“I’ve got to cut fast. There’s storm coming!”
Immediately alert, Fergil cocked his head for the flitter’s alarms. “Did you short ‘em off? Did you?” he cried, shaking her when she didn’t answer him. When she denied turning the alarms off, he wouldn’t believe her and, despite her curses and threats, he dashed into the flitter to check..
“It’s the weather. I know! I can feel the storm coming. I don’t need alarms, you stupid twit! I’ve cut crystal long enough!”
“The charts say we’ve twelve clear days ...” he bellowed from the flitter, brandishing the meteorology flimsies at her.
“The variant storm, you numskull, changes any pattern,” she yelled back. “Those nardy charts aren’t worth the plastic they’re printed on. Move yourself out here and cut! Damn you! Cut!”
He came and worked grimly beside her until his voice was ragged and harsh when they pitched a cut. But with each crystal they cut, Killashandra reckoned that she was that much closer to peace, to tranquillity in blood and bone, to a long, long journey away from crystal.
The next octagons cut were flecked with bloodstains: Fergil’s and hers. She wouldn’t even give him time to get permaflesh from the flitter. He cursed once the cutters were tuned, cursed in tempo to the diabolical pace she was setting. They had just carved a match double fifths which finished off a crate when Fergil took her by the arm.
“Nothing’s worth this pace, Killa. Slack off! We’ll kill ourselves.”
She wrenched free, her sweeping glance of him deriding his weakness. “I’ve only today. The storm’ll be here soon.”
Before she could inhale to sing the cutting note, the dew bell clanged.
“Impossible!” Fergil said it like a prayer, dashing to the skimmer.
“Come back here and cut, you fool. It’s only the dew bell. We’ve time.”
“You said the variant storm changed everything,” Fergil replied, heaving the first crate into the lock. “I just got us out of here last time because I made you come at the dew bell.”
“Come back here and cut!”
“Forget the nardy cutting! Help me load.”
“There aren’t enough yet,” she cried, counting the crates as she passed them to him. How many had they already stored in the cargo bay? She couldn’t rightly remember. “There aren’t enough yet. I’ve got to cut enough this time.” She picked up her cutter again and dashed back to the cliff. She cleared her throat and reached for a high G. Her voice gave before she could tune the cutter. Startled, because her voice had never betrayed her, she swallowed several times, took a good deep breath, pressed against her diaphragm and sang out. Again her voice wavered and cracked. “Fergil. Sing it for me!”
The high clear D was almost drowned out by additional klaxons from the skimmer. But she caught the pitch and tuned her cutter.
“C’mon, Fergil,” she yelled over the piercing cry of crystal. “We’ve time for one more!”
“That’s the girl, Killa,” Fergil called back merrily. “Cut the next one for me. Your voice’ll recover. Just keep cutting. Lanzecki said to leave at the dew bell. Remember? I’ll be back. Yes, indeed. I’ll be back.”
His farewell suddenly penetrated the fogs of her fatigued mind. She turned and stared at the flitter.
“Wait for me, will you, Killashandra?” he cried, waving. His mocking laugh and his words made sudden, horrible sense.
She threw aside the cutter with a snarl and raced down the track they’d worn, but the skimmer’s hatch closed before she could reach it. The suction of takeoff pushed her back, almost to the edge of the precipice. She fell to her knees in the rubble, unable to believe that Fergil was abandoning her! And abruptly as certain that that had been in his mind all along. Weeping, she acknowledged both betrayal and abandonment. With an awful clarity she knew what she had tried to rationalize, that she never had met Fergil until the day he had insinuated himself into her presence in the hall. He’d banked, and accurately, on the fact that someone who’d sung crystal as long as she would have erratic recall, even with the help of a playback. He must’ve known of the emergency before he approached her, counting on Lanzecki’s unwilling cooperation. Had Lanzecki betrayed her, too, for the Guild’s need?
She didn’t feel the wind rising, the enormity of the double treachery dulling her sensation of physical buffets. It was the moan of crystal all around that roused her. The moan and the cessation of pain within her.
Utterly calm, she rose to her feet, incuriously noticed the roiling blackness of the swiftly descending storm. Why had she never appreciated the beauty of a mach storm? She became fascinated by its incredible speed, the look of unlimited power in the billowing multiplicity of black, ochre, and gray clouds. The moan intensified into a low shriek, then broke into chords, dissonances, harmonies as the storm winds caressed music from the living rock.
Her body arched with the sonic ecstasy which engulfed her. She began to sing, as her ear remembered melodies composed by the infinite chords around her. Arias seemed to crash into the canyons and symphonies leaped across peaks, bombarding her with ever more diabolically increased tempi, with rhythms that made her sway and whirl in time. She sang, and the whole blue crystal mountain answered her in a magnificently throated chorale.
The blue mountain! That was all Lanzecki had wanted of her. And Fergil. And Lanzecki had sent Fergil with her: certain that the traitor would get enough of the blue resonances on this second trip to bring him unerringly back to the parent sound. And for good measure, Fergil would have her dead body to mark the spot. For she’d never last the storm alive.
So she was to mark the spot? Not if she could prevent it.
The mountain was singing such a fortissimo that she didn’t need to pitch the cutter: She’d only to turn it on.
At the top of her lungs, playing her voice up and down an incredible span, she attacked the crystal face with the cutter, slicing irrespective of axes: hearing the satisfactory scream of the abused crystal as she hacked a way into the mountain.
“Abuse me, would he?” she chanted. “Use me, would he?”
She’d alter the frequencies for him so he’d never find his way back to her pure-hearted mountain. The storm-stroked crystal obligingly fell away in great rectangles from her ruthless assault. With an hysterical strength, she pushed aside, knocked over, crawled past crystal spires and spikes, and made herself a tomb deep in the heart of sound.
The mach storm seduced ever louder, weirder symphonies from the willing rock as it rolled over her blue sepulcher. And Killashandra, bone and blood vibrating to the phenomenon, willing, delivered her soul to the sound of death.