabbled to keep the foothold and heaved the water-sodden body half up out of the water. Rushing waters still dinned in his ears, a roar louder than the roar of his own pounding blood. Khassian’s body seemed to be slipping back into the river. Acir slithered around in the mud until he could hook his arms beneath Khassian’s and pull him right out of the water.
The last effort exhausted him; he slipped, falling over Khassian, water streaming from his sodden clothes.
‘Khassian,’ he whispered, coughing. ‘Khassian!’
Khassian lay without moving, head lolling, muddy water running out from a corner of his slack mouth.
Sweet Mhir, let him not be dead.
Acir swept the soaked hair from his own face and bent over the composer, one hand on his chest. The ribs were still; he could feel no heartbeat beneath the wet jacket.
He looked desperately around for help – but the fast-darkening gardens were empty. Only a solitary bird sang, high in a bare-branched tree.
He tipped the composer on to his side, trying to empty the water from his open mouth. Still no stir of life.
‘Help!’ he shouted to the empty gardens. ‘Help, here!’ His voice echoed in the twilight – but no one appeared.
There was nothing for it. He knelt astride Khassian and covered the open mouth with his own, breathing in his own panting breath… then pressed his palms rhythmically on the still ribcage. Khassian’s lips were cold and wet, slimed with the foul taste of riverwater.
‘Breathe, Khassian.’ Acir willed life into the limp body as he worked. ‘Damn you, breathe.’
A faint shudder convulsed the composer’s body. He turned his head a little to one side – and vomited up a gush of foul water into the grass.
‘Why?’ he said faintly, and then retched again, ribs heaving now as he gasped in lungfuls of air.
Khassian was alive. Acir began to shake with relief; relief – and cold. Only now did he realise that he too was soaked to the skin. And the evening chill was fast settling into the river valley.
‘What’s going on down there? I heard shouts!’
Acir looked up and saw a man approaching through the early-evening gloom.
‘Can you fetch help?’ Acir’s teeth began to chatter. ‘Th-there’s been an accident.’
‘You stay here. I’ll get help.’
Stay here. The irony of the words would have made Acir smile if his mouth had not been so numbed with the cold.
He could just make out the crumpled shape of his jacket where he had flung it in the grass. He scrambled up the bank and retrieved it, tucking it about Khassian’s body.
Khassian’s eyelids flickered open.
‘Why, damn you?’ he whispered.
‘Self-destruction is the ultimate sin,’ Acir said, though the sternness of his words was lessened by the involuntary chattering of his teeth. He seemed unable to stop shivering. ‘I c-could not let you put your immortal soul in danger of p-perdition.’
‘You really – believe all that, don’t you? Damnation, salvation. You poor deluded simpleton –’
And then torchlights illumined the bank. The rescuers had brought blankets and a stretcher. They carried Khassian to the lodge-keeper’s cottage at the gates to the gardens, Acir following, squelching as water dripped into his boots.
There the lodge-keeper and his wife helped them out of their wet clothes and wrapped them in blankets. Acir found himself thawing in front of the fire, hands clasped about a mug of mulled cider.
‘A foolish accident,’ he told them. ‘My companion was leaning over the river when the wind carried his hat away. He tried to fish it out with a stick… and fell in…’
‘Visitors, eh?’ The lodge-keeper gave his wife a knowing look. ‘The Avenne’s treacherous this time of year. Sulien folk won’t go near her till spring’s past. Then she runs as smooth and placid as a minnow-stream.’
Khassian, sitting hunched in his cocoon of blankets and towels, slowly raised his head.
‘You can’t go back to your lodgings in those wet clothes,’ the woman said. ‘Shall we send for dry ones?’
‘You’ve been most generous…’ Now that the crisis was past, Acir found himself fighting off drowsiness; as the warmth of the fire and the spiced cider glowed in his veins, he felt an overwhelming urge to curl up in the flames’ glow and sleep. Yet he must keep awake, keep vigilant. Given Khassian’s morbid frame of mind, he might easily attempt to kill himself again.
‘You lied, Captain Korentan.’ Khassian’s voice rasped, rough from retching up the riverwater he had swallowed. ‘You lied to protect me. Doesn’t that mean you’ve tarnished your immortal soul?’
Acir came awake with a start. Khassian was watching him, his eyes lit with a dull gleam. Hard as pebbles seen through riverwater…
‘Does that bother you?’ Acir asked.
‘Why are you still here? Afraid I’ll set fire to myself? Impale myself on the fire-poker?’ He broke off, coughing. ‘But then I’m no use to you dead, am I?’
Acir chose not to reply. He sensed that Khassian was spoiling for a fight. And he was too tired to fight. Too damned tired…
A little while later, the grating of carriage wheels on the gravel path outside woke Acir. He must have lapsed into a doze. He sat up, inwardly cursing himself for falling asleep on duty.
Cramoisy flung open the door and swept into the firelit parlour.
‘I came as soon as I got your message! Whatever possessed you to fall into the river, Amar?’
Acir stood up, clutching the blanket to him.
‘And you, Captain Korentan, you leapt in to rescue him. What a hero!’
The castrato seemed charged with the excitement of the situation, his gestures and voice too large for the little parlour.
‘The clothes, Cramoisy,’ Khassian said wearily. ‘Have you brought the clothes?’
‘Heavens, yes. And Mistress Permay’s making a nourishing barley soup for you.’
Acir cleared his throat. It pained him to have to make the request, but he could not think of any alternative course of action.
‘Diva, if I might borrow a pair of breeches and a shirt… I will have them laundered and returned to you on the morrow.’
‘You have no other clothes with you, Captain?’
The Diva would not know, of course, of the vow of poverty he had made.
‘We travel light in the Commanderie.’
‘And it wouldn’t do for you to wander the streets of Sulien naked beneath a blanket?’ The castrato tweaked teasingly at the edge of Acir’s blanket; horrified, he took a step backwards and sat down rather suddenly on the couch. Cramoisy laughed and turned away. ‘How fortuitous that I gathered several items of clothing of Khassian’s with me. I thought he might be cold.’
‘Fortunate, Cramoisy,’ Khassian said quietly. ‘Fortunate.’
‘Whatsoever,’ Cramoisy said, ignoring him as he pulled out shirts, breeches, socks, and laid them on the fender to warm. ‘There you are.’
Cramoisy stood looking at Acir expectantly. It was only then that he realised the castrato intended him to get dressed in front of him. Acir felt his face burning – and not from the heat of the fire.
‘Why this modesty, Captain? I’m an old trouper, well used to cramped dressing rooms in provincial theatres. D’you think I haven’t seen it all before?’
‘Cramoisy,’ Khassian said warningly. ‘Go and give my thanks to the good people who have sheltered us. Some remuneration would be appropriate in the circumstances…’
Cramoisy paused a moment. Then, shooting a venomous glance at Khassian, he left the room, slamming the door.
Acir turned away from Khassian and, in the shadows, shed his blanket to pull on a pair of breeches. As he turned back into the light of the flames for a shirt, he saw Khassian regarding him with curiosity.
‘What is that?‘
Khassian was staring at his bare chest. Acir glanced down and felt a flush of heat sear his face again.
‘A battle-scar?’
‘What, this?’ Acir touched the tattoo that covered his left breast, suddenly self-conscious. ‘The mark of the Order of the Rosecoeur.’ He tugged the shirt on, hastily covering it.
‘No. Let me see.’
Acir found himself uncovering the sacred mark to show the composer. Perhaps if he could explain his devotion to Mhir he might win Khassian over…
Khassian raised one damaged hand as if he wanted to touch the dye-stained skin…
‘A black-thorned rose… what are these three crimson spots, what do they signify?’
‘It commemorates the miracle of the bleeding Rose. Mhir’s martyrdom. The three drops of blood that fell from the Rose that grew from the dead Prophet’s breast and restored Elesstar to life. The thorns represent the difficulties we encounter in our life’s journey; the three drops of blood, the three virtues: love, fidelity and –’
‘Yoo-hoo! Amaru!’ Cramoisy’s voice shrilled outside the room, shattering the moment’s strange, still intimacy. ‘Are you ready?’
Khassian let his hand drop back.
‘Another minute, miu caru!’
Acir could not help but notice the immediate alteration in his tone as he called to Cramoisy; the voice he had heard a few seconds earlier betrayed a different Khassian entirely – gentle and sensitive.
‘Pass me those clothes.’
Acir had handed him the warmed clothes and turned to look away as Khassian shrugged off the blanket. From the smothered grunts of effort he could tell that the composer was trying his best to dress himself. And only then did he realise that there was no way that Khassian would be able to do up the fastenings.
‘You’ll have to help me. If that’s not too demeaning for a member of the secret Order of the Rosecoeur? Or perhaps you’ve taken a vow forbidding you to touch other people’s clothing?’
‘Would you rather I called the Diva?’ Acir said, stung in spite of himself.
‘Good gracious, no. I’ll have to endure him fussing over me as he waits for me to develop a chill. Keep him away for a few moments longer.’
Acir turned around and saw that Khassian had managed to manoeuvre his arms through the shirt sleeves and wriggle into the breeches. The breeches however were flapping open.
This was no different, Acir told himself, from aiding a wounded confrère. He had stripped away blood-soiled, slashed uniforms, he had bathed and salved wounds, he had eased clean garments on over bandaged limbs.
And yet it was different. As he knelt beside the couch and leaned across to fasten the shirt ties, damp strands of his hair fell forward, brushing Khassian’s bare chest. The leather thong that usually confined his hair must have been lost in the river. He raised one hand to push it out of his eyes and saw that Khassian was looking at him. Firelight burnished red glints in Khassian’s water-tangled hair, glimmered in shadowed laughter in his eyes, at the corners of his mouth.
And it occurred to Acir that the composer was in some obscure way mocking him.
Only an hour or so ago he had covered that mocking mouth with his own, warmed it back to life with his own warmth, his own breath.
Angered, he snatched his hands away.
‘What’s the matter, Captain Korentan?’ Khassian’s voice was dark, fire-edged and dangerous. ‘Burned your fingers?’
Riverdreams.
Orial sank down, down beneath the black waters. Dark shapes, long and sinuous, snaked past her.
Drowning.
Black waters, white shroud. Bound from head to foot, she could not kick free. Spiralling on down into the muddy depths.
Her jaw was bound, she could not move, she could not cry out. The lead weights dragged her down to the bottom. Weights, cerements –
They had given her to the waters, thinking she was dead.
But I’m alive!
She heard the snap and grind of razor-teeth close to her ear. The water swirled.
The water-snakes. They would devour her, alive or dead, they would strip the living flesh from her bones–
‘Noooo!’
She was sitting up in her own bed, staring wildly into the darkness, her arms crossed against her breast, hands clutching her bare shoulders.
The Antiquarian, Dame Jolaine Tradescar, rubbed her eyes. Old age was an extreme irritation. Nothing worked properly anymore: hearing failed, sight dimmed – and just when she needed her senses to be at their most acute.
The desk was stacked with notebooks filled with page after tightly packed page of her small, neat script, her meticulous drawings of the hieroglyphs, a lifetime’s scholarly obsession. A lifetime spent searching for hidden clues, following false trails.
Many times in the past, she had been certain she had been about to crack the code. She should know better by now! And yet she could not suppress a shiver of anticipation as she took out her eyeglasses to study the new find more closely.
A soaking in a bowl of clean water had removed the encrusted mud. She could see what it was now. A rolled sheet of fine pewter.
A curse.
With trembling fingers she took up tweezers and, with extreme delicacy, began to smooth the ancient pewter sheet flat.
The custom of inscribing a petition to the Goddess Elesstar and dropping it into the sacred spring was still popular amongst the people of Sulien. A generous donation towards the upkeep of the Temple was the customary fee. Most petitions were pleas for a cure for various ailments – but a few were vengeful curses, imploring the Goddess’s aid. No one was certain when the custom had begun but the Priests and Priestesses did not discourage it, especially as the petitioners usually brought generous gifts of food and wine with them. And no one knew anymore why it was essential to scratch the petition backwards – it was merely the tradition.
But this petition was older and more fragile than any other Dame Jolaine had examined before. It might so easily have been lost for good if she had not spotted it in the silt the workmen had raked from a blocked drainage channel.
She peered at the faint scratches inscribed on the lead sheet. Backwards. Remember: transcribe the letters first, then reverse…
And then she peered more closely.
There were two inscriptions. The first was in what seemed to her eyes to be an archaic form of the Allegondan script. And the second below was in –
In the Lifhendil hieroglyphs!
Her heart pounded a wild jig against her ribs. She sat back, one hand on her breast, trying to control its leaping beats.
‘Steady, Tradescar,’ she murmured. ‘It could be a fake. A forgery. No point having a seizure over a trifle.’
It could be a fake – but it could also be the petition of a long-dead worshipper from the Dark Age, child of an Allegondan-Lifhendil union. Certes, such children had been born. She let out a dragging sigh: little Orial was living proof of that.
And if it was what she hoped – maybe she had at last found the key to the lost language of the Lifhendil.
The faint script dimmed before her eyes. The room grew suddenly dark; shadows loomed across her vision. Pain burst in her chest, bright as an arrowstar. Her hands fumbled over the desk for her enamelled box of pills. Shakily, she opened the lid, picked one out and popped it under her tongue.
‘Easy now. Easy.’
She leant back in her chair, waiting for the flaring pain to fizzle out.
This faulty heart was becoming a damn nuisance. Always letting her down just when she needed it. The doctors had told her to retire. Maybe they had a point…
Chronicle journalese flickered through her mind: ‘Eminent scholar found dead in Museum. It is believed that Dr Tradescar was on the brink of a remarkable discovery. Her sudden death robbed us of the enlightenment…’
‘No other scholar is going to get their hands on this! It’s mine. I’ve waited a lifetime for this.’
And there was Orial to consider. Her soul-child. Orial was rapidly maturing – soon she would come into her full Lifhendil inheritance. The musical gifts to ravish and delight – and then the madness. Jolaine had to save her. She had to try. Maybe her theory was crackbrained, the ramblings of a crazy old academic. But suppose – just suppose she was right and the Lifhendil stelae held the key to the Accidie?
Khassian lay on the striped couch whilst Cramoisy paced to and fro. The Diva was twisting a lace handkerchief agitatedly between his fingers. The situation was, Khassian realised, curiously reminiscent of Flamilla’s scena in the opera The Fires of Fate.
He knew Cramoisy was waiting for him to speak. To give him an explanation. But he would not explain himself – not to the Diva or anyone else.
‘How could you do it?’ The Diva’s voice trembled with tears of accusation. ‘Just – throw your life away! When we have all worked so hard to save you? It’s so – so selfish!‘
Khassian stared through him.
‘Oh, don’t go on pretending it was an accident. I know what you were about. I found the smashed bottle of opiate on the floor in your room. When that failed, you decided to drown yourself. If Korentan hadn’t fished you out, you’d be dead – and what good would that do our cause?’
‘So I’m to keep myself alive to further our cause? Even though I’m useless. I can’t hold a sword, fire a pistol –’
Cramoisy flung himself on his knees beside him.
‘You mustn’t give up, Amar. If you lose hope, how will the rest of us carry on?’
‘There’s no point in carrying on. I’m no use to anyone. I can’t compose.’
‘But with an amanuensis –’
Why couldn’t Cramoisy understand? Suddenly it all came spilling out, all the hopelessness, the despair.
‘I thought I had found the will to compose again – Elesstar’s duet. And today I heard one of the nurses singing the tune in the Sanatorium. Singing it aloud!’
‘Which nurse?’ Cramoisy asked.
‘The girl who found us. Magelonne’s child. Can’t you see, Cramoisy? I’d been deluding myself. I hadn’t composed anything new at all, I must have cribbed the tune from a common street ballad.’
‘Orial Magelonne was singing one of your tunes?’ said Cramoisy.
‘I felt so cheap. So worthless. Elesstar’s final duet – filched from some tawdry tavern song.’
‘Amar. Listen to me.’ Cramoisy cupped Khassian’s face in his hands, suddenly earnest, the tragic mask of Flamilla abandoned. ‘Think back. Had you been rehearsing the tune in your mind that morning?’
‘But I don’t see what relevance –’
‘Think, Amar!’ Cramoisy’s finger-tips pressed into his cheeks.
‘Well, I might have been… maybe I was…’
‘Have you noticed her eyes?’
‘What have her eyes got to do with this?’
‘She’s her mother’s daughter. She has a gift, Amar. A gift that could save your life.’
‘For God’s sake explain, Cramoisy.’
‘She’s – different. And she doesn’t know it yet. Rainbow eyes, Amar. I told you her mother was an exceptional musician, didn’t I? They are descendants of a race of musicians. I sang her Firildys’s arioso – and she sang it back to me, note for note. And she had never heard it before in her life.’
‘So? My father taught me to do the same,’ Khassian said dismissively. ‘With discipline, children can develop remarkable memory skills.’
‘And can they also hear the music in your mind?’
Khassian gave a sceptical snort.
‘Oh, come now, Cramoisy.’
‘Her mother Iridial could.’
‘Musical telepathy? What kind of crazed fantasy did this Iridial spin you? To hear the music in other people’s minds… it would send you mad.’
‘Don’t you understand? You didn’t filch the tune. She learned it from you.’
‘You’re saying that Orial Magelonne could be my amanuensis? That she could transcribe what’s up here –’ Khassian nodded his head, ‘– directly into written manuscript?’
‘She’d need some training. From what I understand, she’s self-taught. The good doctor has expressly forbidden her to take any kind of music lessons. But talent will out…’
‘Ach, Cramoisy, this is like some bizarre faery tale. And I don’t believe in faeries.’
‘Just imagine, Amar,’ Cramoisy leaned close to him, his breath warm on Khassian’s face, ‘the opera coming to life again, here in Sulien. You already have Valentan for the peace-bringer, Mhir. And you have your Elesstar here beside you. If other musicians can make it across the mountains, we can put a cast together –’
‘But the girl. Orial. Suppose she doesn’t want to do it? It will mean days, weeks, months of transcription. And if her father is so opposed to her coming into contact with music…’ Khassian struggled to express the doubts that had already arisen in his mind. ‘It seems – wrong, Cramoisy. To ask her to disobey her father.’
Father. The word still stirred unhappy memories: bitter words, slammed doors, letters returned unopened…
‘After all I’ve done for you. All I’ve given up for you, Amar. My whole life dedicated to the furthering of your career, your talents, to treat me so shabbily. My own son!’
‘Let me talk to her. She’s eighteen, old enough to make up her own mind about the matter.’
‘Maybe.’
‘And no more silly suicide attempts, caru?‘
Silly. Khassian winced at the word. Was that how Cramoisy saw it? The petulant gesture of a child who can’t get what he wants? There had been nothing petulant about the grey clouds of despair that had enveloped him, leeching all colour from the world.
‘Promise me.’ Cramoisy nuzzled his cheek, skin soft as rose-velvet against the unshaven stubble.
He nodded his head, wishing the Diva would leave him alone.
‘Tried to drown himself?’ Orial repeated, wide-eyed. She set down her bowl of tea and stared in alarm at the Diva.
The tea-shop echoed to the tinkle of cutlery and a low murmur of discreet conversation.
Cramoisy nodded – though not too vigorously. He was sporting an elaborately curled powdered wig of a construction as frothily light as the cream-filled pastries piled on the plate in front of him. Orial noticed that the wig had already occasioned several envious glances from the ladies of Sulien.
‘Not a word of it to anyone, Orial. He was in such deep, deep despair.’
‘Because of his hands?’
‘Exactly so.’ Cramoisy helped himself to a second meringue.
‘How terrible.’ Orial stared at the pastry which lay untouched on her own plate. She saw again the shambling figure of Amaru Khassian in the Sanatorium corridor, saw the pale face, the daemon-haunted eyes.
‘And I fear he may try again – he can be so stubborn once he sets his heart on something – unless we can prevent him.’
‘We?’ Orial echoed. ‘You mean I could help?’
‘Mmm.’ Cramoisy’s rouged mouth was full of meringue; he lifted his napkin and delicately dabbed the traces of whipped cream from his lips. Orial saw the red rouge-stain on the white linen.
‘But how could I help?’ Orial picked up her fork and toyed with the cake, pushing it around the plate. ‘I’m only in my first year of training. I haven’t learned neurology or musculature yet –
‘I’m not referring to your medical skills, carissa. I’m referring to your other gifts.’
‘I don’t have any other gifts,’ she said, confused.
‘Let me share a confidence with you,’ Cramoisy leaned closer across the tea-table. ‘Amaru Khassian did not just lose the use of his hands in the fire. He lost the culmination of his life’s work: his new opera. And now he just sits there, thinking through the lost music day and night. It haunts his dreams. At night I can hear him murmuring and weeping in his sleep. It’s destroying him, Orial.’
‘Because he can hear the music in his head but can’t write it down?’
‘To Amar music is much more than a profession. It’s his own personal language, his means of expressing himself. “Music begins where words fail…” ‘
‘But why me?’
‘Think back to a morning last week. Amaru was being treated in the Sanatorium. You were singing in the next-door cubicle as you worked. What were you singing?’
Orial frowned. That melody. That dark, haunting melody with its sinuous, twisted intervals… How did Cramoisy know she had been singing?
‘I don’t know its name. I don’t know where I heard it. I just found myself humming it.’
Cramoisy reached out across the table and took her hand in his own, squeezing it reassuringly.
‘Don’t distress yourself, child. Listen to me. You were singing a fragment of Amaru’s opera.’
‘B-but you said it was burned. How could I have –’
Cramoisy raised his hand to stroke her cheek.
‘You are your mother’s daughter. You have inherited her talents, her gifts. You will need guidance in how to use them…’
‘You mean – I heard the music in the Illustre’s mind?’ Orial could not begin to make sense of the revelation.
‘It’s a kind of musical telepathy. That’s how your mother once described it to me. You will need to develop great mental discipline if you are to use it effectively.’
‘And you want me to transcribe the Illustre’s thoughts?’
‘He needs you, Orial. You could be the one to save him from his own despair.’
‘But I’m untrained. I’ve never had a lesson in my life.’
‘Valentan and I will give you instruction in notation, theory, all you need to know.’
‘Ohhh…’ Orial let out a little sigh of excitement. It was more than she could bear. Her dearest wish come true. And then she remembered.
‘Papa –’
Cramoisy’s expression became pensive.
‘I don’t want to upset him.’
The sound of pastry forks on plates, spoons stirring tea-bowls, had suddenly become a clatter, intruding on Orial’s thoughts.
‘You’re a loyal and loving daughter. I understand that. But whose interests is your father fostering? He has deprived you of the musical training that is your birthright. Forgive me if I speak plainly, Orial. If he cannot bear to hear music played, then so be it. But why should you suffer? It is wrong. Very wrong.’
Orial gasped.
‘There. I’ve said it!’ Cramoisy leaned back in his chair, triumphant.
‘The decision is yours, Orial. Not your father’s. You’re no longer a child.’
Orial looked down at the table; her own hands, slender and unscathed, rested on the embroidered cloth.
Not my hands. But his…
She looked up.
‘When can I meet the Illustre?’