“You’re okay, aren’t you?” Jurtan said. He had been fumbling in his belt, looking for his carrying-pouch.
His sister managed a half-hearted giggle. “Okay? Sure, I’m okay - we’re only penned up here like pigeons in a coop, waiting for the foxes to break through the -”
Then Mont found the pouch, and what he was after inside of it - a lighter flint. He struck the flint. The momentary spark that flashed out showed a fairly small closet, now filled with wreckage, a dust-covered sister, and the former contents of the fractured shelves. Mandolins. Lutes, fiddles, a twisted harp. Underlining the point, a string snapped with a quivering twang somewhere deep within the pile. Other cabinets stacked against the walls of the closet held other instruments.
As Shaa would say, Jurtan thought, there is a certain air of inevitability about this. The door shuddered again under the weight of energetic bodies and one of the panels in the top half began to give way. A new jagged slash of light spilled on the far wall. Through the crack in the door parts of shoulders could be seen. “Do you have any ideas?” Jurtan said.
“I’m looking for a sword or a club or something useful - you’d better do the same thing.”
“Okay, so you don’t have any helpful ideas either. In that case there’s something I want to try.” He pulled the lid off one of the crates and rummaged inside.
“Will it help?”
One board in the door panel snapped cleanly away and sailed across the room. A brawny hand reached through, flailing ineffectually. “It might,” Jurtan said. He held up a flute and squinted at it.
“The other way,” Tildy said.
“Huh?”
“You hold it the other way round.”
“Oh.” Jurtan reversed the flute and put it to his lips.
More hands were madly ripping apart the upper door; their entry was clearly a matter of seconds.
“I hope this is good, Jurtan,” Tildy said.
“Me too,” he mumbled. The music in Jurtan’s head, which had been holding at an expectant quiver, added a sudden snarl of trumpets and the rolling patter of a snare drum. He put his fingers over the holes on the body of the flute, blew into the mouthpiece, and froze. His body froze, and his arms in their raised position and his eyes staring downward at the flute, but a high clear sound had appeared in the air, and his ears were locked around the sound, hearing it to the exclusion of all other senses, his mind stuck on the single thought of the sound and the breath coming almost on its own from his chest. And as his breath whistled through the flute, his mind realized slowly, very slowly, that it was actually working, it had not after all gone blank, the thoughts were forming and circulating like leaden snails but they were indeed alive, he was awake, and there was music not only in his head but also, for the very first time, outside of it as well.
Jurtan Mont took another breath and blew again, and this time, even more amazingly, his fingers began to dance on the body of the flute at the ends of his frozen arms. Music, true music burst out, harmonizing and rounding with the music in Jurtan’s head, a midrange fluid melody running against the insistent scales of the strings and the exulting blaze of trumpets. He wondered how it sounded to the listeners - probably weird, because most of the music was really in his mind; the flute sound would be tantalizingly incomplete without the rest. He concentrated on his eyes. Haltingly, with a deliberately leisurely pace, they began to roll up, His fingers, unconcerned with any irrelevant actions elsewhere in the body, seemingly plugged directly into some hidden musical control center, kept up their flying leaps back and forth along the flute. Then the doorway came into view, the splintered upper door, the large gaping hole where the whole wooden panel was smashed through, the two Guardsmen halfway through the opening - the two Guardsmen! The two Guardsmen, draped across the lower lip of the opening, their arms trailing downward, their heads lolling, their faces blank.
Jurtan’s suspicion was growing stronger. He managed to turn his head, just a little, and marched his eyes around to the side. Tildy, too, had slumped backward to the floor, a dazed expression on her face, her fingers curled limp and loose around a mallet-shaped piece of wood. Jurtan gradually closed his eyes and concentrated on listening. Over the magnetic rush of the music, like a whirlpool of sound still trying to suck him back in, was - nothing! No running feet, no bashing swords, no cries, no moans, nothing!
Wow! Jurtan thought. Not too bad! It seemed as though everybody in earshot was paralyzed, knocked out, shut off, just the way he usually behaved when music hit him. Right behind that realization came another that he didn’t like nearly as much - his fingers were really starting to hurt. And the flute was heating up.
Whatever this ability was, its power was beginning to take a tolclass="underline" Jurtan didn’t know how much longer he could keep playing. If the effect on the people around him was anything like it was on him, though, they might start to wake up as soon as the music stopped, but if they did they’d be pretty groggy. They wouldn’t be accustomed to the situation, either. That would give him a bit of time. Maybe he could buy a little more time than that, too.
Jurtan focused on the music, willing it to go faster.
His fingers, already racing, began to fly. A repetitive pattern in the strings moved a tone higher, then higher than that, picking up an element of added insistency. He began to note the approach of a crescendo. A wisp of smoke curled up from the flute. Then, suddenly but with an air of finality, in a paroxysm of muscle-wrenching glee, a blast of virtually concrete pandemonium shot out from under Jurtan’s hands and across the room and out around the hall. The flute burst apart, shattering into tiny shards. A surprising silence echoed.
Then the silence was broken by the single crash of Jurtan sagging backward into the shelf of twisted mandolins. He was exhausted. His fingers were swelling; in the light from the hall he could see the red and purple colors of developing bruises on the tips. They hurt, too - Jurtan put out a hand to support himself and jerked it back after only the barest touch, wincing at the tenderness. An electric tingling of which he’d been only vaguely aware was fading, making itself known by its absence. There was also the sharper pain from the flute splinters driven into his fingers and his face around the lips.
Jurtan’s catalogue of woe was abruptly interrupted by a groan from the doorway. One of the Guard was stirring. Jurtan gritted his teeth, shook a few protruding splinters loose from his hands, and staggered to his feet. Tildy was breathing but seemed deeply unconscious. He eyed her wood club, chewing his lip. The club had been the supporting upright from one of the shelves, not much of a weapon really, but on one end of it was a heavy iron fitting. Okay, he thought, but I sure wish somebody was around to see this. He knelt and wrapped his hand around the club.
Yeow! It felt like he’d rested his fingers on an active griddle. Jurtan yanked his hand back, then heard another gurgle from the trooper in the door. He forced himself to reach out again, settled the club into the crease of his palm, as far away from his fingertips as he could get, and lifted the shaft of wood into the air.
I can do this, he thought, really I can. The soldiers in the door were stirring, but that was about it. Jurtan looked down at them for a moment, set his jaw, and swung the club, then swung it again. He tried to tell himself it actually wasn’t that bad the second time.
The door was so battered that Jurtan was able to kick it off its hinges and out into the hall without using his hands for leverage. He spent another minute bashing the remaining dozen troopers in the hall over the head. Then he returned to the instrument closet, gingerly selected a new flute from the crate, and slipped it into his belt.