But only the voicehounds noticed anything amiss. The Little Emperor was already bored.
Lust and love and loss; hopeless naïveté and ground-down wisdom; soot-etched, fire-branded, blade-cut, wheel-crushed, ill-rested, underfed. Thus the merry folk of Owl Abbas.
To them, the high, dying falls, the heart-cries Excelsior had intended for the Nightingale, took new meaning. This is what the songs proclaimed: the lily-towers, the jasmine-hawks, the Little Emperor and the Palace Aster must, should, would fall.
Excelsior, racked by sickness, heard voices raised in Petty Street. It was music, he realised, of a sort. A passion greater than that of youth, more violent than that of love.
I could write for this, he thought, tracing twitching marks in the dust of his garret floor, barely alarming the little spiders that had begun to blanket him.
Excelsior, so poorly fitted to be a revolutionary, such an unwitting conductor of dissent, tapped on the floor a martial drumbeat that only the Phantom of the Window-sash, frowning, felt. If a musical affair high above the streets might have disturbed the rooftop dwellers, a burning of roofs—whether in a fit of revolutionary enthusiasm or political retribution—was infinitely more to be deplored.
The ghost was dimly aware that this, after untold years and hauntings, might be its end: sifting as ash down on broken spring-carts. That this was likely also to be Excelsior’s end did not overly concern it.
But oh, this had been too great a mischief.
Having mustered a faint discontent, it slipped out by the window and wafted over the greasy canals, through slums and barricades, borne on the breath and voices of marchers, lifted by the songs of bakers (their long, heat-hardened bread-boards carved to spears), tossed by the shouts of dungmen redolent with ire.
Through gardenia paths waxen with bodies and over palisades spiked with sabres, it drifted into the Palace Aster. It blew like the dust of cobwebs among marvels and mosaics, unmoved by the unmaking of wonders.
Withering, it thought at last of the view from the room in Petty Street, and of the high widowing-walks of the palace, where one might see a mountain glowing red as a lantern.
Finer than thistledown, the phantom tumbled in the currents of bonfire-warmed air up the twisting stairs, and sighed, finally, against the finely turned ankles of the silent Nightingale.
Set free to haunt the Palace Aster with every other creature, curiosity and concubine marked with the Imperial seal, fragmenting its talent in the mirrored arcades of the Palace Aster, the Nightingale knew nothing of revolution.
It had been sent to win the heart of Owl Abbas. First, yearning back to its maker’s mountains, the Nightingale had believed itself shaped merely to capture that heart with beauty.
Then the singer had thought itself to be kidnapper and assassin, but here it had reached the centre and found nothing to bear away. The Little Emperor was merely a man, and could contain the city-state only by letting it slip endlessly through his hands. An ear and heart so lightly lifted were as easy to grasp as smoke. Ringed as they were by flame and riot, they would soon become smoke in truth.
Now, the Nightingale lifted its visitor like a snowflake, save that a snowflake would not have melted moment by moment on the cold brass of the singer’s palm.
“Strange spirit,” said the Nightingale, tuneless. “My maker-mistress sent me to bring back the heart of Owl Abbas. But it is too vast for me to carry, and too bright. See how the walls shine, like my lantern.”
The voice that had never before spoken without singing scraped the Phantom’s being like steel on porcelain. It writhed a little, weakly.
“I listened to you once, and here I am,” said the Nightingale. “I will not say you led me astray. It was I who was not adequate to my task. Am I to follow you again?”
They left the Palace Aster of the heights and followed the groaning of draughts through tower and tunnel. They departed the halls and salons where mirrors splintered and paintings bubbled, and crept into the lowest palace, that composed of cellars and basements, new and old and ancient, and each filled with the surfeit of every beauty, every luxury, every excess, and somewhere—who knows?—the dusty reliquary that contained the bones of the last idle owl.
“Perhaps the heart is here,” said the Nightingale. But there was riot and looting overhead, and no time to search those unnumbered cells and dungeons.
Through storeroom and oubliette, sewer and gutter they hastened, phantom and Nightingale. They slipped past the guards, the crowds, they elbowed through mob and melee. Buildings burned around them, the cobbleskulls ascended in bone-smoke while spirit-lamps, bursting, gave up their ghosts. Once only they paused, on the street of guildhalls, to take the great signet of the Elevated Guild of Horologists and Artificers from the rubble. Then they hastened on.
Fire melted the Little Emperor’s seal on the Nightingale’s shoulder, and wisped shreds from the phantom like steam. And as they fled, they heard, beaten into blunt weapons, into anthems and banners, the songs of Excelsior.
Excelsior did not know what he had wrought.
There are feet upon the stair, he thought. People will want words. But he had none left. The ink in its well had dried to dust, the nibs rusted on the floor, spiders spun in his hair. It is chill. Perhaps they want paper for their hearths, he thought. They will not find enough here. For all the fire below, he saw frost in the window, curling from the webs he had etched there in his first passionate shyness.
They will take the copper-shavings, he thought. Let them, someone may get use of them. He did not even have strength, now, to burn them for the faithless ghost as a last legacy.
The door latch lifted, and a creature walked in.
The Nightingale’s palace robes had been eaten away by spark and flame, threads of precious metals imparting the briefest of strength to the Phantom of the Window-sash, which clung still around the throat of silver and mahogany pipes.
The bonfire light danced like drums through the Nightingale’s hollow cage of ribs, the sliding sheets of ebony and quartz that shielded bellows and bells.
The Nightingale looked about the garret, read singingly the ravings etched into bench and board.
“This is the hand that wrote the songs you brought me, strange spirit,” said the Nightingale. “Yet these are the words the people with torches sang, all through the streets. I heard these in the idle-rooms of the Palace, and this in the tearooms past which the voicehounds brought me. You led me a dance, spirit, but perhaps this is the room on which Owl Abbas now centres, after all, and I shall have earned the signet seal we took.”
Kneeling with a beautiful spinning of weights and wires, the Nightingale peered at Excelsior and said, “It cannot live longer, I see, as people live. Can it live as you?”
The phantom undulated impolitely.
“No,” agreed the Nightingale, without reproach. “I see it lives as you do even now. Wishing nothing to change, wishing power beyond what it was built for.”
The long decorative fingers, designed to accompany music and elaborate a beat upon the air, now probed the skull, the throat, the diminishing softnesses that still enclosed Excelsior.
“How does one get in?” the Nightingale asked the phantom. “How were you drawn out of your shell?”
It could not answer the question, even if it had cared to. Hatred, love, unstretched wings, habit? They had all eroded so long ago.
The Nightingale calculated. It had never had cause to be fitted with the knowledge of where ghosts come from. They infested the city in much the way of the seasonal senates of ash-pigeons and the sub-kingdom of rats, but now all the nests and roosts were in disarray. The city was rearranging itself, and who knew what would pour into its new emptinesses, as a singer stretches the air to let the listener’s heart fall in.