Don Bassingthwaite - The Killing Song

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.”