The Killing Song: The Dragon Below Book III (19 page)

“If they were violent,” Singe said. “House Deneith had some experience in dealing with mercenaries who’d become war torn. It’s better to try and bring them back into the unit—or the community. Often that’s the healing they need.”

“I think that’s what the victims of the killing song need as well. They’ve seen something in the killing song that breaks them.” He looked meaningfully at Hanamelk.

“The other elders don’t share this opinion?” Dandra asked.

“No,” Hanamelk answered.

Nevchaned shook his head. “Erimelk was my friend,” he said. “I’ve seen the war torn recover given time and care. I’ve never seen them recover when they’re shut in prisons.”

He pushed the door open. The apartment beyond, striped by the afternoon light that fell through the windows, was simple but clean. The air, however, was tainted by the sound of a muffled voice. At first, Dandra thought it was someone screaming, but then she realized it was someone singing hoarsely. It was wordless and largely tuneless, but definitely singing.

“We gag him,” Nevchaned said, “but he sings anyway.”

“Light of il-Yannah.” Dandra wanted to stick her fingers in her ears, not that it would have helped. The song seemed to penetrate right through her skull, bypassing her ears to take up residency in her head. Careful concentration dispersed the feeling. “How can you live with it? How can the other elders who hide the fallen kalashtar live with it?”

“Each new victim seems to act a bit differently, though there have been patterns,” said Hanamelk. “Recent victims fell quickly, but seemed to retain a certain cunning. Erimelk hid himself from us for days until you appeared. Earlier victims fell slowly, as if the song took time to have an effect, but when they became violent, they were mindless. The first to fall to the song that we knew of, Makvakri, was moody and sang quietly for a few days before she turned violent. Ultimately, she killed herself before we could intervene.”

“The first that you knew of?” Singe asked.

“We know of seven victims, but three kalashtar have been missing since nearly the same time that the song began.” Hanamelk folded his hands. “We think that they suffered a fate similar to Makvakri and took their own lives, although there was no sign of her slower degradation.”

Singe pressed his lips together. “If there is someone or something behind the killing song, it almost seems like they’ve been tuning the song like an instrument, trying to find the right pitch.”

“That’s an unpleasant way of putting it.”

“Veterans have a way of facing the unpleasant, Hanamelk,” Nevchaned said. “This way.”

The song grew louder as Nevchaned ushered them along a short corridor toward another set of stairs. Before they reached the stairs, however, another door opened along the corridor, and Moon stuck his head out. The young kalashtar
was still dressed in the clothes he had worn the previous night, including the Brelish blue vest. His eyes looked red, as if he had just woken up. Maybe he had—Dandra caught a glimpse of displeasure in Nevchaned’s face. Moon’s gaze darted between them all, then settled on her. For a moment, she thought she saw something flash in his eyes. Heat spread across her cheeks, and she looked away.

The young man’s red eyes had been soft with adoration. Il-Yannah, Dandra thought incredulously, he’s in love with me? She tried to remember saying or doing anything at the Gathering Light that might have encouraged him. Maybe he’d liked the way she handled the elders or the un-kalashtar manner of her behavior. Either way, there was something distinctly odd in the way he’d stared. She almost felt a chill—not a bad chill, but a shiver of familiarity.

Moon looked like he was on the edge of speaking, but Nevchaned’s displeasure reached his tongue first. “When did you come in? I thought you were still out.”

“I got in late.” Moon’s voice was thick and slightly slurred. In spite of herself, Dandra glanced up. The softness had gone out of Moon’s eyes, replaced by a hardness as he looked back at his father. It was unusual for a kalashtar—even one so rebellious as Moon—to indulge in drink. Moon seemed so hostile that he reminded Dandra more of a young human, or even of Diad, Natrac’s half-orc son by Bava in Zarash’ak.

Nevchaned’s face tightened. “Wash and take yourself out again. You shouldn’t be here now.”

“Why?”

Dandra decided to interrupt the argument before it grew. Erimelk was close, and she wanted to examine him before his coarse chant of the killing song got on her nerves. “Because we’re going to try something that could be dangerous,” she said. She smiled at Moon. If he had somehow developed feelings for her, she wouldn’t hesitate to use them. “Go. There’s nothing for you to see here. Maybe we can talk later?”

Somewhat to her astonishment, the appeal worked. Moon looked at her, then dropped his eyes, folded his hands together and bent his head over them in a surprisingly traditional gesture.
“Patan yannah.”

He stepped back into his room. Nevchaned shook his head and continued down the stairs. “You’d think that he was the first kalashtar to wear the blue of Breland,” he said.

“There aren’t many of you,” said Hanamelk. “And he’s both of the lineage of Chaned and your son.
Ranhana thayava, Nevchaned.”

As the two kalashtar spoke, Ashi nudged Dandra. “I think Moon likes you.”

Dandra wrinkled her nose. “You noticed?”

“She wasn’t the only one,” Singe said, glancing back from ahead of her. “I saw—and I think Moon saw that I saw. Did you see the look that he gave me?” Dandra shook her head and Singe chuckled. “Like he was trying to burn stone. He’s jealous.”

Dandra muttered a curse under her breath. Ashi laughed.

Thoughts of Moon vanished as they stepped into the lower passage, an undecorated corridor with a few doors leading off of it. One of them had been barred with an iron rod. Erimelk’s muffled song came from behind it. Nevchaned slid the bar aside, then looked to Hanamelk and to Dandra. Hanamelk nodded. Dandra’s gut felt tight but she said, “Let me see him.”

Nevchaned opened the door. Dandra looked inside. The assortment of domestic goods that had once crowded the storeroom had been pushed to one side, making way for a thin sleeping pallet. Erimelk crouched on the pallet with his arms twisted behind his back and shackled to a ring driven into the wall. Bright metal still showed on the ring and Erimelk’s chains where Nevchaned’s hammer had scarred them.

Although Erimelk had been washed and his clothes changed since she’d seen him the day before, he somehow looked even worse than he had then. He was trembling, more from exhaustion, Dandra guessed, than fear or manic energy. He’d soiled himself, and the stench in the room was thick. Eyes that had been wild were dull, focused on something only he could see. The gag of twisted cloth that circled his jaw pulled his lips back in a hideous smile. It was soaked with saliva and where it had rubbed the corners of his mouth raw with blood. He still sang, the nonsense words of the killing song falling from his tongue in a broken cascade.
“Aahyi-ksiksiksi-kladakla-yahaahyi—”

Nevchaned looked away from his friend with helpless anger written on his face.

“Poor bastard,” muttered Singe. A memory—one of Tetkashtai’s memories—came to Dandra of a service the scribe had once done for her creator, an illuminated page decorated with beautiful jewel-toned inks. Rage at Dah’mir or whoever had inflicted the killing song on Nevchaned and the other kalashtar of Sharn filled her.

“Is he still violent?” she asked.

“When he notices us, he probably will be,” said Hanamelk. “The chains are short, though.”

“I’m not afraid of him.” Dandra raised her chin and stepped into the room.

There was no change in Erimelk’s expression or in the tone of his song. Dandra knelt cautiously at the foot of the pallet and spoke his name. “Erimelk?” He didn’t respond. She probably would have been more surprised if he had. Dandra drew a breath, reached into herself, and pushed her mind toward his in the link of
kesh
.

It was like sinking into thick cream. There was no resistance, and the world vanished around her—leaving her utterly surrounded by the killing song. The cascading sounds were all that she could hear and somehow, all that she could see. It was so sudden, she almost screamed.

She bit back her fear. She could escape this if she needed to. These weren’t her thoughts. The killing song wasn’t in her, it was in Erimelk. She pushed deeper. Just as it had been in the memories Shelsatori had shared with her, the song was inhumanly pure and maddeningly intricate, building toward dark urges of violence. Dandra tried calling Erimelk’s name again, this time within the confines of his mind.
Erimelk?

She might has well have shouted in the middle of a thunder storm. There was no response—at least not from Erimelk.

Like lightning splitting a storm, images burst out of the song along with a wave of violent hatred. Visions of her and of Singe, the targets toward which Erimelk had been directed. To Dandra’s surprise, though, there were also fragments of recent memories, something she hadn’t seen in what Shelsatori had shown her. Erimelk’s joy at spotting his targets. Blissful
release as he attacked. A terrible anger at his failure—

Buffeted by the song, Dandra snatched at the last fragment and examined it more closely. There was something odd about it. Anger—but not the disappointment or anguish she would have expected from Erimelk’s tormented mind.

The shattered memory was his and yet not his, much as the memories she had inherited from Tetkashtai were hers and yet not hers. If Dandra hadn’t known that Erimelk had not possessed a psicrystal, she would have guessed that to be the source of the memory.

But he hadn’t possessed a psicrystal. Someone or something else had ridden with him.

Was it Dah’mir? Dandra braced herself and reached out into the roaring, cascade of the song. She let it wash over her and listened—listened hard—for a voice that had become too horribly familiar to her. There was a particular sensation that accompanied Dah’mir’s dominating presence, a lingering cold that suffocated thought. She’d felt it each time she’d confronted the dragon. She’d felt in Tzaryan Keep, moments before Tzaryan Rrac had led them into Dah’mir’s ambush. She’d felt it in the minds of the sailors on
Lighting on Water
, when Dah’mir’s power—weaker in humans, but still strong enough to command immediate obedience—had kept them trapped aboard the ship in Zarash’ak’s harbor.

She didn’t feel it in the killing song. There was something there, something elusively familiar, but it wasn’t Dah’mir.

The realization pierced her with a numbing fear. She pulled herself back from the song and slid along the link of
kesh
to her own body like someone following a rope in darkness. As if it had finally realized an intruder had entered its domain, the song rose and ripped at her, crystal tones tearing into her mental self. Something turned sluggishly within the storm, and Dandra felt a fleeting moment of terrible exaltation brush her mind.
You!

She burst out of the
kesh
and fell back into herself, but the scream followed her. Something snapped across her jaw, and she tumbled backward, stunned. She caught a quick glimpse of Erimelk stretched out on his sleeping pallet, chains and arms stretched tight as he kicked at her and screamed around his
gag, then hands seized her and pulled her clear. Voices came back to her, cutting through Erimelk’s shrieks in her ears and the echoes of the killing song in her mind. “I thought you said the chains were short!”

“They are short!”

“Dandra? Dandra!”

Ashi, Nevchaned, and Singe. She blinked and glanced up at them. Ashi had her sword out and looked ready to kill. Nevchaned and Hanamelk looked startled. Singe just looked concerned, though relief passed over his face when he saw her eyes focus on him. “Are you hurt?”

“I’m fine.” She sat up. Her jaw ached where Erimelk had kicked her. The mad kalashtar was still screaming and spitting, though at least he was howling curses instead of the killing song. One of his arms bent at a strange angle. He’d dislocated his shoulder in his struggles. There was no sign of the lassitude that had held him before. She was glad he was still chained. “How long was I in
kesh?”

“Long enough that we were starting to worry,” Singe said. “What happened? One moment Erimelk was quiet, the next he was doing everything he could to reach you.”

“I was inside him too long, or maybe I pushed too deep.” She looked to Hanamelk and Nevchaned. “It’s not Dah’mir. I know his touch and this isn’t it. Your guess was right—something else is causing the song.”

Hanamelk’s lips pressed together. “I’d rather I’d been wrong.”

“Well, you’re not.” With Singe’s help, Dandra climbed to her feet. “What do we do now?”

Somewhere above, the chime of Nevchaned’s shop door rang. Nevchaned ignored it. “We’re going to have to go back to the council of elders,” he said. “This is going to frighten some of them—they hoped we’d found all of our answers.”

“I
hoped we’d found all our answers,” Dandra said. “Which do you think the elders will feel more threatened by, the killing song or Dah’mir?”

Nevchaned and Hanamelk glanced at each other. “The killing song,” Hanamelk answered. “They know it’s a threat. They see it in front of them. It may be infecting another
kalashtar right now. But Dah’mir …” He shook his head. “You’ve put a compelling case before us, Dandra, but we don’t know anything yet. Maybe Havakhad and the seers will find something. For now, there’s no immediate danger. Dah’mir hasn’t moved against us yet. He may not move against us for weeks or months.”

“You can’t wait until he strikes!” said Singe. The wizard’s angry words were partly drowned out by Erimelk’s screams and by a new series of rapid, insistent chimes from above. Nevchaned’s face flushed dark. He reached out and jerked the door of the storeroom shut, dampening one source of noise.

“We know!” he said. “But if we have to choose between something that threatens our community now and something that may threaten us weeks from now, we have to deal with the urgent threat.”

“You’ve warned us. We’ll be ready,” Hanamelk added. “But what is there we can do until we know more? We may seem like a large community, but we’re not. We don’t have the resources to fight two dangers we only barely understand.”