24

There was a static, a whispering, when the bursts came. It stayed with Istvan for more than a little while, even once the visions had begun to fade, and within it, if he listened hard enough, he could hear voices. They were incomplete and partial, but they were voices, he was sure of it. Or nearly sure. And they were not, as the other voices had been, merely a squashed repetition of words he had said himself. No, these were voices. Now all he had to do was train himself to listen hard enough so that he could hear them.

He took to sitting in his cell, on the edge of his bed, his feet flat on the floor, his hands on his knees, just listening. It reminded him of sitting on the edge of his bed late at night when he was a boy and practicing blanking the world out. There were the general noises he could hear around him—the sound of footsteps, the voices of the other inmates, a rustle or creak here or there—but these he tried to learn to unlisten to, to tune out completely, and, in a certain manner and after a few days, he succeeded. Then there was the sound of his heartbeat, the noise of his own breathing, the noises coming from his body and stomach. These, too, he learned to unlisten to, first dulling them and then reducing them to nothing at all. It came slowly, and had to be redone every time he sat down again, but it could be done. And then, once in that space of silence, he had to sharpen his ears still further, had to not only make them listen to the rumble of whispering voices beneath everything but to home in on just one of them, to pick it out, to start to hear its words.

It took six days, days in which he hardly ate, hardly even moved. At first his fellow prisoners were worried about him and clustered around him, but after he ignored them for a few hours, they gave up, left him alone. Occasionally one of them would come back, Waldron mostly, but wouldn’t stay long, and though he found it an irritation to have someone shaking him, someone trying to talk to him, he quickly learned to ignore this as well.

And then, late in the sixth day, his ears caught hold of the tail of a voice and reeled it closer until he could hear it. It was incomplete and partial, but it was a real voice, speaking its own words, starting to say something. He massaged it, caressed it, until it grew a little, became a little louder, and he could hear that it was addressing him. Istvan, it was saying, why won’t you talk to me?

But I don’t even know who you are, he said. His lips were moving, he knew, whispering the words, but he could feel the words being uttered in his head as well.

Ah, there you are, said the voice. Now you hear me.

I’ve been trying to talk to you all along, Istvan said.

And I’ve been trying to talk to you. It just took us a while to find the right tongues.

Indeed, as they spoke the voice became stronger, more confident. It stretched and scratched against the sides of his mind like an animal and slowly grew larger, and he knew that now he’d be able to find it again, hear it again, whenever he went searching for it. And late on the seventh day, when the burst came again, he felt less pain this time. It was as if his head had been filled with living, thinking fire. The veil fell over things, tattered at first and then becoming blazing with light, as it always did, and then even more quickly resolving into another colorful world. There was the face of Conn, his lips almost blue, his neck bloody. He hovered there just in front of him, staring.

“Hello, Conn,” Istvan said.

And this time instead of letting the face take his words and use them as his own, Istvan imagined the voice that he had been hearing drifting up from where, despite its growing size and power, it huddled and crouched in the background, and threading itself into the dead man’s throat until Conn opened his mouth and spoke with it.

“Hello,” Conn said. The voice was strange, not quite properly synched with his lips, and he spoke with a wet burble as if his throat was still partly filled with blood. Air, too, hissed softly out from the holes in his windpipe.

There, thought Istvan. Now we’re getting somewhere.