Endworlds - Nicholas Read [58]
“I call this extraordinary session of Conclave to order and bid welcome to the Royal Houses and other dignitaries and guests so gathered to this place, presided over by Her Eternal Majesty Queen Fae’Elayen, who has invited me to conduct this day.” A handsome man forever in his late fifties, Aragenti’s tight grey tunic bore the colorful decorations of a long life in public and military service.
Indeed the Stormers who even now patrolled the local clouds invisibly beyond the crystal perimeter all reported into his aerial garrison. Their people may have died together, may have been restored with special mandate from the Builders together. But that shared history did not guarantee a shared destiny. There were divisions and enemies, now more than ever. Were it not so, his particular faction of the Fae’er High Command would not be required.
“We will commence with wellsoul, followed by an epicle by Vail Telemor of the Nabiyã Siancay.”
The old Fae’ro clipped his thummin disc into a clasp on his breast pocket and returned to his seat as the podium stalks lit from within and grew thicker, pushing upwards to radiate in a perfect twining circle around the inside of the chamber. Each stalk resembled an Arum Lily, a slender tubular bell with a wide trumpet mouth that wound its way around a central cone tweeter stem. The stalks drove down through the very pin that anchored the structure into the Earth’s bedrock where the planet’s own harmonic voice resounded, the wellsoul.
To ears tuned to hear this particular diffraction, an acoustic capriccio sparkled forth with sustained high notes tumbling into a tremor of circadian sopranos, joined by alto strings that rapidly rose and fell, as an exciting bass fugue built up with exquisite counterpoints into a harmony unlike anything composed by man, yet oft echoed by it.
This was what some called the musica universalis, a sonatina where the rotation, orbit and tremor in the planet itself converted to audible sound; where motion became hertz and hertz became musical notes grouped in octaves, pitches and tempo, a literal chromatic scale where the rise and fall of the planet’s movements were rendered both audible and visible as adjoining frequencies of sound and color.
The spherical Conclave filled with tones and lights that washed over those gathered, a semibreve in the bass followed by a minim in the tenor then a crotchet in the alto, with each successive note an octave higher, building to a vast interweaving choral that wrapped all present in a sweet harmony that hinted of warm wheat fields undulating in the wind, then fern glens trickling with dew and waterfalls; great oceans teeming with life, and alpine winds gusting across frigid plains. This was the Earth singing to them, a tune of mathematics and shabda geometry, sometimes joyful and spirited, sometimes tentative and tremulous.
Played in this dimension with the volume of a madrigal between twenty and two thousand hertz, portions of the planet’s tonal harmony could sometimes be discerned in the narrower band audible on Earth Prime by humans in meditation or in the quiescence of mind that came just before sleep, when rhythms of breathing and mental sine aligned with the energy below.
Such unions had instructed many through the Ages. Even here, in the Fourth Age, thinkers like Anaxagoras, Kepler, Heindel, Pythagoras, Boethius and Nunn had uncovered the link between orbital motion and music, and musicians like Pérotin, Mozart, Wagner, Sumner, Amos and Kitaro had even transposed it into notes.
Tubules retracted, shrinking again to form the modest podium, and the glorious polyphonic receded to an echo, its trance-like effect still whisking in circles around the inside of the crystal bulb, cleansing the inside of every mind and heart.
Her audience appropriately sedated, Clansfrau Vail Telemor of the Nabiyã Siancay shuffled to grasp the pulpit with fingers more bone than flesh, as two of the queen’s