The Killing Song

CHAPTER 21

He’d passed through fever and delirium. At times he’d been surrounded by friends, and at other times by enemies. Occasionally, he’d been surrounded by family, which was almost as bad as being surrounded by enemies. He’d run through the vineyards of his youth in the sun, studied by lantern light in the libraries of Wynarn, trained for the Blademarks in the rain under Robrand d’Deneith’s gaze. He’d watched Narath burn, over and over again.

There had been fire. Always fire.

Sometimes he’d seen the deck of a ship with Vennet d’Lyrandar at the helm, singing lustily to a sky that curved above them with no end, while Dah’mir perched in his heron shape on a rail, utterly unmoving. Whenever he saw the ship, the dream had always seemed to end in the same way: a vague memory of Vennet grappling with a half-elf woman, then picking her up and throwing her over the side of the ship.

And Singe had plunged down with her, screaming his way into darkness.

The fever had broken at night. His first coherent memory had been of stars and moons and of the Ring of Siberys, shining in the southern sky as bright as he’d ever seen it. Except that he hadn’t been able to see all of the familiar dusty band at once. He’d had to turn his head to take it all in.

His mind had done him a mercy by slipping into deep sleep before he remembered why that was.

He’d remembered when he woke the next day, though. And he’d discovered that his fevered visions of the ship’s deck, of Vennet and Dah’mir, hadn’t been delirium after all. The elemental ring that encircled Mayret’s Envy burned in a constant, fiery arc above him. He’d been bound on the airship’s deck, his wrists tied behind him, the rope run through a ring driven deep into the wood.

At first Vennet had taunted him. The half-elf seemed animated by a manic energy, though his face was strained. He had stood at the wheel of the airship with his chest bare to the wind and threatened Singe with the power of his “Siberys mark.”

He had no Siberys mark. There could be no pretending that he did. In Tzaryan Keep, Singe had glimpsed Vennet’s naked skin and the dragonmark that spread across his shoulders had been red and inflamed as if Vennet had been scratching it. The inflammation had grown. From shoulder to wrist, across his chest, and along his side, Vennet’s skin was scratched and raw. Wounds oozed clear liquid and yellow-green pus.

No trace remained of the bright pattern that had once crossed Vennet’s shoulders. His back looked like it had been flayed. Vennet had apparently mistaken Singe’s twitch of disgust for awe-struck fear and had ranted that “the powers of the Dragon Below rewarded those who served them.” Singe, he’d promised, would witness the blossoming of his Siberys mark when the dark lords of Khyber were presented with their new servants.

Dah’mir-in heron shape and perched on a rail, just as he had seen in his delirium-had finally silenced him with an impatient hiss.

There was no food. A bucket of clear water had been left within the limited freedom allowed by Singe’s bonds, set out as if for a dog. Singe had crawled to it and stared at his reflection in the water.

His cheeks showed the growth of three days worth of whiskers. The left side of his face was swollen and red. His eye was crusted and sealed with blood. With nothing behind to plump it out, the eyelid seemed loose and sunken. It hurt to smile or frown or turn his head, but it looked like the wound was healing without infection.

Have a good sniff when a battle’s over, and remember that no matter how bad things smell, you’re still breathing.

With a determination that would have done Dandra proud, Singe stuck his face in the bucket and drank.

The hollow in his belly actually seemed to make his thinking sharper-and there wasn’t anything to do besides think. Vennet stayed at the wheel almost constantly, alternating between sullen silence and an animated conversation, apparently with the wind. Dah’mir scarcely moved from his perch on the rail. His feathered face and form were stiff with concentration, as if Dah’mir focused on something unseen. Maybe he did. Singe hadn’t seen him show any difficulty in throwing his domination over Dandra, but there were seventeen kalashtar on board Mayret’s Envy. Even for a dragon, it must have taken some effort to hold all of those minds captive.

Of the kalashtar, there was no sign. Singe presumed that they remained in the hold where he had last seen them. There was no further sign of Virikhad’s presence either, but then he had what he wanted, didn’t he? Dah’mir had succeeded in Sharn.

He dismissed thoughts of escape almost at once. His bonds allowed him enough movement to stand and peer over the ship’s rail. Mayret’s Envy passed above land, not water. They flew west, and from the desolation of the wilderness beneath them, Singe guessed that they were somewhere over Droaam. Even if he had been able to get free, where would he have gone? Dandra might have been able to reach the ground, but he couldn’t. And even if he had been able to, he didn’t like his chance of surviving the wastes of Droaam.

Better to conserve his strength and what spells remained to him and try to escape once they were on the ground. After all, he thought he knew where they were going-and when the wastes of Droaam gave way to the wetlands of the Shadow Marches, he was certain of it.

Back to the Bonetree mound. Back to the ancient prison of the Master of Silence.

Singe knew that the idea should have terrified him. Somehow, it didn’t. It only roused a new anger in him and made his thoughts seem even sharper

Late in the afternoon of the second day after Mayret’s Envy had passed into the Shadow Marches-the eighth day by Singe’s reckoning since the night of Thronehold in Sharn-Dah’mir shook himself and shifted on his perch.

Singe glanced at him, then quickly dropped his gaze and watched the heron from under his eyelid. The ruffling of feathers was more movement than Dah’mir had made in days, and he didn’t seem to be finished. A short while later, his head ducked under his wing and his beak poked among his feathers. If Singe had been looking at a human, he would have said Dah’mir was fidgeting with excitement. He felt an urge to peer over the ship’s rail and search the landscape below for landmarks he recognized. They must have been getting close to the mound.

He forced himself to remain still and watch Dah’mir. Until they were actually on the ground, it didn’t matter how close to the mound they were.

When Dah’mir straightened his long neck again, acid-green eyes that had been dim with concentration flashed bright once more. “Vennet!” he said. “It is time.”

Vennet broke off a one-sided conversation in praise of his own growing power and stared at the bird. “Now, master?”

“Now.” Dah’mir stalked along the rail like a pacing general. “The instant we land, I want to be able to take my master’s new servants to him.”

“But I can’t-” Vennet began to protest.

Dah’mir whirled on him, eyes blazing, and as strange as the image of a heron menacing a man might have seemed, even Singe shrank back in spite of himself.

Vennet flinched. “Master, I’m flying! There was a reason we planned to do this after we landed!”

“Plans change, Vennet. I want no delay.”

“If I leave the wheel, there will be a delay.”

Dah’mir’s wings beat the air. “You are my hands, Vennet! My master commanded that it would be so and you offered yourself to me. Perhaps if you hadn’t thrown our spare pilot overboard you would have had someone to take your place. Now be my hands!”

A dragon’s voice rolled out of the heron’s throat, but Vennet still managed to withstand it, though his voice sounded thin and weak by comparison. “Let Singe do it!” he said.

Dah’mir turned to look at Singe. The wizard felt like he wanted to shrink back even further than he had before. His plans for escape, concocted in the stillness of hours on the airship, were suddenly very far from his mind. Dah’mir nodded slowly, and Singe had a feeling that although his beak couldn’t have managed it, the heron was smiling.

“Yes,” Dah’mir said. “I like that idea. Free him.”

Quick as a leaping flame, Vennet was down from helm and standing over Singe. The half-elf had two swords hanging around his waist. One was his own cutlass; the other was Singe’s rapier. Vennet drew the rapier and pulled Singe to his feet. “Don’t try anything,” he said, “or I’ll make sure you can’t see anything at all.”

Singe held very still as Vennet slid the thin blade of the rapier among the knotted bonds at his wrists. It took him a couple of hard jerks to cut through, but the ropes fell away and Singe’s arms swung free. For a moment, they just hung at his side, numb and useless after being tied for so long. Vennet laughed and swatted at one of them.

Singe turned around and glowered at him. Vennet, in response, punched him hard across the mouth. The blow sent bright pain sparking across Singe’s face and through his still healing eye socket. He staggered, gasping at the intensity of the pain. The sound of a flurry of wings brought him upright again. Vennet was already returning to the helm, the rapier thrust back into his belt, and Dah’mir was settling onto the rail beside Singe.

“Vennet has made it clear what you have to lose, I think,” the heron said with cool indifference to his pain. “I may not have hands, but I could pluck out your remaining eye with ease.”

Singe’s lips pressed tight together for a moment as he tried to shake feeling back into his arms, then he said, “You can’t become human again, can you? We haven’t seen you in your human shape since Geth saw you on the waterfront at Zarash’ak. That was before you went back upriver with Vennet. You were still injured, then. The next time were saw you, you were healed. Was the price of your healing the loss of your human shape?”

Dah’mir blinked. “You’re a clever man, Singe. Too clever.”

“I’ve had a lot of time to think lately, thanks to you.”

“No thanks to me. Vennet is the one who begged to keep you alive. You should have been the one to go over the side.” His wings rustled. “But I will have my full power back, and you’ll play a part in it. Go to the forward hatch. We’re going down into the hold.”

A dark fear grew in Singe. “Why?”

“You’re clever,” said Dah’mir. “You’ll figure it out.” He hopped down onto the deck, and his beak darted at Singe’s leg. The sudden pain sent Singe stumbling across the deck. Dah’mir stalked along behind him, pecking and jabbing until Singe ran to keep ahead of him.

There was dried blood on the stairs. Singe felt sure that most of it was his. There was also a lingering odor of rotting flesh below deck, and he remembered the sounds of violence as Vennet murdered one of Biish’s people before the ship rose from the Gathering Light. He had a feeling that whatever role Biish and his gang had been meant to play in the kidnap of the kalashtar, it had not been what Biish had expected.

There was another odor below deck as well, though. It was rank and foul, and Singe had once smelled the same odor on boarding a ship that had been used by slavers. Sweat. Excrement. The stench of people left shackled and unable to fend for themselves.

The everbright lantern that Vennet had opened in the hold of Mayret’s Envy remained unshuttered. Singe saw all of the kalashtar turn their heads as he and Dah’mir entered. They still sat or stood or lay where Singe had last seen them. The only shackles that they bore were shackles of the mind.

Dah’mir spread his wings and flapped up to settle on top of a familiar metal box. Kalashtar eyes followed him. He ignored them. “You know what’s in here,” he said to Singe. “You’re going to use them.”

The bracers. The binding stones. Singe’s throat constricted. “No,” he croaked.

His defiance seemed to amuse Dah’mir. The heron let out a hissing little laugh. “You don’t have a choice,” he said. His acid-green eyes focused on Singe. “Put the bracers on my master’s servants.”

Singe tried to resist the command, but it was like trying to hold back waves with a castle of sand. Dah’mir’s will washed over his. He stepped forward and, as Dah’mir shifted aside, opened the metal box. The nestled bracers within shone up at him, gold plates and wires, pale crystals-and the dark blue-black beauty of the Khyber shards that Taruuzh of Dhakaan had fashioned into prisons for psionic minds so many millennia ago.

“Pick one up,” urged Dah’mir and he did. Dah’mir nodded his head toward one of the kalashtar. “Her first,” he said.

The kalashtar he indicated was an old woman with a face that might have been stern if it hadn’t been slack from Dah’mir’s control. Singe thought he recognized her from Dandra’s description of the kalashtar elders-Shelsatori. His hands trembling, he approached her.

“Find her psicrystal first,” said Dah’mir. “I believe she wears it around her neck.”

He found the crystal. It was blue and beautiful and it seemed to glow with a softness that Shelsatori lacked. It was set in a fine cage of silver, much as Dandra’s psicrystal had been set in a cage of bronze. He wondered if Shelsatori’s crystal had a name.

It didn’t matter. His fingers pried open the cage and extracted the crystal at Dah’mir’s direction, then inserted it into the empty setting above the binding stone on the bracer.

“Now,” Dah’mir said, “place the bracer on her arm.”

Singe clenched his teeth and fought Dah’mir’s control, but it did him no more good than it had the first time. He watched his hands lift Shelsatori’s arm and slide the twisted gold of the bracer onto it.

He felt her body stiffen and, for an instant, saw her eyes focus on him. There was such a depth of loss and agony in them that he couldn’t help crying out. Then that moment of alertness was gone and she sank back into an unresisting trance. Singe let her arm drop and waited for her to rise as a mad servant of the Master of Silence.

Nothing happened. He looked at Dah’mir. “It didn’t work,” he said. “You’ve failed.”

Dah’mir reared back suddenly, spreading his wings for balance, and one of his feet raked across Singe’s cheek. The wizard fell with a cry, but Dah’mir just settled back to his perch. “I didn’t fail,” he hissed. “In the presence of my master, she will wake.” He folded his wings and glared at Singe with hard eyes. “Now-finish what you have begun. A bracer for every kalashtar here, and when we reach the mound you will see the results of what you have done.”

Singe touched the bloody lines on his cheek. “Not what I’ve done,” he said stubbornly. “What you’ve made me do.”

“A difference,” Dah’mir said, “that means nothing to me.”

His will fell over Singe again.

For all his defiance and for all that he knew it was not his own will that moved his hands, Singe was still the one who felt the kalashtar stiffen as the binding stone caught their mind and exchanged it with the mind of their psicrystal. He was the one who fastened Dah’mir’s bracers around their arms. He was the one, he knew, who condemned them to madness.

By the sixth bracer, Singe’s eye was wet with barely suppressed tears. By the tenth, his hands were shaking in spite of Dah’mir’s control. By the thirteenth, he was numb. He wasn’t even certain that Dah’mir still controlled him. Finding a psicrystal, placing it in the bracer, placing the bracer on an arm had become a routine. The passing of a kalashtar under his fingers became just another rip in his soul.

He’d killed people. He was a mercenary. But doing this, he felt like a murderer.

He picked up the final bracer in the metal box and turned to the last kalashtar at the very back of the hold.

Moon.

“Ah, yes,” said Dah’mir. “I remember him. You left him for us at the arena, unconscious and half-mad already. Very convenient. What happened to him?”

Singe glared at him over his shoulder. “Keeper take you, Dah’mir.” He bent over Moon. “I hope you’re still in there, Virikhad,” he said under his breath. “And I hope this hurts even more the second time.”

Moon wore his psicrystal in a leather bracer wrapped around his left arm. Singe reached for it-and as he did, a voice trickled into his head through kesh.

Take out the binding stone.

Singe froze for an instant and looked at Moon’s face. His eyes were as vacant as those of all the kalashtar had been, yet there was no denying the presence of the voice in his head-though he could certainly deny its request. Virikhad! So you are still there. His fingers closed on Moon’s psicrystal and ripped it from its setting. What’s wrong? Are you trapped in there? Don’t ask me to help you! He stopped. Maybe I should tell Dah’mir about you.

You wouldn’t gain anything. Virikhad’s voice was cold but calm. He would only see an ally.

And how do you know that?

Because he doesn’t know what he has created, Virikhad said. A part of his power is in us. He can’t shut us out. We can exert some influence on him, pushing his ideas in the direction we want. A sneer entered his voice. Did you think he changed his plan of when to use the bracers on a whim?

You did that? Singe’s eyes narrowed. Wait-Who’s we?

Virikhad didn’t answer. The time is coming, Singe. Dah’mir had to succeed in Sharn, but he’ll fail here. Take the binding stone out of my bracer. I promise you, Dah’mir won’t notice. Only do it quickly!

Why? Singe asked, but he didn’t get an answer to that question either.

“Master!” Vennet’s frantic voice echoed down from above. “The Bonetree mound is in sight, but we’re not going to be alone when we get there.”

“What?” Singe glanced back in time to see Dah’mir’s feathered form stiffen. “Vennet, what’s happening? Vennet?” There was no response from Vennet, just the sound of boots racing back to the helm. Dah’mir glared at Singe. “Hurry! Finish with that one!”

Singe looked down at Moon again. Take the binding stone out of the bracer, Virikhad said. Dah’mir will fail-and I’ll even give you Munchaned back.

The sensation of kesh fell away. Singe ground his teeth together-and made his decision. If you’re lying, Virikhad, he thought, I swear I’ll come back from the dead to hunt you down.

It was the work of a moment to pull the binding stone from its delicate setting and slip it into a pouch on his belt at the same time as he placed Moon’s psicrystal into the bracer. Then he put the bracer onto the young kalashtar.

Moon stiffened just as all the others had. Virikhad’s influence? Singe turned to face Dah’mir. “It’s done,” he said. He didn’t need to feign the bitter rage he felt. He might have saved Moon, but who could tell what would happen to the other sixteen kalashtar?

“Good. Now get back up to the deck. Quickly!”

It was tempting to move slowly on the stairs if only to inconvenience Dah’mir. Once again, the heron stalked awkwardly in his wake, driving him onward with prods from his sharp beak. Every jab just stirred greater anger in Singe and he might have stopped and refused to move-he might even have tested just how tough a dragon in heron form was-if he hadn’t wanted to know as badly as Dah’mir what was happening at the mound.

The answer was obvious as soon as he reached the deck and peered over the side.

They were coming up fast on the Bonetree mound. Approached from ground level or along the river that ran nearby, the mound was an astounding sight, rising proud and massive from the flatness around it. From above, though, it just looked like a wart on the land-a wart painted angry red by the setting sun.

Spread out before it were hundreds of small shapes milling around in chaos. The raking light of the sun struck sparks from the blades of weapons shaken in the direction of the airship and Singe could just catch the faint whisper of war cries.

“Twelve moons!” he gasped.

“Orcs!” Vennet shouted from the helm. “Orcs, master! We can’t land!”

Dah’mir settled onto the rail close to Singe and glared down as if he were able to see every detail of the distant warriors. “Gatekeepers! How could they have-” His head came up and his acid-green eyes turned on Singe. “There was always one of you missing, wasn’t there?” he said in a hiss. “Geth was never in Sharn!”

Singe gave him an angry grin. “Aye!” he said. “But he’s probably down there!”

“He won’t be for much longer.” Dah’mir’s voice rose. “Vennet, keep the ship high while I deal with this.” He gave Singe another look and his eyes narrowed. “And kill our guest before he causes trouble. We have enough distractions now.”

Singe’s gut rose.

“But master-” Vennet began in protest.

“Just do it, Vennet!” Dah’mir screamed-and flung himself over the rail.