Songspinners Read online

  ALSO BY SARAH ASH

  Moths to a Flame*

  Songspinners*

  The Lost Child*

  ALCHYMIST'S LEGACY

  Tracing the Shadow

  Flight into Darkness

  THE TEARS OF ARTAMON

  Lord of Snow and Shadows

  Prisoner of the Iron Tower

  Children of the Serpent Gate

  *available as Jabberwocky e-books

  Copyright © Sarah Ash 1996

  All rights reserved

  The right of Sarah Ash to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in 1996 by Orion Books Ltd. Published as an e-book by Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc., in association with the Zeno Agency LTD.

  ISBN: 978-1-62567-004-5

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Also by Sarah Ash

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Note on Opera and Opera Singers in Bel'Esstar

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  For Eve and Louis, my parents

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My grateful thanks to:

  Caroline Oakley, my editor, for her patience, insight and expertise

  Alison Sinclair for long-distance writerly encouragement and commiserations

  Steve Jeffery and Vikki Lee-France – for cheering me up

  David Pringle: the Lifhendil first appeared in my short story ‘Airs from Another Planet’ in Interzone

  And Michael, Tom and Chris

  Many thanks are due to Marcelle Natisin for her expressive cover art, to agents John Richard Parker and John Berlyne of Zeno Literary Agency Inc. and to Joshua Bilmes, Jessie Cammack, and Lisa Rodgers of JABberwocky for giving Songspinners a new lease of life as an e-book!

  NOTE ON OPERA AND OPERA SINGERS IN BEL’ESSTAR

  The female roles in opera were always taken by castrati as women were forbidden to appear upon the stage (as in Rome in the seventeenth century). One or two castrati devoted their careers to the portrayal of female roles, thus acquiring the title of ‘Diva’.

  PROLOGUE

  AT IRIDIAL’S SHRINE

  Shadows flicker on the painted walls of the shrine. Shadow-petals from the slow-burning lotos candle, perfuming the vaults with its somnolent fumes, essence of summer water-meadows, sun-warmed shallows.

  The girl sets the lotos candle down on a ledge.

  Petals of rose-white light warm the dank darkness.

  Meadows of painted primavera flowers embroider the walls, a constellation of star-daisies, marigolds, nodding windflowers, white and gold and azure blue.

  The girl balances the cithara against her shoulder, picks up the quill plectrum… then lets fly a quiver of darting notes, sweet enough to charm the slumbering spirits of the dead from their sleep.

  The lotos flame flickers.

  The notes falter.

  ‘Mother…?’

  Her soft voice barely stirs the enfolding silence, the dusty, timeless silence of the vault.

  The flame burns brighter.

  The girl lifts one hand to shield her eyes.

  Fire licks at the painted walls, flames burst into flower, smoke curls into the air.

  The girl begins to cough on the acrid fumes.

  Flames all around her, crackling, roaring. Beams come crashing to the floor. Sparks sting her skin.

  ‘Mother! Help me!’

  She stretches out her hands blindly into the blaze, trying to fumble her way through the searing heat.

  The cithara drops to the floor.

  ‘Ai – my hands, my hands!’

  White fire flickers from her clawing fingers, the bones broken sticks of charcoal against the dazzle. The skin is blistering, flaking away in flecks of flame, weeping fiery liquid.

  Her mouth twists wide open in a smoke-choked scream of agony.

  ‘Aiii…’

  The air trembles, shifts, re-settles.

  No smoke. No flames. No fire. Only the eternal silence of the vaults, the Undercity of the Dead.

  The girl slides to the dusty floor, gasping.

  Slowly, shakily, she examines her hands, finger by finger, palm by palm.

  They are undamaged, the pale skin smooth and whole.

  CHAPTER 1

  Morning mists swathed the spa city of Sulien, mingling with the steam rising from the hot baths and pump rooms.

  At this early hour, Orial thought, shivering as she dressed herself, the city seemed like a shadow of itself, the soft rose-tint of its ancient stones dulled to damp grey by the miasmic fogs. Only when the sun had dried the mists would the warm colour of the carven stone begin to emerge and the rose-stone city appear from the fog like the enchanted City of Khitezh in the legends. And by that time she would be occupied with Papa’s patients in the Mineral Water Sanatorium, too busy to witness the moment of transformation she had so loved to watch on her way to the Academie for Young Ladies. But schooldays were over, she was eighteen now and her father’s assistant, working with him in the worthiest of all employments: healing the sick.

  The Sanatorium treated a wide variety of patients and complaints, ranging from gout-swollen toes to the many forms of rheumatism. A culvert and elaborate system of pipes drew water from the central source of the hot springs to supply the treatment baths and sprays. Patients attended for an hour or so a day; only the serious cases stayed within the Sanatorium whilst most others took lodgings nearby.

  A fragrant aroma of brewing qaffë wafted from the dining room as Orial came hurrying down the stairs. Her father was already seated at the breakfast table, a cup of qaffë (black) in one hand, a pen in the other, annotating the day’s schedule. Orial leaned down to kiss his cheek and sat herself opposite him, surreptitiously adjusting the slipping straps of her clean starched pinafore. Try as she might, she could not achieve the neat appearance of the other nurses in the Sanatorium; a stray lock of hair, a wayward strap, a loose button, all usually contrived to work against her. And Dr Jerame Magelonne was insistent that all his staff should be immaculately turned out.

  Freshly baked buns, yellow and fragrant with saffron, steamed in the basket; she split one and spread it liberally with butter, watching the butter melt into the warm dough before taking a bite. The fun was in wondering when your teeth would crunch into the knob of sticky loaf sugar hidden in the golden centre of the bun. She watched her father reach for a bun, split it, butter it, eat it – and all without once looking up from his Sulien Chronicle. A smile began to twitch at the corners of her lips. How did he manage it?

  ‘Singular,’ Dr Magelonne muttered. ‘Very singular.’

  ‘What is so very singular, Papa?’ Orial rose and refilled his cup with qaffë, then leaned over his shoulder to scan the columns of black print.

  ‘This wave of piety sweeping through our neighbours in Allegonde, both the capital and the court. We shall not see Prince Ilsevir in Sulien this season; it says he has been miraculously cur
ed by praying to the Blessed Mhir – and in consequence, has abandoned his life of pleasure to devote himself to matters of the spirit.

  ‘Apparently he has ordered all the opera houses and theatres to be shut down. Not before time, in my opinion. Opera’s a mindless, vacuous entertainment, fit only for those stupid enough to part with their money.’

  ‘Opera,’ Orial echoed wistfully.

  ‘And wholly unsuitable for young girls of an impressionable nature!’ Dr Magelonne said sharply. Orial retreated, nodding resignedly. This was an argument she would never win – and she had learned long ago not to pursue it with her father.

  It was well known in the Sanatorium why Dr Magelonne vehemently resented any mention of music. When Orial’s mother Iridial died, he had forbidden the playing of any music in the house. Orial understood. He had worshipped Iridial, who had lived and breathed music. Her death had almost destroyed him. The very sound of music would surely provoke memories too painful to be endured, so not one note was to be heard in the Sanatorium and there were no music lessons for Orial. Indeed, at her father’s express wish, she had been given different tasks to occupy her at the Academie for Young Ladies whilst the other pupils received instruction in musical accomplishments. Yet whilst Orial dutifully plied her embroidery needle or dabbed at a water colour, she’d often caught strains rising from the music room below. And, oh, how she’d yearned to join in that distant sweet harmony…

  ‘At least we are a more phlegmatic people than our hot-headed neighbours.’ Dr Magelonne drank down the last of his qaffë and neatly folded the newspaper. ‘There is always some kind of ferment seething in Bel’Esstar. Let us trust they do not try to bring their religious fervour over the mountains.’

  ‘So what is to be done today?’ Orial asked, returning the conversation to more neutral ground.

  ‘The usual rheumatic complaints… neuralgia… and a stubborn case of gout. Nothing out of the ordinary, my dear.’ Dr Magelonne sighed. ‘We have to accept that the days of Sulien’s glory have passed. When I was a boy, the Prince’s father regularly crossed the borders to take the waters and all his court came too. But Ilsevir’s interests lie elsewhere. He doesn’t wish to while away his days in a fading spa resort.’

  ‘Poor Papa. Longing for a complex and challenging case… and obliged to pass your days curing fat gouty old gentlemen!’

  ‘Who all believe a couple of glasses of spa water a day will cure them. At least it gives me time to work on my treatise,’ he said abstractedly.

  A bell jangled in the courtyard. Orial jumped up. The first patient of the day had arrived.

  ‘My cap. I’ve forgotten my cap.’ She went hurrying up the stairs to find the starched white cap and, standing in front of the mirror, attempted to pin it on straight.

  It was three days now since Orial had experienced the vision of flames, and since then she had not returned to the Undercity. It was the first time she could remember feeling reluctant to go back. Most days she contrived to slip away unnoticed from the Sanatorium to her mother’s shrine for an hour or so. Only there could she practise the art which she had taught herself. The art which she loved above all other. The art forbidden to her.

  Music.

  So far she had contrived to keep her obsession secret. But of late she had begun to fear her fingers would betray her. She would find herself unconsciously tapping out the latest melody she had composed on the wall of the laundry room as she stood in the queue to collect warm towels. Or nimbly running figurations up and down the treatment slab as she waited to help peel away the hot mud packs from a patient. She could not stop. The music simply flowed from her as naturally as water flowed from the hot springs. It had become as much a part of her life as breathing. Concealing it from Papa was becoming more and more difficult. And she hated to have to resort to deception.

  Up here in the cool Sulien daylight it was easy to rationalise what had happened. A dream. A waking dream. She must have become drowsy, practising down there in the dark, she must have nodded off for a few moments – and dreamed the fire, the flames, the searing pain.

  It was foolish to stay away for fear of a vivid dream.

  Towards four o’clock Dr Magelonne came out of his office with a letter in his hand. She saw her opportunity.

  ‘Shall I take that to the post for you, Papa?’

  ‘Thank you, my dear. I wouldn’t normally wish to remove you from your duties at the Sanatorium but this is important…’

  As long as she was back by the time the Sanatorium closed its doors to day patients at five, he would not worry. And she could post the letter in a matter of a few minutes.

  Orial tied her cape ribbons about her throat, seized the letter and almost danced out of the Sanatorium courtyard into the street.

  Free!

  *

  A stranger could lose his way under Sulien – and never see the light of day again. But Orial had been coming to the Undercity alone since she was a child. The underground labyrinth that the ancient city’s builders, the Lifhendil, had constructed held no terrors for her. She had studied the plans of the labyrinth in the Museum and had discovered her own secret ways in the dark.

  Few people ventured below ground now, only the ingenieurs who maintained the vast subterranean reservoirs, the Priests and Priestesses of Elesstar who officiated at funeral rites, and the bereaved who, like herself, came to light candles at the memorial shrines. Only once a year was the Undercity filled with people – and that was the Day of the Dead.

  As a child, Orial had never feared the dark. To her, the Undercity was a place of hidden wonders. She did not believe the stories of blood-sucking ghouls who haunted the shrines, looking for live victims. She had seen the occasional brown rat in her explorations… and that was all.

  She had come to love the ancient wall-paintings that decorated the Undercity. She had spent hours gazing at the flaking colours applied by long-dead artists of the Lifhendil until she felt she knew the people pictured there almost as well as those in her everyday life above. She had even given them names, characters: this tall, dark-skinned young man, with fishing spear and tuft-eared hunting cat slinking at his heels, was Black Heron the Hunter; these two laughing girls, arms interlaced, were Ylda and Nanda, the best of best friends (Orial had always longed for a close companion of her own age but Papa had never encouraged it). The Lotos Princess, her favourite, sat singing and playing a gilded cithara to a rapt audience. The painter had depicted the irises of her eyes with exquisite attention to detail: even with the fading of the centuries, it was still possible to see in the splash of lamp-light the tiny brush-strokes of rose-pink, purple and gold flecking the blue.

  Rainbow eyes.

  Orial passed the Princess and her entourage and entered the vaulted hall of the Reservoir of Blue Dragonflies.

  Tall fluted columns rose out of the deep waters to support the roof, each column carved with lotos leaves. And every wall was covered with a frieze of water-meadows and rushes.

  The Lifhendil sense of perspective and scale was a little skewed here, Orial thought, for the sapphire-winged dragonflies that darted across the water-meadows were painted the same size as the slender men and women who were pointing to them. The Lifhendil had portrayed themselves as tall, elegant, slim-waisted. Men and women alike wore their hair long, bound back in elaborate fillets and ribboned braids. The coloured gauzes that draped their bodies were as vivid as the jewel-colours of the dragonflies: sky-azure, crimson-garnet, grass-green emerald.

  As Orial passed by her fingers drifted over the inscriptions that bordered the friezes. The people who inhabited Sulien nowadays had no way of translating the unknown language of the Lifhendil. The names of the dead were lost. The purpose of the Undercity was unknown. Ancient artefacts were unearthed from time to time in back gardens or foundation trenches when new houses were being built – but nothing had yet been found to shed any light on the practices or beliefs of the city’s builders.

  Orial skirted past the Lotos Chamber and sli
pped through the Hall of Green Ninufars. All was dark – and all was still, not even the black waters of the funerary reservoir stirred. No ingenieurs were dredging the surface of the waters today, no Priests preparing for a funeral…

  The sudden low murmur of voices took her by surprise. She crept on – and saw a gleam of light.

  Light in Iridial’s shrine. Lantern-light.

  She shrank close against the wall, wondering who could be in her mother’s shrine, fearing tomb robbers, necromantists.

  The lantern-light cast distorted shadows. Flapping of torn wings, rotted cerecloths… In sudden panic, Orial dropped her own lantern.

  A figure materialised in the doorway, frozen, as if listening.

  No. It could not be. The dead do not return. And yet…

  ‘Who’s there?’ The voice was light as a woman’s, sibilant with fear – yet the stance and costume were those of a full-grown man whose hair was dyed a startling crimson. This was no ghost. Orial snatched up the lantern and made straight for the doorway.

  And the stranger saw her.

  ‘Iridial!’ The whispered name went echoing up into the dark vaults, faint as the drift of incense smoke. ‘But they said you were –’

  ‘N-no.’ Orial shook her head. Her heart was beating too fast. ‘I am called Orial. Her daughter.’

  ‘Iridial’s daughter? But – I thought –’ The stranger was still staring at her.

  ‘Who are you?’ Orial asked, recovering her self-possession. ‘And what are you doing down here?’

  ‘So like her,’ murmured the stranger.

  Orial felt a shiver, chill as melting snow, trickle down her spine. No one had ever mistaken her for her mother before.

  ‘Who are you?’ she repeated. She had the oddest sensation that the stranger was blocking the entrance to the shrine so that she should not see what lay beyond. And suddenly she wanted to see, to know what he was trying to conceal.

  ‘Orial Magelonne,’ said the man in his curiously light voice. ‘Daughter of Jerame Magelonne. Does your father still work in the Sanatorium?’