Azure bonds - Kate Novak [162]
"You have no doubt heard of the Harpers," the Nameless Bard began. "They were established in the north long before you were born. Their members are primarily bards and rangers, though not limited to such. All are good and true men and women devoted to preserving the balance of life, opposing all that threatens the peace of the Realms, protecting the weak and innocent. You might recognize them by their small silver pin of a harp and a moon.
"One of their number was a bard, a master of his craft, with a voice and a memory like polished ice. A creator of songs that could move people to action, or calm them to slumber. None heard his music but that they were impressed. The bard himself was often astonished by his own skill and wished for all his works to be preserved for eternity.
"Yet songs are so easily changed, their lyrics tampered with, their melodies maligned. The bard's own colleagues had done this to his works, substituting a phrase to suit a particular audience, quickening the tempo to end an evening's entertainment sooner. Or simply forgetting a line. And though such things are only natural, the bard was obsessed with preserving his works as he'd intended them to be sung."
"Prickly sort, wasn't he?" Olive asked with a tiny grin.
The corner of the true bard's mouth turned up in a half-smile. "We all have our faults.
"Rejecting human singers as the preservers of his art, he turned to mechanical means. Paper and stone would not suffice-the written word could not convey the meaning as well as spoken words, and written notes describe only the melody, not the spirit of the music. And paper and stone can be destroyed. Even magical attempts to reproduce his music dissatisfied him. They could not demonstrate the full interaction of the bard with his audience.
"Finally, he determined a mixture of these methods that would fulfill his requirements. A human shell, unwilling, even unable, to stray from the original rendition, a repository for his tales and music that could render them unto generations."
"Alias," Akabar said.
"Alias?" Olive chirped.
"Alias," the true bard said. "The price to make such a creature, however, was very great, involving dealing with powerful mages and extra-planar powers. The price was also horrible. It would cost the life of a noble innocent, both pure and true, by brutal means.
"The master bard, with his apprentices, men and women of lesser power but great talent, tried to create this shell on their own. The attempt failed, costing one assistant his life and another her voice, so that she was silent for the rest of her shortened, painful days.
"Many men and women of the Realms might have shrugged off such a tragedy. But the Harpers considered themselves better men and women and were horrified by what the bard had done. They summoned him to judgement.
They stripped him of his name, stole it from his memory. His name being a given thing, this was easy to do. But knowledge discovered is like an efreet let out of a bottle: it cannot be forced back in. The struggle to discover it makes it part of the discoverer's soul. They could not destroy the knowledge in him. They feared he would try again, or pass the knowledge to another. So they could not let him go free, yet they would not slay him, for he was one of their own, and they did not want his blood on their hands.
"They decided he would have to be imprisoned, but no ordinary prison would do. They could not risk his ever passing on the method he had developed. So they shackled and exiled him beyond the bounds of the Realms, in the lands where reason fails and the gods roll like storm fronts across the sky. All his songs, his words, and his ideas were expunged in a sweeping attempt to cover up what he had achieved. Those who knew his songs were told to sing them no more, and such was the respect and fear of the Harpers in those days that many complied.
"So that which the master bard feared most came