The Blood Knight - J. Gregory Keyes [131]
“Ah,” the man said. “How good to see you, Brother Stephen.”
For an instant he’d hoped to be wrong, hoped the face was a trick of light and memory. But the voice was unmistakable.
“Praifec Hespero,” Stephen said. “What a surprise.”
LEOFF REMEMBERED blood spattering on the stone floor, each drop like a garnet until it struck the slightly porous rock, where it soaked and spread, jewels transformed into stains.
He remembered wondering how long his blood would be part of the stone, if he had in some sense become immortal by spilling his life there. If so, it was a humble sort of immortality, a common one, judging by the quantity of stains already there.
He blinked and rubbed his eyes with the knobbed backs of his wrists, torn oddly between a fit of rage and utter exhaustion as he watched splashes of ink soak into the parchment, so like blood on stone. He seemed to vibrate between the two moments: then, the lash across his back, the exotic pain so total that it was difficult to recognize, and now, ink spraying from his shivering quill.
For a long instant the difference between then and now collapsed, and he wondered if he was still there, in the dungeon. Perhaps the now was just a pretty illusion his mind had created to help him die more easily.
If so, his illusions were of poor quality. He couldn’t actually hold a quill, but he’d had Mery tie one to his hand. At first his arm had cramped quickly and agonizingly, but that was only a fraction of the pain he was enduring.
To write music, he had to hear it, and doing that in his mind had always been his great gift. He could close his eyes and imagine each note of fifty instruments, weaving counterpoint, insinuating harmony. Everything he wrote he heard first, and that had never been anything but a joy to him—until now.
A wave of nausea swept through him. He rose jerkily from his stool and stumbled to the narrow casement of the window. His belly crawled as if it were full of maggots, and his bones felt as rotten as termite-infested branches.
Could it kill him merely to imagine these chords? But if that was the case…
Speculation was swept aside as he leaned out of the window to retch. He had eaten hardly any supper, but his body didn’t care. When his belly was empty, it reached deeper, convulsing him until his legs and arms gave way, and he crumpled until his face was against stone.
He imagined himself as a drop of blood, a garnet becoming a stain…
He wasn’t sure how long it was before he found the strength to stand again. He pulled himself back up to the window, heaving in great gulps of the salty air. The moon had risen, cold and round, and the freezing air numbed his face. Far below, silver lapped against ebony in little wavelets, and Leoff suddenly yearned to join them, to free himself through the window, break his ruined skeleton on the rocks, and leave the lands of fate to those who were stronger and braver. To those who were well.
He closed his eyes, wondering if he was mad. Certainly, if he had never been tortured, broken, humiliated as he had been, he would never in his wildest dreams be able to imagine the music that so sickened him now. He knew that viscerally.
The obscure notation in the book he’d found would have remained as incomprehensible as the script in which it was written. It was related to no system of music he knew, but once he’d seen that first chord, he’d somehow heard it in his head, and the rest of it fell into place. But a sane man—a man who had not experienced the horror he had—could never have heard that chord. He certainly could never have gone on, never purposefully hurt himself the way he was doing now. Anyone who loved his life, who imagined a future, could never write this music.
His dreams for his music had been grandiose; his dreams for himself had never been particularly ambitious. A wife to love him, children, evenings singing together, grandchildren in a comfortable house, and old age coming on kindly,