They claimed to play the music for its own sake, for the
sake of the glory of song, but they all knew otherwise, for
always music serves some master.
Even Finn knew they were liars. Finn, who had held
neither harp nor flute, whose poetry was ambush and
plunder. He leaned into the eroded throne, dismissing the
pearly singer from Kalaman, the pale lad from Palanthas
and the merchant turned poet from Dargaard. Each gathered
a heel of bread for his song and turned, grumbling, eastward
toward Solamnic cities and the possibility of castles and
shelter.
It was night. Bats rustled in the upper regions of the
cavern, and I remembered an old time, a winter time, a
cavern and a dry rustling sound. Two last supplicants stood
between me and the bandit: a beggar whose leg had been
damaged in a field accident, and another bard.
While the beggar begged and was given a loaf, and
while the bard sang and received a crust, I waited in the
shadow of the cave.
None of them had the song. None of them. Neither bard
nor minstrel nor poet nor troubadour. Their songs rang
thinly in the cave, echoing back to them and to us, throwing
the music into a doubling confusion.
I had come this far, and for me there was still more to
discover, more than thin music and mendicant rhymes.
When summoned, I stepped to the light, and when the
dulled eyes of the bandit king rested upon me, I threw back
my hood.
*****
“Firebringer,” he rasped, and “Orestes the Torch.”
As all the bandits hastened to be the one to slay me, to
end the line and the curse before the approving eye of their
leader, Finn raised his hand and stayed theirs.
“No,” he rumbled. The blood of the line of Pyrrhus
should not stain the floors of this cavern. For remember the
curse. Remember the harm it might visit.”
One shaman, seated by the stone foot of the throne,
nodded in agreement, beads rattling as he fondled his bone
necklace.
I followed the bandit guards into the throat of the cave,
to a confusing depth where all light had vanished except the
glow of candles wedged in rocks and later only the torch
that guided us. In a great rotunda hundreds of feet below
the surface they left me, the last of the guards covering their
tracks, candle by extinguished candle, and their footsteps
echoed over each other until the cavern resounded of a
passing, vanished army.
I sat in a darkness most absolute. After only a moment,
I heard a voice.
The language was quiet, insinuating, weaving with the
fabric of my thoughts until I could no longer tell, especially
in this darkness, what words lay outside me and what
within.
OH, TO A WANDERING EYE … it began, a fragment
of song in the darkness.
I scrambled to my feet and lurched toward, I hoped, the
passageway. Bones clattered beneath my feet, rattled
against rotting wood and rusted strings, striking a hollow
music. Spinning blindly in the dark, I realized I had left
father’s harp behind, and knew at once that I could not find
my way back to it.
A second voice caught me standing stupidly in the same
place, huddled in my cloak, expecting the fangs, the
monster’s fatal poisons. At the new sound, I jumped,
flinging my pitiful knife away into the darkness, where it
clattered much too loudly against the rock wall.
“EST SULARIS OTH MITHAS …”
And then, behind me, or what I thought was behind me,
another.
BUILD YE THE WESTERNMOST WALL IN THREE PARTS . . .
And, beyond that, another voice, and yet
another, until I spun about dizzily, buffeted by voices, by
echoes, by wandering sound from centuries before. For not
only did the voices of Southlund and Coastlund mingle in
the darkness with a chorus of High Solamnic, but the
ancient ritual language seemed to change as I heard it,
traveling from voice to voice, each time its pronouncements
varying slightly until I realized that the last voices I had
heard were another language entirely and that I had
followed a passage of familiar words, familiar sounds, back