Moon looked like he was on the edge of speaking, but Nevchaned’s displeasure reached his tongue first. “When did you come in? I thought you were still out.”
“I got in late.” Moon’s voice was thick and slightly slurred. In spite of herself, Dandra glanced up. The softness had gone out of Moon’s eyes, replaced by a hardness as he looked back at his father. It was unusual for a kalashtar-even one so rebellious as Moon-to indulge in drink. Moon seemed so hostile that he reminded Dandra more of a young human, or even of Diad, Natrac’s half-orc son by Bava in Zarash’ak.
Nevchaned’s face tightened. “Wash and take yourself out again. You shouldn’t be here now.”
“Why?”
Dandra decided to interrupt the argument before it grew. Erimelk was close, and she wanted to examine him before his coarse chant of the killing song got on her nerves. “Because we’re going to try something that could be dangerous,” she said. She smiled at Moon. If he had somehow developed feelings for her, she wouldn’t hesitate to use them. “Go. There’s nothing for you to see here. Maybe we can talk later?”
Somewhat to her astonishment, the appeal worked. Moon looked at her, then dropped his eyes, folded his hands together and bent his head over them in a surprisingly traditional gesture. “Patan yannah.”
He stepped back into his room. Nevchaned shook his head and continued down the stairs. “You’d think that he was the first kalashtar to wear the blue of Breland,” he said.
“There aren’t many of you,” said Hanamelk. “And he’s both of the lineage of Chaned and your son. Ranhana thayava, Nevchaned.”
As the two kalashtar spoke, Ashi nudged Dandra. “I think Moon likes you.”
Dandra wrinkled her nose. “You noticed?”
“She wasn’t the only one,” Singe said, glancing back from ahead of her. “I saw-and I think Moon saw that I saw. Did you see the look that he gave me?” Dandra shook her head and Singe chuckled. “Like he was trying to burn stone. He’s jealous.”
Dandra muttered a curse under her breath. Ashi laughed.
Thoughts of Moon vanished as they stepped into the lower passage, an undecorated corridor with a few doors leading off of it. One of them had been barred with an iron rod. Erimelk’s muffled song came from behind it. Nevchaned slid the bar aside, then looked to Hanamelk and to Dandra. Hanamelk nodded. Dandra’s gut felt tight but she said, “Let me see him.”
Nevchaned opened the door. Dandra looked inside. The assortment of domestic goods that had once crowded the storeroom had been pushed to one side, making way for a thin sleeping pallet. Erimelk crouched on the pallet with his arms twisted behind his back and shackled to a ring driven into the wall. Bright metal still showed on the ring and Erimelk’s chains where Nevchaned’s hammer had scarred them.
Although Erimelk had been washed and his clothes changed since she’d seen him the day before, he somehow looked even worse than he had then. He was trembling, more from exhaustion, Dandra guessed, than fear or manic energy. He’d soiled himself, and the stench in the room was thick. Eyes that had been wild were dull, focused on something only he could see. The gag of twisted cloth that circled his jaw pulled his lips back in a hideous smile. It was soaked with saliva and where it had rubbed the corners of his mouth raw with blood. He still sang, the nonsense words of the killing song falling from his tongue in a broken cascade. “Aahyi-ksiksiksi-kladakla-yahaahyi-”
Nevchaned looked away from his friend with helpless anger written on his face.
“Poor bastard,” muttered Singe. A memory-one of Tetkashtai’s memories-came to Dandra of a service the scribe had once done for her creator, an illuminated page decorated with beautiful jewel-toned inks. Rage at Dah’mir or whoever had inflicted the killing song on Nevchaned and the other kalashtar of Sharn filled her.
“Is he still violent?” she asked.
“When he notices us, he probably will be,” said Hanamelk. “The chains are short, though.”
“I’m not afraid of him.” Dandra raised her chin and stepped into the room.
There was no change in Erimelk’s expression or in the tone of his song. Dandra knelt cautiously at the foot of the pallet and spoke his name. “Erimelk?” He didn’t respond. She probably would have been more surprised if he had. Dandra drew a breath, reached into herself, and pushed her mind toward his in the link of kesh.
It was like sinking into thick cream. There was no resistance, and the world vanished around her-leaving her utterly surrounded by the killing song. The cascading sounds were all that she could hear and somehow, all that she could see. It was so sudden, she almost screamed.
She bit back her fear. She could escape this if she needed to. These weren’t her thoughts. The killing song wasn’t in her, it was in Erimelk. She pushed deeper. Just as it had been in the memories Shelsatori had shared with her, the song was inhumanly pure and maddeningly intricate, building toward dark urges of violence. Dandra tried calling Erimelk’s name again, this time within the confines of his mind. Erimelk?
She might has well have shouted in the middle of a thunder storm. There was no response-at least not from Erimelk.
Like lightning splitting a storm, images burst out of the song along with a wave of violent hatred. Visions of her and of Singe, the targets toward which Erimelk had been directed. To Dandra’s surprise, though, there were also fragments of recent memories, something she hadn’t seen in what Shelsatori had shown her. Erimelk’s joy at spotting his targets. Blissful release as he attacked. A terrible anger at his failure-
Buffeted by the song, Dandra snatched at the last fragment and examined it more closely. There was something odd about it. Anger-but not the disappointment or anguish she would have expected from Erimelk’s tormented mind.
The shattered memory was his and yet not his, much as the memories she had inherited from Tetkashtai were hers and yet not hers. If Dandra hadn’t known that Erimelk had not possessed a psicrystal, she would have guessed that to be the source of the memory.
But he hadn’t possessed a psicrystal. Someone or something else had ridden with him.
Was it Dah’mir? Dandra braced herself and reached out into the roaring, cascade of the song. She let it wash over her and listened-listened hard-for a voice that had become too horribly familiar to her. There was a particular sensation that accompanied Dah’mir’s dominating presence, a lingering cold that suffocated thought. She’d felt it each time she’d confronted the dragon. She’d felt in Tzaryan Keep, moments before Tzaryan Rrac had led them into Dah’mir’s ambush. She’d felt it in the minds of the sailors on Lighting on Water, when Dah’mir’s power-weaker in humans, but still strong enough to command immediate obedience-had kept them trapped aboard the ship in Zarash’ak’s harbor.
She didn’t feel it in the killing song. There was something there, something elusively familiar, but it wasn’t Dah’mir.
The realization pierced her with a numbing fear. She pulled herself back from the song and slid along the link of kesh to her own body like someone following a rope in darkness. As if it had finally realized an intruder had entered its domain, the song rose and ripped at her, crystal tones tearing into her mental self. Something turned sluggishly within the storm, and Dandra felt a fleeting moment of terrible exaltation brush her mind. You!
She burst out of the kesh and fell back into herself, but the scream followed her. Something snapped across her jaw, and she tumbled backward, stunned. She caught a quick glimpse of Erimelk stretched out on his sleeping pallet, chains and arms stretched tight as he kicked at her and screamed around his gag, then hands seized her and pulled her clear. Voices came back to her, cutting through Erimelk’s shrieks in her ears and the echoes of the killing song in her mind. “I thought you said the chains were short!”