Chapter Three

 

 

Edgar—known simply as Ed to his family of which none still lived and his friends of which there were very few—stepped out of Valeria’s clerk office after a long day’s work, flexing his cramping hand and yawning. The sun was still up, the night another hour or two away. After so long spent in the relative gloom of the building its rays seemed painfully bright, and Ed shielded his eyes with his hand as he started down the street. Edgar cared little for daylight, a time that, for him, was made up of going through ledger after ledger, of calculating debts owed and debts paid, loans denied and loans made. It was a time of him being no more than Ed—a middling level clerk with very little ambition and even less respect whose coworkers referred to as Simple Ed when they thought he couldn’t hear.

But that part, at least, Ed didn’t mind. Like his name, he preferred people to think of him as simple, uncomplicated. It was the easiest way, the best way to be invisible, and there were many things far worse than being invisible. He was walking quickly, intent on making it to a particular tavern before nightfall—he had an appointment he didn’t want to miss—and so busy pushing his way through the crowd gathered in the street, that he didn’t stop to question why there would be a crowd in the first place.

After all, he had gotten off work an hour earlier than normal—giving his boss an excuse about not feeling well—so that he might make his appointment with time to spare, for Ed always preferred being the first party to arrive at any meeting. He prided himself on it. This early, most people should have still been about their work day, spending hour after hour in drudgery to provide a modest living for themselves and their families and what few were either fortunate—or unfortunate, depending on a man’s perspective—enough to not have employment should have already been at home or, more likely, in their favorite tavern.

And even if he’d left work at the normal time, Ed would have never suspected the streets to be this crowded as they never had been before. He briefly wondered if there was some parade going through the square, some last ditch-effort to suck the last enjoyment out of the Carnival of Lights celebration only just ended. That was when he heard a voice raised in song.

A woman’s voice, beautiful and sweet and carrying easily over a street that, despite the many bodies crowding it, was almost supernaturally silent save for her. Simultaneously, Ed realized that the crowd he’d been pushing his way through wasn’t moving but standing still, all of them facing the same direction, toward the side of a modest tailor’s shop where Ed sometimes purchased his clothes, his meager clerk’s salary making it impossible for him to justify—or explain—purchasing much finer clothes as much as he might have liked to.

There was something about the song which called to him, that pulled at him as if with some invisible force, and Ed found himself wandering through the crowd, making his way toward the front. Although he always made it a point of remaining invisible, of never calling attention to himself, he pushed and shoved those in his way aside, ignoring the curses that trailed in his wake. He found that his breath was coming fast, and as he drew closer to the unseen singer, the spell-like quality of the song intensified until finally he thought that, should he look down, he would see his feet floating several inches off the ground.

He didn’t look down though, didn’t even consider sparing a moment to do so, for he was possessed of an urgency that demanded he get closer to the source of that song, of the beautiful notes that rose and fell in the air as if they were the weaves of a spell cast by some masterful magician from one of the storybooks his mother had read him long ago before she had died from the herbs she smoked.

Ed’s father had abandoned him and his mother when Ed had been just a baby, his only comment on their child—and one which his mother had insisted on sharing with him any time she was under the effects of whatever drugs she could get her hands on—was to say that he looked small and weak. His mother had wielded those words—said so often that not a day passed in which Ed didn’t still hear the echoes of them—like weapons whenever she was high and angry. Which, as it happened, had been pretty much always.

Ed had taken the abuse—verbal and physical—largely because he’d had no choice, just as he had taken it upon himself to clean up the puddles of vomit she often left in the house or on her sheets, cleaning and replacing her bed linens without expecting or receiving so much as a thank you. He had done so for the same reason he had done most things for the majority of his life: because he had no choice. Yet hidden deep down in the back of his mind, hidden behind each “yes, ma’am” and “sorry, Mother,” Ed had hated his mom, hated her more than anything in the world.

But while she might have been cruel, while she might have used him as a surrogate for his father that she might punish for his transgressions as the man himself was long gone, there had been brief moments in which Ed’s mother had shown, if not love, at least a sort of…tolerance. An acceptance of him in all what she dubbed his “pathetic glory.” There had been those brief moments when the high of one drug had worn off, but she was not yet craving losing herself in oblivion once more, that his mother had experienced a state of clarity that was so rare in her, and sometimes even a compassion for her son which was so at odds with the typical loathing she displayed.

In those moments, those rare, precious moments, Ed had seen some inkling of what a normal family might be like, of what it could feel like to love and be loved. She would fix him his favorite food, sit him down and ask him how his day had been—even pretending to care. Then, if Ed were really lucky and she was in a particularly fine mood, she would sing. Her voice was no match to the woman’s which Ed heard now—even the hefty, nostalgic lenses through which all men and women view their pasts could not distort events enough to make him think otherwise. Yet, in many ways, his mother’s voice, her singing, had been even more beautiful for all that, because when she’d sung she had sung for him, and in that song Ed had heard, had felt an answer to all of the beatings he’d endured, a sort of amends for them.

Because of that, Ed had always loved music and singers, a love which continued long after his mother succumbed to her habit, so he could no more have turned away and continued down the street, ignoring the chanced upon song and rushing toward his appointment, than a moth could ignore a flame. In fact, Ed had forgotten all about his appointment just then and had someone asked him about it, he would not have known what they meant, would have only tried to extricate himself from the conversation as quickly as possible so that he might follow the siren call of that voice.

Yet no matter how many people Ed pushed his way past, there seemed to always be more blocking his way, hindering him from answering the call of that achingly beautiful melody. He fought harder, shoving his way past those in his way, elbowing them aside, a desperation in his actions like a drowning man fighting against a powerful current that sought to pull him under. Ed was no singer, had been given no such gifts from the gods, but listening to music from afar, sampling it, or on occasion consuming it the way a wine-lover might her favorite beverage, was a constant pursuit of his, and so he began to detect the resolving of the melody which would inevitably lead to the song’s conclusion.

His hands began to sweat. What if the singer was gone by the time he managed to push his way through the milling crowd, full of slack-jawed simpletons fully too ignorant to appreciate the divine beauty that they were undeservedly witnessing? A particularly fat man stood in front of him, and try as Ed might, he was unable to move the big bastard who was oblivious to Ed’s increasingly frantic attempts to shove him out of the way just as he was deaf to Ed’s pleas and threats. The man—who was considerably taller than Ed himself as well as most of those in the crowd—stared as if transfixed on some point in the distance that Ed couldn’t see from his vantage point. The fat man’s mouth was slightly open, and Ed remembered his mother telling him to keep his mouth shut when he was a child, telling him that he might catch a fly, if he wasn’t careful, but that he’d certainly catch a beating.

And Ed had learned to keep his mouth shut. But this bastard never had, this fat glutton with what appeared to be food stains on one ruffled sleeve of his doublet had never been taught to shut up, had probably never had to clean up his mother’s vomit while she told him how stupid he was, how worthless, how weak. And none of these were the greatest of the man’s crimes. The greatest—the one for which Ed could not have forgiven him, even had he been so inclined—was that he was clapping his fat, doughy hands together, interrupting the rhythm and melody of the song.

Clapping. As if he was at some barn dance full of men with buck-teeth and pieces of straw stuck out of their mouths where the closest thing to music was the tortured refrains of some child given a lute for his birthday and being forced to play it against his will. Ed felt his upper lip curl back from his teeth, but he forced himself to remain calm, to allow the soothing song to wash over him, cleansing him of his anger. One of the many lessons his mother’s attentions had taught him as a child, one of the greatest, was that a man should never lose his temper, for if he lost his temper, he lost control, and a man—or woman—without control was little more than an unthinking beast.

So Ed had made a promise to himself long ago to never lose control. Be invisible, always, and always be in control. He was surprised, then, when he found that he was reaching for the silver letter opener he always kept on hand during his work day, one he used to open the many letters—pleas for extensions on loans, mostly—that he dealt with daily at the clerk’s office.

Ed withdrew the small, thin blade from his tunic, clutching it tightly. With the crowd so tightly-packed, it was easy enough to reach around the man’s back, his arm largely hidden from view by the press of bodies. Then, gently but quickly, he slid the letter opener into the man’s side. Not a weapon, perhaps, but the thin blade sank deep, and the man let out a sharp hiss similar to the sound a man might make when bit by an ant or wasp, and spun to look at his side, a movement made more difficult by the crowd around him. By the time he managed it, Ed had already pocketed the blade again, reminding himself that he would have to clean the blood off later.

He paid the fat man no more attention though, for he saw that, as he’d hoped, the man’s sudden concern over the small wound in his side had opened up a space, and Ed took advantage of the brief window provided him, lunging forward as a fencer might toward an unbalanced target and filling the gap moments before the crowd closed in. Struggling to peer around those in front of him, Ed caught the briefest glimpse of the woman seated in a chair, a lute in her hands.

He had an impression of blonde hair and green eyes that seemed to shine like emeralds before the crowd’s movements blocked her from view, and Ed hissed, pushing his way forward. The fat man had seen that he’d been stabbed by now and was making enough of a ruckus to distract some of those in the crowd, making Ed’s job easier, and soon he made his way to the front of the crowd just as the melody resolved and the final notes of the woman’s voice and the lute’s own faded into the afternoon air.

Several moments of silence followed as those in the crowd, too ignorant and uneducated to have any idea of the level of talent and skill they’d just seen on display tried to get their minds around the woman’s song.

Then, as Ed had thought they might, the crowd erupted into cheers and on this, at least, Ed agreed with the sheep wholeheartedly, clapping along himself and smiling, trying to catch the woman’s eye. But the woman herself seemed shy of the attention, smiling prettily and blushing, her eyes lowering to the lute in her hands as if it was at once a musical instrument and a shield that might stave off her embarrassment, though why anyone able to produce such beautiful music might be shy of the fact, Ed couldn’t imagine.

Gods, to be so gifted, Ed thought, staring at the woman, at her faintly-colored cheeks, at her fine, delicate fingers, fingers crafted by the gods themselves to create beauty in song, his eyes roaming over her the way a wanderer in the desert might study some chanced-upon an oasis, hardly daring to believe it had existed at all. Ed had heard fine music before, had spent his nights in establishments that prided themselves on their singers and musicians, and he had thought he knew what good music was. He realized, now, that he had been wrong, that he’d had no true inkling of what it could be. The woman before him was a true master, and those fledgling amateurs who he had, until moments ago, considered experts of their craft did not deserve to even so much as listen to her music, let alone rank themselves as her peers.

Men and women in the crowd pressed forward, tossing coins into a waiting basket sitting in front of the singer, one which was already overflowing so greatly that most of them ended up spilling around beside it. Ed was surprised to see what appeared to be a Ferinan man—he had never seen one of the savages from the southern desert himself, but the man was unmistakably a member of that backward people—retrieving the coins from where they landed and placing them into a second basket, one which he carried on his person.

Yet as odd as it was to see a Ferinan, Ed only had eyes for the woman and the lute still in her hands, only had ears for the echoes of her song still hanging in the afternoon air like a spell of such potency that it is reluctant to let loose its hold upon the world even long after its creator has stopped feeding it.

“More!”

“Another please!”

Shouts came from the crowd, a few at first, then dozens, what might have been hundreds of them as everyone asked the woman to continue playing, begged her in truth. Ed—who always prided himself on being in control and remaining unobtrusive—would have been shocked to later learn that he was the loudest of the lot. He asked for another song with a desperate fanaticism that one rarely saw even among the most devout worshippers of the gods, and would have aroused more than a little suspicion had anyone in the crowd taken their attention away from the woman long enough to see the wild gleam in his eyes and crazed twisting of his expression.

They did not, however; they were as unaware of the change that had overcome Ed as he was himself, far too absorbed in their own need for another song to consider any of those around them. The woman, though, glanced to her side, and Ed followed her gaze, noticing for the first time that a man stood nearby. He was dressed in fine, expensive attire that marked him as a member of the noble caste, and he gave the woman a single nod. A patron, Ed suspected, a man who would support the talented musician with coin and lodging, in the trade being able to decide when and where she plied her talents. Ed felt a powerful shock of jealousy at the thought and had a brief—but nearly overwhelming—desire to kill the man, to open up the artery waiting on his neck and watch him bleed out and suffer for thinking himself somehow worthy of controlling so wonderful, so divine a talent.

But looking back at the woman, Ed saw that she returned the man’s nod, and his heart dropped as she began to return her lute to its case sitting on the sidewalk beside her. No, he thought desperately, no, do not let it end, not yet.

And judging by the reaction of the crowd—their shouts and pleas intensifying—he was not the only person who felt this way. But the woman did not stop and soon the lute was nestled gently in its case. As she began to close it, some of the crowd surged forward, meaning perhaps, to get another song even if they had to force the woman to play it, and the Ferinan reacted in an instant, stepping forward and drawing a spear from his back, the basket he’d held a moment before nowhere in evidence. Those at the front of the crowd froze, deciding, it seemed, that while they loathed the thought of continuing on their mundane lives without another of the woman’s rapturous songs, they hated even more the thought of doing so with a spear-sized hole in their chests.

Lifting her lute case, the woman glanced once more at the crowd, offering them a smile, then walked toward her waiting patron, the Ferinan following with his spear still clutched in his hands.

Slowly, the crowd began to disperse. Ed, though, was not so easily swayed, and when the nobleman, the woman, and the Ferinan began to make their way down the street, he followed at a distance, his thoughts not on the appointment he was already late for, but only on the woman, on the song she had sung and what other songs she might hold within her.

Perhaps the moth, flitting about the flame, the burns it will take inevitable, knows of the doom that awaits it, knows but chooses it anyway, for it can do nothing else. Neither, then, could Ed, and so he walked on, trailing after the small group, and if they noticed the short, slightly overweight clerk walking behind them, his hands stained with ink, his fingers working as if plucking the strings of some invisible harp, they did not show it.