Second Sight: Second Tale of the Lifesong Read online

  SECOND SIGHT

  SECOND TALE OF THE LIFESONG

  by GREG HAMERTON

  FIRST THINGS FIRST?

  You can enjoy this book on its own, even though it is part of a series. Here’s what they said about the First Tale of the Lifesong:

  “Utterly compelling...with a blistering climax.” Terry Grimwood, Author: The Exaggerated Man

  “Enormous fun to read and extremely easy to lose yourself within.” FantasyBookReview (UK)

  “When you reach the end of The Riddler’s Gift, you’re left wanting more. Highly, highly recommended.” FantasyBookCritic (USA)

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Greg Hamerton is fascinated by magic and is a disciple of transforming paper into gold, one word at a time. Originally from Cape Town, he lives near London with his wife and a small stone dragon. He is an adventure enthusiast, extreme-sports writer and film maker, but mostly enjoys soaring over mountains on his paraglider and writing imaginative fiction. Second Sight is his second novel in the Lifesong cycle.

  COPY, RIGHT?

  Thanks for buying this ebook. Your support allows the author to continue writing. This is a Single User Digital Version, which grants you the right to use this ebook on any device you own for your own reading pleasure. To make that easier for you, I have removed Digital Rights Management, but it is copyrighted work and cannot be distributed to others. If you enjoy the book, please direct them to purchase a legal download from greghamerton.com. Outside of your personal use, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  Greg Hamerton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  Second Sight

  First published August 2010

  Other titles by the same author

  The Riddler’s Gift

  Publishers

  ETERNITY PRESS

  [email protected]

  www.eternitypress.com

  London | Cape Town | Worldwide

  Copyright © Greg Hamerton 2010. All rights reserved.

  Digital Edition ISBN 978-0-9585118-9-6

  THE FIRST MOVEMENT

  FROM EYRI

  A song in heart, borne through the veins,

  to live in simple silence;

  the knowledge that the song remains,

  to die in perfect peace.

  1. A QUIVER IN THE STRINGS

  “How can you understand the language of music,

  if you will not be an instrument?”—Zarost

  There was a time when the winds of change blew across Oldenworld, scattering the dry leaves of autumn like manic heralds through the avenues. The winds might have been recognised, had there been anyone wise enough to interpret the subtle signs. Filaments shook free from the cotton plants in western Orenland, only to be caught again in the thorn trees further east, where they flapped like tattered pennants in clusters of three. Fretful fires began in the forests of Koraman, brief blazes that suffocated upon their own smoke as the wild wind passed. High over Moral kingdom, threads of lightning crossed a bruised and purple sky as whirlwinds stalked beneath the clouds. The harbinger swept onward over the Winterblades, twisting and tumbling through the grasslands until it reached the smooth sands of the southern deserts and there, at last, found its peace.

  The people of the Three Kingdoms had been warned, but they had become too learnéd to pay heed to omens. They feared no one in those years. Order ruled their culture; order built upon the advancing lore of magic. Into that time did the Destroyer choose to plant his seed.

  Celebrations were held to mark the end of another plentiful summer. In the town of Fairway, three days north-east from the capital city of Kingsmeet, the bells pealed long and loud. A night had come that could not be missed: the festival of Summerset Eve. It brought troupes of entertainers from far and wide to Fairway’s tiered Rank-hall. Actors, jesters and musicians filled the pits. There was something for every class of citizen, from cock-fights and cheap ale for the grovellers in the basements to fine food and song for the trading families. In the uppermost chambers, the high nobility attended an elegant exclusive ball. The servants scuttled among these levels bearing all manner of wines, delicacies, and other pleasures more discreetly offered.

  Of these pleasures, none was as popular as the saccharine dust called Joy. It was said that from the greatest refinement came the sweetest sugar, and Joy was the taste of that elegance. The wizards had originally devised it to bring happiness to those prone to melancholy, but strangely enough it was most sought after by the nobility, who surely did not suffer at all. Yet, it was accepted that one should have some of the wizard’s white powder to cap the celebrations at the stroke of midnight.

  The Baroness Elam-Rye had enjoyed the ball. As the recently widowed wife of a minor baron, Katrine Elam-Rye had inherited a small estate, but also the first rung on the ladder of nobility, and she was determined to climb higher. She noted the men who turned their eyes toward her that night, even some whom were married, and she offered them thimbles of the sweet dust at the turn of the celebration. She consumed much herself.

  And so the strictures of ceremony dissolved with the Joy in her veins.

  Summerset Eve surrounded her with wild delight. The gilded ballroom swirled to become a dance of coloured lights and liquid passions, captivating in its intensity. The Baroness lost track of whom she danced with, and whether they promised to court her. The effect of the Joy dust should have begun to fade, but Katrine found herself falling further and further into abandonment. Perspiring beneath her long gown, she tore it off above the knees. She sang, almost in tune with the musicians. The dancing and drumming grew wilder and wilder. She found herself in the lower levels of the Rank-hall, lower than her class afforded her, and yet she was excited and entranced and bewildered by it all.

  Wine that bubbled, fingers that dipped into cream, cherries that filled her mouth with juice as their ripe skins split upon her teeth—men, strong men, young men, laughing with her, kissing her, wanting her.

  Faster and faster the world turned. The room grew dim. The sounds encircled her, like a chanting crowd then like rabid dogs, barking and snarling and closing on her as her knees ground into the floor. She rode the rhythms of her body’s climax in a dark corner somewhere in the lowest level of the Rank-hall. She couldn’t see, couldn’t feel. She couldn’t understand what was happening to her. But she knew enough to be scared.

  Then an ancient face that filled the darkness with its fire rose before her. A sonorous voice spoke in a language of echoing tones, unintelligible yet filled with a hunger that rushed through her, carrying an awful heat, an awesome power. The shimmering silver patterns upon his deep eyes made her weak. His presence dominated her, even though she understood that He was not of this world; that He was separated by a gulf. She experienced only a sliver of what He could be. He watched her a moment longer then reached into His face to tear the left eye from its place. He thrust it toward Katrine, thrust it into her, and she cried out.

  She was burning, burning, burning.

  Katrine came to shaking uncontrollably, pressed to the floor on her knees in a curtained alcove beside a rough wooden stage. The effect of the Joy dust had worn off. Stealing a cowled actor’s robe to cover her shamefully torn dress, Katrine ran from the vile basement.

  But she could not run from the sin she had committed that Summerset Eve, and from the sin that had been committed upon her.

  She threw up in the morning, into the waters of her bathing pool. She told herself it was because
of bad cherries, but the heat of the nightmare still clung to her, and soon she could not bear to wear any clothes at all. After a month of terrible pains and sweating, Katrine called a great wizard to her chambers, and he confirmed what she dreaded. She was with child. At once she demanded of the wizard that he provide her with a foetal poison to end her pregnancy, and this he did, for a large fee, but after another month the foetus still clung to her womb like a terrible cancer. The wizard suggested using a needle of cold steel, but as soon as it entered her it burned the wizard’s hand to the bone. The wizard staggered away, clutching at his ruined hand, while tearing the air with threads of light as he tried to heal himself. He did not approach Katrine Elam-Rye again, demanding that she tell him the full story of the night of conception. Afterward, he hurried away to consult his lore.

  When he returned, he said he knew what was within her, and that there was nothing to worry about, but he spoke too loudly, and beads of sweat ran from his bald head. He told the baroness he would use his magic to kill what was in her womb. For a long time he turned the scattering pages of his collected notes, spoke slow words of power and covered himself with magical wards. Then, at last, he touched his hand to her swollen belly and called out a spell. He didn’t finish the words. Suddenly rigid, the wizard dropped to the floor—dead.

  Katrine Elam-Rye was terrified of the child she carried, but after the wizard, she could do nothing but count herself ever closer to the dreaded month of delivery. She cried at the injustice of her condition. Some of the men who had enjoyed her Summersend advances came to seek her out. One was even an Earl. She could not receive him. Katrine hid in shame and nakedness, her body red and bloated. No one answered further visitors at all, because she dismissed the servants for fear they would speak of her condition. Among the nobility it would be whispered that the Baroness Elam-Rye had squandered her meagre wealth, and that she was likely to slip below even the humble class of her own parents, who had been traders.

  The callers stopped coming. They did not wish to court a peasant.

  No one guessed what was really happening to her.

  It was high summer in Oldenworld, and the month of her great heaviness ended when her waters broke. She staggered to the forest, where there would be no witnesses. She took a butcher’s knife with her, pretending she would use it to cut the umbilical cord, but in secret a darker thought turned over and over in her mind. She could kill the abomination that had brought her such shame, ending its terror forever.

  But she fainted from the pain of trying to pass the enormous child. When she awoke there was a great amount of blood, too great to stop. A small fire burnt among the leaves, throwing smoke and heat against her face.

  Something had latched onto her breast, something bulbous, deformed, devil-marked. She gave a small cry, and the thing upon her lifted its head. She looked into its eye, and screamed…

  A single eye set in a pallid, crushed face. So close, the eye too focused, the dark iris marked with shimmering, spiralled silver patterns. The babe looked at her as if it knew what she had done to it, what she had tried to do.

  There was too much blood, too much to stop.

  She died looking into that single eye, the last of her life having soaked into the leaves beneath her.

  Ametheus: deformed from the magical poison fed to him, scarred from the spell which had sought out his mind and divided it in three, abandoned by a mother who left only one offering of milk to him before her breasts went cold beneath his bloodless lips.

  He would be persecuted; he would be blamed and cursed and feared all of his life.

  Ay, he had reason to hate magic and all those who wielded it.

  2. TROUBLED CLEFF

  “In the middle of power is the little word owe;

  the duty you have to use what you know.” —Zarost

  Magic was a treacherous craft, Tabitha Serannon decided, because it gave one a sense of power yet made one so terribly weak. She hadn’t slept at all for two days, she was tired and hungry and her throat was sore. Yet her art demanded more of her. Because she could heal people, she had to. They came, in their hundreds, to her hall in Levin, to be touched by the Wizard. She could not escape from her duty. She could not escape from her magic.

  Echoes of the Lifesong quivered through her veins. The more she worked with the song, the more she understood how it was drawn from the sounds of the world around her, and how the sounds themselves defined the shape and form of what was real. She was wrapped in a melody; the kingdom of Eyri was a melody.

  Dawn over Eyri had been spectacular and the sky had been filled with that subtle music she heard ever more within her soul, the call of the many voices combining to form the day. When the mist had burnt away from the great central Amberlake, the softer, whiter sounds among the chorus had been lost, the song becoming clearer. The warm hum of the Amberlake grew richer and deeper as the waters became visible. That sound was divided by the high tone of the long and narrow black causeway stretching away from Levin to the distant glittering settlement of Stormhaven upon the King’s Isle. Tabitha’s gaze was drawn to the glistening white peak of Fynn’s Tooth, which stood sentinel on the western horizon, its ice and bare rock jingling in her ears. Below the Tooth grew a rumpled skirt of forests, and below that, the distant green hills of Meadowmoor County rang with their verdant health.

  So much music blended she could hardly discern the melodies. The sun playing against her hands was the coloured symphony of full daylight, the air against her face, the soft dampness of the dew on the grass, the arching blue sky… All cast a music toward her. All resonated to form a harmonious and ever-changing theme. So many things touched her with their sound, and she was connected to them all. She realised then how little she used to see, before she had become a wizard. Eyri was more beautiful than she had ever known. It pulsed with the golden sounds of living creatures, of people, of dancing lights and silent shadows, and the ever-shifting patterns of the elements. All that was real, was song.

  Yet now, as the afternoon drew on, her song was failing. Although the music sustained her spirit, she sensed the other theme below it—the deep fatigue gnawing at her bones.

  She sank to the floor then gazed about her domain. The hall was full—fuller than full. Wherever a blanket could be laid upon the straw there were two. She had asked them to bring bunches of flowers to sweeten the air, but nothing could hide the ripe smell of blood and sweat. The petals had been trampled and scattered upon the floor. The same could be said for many of the injured men.

  They had seen her sit, so they expected her to perform again. Those who could rise began to converge on her, stumbling between the makeshift beds. Some dragged their blankets with them, some were clothed, and some crawled closer through the dirty straw.

  The world closed in upon her, a gathering crush of needy humanity; the men who had been caught in the horror of the battle upon the Kingsbridge. Only the circle of her wardens kept Tabitha from being overrun. She had to ignore the many pleas for healing, because she had already chosen her sufferer when she had sat beside him. She could serve no more than one at a time.

  His lips were parched and cracked, his face pale. A bloody crust stained his chest where an arrowhead protruded through his breastplate. A second shaft had been broken close to the fabric of his trousers, where the wound wept angry colours into the threads. The true danger lay deeper, though, an infection near his heart. Tabitha could see the approach of death in his eyes.

  “Help me. Heal me,” the man pleaded.

  She bowed her head, but gripped the man’s hand, to let him know she would try. To heal him, she had to deny someone else a chance at healing. That was difficult to bear, but there was no other way—she was too tired to heal them all. Some of them would have to die.

  The wounded man pulled weakly on her hand. “Please,” he said.

  Tabitha raised her lyre. She had sung her first stanza of the Lifesong so many times that it came to her without any effort. It had once been an inspiration,
to release such wonderful power, but with every iteration, the Lifesong became more of a burden, a responsibility.

  When she plucked the first note from the lyre, the crowd thickened even more. Some of the patients had missed her preparations, and they wailed and ran to get as close to the source of her magic as possible, to be near the Wizard, who could save them from their misery.

  Hands reached out to touch her. Fingers brushed against her hair. Someone touched her lyre briefly. A child tugged at her dress. It was as if they believed she was a charm that needed to be rubbed for the magical effect to be passed on. Tabitha hunched over to avoid the crowd’s pressing need. She reached inward, to that place of solitude, wherein the Lifesong rang clear and true.

  Heads pushed in past the wardens’ defensive circle. Soon the crowd would crush the man she was trying to heal. It always happened, no matter how many times she tried to explain the truth to them: only the place that she held in mind would be touched by the magic of the Lifesong. The people believed her mere presence brought healing, and if they could touch Tabitha or one she had healed, they would draw some of that healing power onto themselves.

  Too many hands touched her. Hands crept all over her body. People pressed too close.

  Tabitha didn’t scream, or move, or fight against the crowd. She had learnt it was futile, for if she shouted, her words touched more of them, and so more were drawn. There was only one answer to their need.

  She sat quite still, and waited.

  A sighing, mournful whisper spread through the crowd. Those closest to her knew what to do. They knew the spell had been stopped; the Wizard was not singing. They tried to push back against the press of the crowd, but it was fifty deep, and most of the people were still trying to move inward, to get as close to the Wizard as possible, to be touched by her healing aura as she worked her magic. Tabitha waited for the jostling and shoving and whispered arguments to spread. At last the people fell back, but only slightly, just enough for her wardens to re-establish their circle. At least the people weren’t touching the lyre any more.