8 – Athéna

Her heart was ready to burst; still, she kept running.

Catching sight, through the curtains of falling rain and the shifting banks of mist on this stormy night, of what looked like the ruins of ancient workshops, she bolted toward them. It was shelter, however futile.

Plunging blindly into the first building she reached, she tripped over a collapsed beam, falling heavily onto shards of pottery long buried under ash and dust. Her fall added, with a low groan whose cry she smothered by biting her cheek to the blood, more cuts to the wounds she had already accumulated. Discerning shapes with difficulty in the dark hovel, she sensed a rickety staircase. She scrambled up it on all fours, swallowing sobs of distress.

Upstairs, the charred floorboards held firm in places and smelled of wet soot, urine, and river silt. But she cared nothing for that. She never knew she narrowly missed a gaping hole in the wooden laths as she took refuge against the jamb of a small window.

She had to catch her breath. Her lungs were as hot as hell, so starved for air that glowing phosphenes danced in a sinister sara-band, filling her field of vision. Her heart was pounding so hard she could easily have believed it was audible all the way across the city. She had forgotten the pain, but she suspected she undoubtedly had at least one broken toe and bruised ribs, perhaps other more serious injuries.

Then she heard the dogs. They were still tracking her, the men holding those mastiffs on leashes. The barks, muffled by the pouring rain, were lost among the ruins of her refuge; and despite her exhaustion, despite her terror—or perhaps thanks to it—she could almost sense the shouted voices of Bey Jharin’s guards, hunting the woman who had just killed their powerful master.

She would not be able to run much further; she felt her heart giving out. Soon the adrenaline would ebb away, she already anticipated it, and then she would measure the price of her frantic flight—of her drowning in the muddy waters of the Argas, which she had swum across under torrents of rain and flashes of lightning streaking this stormy night ; and of the wounds she had been able to ignore until now in her terrified dash. Cold, despair, and exhaustion would then finish her off, and they would come to pick her up like picking a overly ripe fruit fallen from a tree. And they would feed her to the mastiffs.

She knew it; she had seen it. The man who had bought her had forced her to watch, chained at his feet, the savage, sadistic execution of another runaway girl. She had screamed in terror and rage, wishing she could kill him, while he laughed at the spectacle. He paraded his delight and contented hilarity at the sprays of blood, the sounds of chewed flesh and broken bones, and the agonizing screams of the victim; her only crime had been wanting to escape that demented monster.

The memory of the stench of entrails and the monstrous agony of the young woman she had seen die whipped her more effectively than an injection of pure methamphetamine straight into her veins. That was not how her life would end: it was out of the question. She stumbled toward the opposite wall of the upper floor and the building’s second window, searching for a way out. Drunk with a mixture of fear and rage, she gathered all her strength to vault over the stone balustrade and drop to the ground as best she could. The barking was still there, but she remembered that they were tracking the scent of her linci. In the rain, amid the dreadful humidity of this stormy, reeking, mud-caked night, that cursed scent trail was inevitably as drowned as everything else. She had a chance.

At least one chance, if not to escape them, then to die free having tried everything. If that was her fate, at a stretch, she would accept it with pleasure; it might be her only pride and her last, but it would be pride. Her breath still short and painful, she plunged into the maze of ruins.

 

***

 

Priscius had, in a way, gotten rid of her. Following the flight of Sonia, his most valuable tool and professional investment, rumor had spread like wildfire through the city that he had lost the very source of his business’s prestige and quality, and thus would no longer be able to ensure the reimbursement of his debts. Five years earlier, as everyone knew, he had staked a fortune: placing the highest bid on the most luxurious stages of the Celendiaterio, the grandest auction hall in the Cage Market, to acquire Sonia the Languiren; over twenty-seven thousand gold andris, paid spot cash. Only once or twice a year did a slave sell for such an extravagant fortune. Everyone knew he did not possess that sum: he had been forced to borrow. And his winning bid had drawn the ire of wealthy collectors who had been unable to match it and were beaten to the punch; there had even been rumors of collusion with the auctioneer to drive the bidding up to the intended amount and declare Priscius the winner.

Languirens were rare, and many men had not swallowed the insult, just as numerous rivals and creditors of the slaver were waiting for the first opportunity to swoop down on his assets like vultures. But Priscius had lost Sonia; worse, word was that Jawaad the master merchant had seized her without paying a single scrap of iron. The vultures needed to swoop down swiftly on the carcass before nothing was left.

Three days later, the creditors came demanding an accounting, led by an officer of the Merchant Guild tailed by an escort of Elegiatori. He demanded payment within a month of the first installment due. Priscius learned at the same time, and in the most unpleasant manner, that his debts had been bought up by an investment fund of master merchants he knew nothing about. He owed them eight thousand gold andris. To begin with. That was merely the first third of his accumulated debts.

Elena had absolutely no idea what such a sum might represent, but the panic among the household slaves gave her at least a clue as to the gravity of the event. She would not be long in grasping its exact value. Priscius was with his back to the wall; if he did not pay, the bailiff would return with an armed escort and heavy-muscled laborers to seize the entire contents of his estate. The slaves would be part of the lot, like all other sellable personal property in his home.

The interview was stormy: Priscius’s anger was epic, his reaction devastating.

And his decision dramatic: convinced that this was the final, ultimate blow intended to destroy him after the string of set-backs he had accumulated, which his rivals and competitors had cleverly orchestrated, he decided to set aside his scruples to save his business. There was one client to whom Priscius had always refused to sell his goods; the man was rich, fabulously wealthy, even, and prepared to pay fortunes for the finest, most exotic slaves possible.

But he was also a bastard and a sadist devoid of the slightest regard for the girls he bought. He went through two or three a year, it was said; and those he didn’t kill were in such a state after the abuses he delighted in inflicting upon them that, most often, it was more merciful to finish them off than to leave them alive, broken in mind and body. No master slaver in Armanth wanted to sell him anything anymore, and all spat on the ground whenever they had to utter his name. But he was a Bey, a powerful lord of the Athémaïs aristocracy. He had the power and the means to procure new slaves outside the traditional network to satisfy his vices, even if he had to content himself with whatever he could find, having become persona non grata in all the city-state’s markets.

Priscius remained a slaver of renown. If he offered one of his educated girls, a beautiful woman, Earthborn and red-headed to boot, to Bey Jharin Irrisha Arin, the latter wouldn’t even look at the expense to enjoy such a unique windfall. The northerner could extract whatever price he wanted, even if, from his perspective, it had the bitter taste of selling his soul to demons.

A week later, the transaction was finalized.

Elena was on her knees at Priscius’s feet; he had taken the precaution of placing her on a leash, but he was convinced the Earthwoman wouldn’t have the stupidity to defy him again by trying to fight back. And he was right, a fact Elena would never have admitted. After the thrashing she had received during the uproar over her separation from her younger sister, the marks from the flat whip had not yet fully faded, and she had just spent virtually every night of the past two weeks in a cramped cage, forced to beg to be let out. She simply wanted to avoid reliving those abuses, and finding a reasonable way out was her sole concern.

Ever since her brief conversation with Sonia and the strange gift she had given her, which Elena was concealing on her person by every possible means, the only thing keeping her going was the hope of finding Lisa again and the necessity of exercising all the patience she was capable of to escape this nightmare, one way or another. And the only way to achieve that was to agree to play the game and submit. So she had become a perfectly disciplined, calm, and even feminine slave, pleasant and seductive, even though these efforts cost her dearly morally. Priscius wasn’t completely fooled either, but he had tested her enough to see that the High Art had worked its magic on the Earthwoman with a measure of success. It would have taken another full month to finish perfecting her and then educate this slave to fetch the highest price. He had planned to make her a perfect dancer, for which she already possessed the training and potential. Thanks to her, he would have set the stages of the Celendiaterio ablaze and driven the hearts of the bidders wild, tasting a moment of glory that might even have touched the rebellious Earthwoman, who didn’t know how lucky she was. But he had no choice left but to abandon his original goals and strike a deal with a man whose very presence made him nauseous and whose conversation gave him murderous urges.

Elena was hardly feeling confident. Her Athémaïs was still too poor; she struggled to follow the conversation, focused on remaining as calm as possible. But the Bey had touched and groper her like sizing up a horse, and though the exercise had become common for her, though she knew it was customary, she had to hold back growls of anger at the touch of his thick, greasy, clammy hands. This seemed to delight the man, whose bloated face displayed a greedy concupiscence that only added to the Earthwoman’s rage.

Priscius needed no fast-talking sales pitch to close the deal. Jharin was salivating with desire for Athéna; the slaver would have expected him to leap on her right then and there and sample her in his office without waiting. The Bey had not seen anyone so rare, exotic, and beautiful in years and could not believe his luck. There was hardly anything left to negotiate except the price.

The master slaver demanded ten thousand gold andris in commercial bars. That was the price of a Languiren in the highest bidding rounds of the Celendiaterio main hall, a quarter of the value of his estate, including his property. The Bey wasn’t even outraged by the sum; after less than ten minutes of bargaining, he gave him eight thousand five hundred.

Elena realized she had just been traded for a fortune. But while she had learned from the other girls that, often, the more expensive a slave was sold for, the more pleasant and comfortable her fate and future were assured to be, here she was convinced of the opposite. She could read in the Bey’s eyes a vicious, sadistic dementia, the relish tickling his stomach and stroking his ego at the pleasure he would take in using his new acquisition for his most perverse gratification. Oh, Elena had no doubt he would be careful, relatively speaking, not to damage her too quickly. She was red-haired and Earthborn, of a rare and unique beauty owing to her mixed heritage, possessing a wild, rebellious femininity. Yet even Priscius, as he shook his client’s hand while handing him Athéna’s leash, was seized by a painful pang of remorse that he had to smother immediately.

The slaver merely took the time to whisper a few words to Elena before letting Jharin take possession of his new acquisition:

“You have just saved my household; be proud of that, and of the price your master paid to possess you. It is one of the greatest honors a slave can receive.”

Elena did not answer. Her gaze, with its deep green, almost black reflections, flared with a flash of rage that she hid by turning her head away. But at that exact second, she swore to herself never to forget the slaver, and to make him pay by any means necessary the debt for everything he had inflicted upon her.

 

***

 

“You are a Singer of Loss.”

Sonia looked down at Lisa, her blue eyes locked onto her pupil’s jade eyes.

“But… no… no, I am not one, Sonia!”

The slap she dealt her was so fast no one would have had time to see the gesture, least of all her target, who reeled from the blow and collapsed, stunned. Her cheek immediately flushed bright red.

“Mistress! I am your tutor! You are a Singer of Loss, and more besides! Stop denying the gifts you were born with and those I bestowed upon you!”

Azur exploded with anger. She was just returning from the kitchen carrying her chain-sister’s meal and had witnessed the scene. She had to hold herself back from dropping everything and lunging at Sonia to beat her without preamble:

“Are you out of your mind?! What’s wrong with you?!”

The feline San’eshe turned toward the psyké, offering her a sinister smile that she deliberately laced with madness as her answer. Azur grimaced in disgusted fear.

“Physically, no, quite obviously. But I am doing what you should have done. Do you want this girl to remain a stupid, fearful, useless animal when she possesses so much potential? Tell me, psyké, what did you endure to learn your gift of reading thoughts on my face? Would you prefer yourself naive and blind, or capable of such talents to serve the master you cherish so much?”

Azur blew air through her nose and carefully placed Lisa’s meal tray on the bedside table before giving in to the urge to use it to knock Sonia out:

“I don’t slap anyone, and I don’t need violence and cruelty to explain anything!”

“That is precisely why you could never be a tutor. Stay in your place and do not judge mine.”

“I swear to you, if you ever do that again, I’ll—”

Lisa intervened, raising a hand to place it on Azur’s thigh, before pulling herself up with some difficulty and letting herself sink back onto the bed:

“A… Azur, no. Please… She’s… she’s right. She’s… she’s my tutor… I… I wouldn’t be here without her.”

The psyké let out an angry breath before fixing the young Earthwoman with a tender, touched look, gently placing her hand over her sister-slave’s hand resting on her thigh. Lisa offered a soft smile with a loving gaze. She couldn’t hold back a slight shiver at the touch of Azur’s caressing fingers, which didn’t surprise the latter, who had explored the extent of the young Earthwoman’s constant physical sensitivity. She whispered, as an agreement to Lisa’s words:

“Anis…”

Sonia displayed a cynical, victorious smile as she looked down at Azur, before turning to her pupil:

“At least you have learned to listen; I haven’t wasted all my time. You managed to read in three days, didn’t you? Just as you learned to speak in two weeks, just as you measured the time that passed during the Languori, all things no one else could do except you. Talents that make you an exception, and what do you do with them?”

“I… um… I… nothing, mistress… I… It’s… true, I haven’t done anything with them yet.”

“Give her some time, Sonia! Barely more than six days ago, she was dying!”

The tutor cast a look heavy with contempt toward Azur:

“And I kept her alive as best I could. She didn’t have to risk her existence and ruin everything I made of her. She no longer belongs to herself and has no regard for what she has become, nor any awareness of her place and her good fortune. She nearly died!”

 

***

 

She had no idea where she might be. Elena had never explored or even walked the streets of Armanth, nor ever seen the slightest map of the city; at most, she knew the city was immense and built partly of islands and islets constructed on a lagoon, somewhat like Venice.

All she knew was where she had come from and the path she had traveled. The Bey’s palace was in a sort of large residential district on the hillside, set against cliffs of white limestone, the Alba Rupes. She had plunged into the first alleys descending the steep avenues of the neighborhood, rushing as fast as possible toward the mouth of the river, doing her best to cut through courtyards and gardens to avoid being caught by passersby or guards.

She would wonder later by what miracle she had managed to escape them. The storm that had broken out just before her flight had obviously played no small part. But it hadn’t taken long for them to track her like an animal, them and their dogs.

Elena zig-zagged through the ruins of what had once undoubtedly been an islet inhabited by wood and carpentry workshops. It had clearly been abandoned after a series of floods and fires that had left little standing. Hiding places were hardly lacking here, but none could guarantee she would escape the dogs and their sense of smell. Fear gripped her stomach as she plunged deeper into what remained of this sort of village with cluttered streets and walls packed tightly against one another. At every distant shout, every muffled bark, she flinched, holding back a cry of fear. It was terribly dark; the storm hid Loss’s immense moon behind heavy clouds, leaving barely enough light to place one foot in front of the other.

It was impossible to have any sense of time passed. Pressed against the soot-blackened ruins of a rickety wall, Elena strove to try and determine the distance and direction of the rare sounds that reached her, while the rain and storm muffled everything. But the deeper she plunged into the ruins, the more the faint echoes of her pursuers faded away.

She did not dare hope that she might have managed to escape them. The linci was still there, that cursed symbiote grafted onto her thigh like a fatal piece of jewelry, which had altered her scent to leave an invisible trail that the dogs were all trained to recognize and track. She would have wanted to tear it off, she had thought of nothing else since it had been implanted in her, but she had learned that even so, the scent was part of her and would only dissipate after long weeks. She would only worsen her condition for nothing. Besides, she avoided thinking about it: she was already at the end of her strength, feeling as though she had been running and scrambling barefoot for hours under the rain that chilled her to the bone, and before long, exhaustion would overcome her.

And if she survived that, it would be time to think about hunger and thirst.

She resumed her exploration of the ruins, cursing herself for chewing on dark thoughts that only served to reduce to nothing her efforts to stay alive in the immediate present. She knew it; there was no point repeating to herself that she was light-years away from her home, her city, her country, any civilized place endowed with reasonable laws and freedoms. She was alone and lost, with no contacts and no hope that anyone would come to her rescue. There was only herself and her determination to find an escape, whatever it might be, and one day manage to find Lisa again.

 

***

 

“Down on the ground, you dirty slut! It’s on all fours and under the whip that you’ll eat!”

The shout was followed by the first blow, which tore the skin from her lower back to her buttocks. He hadn’t even waited for her to drop to her knees and obey before striking, and he delivered a second blow as she attempted to approach the bowl containing the foul mush meant to serve as her meal. Elena panicked, anticipating the next one, and balked, pulling on the leash Jharin held firmly. The violent jerk he gave was so powerful that her collar choked her: she lost her breath in muffled gasps.

He burst out laughing, relishing the spectacle of his new acquisition half-crawling, piteously attempting to breathe, toward the food she was forbidden to touch with her hands, an humiliation designed to turn her into what he intended for her: a decorative animal that would never have the right to stand upright, nor even to move in any way other than on all fours. He was already thinking of the pleasure he would take in turning her over like this to his dogs, specifically trained for such purposes, and watching the show with a few chosen friends.

Elena ended up eating as he wanted, in sobs of terror waiting for the next cracking sound of the whip. It was the only alternative to escape the blows and the pain. He did not strike with the short, flat whips of the slavers, but with a terribly thin crop, crafted from a weave of ox sinew and copper wire. Every blow left red welts so deep that blood beaded from them, the impact radiating so intensely it induced nausea. It took almost a minute to begin feeling the pain recede to a tolerable level.

She had sensed that this man was a lunatic when he bought her, and she had quickly realized from the very first hours that he was a monster. He had begun by raping her as soon as she arrived at his estate, right on the steps of the staircase leading to his villa, then threw her among his servants—most of whom were almost as terrified of their master as his slaves were.

Ordering music, he had forced Elena to dance naked, still in shock from the brutal rape, in front of all his men, his servants, and his slaves, guiding her with heavy strikes of a snake-whip. That was how he had presented his new marvel to everyone, boasting of the purchase before his entire household. Until now, Elena had often considered everything she had experienced to be a descent into hell. Yet hell was only just beginning.

 

***

 

The psyké opened her eyes wide. For a brief instant, Sonia’s gaze had just expressed far more than her usual disdain and arrogant pride. There was anger, resentment, a deep and intense concern that she could almost have touched with her finger. This woman, so selfish and contemptuous of everything, cared deeply for Lisa, with a profound and genuine affection. Azur opened her mouth to voice her astonishment, abandoning the idea of hiding her surprise. Immediately Sonia understood and glared at her hatefully, before turning her attention back to her pupil:

“From now on, it is your master who will teach you everything you must become and be for him. I will not meddle; I have far better things to do, and no one ordered me to continue educating you. But you are a Singer of Loss. You can understand it, accept it, and learn to make use of it faster and better than anyone, or remain stupid and weak and continue to be afraid to live and own what you are. But if you choose weakness, I will take great pleasure in torturing you until I force you to learn. For no one ordered me to stop educating you either.”

Lisa flinched, cowering, nodding fearfully:

“Y… yes, mistress. But… but how do I begin? I don’t have the slightest idea what happened! When I try to remember, I’m paralyzed with terror!”

“Begin by remembering why you Sang, why you saved your master. Why you then took the stupid risk of dying to save his life. And do not try to remember it; remember it! I know better than anyone that you forget nothing. Unless… you are too afraid to remember.”

Azur stepped in again, her bewilderment past. She had to make an effort not to betray at that moment the compassionate—and equally annoying—emotion that had just touched her upon realizing the depth of Sonia’s feelings for the Earthwoman:

“And you, what do you know about any of this, huh?”

“Are you so blind or naive as to still believe I am merely a simple tutor, Azur? My work with her is not finished, and this work, I am surely the only one capable of doing it. See to teaching her how to read, make tea, and all those silly trifles to please your master, and let the one who knows what she is doing handle what matters most.”

 

***

 

The rain passed from a downpour to a fine drizzle. The seasonal storm was moving away. Ortentia finally decided to pierce through the heavy clouds a little, gradually illuminating the ruined village.

Elena had not heard calls or barking for a long time, only the sound of water trickling through the night. She wandered through the ruins, limping. It was no longer possible to run; every step was now a torture that drew tears of pain from her. Though she had been able to ignore it until now, she had no doubt she had broken a toe.

She had crossed almost the entire width of the islet. In the bluish light of the phantom moon, she could now make out the details of the place; it was far more extensive than she could have imagined in the gloom. Anyone lost here in the labyrinth of abandoned streets and houses would have had a hard time finding their way back easily.

She was soaked and her teeth were chattering with cold; she wore nothing but a loincloth of precious silk and jewelry for all her clothing. Stumbling between two alleys, she chose what appeared to be the most intact ruin in the block of houses. The building had a second floor and a roof still whole. Slipping inside, she found herself in darkness once more, guiding herself by touch. Climbing the steps of the stone staircase to take refuge on the upper level was the final effort she was able to manage. Had someone been hiding in the shadows, she would have been unable to notice. She collapsed, overcome by exhaustion in the first available corner, curling up as best she could to keep warm.

Not a handful of seconds passed before she fell asleep.

 

***

 

There was blood everywhere. It had splashed across the entire marble-tiled wall up to the ceiling. Jharin was pinned face-first against one of the half-columns, as if standing and strangely flattened. A portion of his ribs, ejected from his ribcage, pierced his greasy skin; what now served as his face was nothing more than a pulp whose only recognizable feature was a hanging eyeball, dangling piteously, appearing to display an almost ridiculous look of surprise. He wouldn’t fall unless peeled off the wall into which the impact had embedded him.

Elena was still lying down, half-unconscious on the Bey’s wide and overly soft bed—or at least what remained of it. The immense bedroom, decorated with taste as pompous as it was dubious, was so ravaged that an observer would have hesitated between the damage of a powerful explosive and the devastation of a raging tornado. Nothing remained intact except the young woman. Elena managed to regain a bit of strength and tore away the leather cord with which Jharin had been strangling her a moment earlier while brutally raping her once again. It took her another brief moment to manage to remove the bangles binding her wrists together and realize the havoc of which she was both the epicenter and the author.

She did not understand how it had happened, but she knew she was responsible for it. Something had occurred when, suffocating from the cord making her lose consciousness, she had suddenly sensed she was going to die. In what remained of her breath, she had begged and screamed, and that scream had turned into an inhuman sound.

The next moment, reality had gone mad.

Elena had no time to question herself further. Jharin was dead, crushed against the wall; the noise that devastation must have made would surely alert the staff. She knew that, given the Bey’s practices and his whims, his servants wouldn’t decide to come see what was happening immediately. Screams and violent noises coming from his quarters were common occurrence. It would be prolonged silence that alerted the household.

She had done that thing: the Song of Loss. Though Cénis had only spoken of it in hushed terms, she had understood that there existed here a sort of devastating curse of which only red-headed individuals were capable. A curse that seemed to concern her as much as her younger sister. She did not linger to measure the extent of this information; she had only a few moments to flee. There was only her loincloth here, and while she had the reflex to grab it to clothe herself, she didn’t think to grab her abuser’s duds, in which she would have been swimming anyway, so vast and fat was he.

Stepping out onto the terrace balcony, Elena vaulted over the balustrade to drop painfully into the estate’s bushes one floor below. Thunder rolled, and the rain began to turn into a downpour. She had to run, run as fast as she could, flee as far as possible; she knew all too well what would happen if the bodyguards of the pig who mastered this place caught her. Fear in her gut, she bolted into the shadows through the grounds.

She would only understand much later why Sonia had given her that small bar resembling shining silver, advising her to keep it on her person by any means necessary.

 

***

 

“How… how do I go about it?”

Lisa stared at Sonia, lost and pleading. Admitting what the tutor was saying was far beyond her strength. She knew very little about Singers of Loss, only what Cénis and Lilandra had been able to tell her, and that carried no more weight than what Sonia had just explained. And in any case, it seemed that only to Sonia did this thing appear as a gift. From the perspective of the other people who had spoken to her about it, on Loss it was a sort of dangerous, deadly curse capable of terrible misdeeds, to the point that anyone who might one day possess the capability was hunted down and enslaved. Learning so abruptly that she was therefore among the worst cursed beings of this world only fed her bitterness toward her fate.

Sonia knew this full well. But the San’eshe possessed a perception of the Song of Loss very different from the rest of the Lossyans. And with it, a way of understanding it of which the tutor was an inheritor. In her distant jungles, Singers of Loss were revered as the expression of Mother Earth and her wild will; it was the role of shamans to guide and channel Singers to use their gift and master it. In another life, buried beneath the thick layers of her madness, Sonia should have become one of those spiritual guides: she had been trained and prepared for it from childhood, until everything stopped and that life was cruelly destroyed.

“Do not try. Content yourself with remembering, and no longer fleeing what you recall. The Song of Loss is sculpted by emotions and feelings: fear makes it explode, hatred makes it devastating, love irradiates it. It is the most intimate and deep trust that tames and muzzles it. Deny what you feel, continue to be stupid, blind, and fearful, and it will remain a wild, unleashed animal that will devour everything, including you.”

Azur listened with furrowed brows. Her trust in Sonia was relative in the extreme, and she would have gladly seen herself cornering her to give her a proper thrashing rather than cooperating with this perverse, dangerous woman. But she had heard wind of the chase with Damas and the tutor’s exploits. She had always thought no one could match the Jemmaï in his cat-burglar skills, and the psyké carefully swallowed her pugnacious urges from then on.

On the other hand, she understood clearly enough what Sonia was explaining: the San’eshe seemed clearly to know what she was talking about, and it shed light on certain past details, such as Jawaad’s barely perceptible disappointment when he had cut Lisa’s palm to perform the rite of christening the Callianis. He had expected something to happen, but nothing did. Azur now understood that he had thought, by scaring his slave in such a manner, to awaken a jolt of survival instinct in her that would have begun to manifest the Song. But nothing at all had happened.

It was not when she feared for her own life that Lisa had Sang; it was when she feared for Jawaad’s that the Song of Rage had exploded in a brutal Awakening. Azur cracked a smile that was as touched as it was curious, but had no time to ask the question she had in mind. Duncan, the senior physician and master of the hospice, had just entered the room, trailed by Lilandra. Azur lowered her head to bow humbly, Sonia doing the same, though with a smile that made her gesture of respect debatable.

The old doctor with the graying beard displayed a kindly, cheerful smile:

“Good evening, slaves. So, how is Jawaad’s little prodigy doing tonight?”

 

***

 

“Hey, look what’s lingering around here!”

“Ho!… Well, the storm leaves us pretty things, I must say. Superb things, even!”

“If she’s still alive, yeah.”

“Did you see the jewelry she’s wearing? She must be a Languiren to be decked out like that. Look, even her breasts are pierced. Pretty hoops, by the way; do you think those are real pearls?”

“Looks like it. Bah, wait, we’ll soon see; she looks dead…”

The first of the three thugs approached when the woman curled up in a ball in a corner of the upper floor snapped her eyes open, trying to sit up.

The men facing her were surprised; she was indeed alive after all, even if, given her condition, doubt was permissible. But they had little to fear from her, and her reaction made them rather hilarious.

“Ha, well, there’s your answer, Janus: she’s alive!”

The one named Janus stood slightly back, watching the scene with arms crossed, looking relaxed. Clad in leather and armed, he had the air of a seductive swashbuckler, boasting a meticulously trimmed goatee, the only clean and genuinely maintained thing about him. His two companions had much the same look: jackets of worn, tired leather missing buttons, faded clothes whose colors had long passed, and armed as well. From their sinister faces, one could easily guess they were footpads.

Janus offered a satisfied smile as he stared at the girl, estimating her price. She must be truly beautiful if one took the time to imagine her without the filth, blood, and mud she was smudged with. Wherever she came from, she must have been through hell and was covered in the cuts and slashes typical of those sustained when running blindly for one’s life. She had auburn hair, and no one would have had the foolish idea of dyeing a slave’s hair red, certainly not in Armanth. Janus knew how to put two and two together:

“Alive and on the run, yeah. She’s definitely not a Languiren; Languirens never run away. But for now, who cares. She’s prime merchandise, but we’ll have to hawk her carefully and not right away. That blood on her isn’t just hers.”

“You mean she killed someone? Look at how she’s built! She wouldn’t even scare Serhen’s kid!”

“Bah, up to you; in your shoes, I’d be a bit cautious…”

The broader of Janus’s two companions, Meeri, shrugged and posted himself in front of the girl, who was trying to stand, balancing with difficulty on her feet. He towered over her by a good head and a half. She was terrified, haggard, and seemed not to truly understand everything these men were saying in their thick slang and heavy accent.

“She’s just a slave; since when do we fear those animals? Then, turning to the redhead, he bellowed: “Down on your knees, come on!”

Elena flinched, but instead of obeying, she took a step back. Janus noted the reaction, and especially the spark of rage and determination that had just been born in the girl’s frightened gaze. Meeri grunted, annoyed. Beside him, Berrel burst out laughing:

“Well, old man, you blew it.”

“She’s not going to play the smart aleck for long! I said: down on your knees!”

“No!”

Janus was surprised by the shout. This time the young woman, exhausted as she was, was beginning to sink into a defensive posture. He was really not sure what was going to happen, but he took a few steps back, just in case; after all, she was red-headed. Meeri was fuming, paying no mind to that detail. He pressed violently on the girl’s shoulders to force her to the floor. Given his strength, she collapsed with one knee to the ground, yet resisting as best she could:

“On your knees, slave!”

“No!”

Elena understood immediately, feeling what was happening inside her own body. It was like realizing she held a grenade in her hand, and simply pulling the pin without fear. The small bar of Loss-metal Sonia had entrusted to her, hidden in her jewelry, vibrated more and more frantically, and in unison with that vibration, her heart and soul were seized by a nausea beating at the exact same musical rhythm. The surge that rose from her stomach to the edge of her lips tasted of bile and fury, and her lungs filled in a second with violent heat. She could feel the two men closest to her; she could see the smallest detail of their bodies, their movements, their beings, with no need to touch them. Metal, leather, fabrics, and flesh mingled—she perceived everything without needing to look. The fire in her guts became a hell pressing to escape, and she Sang.

The sound she uttered then resembled a vocalise. But in an instant, it took on a surreal, inhuman pitch. It was not vocal cords that could produce such a harmonic, but a cacophony of mad instruments having barely any resemblance to the human voice. The air rippled like disturbed water and brightened as if some whimsical god had just kindled a light from an invisible source. And suddenly everything became heavy, terribly heavy. As the floorboards creaked dangerously under their own weight, Meeri and Berrel collapsed to their knees, groaning in pain, crushed by gravity that had suddenly become unbearable.

Janus stared at the slave pulling herself up, flabbergasted. He had never seen a Singer of Loss in action, and this woman facing him now stood straight, her face contorted with rage, almost divine in her fury. Janus felt his guts knot painfully with fear at the memory of tales and stories of the demonic emissaries of the ancient gods. He realized he was perhaps staring at one, and that only his cool composure explained why he wasn’t pissing his breeches. He even asked himself the incongruous question of why he wasn’t running at top speed to see if the air was less dangerous elsewhere. He could feel the hair on his skin standing up, as much from pure fear as from static electricity. But he remained in front of the Singer, fascinated; that was how he would surely tell it later: he was too fascinated to run, and in any case, he wouldn’t have left his two fool friends to die alone.

Elena’s eyes, usually a deep dark green, were now two pearls of fleeting, throbbing light. The air around her trembled, as if heat waves were running along the walls and floor; and everything metallic on the three men and the girl seemed illuminated by a whimsical, fleeting blue glow.

Elena felt the pressure of gravity weighing on the two men she had brought down. She felt it as if she were experiencing it in their place, able to capture their efforts to breathe, to bear their own multiplied mass; the tensions weighing on their bones, their tendons, their organs. They were suffering and struggling, and she was living it, sharing this monstrous sensation she was causing, enduring as much of the effort she exerted to crush them. Horror struck her at this heightened realization, and she released everything when she understood that the cracking sound was that of their bones, unable to take that weight any longer. Yet she knew she should never have been able to hear it.

When she ceased Singing, letting reality return to normal, her voice remained low and menacing, facing the two men she had just overwhelmed, who were gasping as best they could:

“Never again will I get on my knees! Never again will I be a slave!”

Janus didn’t make a move, staring at the young woman. He realized he was no longer breathing, which struck him as an odd idea. But he only caught his breath very slowly, very carefully. The floorboards were no longer creaking, and apparently dust and ambient air had just decided to behave normally. Apparently. It was possible she could start again.

The girl who a moment before had taken on all the appearances of a demon from before the Long Winter returned a look of defiance he was not going to take lightly. But she was livid, and her eyes were filled with tears. She was trembling with exhaustion. Janus was now looking at nothing more than a fragile young woman—in fact, even more terrified than he was, and whom he guessed to be at the end of her rope in every sense of the word. That made her all the more dangerous, though; in her place, he would make them pay dearly for his skin, down to his last breath. Demon, Singer of Loss, or simple lost human being, he reckoned that in the end, anyone would do the same, but it was what she whispered in a raspy, weary voice right after that gave him his idea.

“Then kill me… or let me… go. But… never again.”

Janus was the first who would have been surprised by the smile he cracked. That was it—his idea wasn’t bad at all after all. He approached his two companions slowly, not without a certain caution, and more to hold them back from doing something foolish than to check on their condition. They were still coughing and would be shaken for a good minute at least. Janus didn’t take his eyes off Elena as she reeled further, resisting unconsciousness furiously and with all her strength. He extended a hand toward her very slowly, palm open, deploying all his talents as a friendly charmer to reassure the girl, who could very well crush him in a few moments if she panicked:

“In my opinion, I can offer you something better. But you’re going to have to trust me. My name is Janus, and yours?”