The Charnel Prince - J. Gregory Keyes [170]
“Is there anything else, Your Grace?” Leoff asked, feeling himself wilt.
“Indeed. I will give you a list of triads you may not include in your piece, and you will not have chords larger than a triad. You may retain your thirty pieces, but only for the sake of volume—you will simplify the passages I mark. And this most of all—voice and instruments shall not be joined together.”
“But Your Grace, that’s the whole point.”
“That is your whole point, but it is not one you will make. The instruments will play their passages, and then the players may recite their lines. They may even sing them, I suppose, but without accompaniment.”
He rolled the papers up. “I’ll borrow these. Write the new text, with my inclusions. Do it in Almannish if you must, but I will have a complete translation, and likely some amendments, so do not become too attached to it. I will return this to you in two days’ time. You will have two days to alter it to my satisfaction, and you will begin rehearsals immediately after that. Is this all clear?”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“Cheer up, Fralet Ackenzal. Think of it this way—the patron who originally commissioned this piece is no longer in a position to reward you for it. You are fortunate you still have a position here at all. The regent is your new patron—mind you do not forget that.”
He smiled thinly and turned to leave.
“Your Grace?” Leoff said.
“Yes?”
“If I am to start rehearsals so soon, I must retain the musicians. I have a few in mind.”
“Make a list of them,” the praifec said. “They will be sent for.”
When the praifec was gone, Leoff closed the door and leaned against the hammarharp on balled fists.
And then, very slowly, he grinned. Not because he was happy, or because anything was funny, but because he wasn’t worried or afraid anymore. That had been swept away by a clean, cold fury the like of which he had never felt before. This man, this fool who styled himself a praifec had just sowed a very large field, and soon enough he would reap it. If Leoff was a fighting man, he would take his sword and cut down the praifec, and Prince Robert, and whomever else he could reach.
He wasn’t a fighting man. But when he was done, the praifec would wish Leoff’s weapon was the sword. That he promised himself and every saint he knew.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE NICWER
STEPHEN FIRST THOUGHT THE water itself had drawn up in a fist to smite at Aspar, but then the fist resolved itself into a wide, flat head with yellow-green eyes that glared like huge round lanterns, all arranged on a thick, long neck. It was a shade between olive and black, and looked weirdly horselike, somehow.
Horselike. That struck a bell instantly in his saint-blessed memory. He jammed his palms up to his ears.
“Winna, cover—,” he began, but it was too late, as the beast started to sing.
The note cut through his hands like a hot knife through lard; sliced straight into his skull and began slashing about. It was beautiful, just as the old legends told, but to his oversensitive awareness it was a terrible beauty that stung like hornets and wouldn’t let him think. Through a red shroud, he saw Aspar calmly put down his bow and begin walking toward the creature. Winna was starting toward it, too, tears streaming down her face.
He dropped his useless hands and picked up Ehawk’s bow. It was only seconds before Aspar walked into the creature’s gaping jaws.
He screamed as his shaking hands raised the weapon, trying to cancel the noise in his head, trying to remember the clean motion Aspar used when firing. He drew and released. The arrow skittered harmlessly off the monster’s skull.
The note it sang changed in tenor, and he felt his taut muscles loosen and a strange joy surge through him, like being drunk, happy and warm. He dropped the bow and felt a silly grin spread across his face, then laughed as the nicwer—that’s what it was, a nicwer—curved its muzzle down toward Aspar.
The neck suddenly snapped back like a whip, the wonderful song cut off by an anguished bellow. Something whispered by his ear, and his