The domed building was really just a series of airlocks and pressure chambers, and each opened door layered on the discomfort in the air. I could actually hear it, now, could feel it in my bones and in my teeth. The articulated sheath seemed to cringe on my back, like a crushed spider. It was the hardest thing not to just draw steel and start shooting. Anything to drown out that mad Song.
The Chanters come from a narrow arc of Alexander's life story. An unhinged time. Becoming divine had been tough on the three brothers, and they each dealt with it in their own way. Alexander's place in the divinity meant he was particularly sensitive to the pain and sickness of men, and his initial reaction was to try to heal all of it. Noble, but foolish. Morgan did not try to win all the battles, only the one before him. But Alexander locked himself up and tried to sing a song of healing that would spread around the whole world. To say that he failed would be… well, polite. He went mad. The song he tried to form ended up forming him, as he tapped into deeper and older powers than he could ever understand. When he broke free from it, the song continued, and became the subject of worship for certain of his followers. They etched it, and it cut them, and together they became the Chanters.
I always felt like the Song was getting the better part of that conversation, between scion and invokation. It seemed as if the Chanters had to form their whole lives around this thing that they barely understood, much less controlled. They got farther and farther away from their service to Alexander, and became more and more their own thing. A separate thing. But the power that this service gave them, my Brother. I didn't think Amon's captive Cult was going to invent something to replace them anytime soon.
We stayed far enough away from the central chorus, where the Elders of the Sect kept the Song, trading off watches to rest their voices and their minds. The visitors' chambers were in the perimeter of the dome, though still too deep for my comfort. They weren't really built for comfort though, I guess. Lesea led me down a long hallway of circular doors, each vibrating like the stops in a pipe organ. I just kept my eyes forward, my hands at my sides. The woman next to me seemed completely at her ease, of course, and I saw that an unnoticed tension had left her face. She looked a bit drunk, actually.
Cassandra's door had its own little hallway, and the drone grinding out from it was something I could feel in my lungs. Lesea paused before she opened it and looked at me over her shoulder.
"Your shields will not help you in here, Paladin. But I would brace yourself, nonetheless."
I gritted my teeth and clenched my fists into knots. She nodded, then opened the door.
Cassandra was in chains, draped from heavy iron manacles and a collar. She was on her knees, her head bowed, her eyes closed. I would have thought her asleep if she hadn't turned her head at our entrance. There were four Chanters with her, one at each of the cardinal points, three men and a woman. They were singing through her, the drone of their voices whipping her robe and hammering her bones. And yet she looked calm. In the whining harmony I could hear a voice, nearly subsonic. Asking questions, about the Fratriarch, the Betrayer, the kidnapping. The murders. Not direct questions, just bringing up images and then abandoning them, like a dream that you forget with your first breath in the morning. Yet these dreams were carried on hammer blows. They spoke at the level of thoughts and spirit. I caught myself mouthing what I knew of the Fratriarch, intoning the story of our first meeting, our first fight, our first lesson together. The last time I had seen him. That I was worried he was dead, that it was my fault.
Cassandra was silent, cocking her head to listen.
"She is unique in this," Lesea whispered to me, though I wasn't sure she was even talking anymore. "We have never sung a song like her."
"Do you question many Amonites?" I asked, each word a gasp.
"We rarely have the opportunity, not since the Betrayal. They are always difficult. Such clear thinkers. Not like…" She paused.
"Morgan. I know. All fire and emotion. Will she talk?"
"She talks all the time. Just not about things that we want to hear."
As if to demonstrate, Cassandra raised her head and spoke to us, her eyes still closed.
"It is a series of mathematical thirds, iterated and then reiterated across a platform of subsonic patterns. I would call it beautiful, I think, in other circumstances." Finally, she opened her eyes and looked at me. A little surprise. "Eva?"
I didn't answer her, and in time she shut her eyes again. The singers did not stop. Lesea plucked at my sleeve, and I happily turned away and followed her into the hall.
"So you see she is well," the Chanter said. Her voice was strangely the same breathy whisper here, amidst the din of the Song, as it had been in the quiet garden above.
"I need to speak to her, still. Alone."
"No," she said, and her voice raised a little, gaining an echo and a vibration that unsettled me. "You do not. You are here for other purposes, Eva Forge. I feel the dissonance in your blood."
"Oh, that's just distaste, lady. Now get her out of those chains and give us a little privacy."
We stood, staring at each other in the cacophonous hallway, unmoving. Finally, she nodded and motioned me away from the door.
"She is in ritual now. I will not interrupt that. But we may sit, and talk this through." She turned and walked down the hall. When I followed her, she glanced over her shoulder. "Can I get you something to drink?"
"Whatever you've got," I said. "And plenty of it."
* * *
What they had was black wine, served in crystal that hummed between my fingers. We drank it in the quietest room I had been in since I had entered this damned building. The walls were three feet thick and the door was like a tombstone, rolled aside by pistons as thick as my waist and then sealed from the inside. Still I could hear that music, running through my bones.
"How do you people stand it?" I asked, my face buried in the wide mouth of the wineglass. "It's like living on the monotrain."
"Hm. Yes, I suppose it would be. But this is something you grow to love." She paused to drink. When she raised the glass to her mouth, the fluted chimes of her mask shuffled aside. Her lips were painted black, and she had the most delicate bones. She was careful not even to breathe when the mask was retracted. "You would have loved it, I think. Had you been born to the right path."
"We don't choose our paths, Lady Chanter. Not any more than they choose us."
"How very fatalistic. Appropriate for a warrior, I suppose."
I drank my wine and listened to the music in my bones. She tried to start a couple conversations, but I wasn't liking it. This place wasn't for me. It wasn't for Cassandra, either. Lesea was halfway through describing something about octaves and the high calling of the Chanters when a noise played its way through the horrible chorus, a noise that gave even the good Lady Lesea pause.
To me it just sounded like more of the Song, at least at first. The background noise of earthquakes. But then I noticed the Chanter had stopped talking, and was sitting perfectly still with her head cocked to one side, wineglass halfway to her mouth. Then I noticed that the chorus had kicked it up a notch, rising in waves and tides of pure noise.
Something tore through the chorus, like a jagged line of fire in a forest of dry grass. The Chanter dropped her glass and stood. The mask of chimes snapped open, revealing a perfect mouth and teeth white as tile and sharp as knives.
"Stay here," she said, and her voice ripped from her throat like barbed honey. "I'll be right back."
I stumbled at the sound of her voice, my glass tumbling to the floor, warm black wine splashing across the plush rug. I slid boneless from my chair, my skull vibrating, my fingers numb. By the time my eyes cleared the room was empty, and the door was sliding shut.
I struggled to my feet, using my sword as a crutch, leaning against it as I swayed in the wake of Lesea's impossible voice. Even I could hear the chaos in the Song outside. A great deal of divine violence was being done, at octaves that barely registered to my mortal ears. I dragged myself to the door, checked to see that it was locked, and slid back to the floor with my back to the wall. Time for the trick.
The bullets clattered as I dropped them to the floor, emptying the cylinder with a flick of my wrist. I loaded two blanks, special rounds we kept to scare the hell out of crowds. Two rounds.
"Morgan, god of war, lord of the hunt," I intoned. "Your breath is smoke, your mouth is the grave. Your skin is fire."
My skin stiffened and then sprouted the tiniest scales, blackening as the invokation spread across me. It wouldn't last long, but I didn't need it to. I held the bullistic next to my ear, said a little prayer for Barnabas and Cassandra, closed my eyes, and pulled the trigger.
Sharp pain, and then the sound of the world was sucked away into a humming maelstrom of silence. Quickly I switched hands before I lost my nerve, held the gun next to my other ear, and pulled the trigger. A lesser noise, but still great pain. I stood. My eyes were burning with powder. The scales had flashed away in the heat, but my face was blackened with powder. Warm, thick blood poured out of my ears. The world around me was silence. I could still feel the Song in my bones, but not in my head. I flicked the two rounds onto the ground, reloaded my bullistic, then exchanged weapons and invoked a silent rite of guidance.
In absolute, deafening silence, I opened the door and stepped out into chaos and fire.