Song of the Beast

Chapter 1

The light had almost undone me. I had not been prepared for any of it, dead man that I was, but never could I have been ready for the shattering explosion of sunlight after so many years in the dark. They had threatened so often to burn out my eyes, the thought crossed my mind that it had finally come to pass. Perhaps my memory of being dragged from my cell through the bowels of Mazadine and kicked through the iron door that would take me back to the world was only another cruel nightmare.

Wrapping my arms about my head, I sank to the ground, huddling to the faceless prison wall like a pup to its dam, and there I remained until the sun slipped below the rim of the world. Only when blessed darkness eased the agony—never had I thought to bless the dark again—could I consider other pressing matters, such as getting as far away as possible before someone decided to put me back behind that wall.

Rocks and gravel cut into my bare feet as I stumbled down the rutted road and found a crossroads shrine, a mossy spring dedicated to Keldar. Just off the road sat a well-stuffed wool cart, while from the nearby shrubbery came the unmistakable sounds of a drover who had drunk too many tankards of ale at supper. I fell to my knees beside the spring, but no sooner had I taken a first desperate sip than five Royal Horse Guards, torches blazing in the night, raced past at full gallop, turning up the road to Mazadine as if the cruelest of the world’s monsters were at their backs. Breathing a prayer of heartfelt thanksgiving, I scrambled into the wagon and buried myself in the wool.

Eyeless Keldar had never been my god. The cold lord of wisdom had never appealed to one born into the service of his brother Roelan, the joyous, hunchbacked god of music. But Roelan had abandoned me in the darkness. The loving voice that had guided me through my growing had fallen silent. The hand that embraced me at my dedication when I was fourteen, accepted my service for seven years of glory, and sustained me through the first years of my captivity had been withdrawn. So, as the beggar who refuses no penny dropped in his cup, I accepted Keldar’s gift and pledged him service as I rode through the night, cradled in a wagonload of wool.

Hunger quickly became my encompassing reality. Though half out of my head, I dared not risk a charge of thieving or any other crime that might fix a guardsman’s eye on me, so I roamed the pigsties and refuse heaps of Lepan, the market town where the drover left off his wool and his passenger. Too weak and sick to fight the other beggars for the best scraps, I would take whatever was left and find a dark hole in which to hide, trying to block out the noise and the light that drove me to madness.

I took my first step back toward life on the night of a monstrous storm. Thunder echoed from the distant peaks like giant’s laughter, and if lightning was, as old wives said, the fire of dying heroes’ hearts, then there were a great many heroes dying that night. A merciless rain drove me to shelter in a stable. I huddled in a corner, drenched to the soul, shivering with the chill of death and the late spring wind. Somewhere amid murky cravings and failing senses passed a fleeting sorrow that my brief freedom had had no more value than my captivity. A final victory for those who had sent me to Mazadine, never bothering to tell me why.

While I was thus occupied with dying and regrets, the stable door crashed open to a heavy boot, followed quickly by the grunts and whimpers of a backstreet mating. The smell of wine and vomit and lust soon overpowered the aura of unclean stable and even my own filth. Only when the woman began to struggle did I realize that the coupling was not voluntary.

I did not—could not—move. I had no strength left to right the ills of the world. But then I heard crackling sparks and frantic pleading. “Have mercy! You wear the Ridemark. I’ll die from your pleasuring! Oh, sir, I’m just sixteen!”

A Dragon Rider! From the ashes of my life flared one last ember, fanned by brutish laughter and wine-sotted grunting ... and the memory of a red dragon scribed on the wrist of the faceless judge who stole my life. If I was going to die, then I would take at least one Dragon Rider with me. Hopeless fool. I could not even think how I would be able to do it.

I eased myself up the wall and edged to my right, lifting a length of rusty chain from a nail. The stable floor yielded a long spike, thin enough to pass all but its head through two links of the chain. Faster than I’d have believed possible, I stepped toward the groveling shapes. When the Rider lifted his head to bellow in his lust, I dropped the loop over it, twisting the spike so the chain bit deep into the man’s flesh. His cry was cut short, and I hoped I could keep the iron noose tight for long enough that he would fall insensible before throwing me off. But those who mount the dragons of Yr and ride them to war are no striplings. He raised his shoulders and leaped to his feet, carrying me with him until he slammed me against the stable wall. Sparks shot high, spitting and hissing in a scalding rain of fire as the wind went out of me, my vision grew blurry, and I lost my grip on the spike.

Better this way, I thought, as my ribs cracked and the roaring warrior yanked off the noose, turning to finish me. But even as he raised his fist, his red-rimmed eyes bulged and died, and blood trickled out of his silent mouth. It would be a race to the last crossing, but at least no girl of sixteen, charred to ash by a Dragon Rider’s mating, would accompany us. It was a satisfactory ending as I slumped to the filthy floor and the warrior’s heavy body fell on top of me.

It was not in the afterlife that I next opened my eyes, nor in the rain-lashed stable, but in a shabby room that was achingly familiar. No one who has traveled the roads of the world would fail to recognize the attic room of an ill-prospered inn, the cheapest lodging to be found under a roof. A dirty sheet and a mouse-chewed blanket on a pallet that was half moldy straw, half mouse droppings and beetle husks. A flyspecked window that could not be opened in summer or could not be shut in winter, and that would always overlook the midden. A broken table for eating or writing or playing cards. I’d spent a sizable portion of the happiest years of my life in such lodgings.

“... never saw such marks upon a living man. What think you, Narim? Is he a runaway slave? I’d not have brought him here if I’d thought it.”

Fingers drifted lightly over my bare back. Where was darkness when you needed it? Would that I could pull its mantle over me to hide what I could not bear to remember.

“Not a slave. Look at the shape of his eyes, his dark hair, his height. He is clearly Senai.”

The first voice was a young woman. The second unmistakably an Elhim. I could imagine the pale gray eyes examining my wreckage and the slender fingers rubbing his colorless face.

“Senai!” said the girl. “You jest! He may have the height and the coloring, but what Senai was ever brought so low as this? Smells like pigsties, he does. To have scars like these, and ... blessed Tjasse ... look at his hands.”

Why could I not move? I was not ready to face these things myself, much less have them exposed to public view. I lay on my stomach on the straw pallet, a spider busying herself with her spinning not a hand’s breadth from my nose. I felt like the carcass of a holiday pig, stripped bare and possessed of no will, no dignity, and too many memories of mortal horrors to get up on my bones and walk. And, too, rags had been wrapped so tightly about my middle that I could scarcely breathe.

“Someone has broken his fingers repeatedly. Hundreds of times, I would say.”

“Hundreds ... Fires of heaven!”

“I’ve heard rumors of a prisoner escaped from Mazadine.”

“Bollocks! No one leaves Mazadine alive.”

Foolish girl. She couldn’t see that I was really dead. The Elhim was wiser. “Who can say what is life, Callia? I think perhaps this one has known that which makes death a sweet companion. He may not thank you for bringing him here. Yet ... he came to your rescue.”

“Aye. I put the knife in the pig, but it was this one took him off me.”

Time to move. I drew my knees under my aching ribs and paused to take a shallow breath. Then I pushed myself up to kneeling, wrapped my arms tightly about my middle, and anxiously waited for the room to stop spinning. The girl knelt on the floor beside me and the Elhim stood next to her, slimmer than a young boy and scarcely taller, his skin fair and smooth, his hair white blond. It was almost impossible to tell one Elhim from another, all of them so fair and pale and sexless. Though we called them “he,” crude bullies of every race regularly found unseemly pleasure in confirming that Elhim were neither male nor female.

The girl looked old, even at sixteen. She might once have been called pretty, but her hair was dull, her skin blotched with disease, and her light blue eyes knew too much of unnatural pleasure. Her shabby, low-cut gown of stained and singed green silk was overfull with her blowsy charms. As I sat up, she clamped one hand over her mouth, as if I were indeed a dead man waked. Her other hand gripped a flask of wine.

The Elhim cocked his head to the side and widened his pale eyes. “So your valiant rescuer wakes, Callia! Hand him your flask. A dram of wine might do the fellow good.” His curly head would have come no higher than my shoulder if I’d not found it expedient to remain seated, leaning against the wall. “You are a great mystery, Senai, that begs for explanation. But for now we’ll settle for a name to thank you by.”

I should have said something, but I had forgotten how to form words. For the final seven years of my captivity I had uttered no sound, and it would take more than a moment to convince my tongue that the metal jaws and the lash were not waiting for me, and that the tally of seven years would not have to start all over again with my first utterance. I struggled for a moment, then shook my head, pointed to the bed and my bandaged ribs, and cupped my grotesque hands to my chest as one does when acknowledging a service.

“They’ve not taken out his tongue, have they?” asked the girl in horror. She soothed the thought with a swig from her flask, leaving red droplets of wine running down her chin when she pulled it away too quickly.

Shaking my head, I tried to indicate that my incapacity was a passing problem of no importance.

Callia yielded me the wine flask, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “That’s good, then. Couldn’t stomach that.” She grabbed a cracked pitcher and the remainder of the ragged petticoat they had torn to bind my ribs and carried them to a peeling dresser next to the window, setting them beside a dented plate polished to a high sheen. With no conscious immodesty she removed her bodice and dabbed at her blood-streaked breasts with the rag she’d dipped in the water pitcher. “Still three hours till dawn,” she said. “Don’t do to scare off the customers with the blood of the last one.”

I dropped my eyes, and my cheeks grew hot.

“You may be half a madman to throw yourself on a Rider in your condition, but at some time you’ve had some wit about you. ...” The Elhim cast his eyes to my left wrist, where the silver mark of the Musicians’ Guild lay unrecognizable beneath the scars of manacles worn for too many years. Elhim were known to be clever at numbers and puzzles and games, always poking about in mysteries and scraps from the table of life, drifting on the edges of society. They were welcomed by neither the Senai nobility nor the Udema, who filled the trades and armies and freeholds, nor even the foreigners like Florins and Eskonians, who still languished for the most part in slavery or indenture decades after their kingdoms’ defeats. “Did anyone see you with the Rider, Callia?” he called over his shoulder while his gray eyes picked at my secrets.

“Nah. I was in Smith’s Alley, catching my breath from a fine, strapping fisherman, when the villain takes a wrong turn from the Alewife. Drank up half their stock from the smell of him. It was dark so’s I didn’t see the Ridemark on him until he had me to the stable.” She threw down her rag and buttoned up her dress, then came to retrieve her wine. After a long pull at it, she dropped it back in my lap and bent over me, permitting an unavoidable glimpse of what her bodice couldn’t hold, while planting a kiss on the top of my head. “When you’ve mended yourself a bit, I’ll thank you proper. Till then you can claim anything else I’ve got for as long as you need. I do dearly love being alive.” Her eyes sparkled with more than the wine, and she skipped through the door, her footsteps dancing down the stairs out of hearing.

The Elhim watched her go, smiling a crooked smile. “Callia has charged me to coddle you until she’s back. She’s a kindhearted girl.”

I nodded and tried to remember how to smile, even as my eyelids sagged.

“Here, here, good fellow. I dare not let you sleep just yet. See what Callia’s brought you.”

With effort I dragged my eyes open again and identified the smell wafting through my bordering dreams. Soup. A steaming pail of it. Narim filled a dented tin mug and held it out. “Can you manage it?” His eyes studied my hands as I carefully cradled the hot, dripping cup between my palms. I could not yet make myself look at my hands, so I concentrated on the soup, inhaling the glorious aroma—a touch of onion, a sprig of parsley, and mayhap somewhere in its past a knucklebone had touched the broth. I could hardly bear to take the first taste, for the reality could be nowhere near the glorious delight of anticipation.

I was wrong. The broth was watery, but rich with barley, and imminently, delectably satisfying. I took only a small sip at a time. Held it. Savored it. Felt it go down and outline the hollow places. Strengthening. Saving my life.

Narim was kind and let me enjoy an entire cup without interruption. But as he refilled it, he served up the question that had been quivering on the edge of his tongue. “How long were you there?”

I saw no reason to alter the dismal truth, so I held up five crooked fingers once, then twice, then again, and two fingers more after all.

“Seventeen ... seventeen years? Hearts of fire. Is it possible?” His voice was soft, filled with wonder and a thousand unspoken questions. But he said nothing more, only stared at me as if to map my bones.

When I finished the second cup of soup, he offered me another, and it was all I could do to refuse it. Starvation knows nothing of reason. But I had once traveled the poorest places of the world, and I’d often witnessed what happened to those who gorged themselves after too long without. Narim must have read the panic in my eyes as he hung the cup on the rim of the bucket, for he smiled and said, “It will keep. When you wake again, the ovens down below will be primed and roaring, and I’ll whisper compliments to my friend the cook, who’ll heat it up for you. Will that do?”

This time I managed the smile, and I cupped my hands to my breast and bowed my head to him as if he were the king’s own chamberlain.

“You will return the service someday, I think,” he said, putting a strong arm behind my shoulders so that I could lie down on my stomach again without too much pain. “You have returned from the netherworld with the flame of life still lit within you. The gods do not ignore such a heart.”

It was kindly meant, but I did not believe him. I had no heart left.