For a moment it was as though time expanded all around Rhapsody. Heat flushed her face and she heard, and felt, a distant but audible crack, followed by a puff, like a spark exploding, or smoke dissipating.
A strange feeling washed over her, unlike any she had ever felt; light-headedness from all the running, perhaps. She winced internally at the idiotic name that had come to her on the spot, but it seemed to have done the trick, because the town guards were now staring over her head in abject fear.
A series of soft thoop sounds whispered behind her and whistled past her. Faster than her eyes could track them shining projectiles, thin as butterfly wings, struck the throats of all three, toppling them over in rapid succession. The guards fell heavily into the mud of the alley, not moving.
Rhapsody looked down at the bodies, amazed. She turned to the strangers again. The smaller of the two was slinging a strange-looking weapon, shaped somewhat like a crossbow but with an asymmetrical curved arm, over his shoulder and under his cloak again. She looked at him in blank admiration.
“Nice work,” she said. “Thank you.”
The two strangers looked at each other, then around the alley. The cloaked one put out his hand to her. It was slender in its leather sheath, but the grip looked deadly.
“Come with us if you want to live,” he said.
His voice was dry with an unnatural rasp to it; it was a percussive sound that widened Rhapsody’s eyes with interest.
She looked quickly over her shoulder, hearing the approach of more guards, and then turned to the stranger once more and took his gloved hand. Together the three of them bolted from the alley and into the shadows cast by the afternoon sun setting over the back streets of Easton.
3
The walls of the vast city could no longer be seen and darkness was swallowing the meadows that surrounded Easton long before the three travelers stopped to make camp. They had left the city by the eastern gate, down by the docks.
Easton was a port city, a thriving relic left over from the days of the racial campaigns in the Second Age. Though its original planning, and recent attempts at restoration, saw it as a great center of art and culture at the crux of the trade routes, during the wars it had been refitted for defense, as a walled fortress, surrounded on three sides by great stone bulwarks eighteen feet thick leading down to the wharf. The bustle of the seafaring traffic made handy cover for their escape.
Rhapsody had run through the back streets of Easton before, had even been dragged once or twice, but never as purposefully as with these two who half-led, half-carried her through the yards and cobbled alleys. She was able to keep up with them only because of her knowledge of the city.
When they cut through two abandoned buildings well after the point where she was sure they were out of tracking range, however, she lost her bearings. Certainly they had also lost anyone who might have identified them at the scene of the crime. In front of a busy portside tavern, the slighter man stopped.
“These will do,” he said, then stole two horses in broad daylight.
The giant lifted Rhapsody onto one of the horses, and they walked a few blocks before the men mounted and rode quickly out of town, across the fields south and along the sea.
The giant rode slightly behind, and Rhapsody could hear the horse working hard to keep up with the pace set by the man with thin hands. In fact, even though she rode in front of him, in the same saddle, she could not hear his breath. It felt only as if she were wearing a modestly heavy cloak instead of sitting in front of a person intent on escape, guiding the horse from behind her. The vibrations from the galloping horse hid her trembling.
They rode the entire afternoon. Rhapsody had never been outside of Easton’s southern wall before, and kept casting mournful backward glances at the great gray vista of mud-and-thatch buildings, decaying marble temples, ramshackle stone houses, and towering statuary receding more and more into the twilight with each moment. At dusk she could barely make out the high, twisting wall that led down to the harbor, where distant lights were twinkling; it was nothing more than a faint black line in the approaching darkness.
Once they were out of sight of the city, they slowed their pace, but it was clear that the two men intended to put as much distance between themselves and Easton as possible. Even as night fell and Rhapsody had to acknowledge to herself that she was lost, and might have been kidnapped, not rescued as she first thought, they pressed on.
For a while Rhapsody had felt it was dangerous to the horses to keep moving when no one could possibly see a safe path. Then, without a sign or warning, they stopped. The night had come into itself, and the riders were surrounded by darkness.
“Get down.” The voice seemed to come from the air.
Before she could react the smaller man quickly moved her from the saddle. He was down himself in an instant, and with a swift motion threw the reins to the other man.
“Grunthor, lose the horses.” The veiled man vanished into the night.
Rhapsody lost sight of him almost immediately. She turned to the shape that the darkness made even more huge, simultaneously backpedaling a step and reaching quietly for the knife in her wrist sheath.
Grunthor did not look at her, but dismounted, tied up the reins on each horse, and stepped back.
“Get on with ya,” he said, but the animals were so spent that they hardly reacted. As if he had anticipated this, the giant removed his helmet and moved to a spot directly in front of the horses, where both of them could see him clearly, even with all trace of twilight faded from the sky. He spread his arms and roared.
The sound rumbled and echoed through the horseflesh and through Rhapsody. For a moment the mounts were frozen, but after a breath they were reanimated and fled in the panic of prey in sight of the predator, wild-eyed and screaming.
Grunthor replaced his helmet and turned to Rhapsody. He took one look at the expression on her face and roared with laughter.
“’Allo, darlin’. Oi’m so glad to see it’s love at first sight for you, too. Come along.” He walked away into the night.
Rhapsody was not sure that it was wise to follow the giant, but was sure it was even less so to make him angry, so she took off after him. She struggled to keep up, trying to sort things out in her head. “Where are we going? Are we walking all the way?”
“Doubtful. We already been on forced march today.”
At the edge of the horizon the full moon appeared and began to rise, golden, blanketed in the fog at the edge of the sea. Its light did nothing to illuminate the darkness; impenetrable blackness hung, heavy as pitch, in the summer air. Rhapsody thought she had good night vision, but she was still moving along more by touch and sound than sight.
She trailed after the giant as he followed a path that was apparently only visible to him until she nearly stepped into a small fire. Grunthor had sidestepped at the last second and had to put his arm in front of her to keep her from putting her boot directly into the flames.
A camp was already made. She was not sure if she didn’t see it because he was in the way, blocking her view, or because of the darkness of the night, or the way the camp had been placed.
Grunthor moved to a spot upwind of the fire, took off his helmet, and drew a long breath before sitting down. He had paid little attention to her so far, and even though it would put her directly into his line of vision, Rhapsody went to the opposite side, keeping the fire between them, and dropped her pack to the ground. She wasn’t bothered by smoke, and thought the flames might provide at least a small barrier if necessary.
In the firelight she took a good look at the giant across from her. Sitting on the ground, he was easily still eye to eye with her, which meant that he was a minimum of seven feet tall and at least as wide as a dray horse.
Beneath his heavy military greatcoat she caught a glint of metal. His armor was foreign to her, and better-made than she would have guessed. It looked like a kind of reptile-scale leather banded by support joints of metal plate, but she
had not heard any scrape or other resonance from it the whole time. She was slightly alarmed that she had not heard much from his many weapons, either. He wore an extremely large ax and several wicked-looking blades, and had a number of hilts and handles jutting out from behind his armor.
His face was even more frightening. At least one tooth protruded past his lips, and it was difficult to tell what color his hidelike skin was in the inconstant light. His eyes, ears, and nose were exaggeratedly large on his face, and Rhapsody guessed that he was able to see, hear, and smell her much better than she could him. At the ends of his massive hands were talonlike nails that more accurately resembled claws. He was the stuff of an adult’s nightmare. At the moment he was pulling food and something to cook it in from his pack, still ignoring her.
“Let me guess; you’ve heard of Firbolg but you never met one before, right?”
The sandy voice of the other man spoke directly behind her and Rhapsody jumped. She had not sensed his presence at all.
She stared across the crackling slames at the giant. “You’re Firbolg? You don’t seem it.”
“And just what do ya mean by that?”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude,” she said, her face turning red in the light of the campfire. “It’s just that, well, in my limited experience, Firbolg are thought of as monsters.”
“And in my not-so-limited experience, Lirin are thought of as appetizers,” Grunthor replied breezily, without rancor.
“I assume it’s your preference not to adopt either of those assumptions,” said the cloaked figure.
“Absolutely,” Rhapsody said, smiling’ and shuddering at the same time. She had a feeling the giant wasn’t kidding.
The thin man dropped a pile of rabbit carcasses near the giant.
“Who are you?”
“My name is Rhapsody. I’m a student of music. A Singer.”
“Why was the town guard chasing you?”
“Much to my surprise, and chagrin, they were in the service of an imbecile who was looking to have me brought to him.”
“Brought to him for what?”
“I assume for entertainment purposes.”
“Does this imbecile have a name?”
“He calls himself Michael, the Wind of Death. Many of us call him similar, if less flattering, things behind his back.”
The two men exchanged a glance, then the man in the cloak looked back at her again. “How do you know him?”
“I’m sorry to say he was a customer of mine three years ago when I was working as a prostitute,” Rhapsody answered frankly. “It wasn’t really by choice, but not much is when that’s your profession. Unfortunately, he became a bit obsessed with me, and he told me at the time he would return for me, but he was such a pompous windbag that I never was much concerned about it. The first of several miscalculations on my part. The second occurred today, when he sent one of his slimy minions to fetch me, and I refused to come. If it had been his regular lackeys, I could have eluded them, but he’s managed to enlist the aid of the town guard since I last saw him.”
“Why didn’t you just agree to meet ’im, and then go into ’iding?”
“That would be lying.”
“So?” said the cloaked one. “That would be living.”
“I never lie. I can’t.”
Grunthor chuckled. “What a convenient memory ya got there, sister. Oi seem to remember you tellin’ them town guards that you and we was related. Oi think you might look a bit out o’ place at our family gatherin’s.”
“No,” interjected the sandy-voiced man. His eyes were full of clear comprehension as they stared at her. “That’s why you asked us to adopt you first.”
Rhapsody nodded. “Right. My attempt to dissuade them from bothering me wouldn’t have worked if it wasn’t the truth, at least on some level.”
“Why not?”
“Lying is forbidden in the profession I have chosen; if you don’t speak the truth, you can’t be a Namer, the highest form of Singer. You have to keep the music in your speech on-key and attuned to the world around you. Lying corrupts those vibrations, and sullies what you have to say. It’s not an exact science, since truth is partially influenced by perspective.
“That’s the academic reason. As a more personal philosophy, my parents always told me deceit was wrong. More recently, it’s because once I broke free of my old, uh, line of work, the thing I treasured most was the truth. There really isn’t any in being a whore—you are always someone else’s lie. And you have to bite your tongue and participate in other people’s fantasies, many of which you can’t stomach.
“So now that I am free of that life, I couldn’t contain my loathing of Michael for one minute more. It was probably a mistake, but I’m not sure I could have done anything differently and still have lived with myself.”
“Well, there’s no ’arm done.”
“Yes there is. I just exiled myself from Easton. I probably blinded one of the town guards in my attempt to escape, and now I can’t go back.”
The smaller man laughed. “I doubt there are any eyewitnesses.”
“Maybe not that saw you,” said Rhapsody. “There were many more that saw me—they chased me for eight street-corners.”
“Then you have a problem.” The cloaked man sat back, surveying the field as the smoke from the fire formed a twisted tendril that pointed to the stars. “You could simply choose not to go back. Have you a family you would leave behind, or perhaps one elsewhere on which you can rely?”
The utter indifference in his voice gave Rhapsody the feeling that this was an interrogation, not an attempt at friendly advice. She was fairly sure she had been able to persuade them that she was harmless and relatively valueless, but the fatigue of the flight and uncertainty of her situation was beginning to take its toll.
By now the giant Firbolg had skinned the rabbits and arranged the fire to cook them. Rhapsody did not know whether to expect them to offer her anything, but she would hardly have been surprised to see the game eaten raw. When she first undertook to become a Singer, one of the earliest lessons was an epic song of Firbolg history that had left a grisly impression on her, and her two rescuers had done little to change it.
The men moved as though they had traveled together for a long time. There was a routine to the tasks of preparing the meal that spoke of practice and mutual respect. The thin man had killed the rabbits; the giant skinned them. The giant arranged the fire; the other man found fuel. The entire meal, from the meat to some root that also required cooking, was accomplished and the campsite laid out without a word, one to the other. They behaved almost as if she were not there at all. Grunthor did motion at her once, across the fire, with a skewer heavy with sizzling meat, but she shook her head.
“No, thank you.”
For her part, she rationed out a small portion of the bread Pilam had given her, and stored it in a pocket of her cloak rather than return it to her pack. She was feeling more and more uneasy about her companions by the minute, and wanted to be ready to flee if necessary. Her pack was not within easy reach. Normally she would never have considered leaving her instruments, but when he stopped to eat, Rhapsody had caught sight of the thin man’s face.
She tried to look at first without appearing to look, but as horrifying as the giant was, she was unprepared for the shock of the slightly more human face.
In the whole expanse of skin on the front of his head there was not a single smooth spot. It was not lumpy, but scarred, pocked, and it was marked with traceries of exposed veins. She had seen diseased faces, and faces marred by time and weapons and other scourges, drink and worse, but here it looked as if the entire army of Destiny’s Horsemen had run roughshod over his face, sharply clipping flesh from his nose, thrusting the rest around with the force of their riding.
What truly caught her, though, were his eyes. As if plucked from two different heads, neither size, nor color, nor shape were matched in them, and their placement in this remarkable and terrif
ying face was not even symmetrical. He looked as if he were sighting down a weapon. Just then she became aware that he was staring back at her.
Rhapsody had been in the city long enough and was a quick enough reader of people to seldom be caught looking. Her recovery was swift, if fumbling: “So where are you headed next?”
“Off Island.”
She smiled uncertainly. “You must have irritated someone really important, too.”
A cloud passed over the moon. Rhapsody could vaguely tell that she should be aware of something.
She continued to stare at him through the fire, which seemed to have changed ever-so-slightly, and as she watched the thin man chewing, she saw the fire roar up and reflect in his eyes. She imagined that he was staring at her while chewing on her answers instead of the roasted rabbit she now felt foolish to have refused. Everyone deserves a last meal, she thought ruefully.
Somewhere in the deepest part of her, the part of her that was a Namer, a storysinger, she heard her own musical note ring through the roaring of the fire, through the silence of the men. The clarity of her Naming note, her touchstone of truth, told her that this was a trap, a trick of the fire. Then she saw the thin hands and the battlefield face step through the fire itself, and she knew it was too late to escape. She blinked with eyelids made heavy by more than exhaustion; the smoke must have contained a hypnotic herb with which she was not familiar.
He was angry, but he did not touch her. Instead, he grabbed her pack from the ground next to her and began rifling through it.
“Who are you?” the cloaked man demanded. His voice was a fricative hissing, his cloak still smoky from his leap over the flames. He waited for an answer.
“Hey, put that down.” She tried to stand but satisfied herself with shaking off the trance.
The giant stood up. “Oi wouldn’t do that if Oi were you, miss. Just answer the question.”