A Prison Unsought (47 page)

“The crew from that Rifter ship, the one Brandon was on
before
Mbwa Kali
found them,” Vannis
said, her tone indifferent. “The musician is one, a former member of a minor
Service Family. And see that tall woman in black in the end seat, first row
down there? With the white-furred sophonts? Apparently she’s the captain.”

“Dol’jharian, I’ve been told,” Srivashti murmured, his
expression amused.

Fierin looked down into the first level, easily picking out
the straight-limbed black-haired woman flanked by the two exotic-looking
beings. “She’s very striking. In fact, with a decent gown and something done
with that hair, she’d turn every head,” she remarked.

Vannis’ smile was a shade condescending. “Of course.
Dol’jharians kill their ugly babies.”

“I’ve always found that curiously compelling,” Srivashti
said. “A race that concerns itself entirely with power, pain, and death, yet
requires its progeny to be pleasing to the eye.”

In that first row, Eloatri gazed about the theater with deep
appreciation, taking pleasure in the bright formal attire and graceful motions
of the audience. To her right, in the end seat, the tall young Dol’jharian
captain sat erect. Next to her stood the pair of small white-furred sophonts
whom Eloatri had encountered now three times.

They chittered softly at Eloatri, their immense eyes
glittering in the muted light, their twiggy hands briefly forming a simple
pattern. It was one of Manderian’s semiotics:
We see you.
She signed the pattern in response.

As the man at the organ came to the close of his incidental
music, amid the scattered applause, Eloatri leaned toward Vi’ya. “That is one
of your crew, is it not?”

“He was.” Vi’ya’s voice was soft, giving no hint of her
emotions, but Eloatri sensed a tension in her. No doubt the emotional radiation
of the many in attendance affected her; Manderian had reported that she was
gaining control very slowly, struggling with the enhanced sensitivity
engendered by her association with the Eya’a.

The doors to the hall swung shut with a soft boom more felt than
heard. Montrose straightened up, his massive body a focus of intent, and began
to play a slow, deeply evocative melody.

Eloatri stiffened, shock flooding through her. She knew that
piece.
Dangerous. Oh, so dangerous
. A
rustle and a hum swept through the assembled guests: many of them had
recognized it as well.

She looked up at the royal box, but the Aerenarch still had
not yet arrived. This, then, was a warning and a challenge to his enemies on
Ares.
Perhaps you are your father’s son
.

Beside her, Vi’ya rubbed her temples; the Eya’a chirped briefly,
almost ultrasonic.

“It’s the
Manya Cadena
,”
said Eloatri, and when Vi’ya turned an inquiring glance her way, she added, “It
commemorates the great chain of lives that links all of us to Lost Earth
through all the centuries of Exile.”

Seeing incomprehension in the Dol’jharian’s face, she added,
“It would have been played at the Aerenarch’s Enkainion during the Three
Summons.”

Above them, Fierin watched as Vannis stilled, her profile
intent on the musician, while Srivashti flicked a glance from Vannis to the
royal box, his expression coldly speculative. Fierin’s pulse leaped, but when Srivashti
met her wide gaze, his face smoothed out.

The music swelled, rolling around the room, and resonating
through bones and teeth; even those, like Dandenus, who had no interest in
music were compelled to listen.

When the last chord died away, the Phoenix fanfare pealed
out, the Aerenarch entered the royal box, and the audience rose to make its
obeisance. The Aerenarch made his, the ancient ritual as stylized and graceful
as ballet. Then expensive fabrics rustled as all sat amid the whispering of
expectation.

“And so it begins,” Vannis murmured.

Srivashti showed his teeth in a soundless laugh, almost a
grimace.

After the entrance of the Aerenarch the concert proper
began, with a medley of ancient music performed by members of the Akademia
Musika. Eloatri was impressed; had the Aerenarch chosen these pieces himself?
If so, it betokened an encyclopedic knowledge of musical history.

Then a familiar melody caught her ear, born on the haunting
plainsong voiced by a single musician, and her throat thickened.
Veni Creator Spiritus
. She had first
heard that melody at her forced assumption of the cathedra at New Glastonbury.
But then it had merely been a pleasant sound; now she knew what it meant.

With irresistible force the music caught her up beyond
herself, drenching the theater with a numinous aura. At her right for that
moment sat no human woman, but a luminous flame so bright her eyes watered. Two
smaller flares attended her; beyond, like the radiation of an unquenchable
furnace, the royal box vanished in supernal light. And in the audience another
flaming spirit, red-haired, double-imaged, reinforced by a triune presence.

Eloatri trembled. These were all linked, yet lacking some
vital presence that would complete the hinge of time which they comprised.

Then the musicians moved on, climbing the years from the
Exile toward the present, and the Dreamtime released her.

Eloatri looked up at the
royal box where the Aerenarch sat, merely human now, his Douloi mask
impervious.
Are there messages here of equal import for others in the audience?

No matter, she decided; the general impact was plain
enough, evoking the deeply praeterite feelings of the Exiles, engaging their
dependence on tradition and continuity.
They have all suffered loss—none of
them know what is to come. He has offered them the familiar haven of their
collective memories of Lost Earth.
And he was the last of the Arkads, a tradition
in itself, the family that had ruled the Thousand Suns for nearly a thousand
years.

The Akademia withdrew from the stage during a brief
intermission. Bursts of whispered comment quickly stilled when the Kitharee
glided onstage, playing a variety of strange instruments, no two alike, their
costumes just as varied. No introductory flourishes; they played as if
continuing a musical conversation that had never been interrupted, offering
wild melodies sometimes harmonic and sometimes dissonant, strange, wild,
compelling, utterly itself, utterly uncompromising.

Famed throughout the Thousand Suns, the Kitharee saw music
as worship, a ritualistic combination of dance, chant, song, and instruments.
Each Kitharee made his or her own instruments, which were burned with the
musician at death.

For those able to perceive it, their performance constituted
a different statement by the Aerenarch. The Kitharee had never before performed
in a secular setting, and many had never heard their music except in rare,
unauthorized recordings. Even an Arkad could not have ordered it. Persuasion
only would have sufficed. Despite Brandon Arkad’s ambiguous status, and the
cloud of suspicion that hung over him after his solo escape from the
annihilation of his Enkainion, this evidence of persuasion was a statement of a
power no one else on Ares could match, and yet—like the music—it was not easy
to define.

After another brief intermission, the third part of the
program commenced, and hearing it, Eloatri bowed her head and gave thanks. Danger
there was still, and even the possibility of failure, but she now had no doubt,
that whatever the nature of the grace that Telos had bestowed upon the Arkads,
it inhered as strongly in the forty-eighth of that lineage as in the blood and
bones of Jaspar Arkad himself.

For three others in the audience, the concert’s final selections
forced the doors of memory.

Montrose had slipped into a seat near Sebastian Omilov, high
in the back. Montrose closed his eyes, his face relaxed in enjoyment. Omilov
sat with his fingers steepled, his brow thoughtful, his gaze on the performers.

From his position at the back of the royal box, Jaim observed
Brandon, who sat motionless, his head bowed as if in contemplation, his
expression pensive. Did he not know that the concert was a success, that the
musicians were superlative, and the choice of music—his own—inspired general
approbation?

A new melody pealed, a concerto for brass, evoking images
Jaim had thought he’d buried. He surrendered to them.

Light, dark, dancing brightness like sunbeams on water, deep
and slow as molten rock beneath a planet’s crust; all the music was from the
years he crewed
Telvarna
, and it
freed, as no drug or mantra ever could, all the emotions of the past, painful
and yet sustaining. Jaim saluted his surrender as a lesson to be learned.

Symphony, melody, rastanda, twelve-tone, eight-tone, and
syncopated, polyphonic: the pieces ranged all over the known universe, but a
single theme bound them, stitched by the genius of a musician named KetzenLach.
His greatness had lain in taking ancient art forms, forgotten arias and melodic
lines, and weaving them anew for modern audiences, infusing them somehow with
modern experience. As a child a brilliant mimic of great artists, KetzenLach
had written only one original melody, his last—his gift was in reforming the
old.

And KetzenLach had been Markham’s favorite composer.

Every piece of music chosen evoked Markham vlith-L’Ranja;
all had been his favorites, heard time and again aboard the
Telvarna
, and on Dis, and even in
concert halls on distant planets, when—Telos knew how—Markham found out that
this or that famous artist was to perform, and he took his primary crew
light-years beyond their immediate goal, just to hear music.

Some of the music Jaim did not know, but he guessed it was
from the boyhood that Brandon and Markham had shared; for this was a memorial,
a tribute, though out of the audience of glittering aristocrats from many
planets, probably fewer than half a dozen people knew it. And the fact that it
was the Navy Band playing it gave the tribute a razor’s edge, for Markham had
been a brilliant cadet before he was cashiered.

Jaim turned his head: there was Vi’ya in the front row, with
the Eya’a, whose eerie stillness was impossible to interpret. Vi’ya’s face was
like carved rock, her eyes in shadow. Dol’jharians were never very expressive
even at their most relaxed, but Jaim had learned to read her: she was not, even
remotely, enjoying the music.

Music feeds the soul
,
Reth Silverknife said once.
For those who
deny the soul it is a weapon without defense.
Jaim turned his head toward
his former captain, thinking,
For those
who deny the emotions?

Unaware of Jaim’s gaze, Vi’ya focused on the musicians. She
examined the forms of the instruments, analyzed the motions made by the
players, calculated the modification of sound. Anything to fend off the
onslaught of the familiar grief—and of something deeper, more dangerous than
grief.

She glanced down at the Eya’a, fighting hard to maintain her
shield. It was a new lesson, and one that taxed her to the utmost: to guard her
thoughts—to protect her privacy.

Her eyes burned and her jaw ached with the effort she was
expending, and still the music fell around her, invisible knives to flay her
outer shell and expose raw nerves to the air.

She would not raise her eyes to the balcony where Brandon
Arkad sat, though she could feel his presence, like sunrads through an opaqued
port.

Possibly he was watched her, trying to ascertain her
reaction—for she knew that this entire concert, every piece of music, even the
order in which they were played, was aimed at her.
I refused to talk to him about Markham, so here is the result.

It was a kind of communication she could not ignore, but she
knew it was not meant in malice, for that was not in Brandon Arkad’s nature.
The Arkad intended this as a tribute, a gift. He was giving her to know, as
clearly as if he spoke, his feelings for his dead friend, for Brandon had loved
and trusted Markham vlith-L’Ranja. The music was a gift to the one other person
who had loved and trusted him and in turn had earned Markham’s love and trust,
a wordless acknowledgment of the bond of loss they shared.

She would not close her burning eyes. The musicians’ heads
bobbed, each with a smearing aura of light surrounding it.

He could not know—and would not—that she would rather be
anywhere, even the torture pits of Dol’jhar, than here, seeing in Markham’s
music what Brandon Arkad could not.

There was no original music in KetzenLach’s repertoire. Did
he not perceive the terrible parallel? That KetzenLach was, after all, only a
clever mimic—and so, too, had been Markham?

And that . . . and that . . .

She forced the thought away, with a violence that caused an
answering pang in one temple. A tremor went through the small white-furred
figures at her side, and she felt their question inside her aching skull. She
sent a reassurance, even as the insidious melodic line whipped monothread
tendrils through layer after layer of buried memory, stirring up images and
emotions she had labored to banish.

The Masque of the Red Death . . . A long
face, tangled blond hair, a lazy, slanting smile, all unreal, all a mask, for
the poses, the cadence of the words, and deeper, deeper, the gaze of humorous
compassion on an unforgiving universe, the delight in finding beauty in the
most unexpected places and the urge to share it, those things were not
characteristic, but had been consciously modeled after another.

“The other two, slight
air and purging fire;

Are both with thee,
wherever I abide;

The first my thought,
the other my desire . . .”

The pure voice of the young singer carried KetzenLach’s
plainsong note through the swooping, fluttering melodies fashioned by the
musical instruments. Vi’ya did not have to close her eyes; she could not see
the singer now.