The Doom of Kings_ Legacy of Dhakaan - Don Bassingthwaite [74]
“When we are gone, you may move about the roof,” she said, “but you must remain awake and you must hold onto Aram through the night. Don’t release it. Do you understand?” He nodded and she clicked her tongue again. “We will return at dawn.”
She stepped back to form a line with Ekhaas and Senen. “Face the sun,” she told Geth, and he shifted around so that the red light was in his eyes. The movement put the three women at his back. His shoulders prickled, knowing they were back there but not knowing what they were doing.
Then they started to sing.
Geth recognized Ekhaas’s voice in the song, like burning cedar. He could pick out another voice, too, higher and more clear. Soaring over both voices, though, was a sound that barely seemed as if it could come from the throat of a living creature. It had a depth like the sea and a luminous beauty like a hundred beeswax candles glowing in the dark. It pulled at his heart and seemed to reach into the base of his skull to push against his mind. He felt it in his head, in his chest, in his belly, in his groin. It brought a dozen emotions washing over him at once, so many that he couldn’t react to them all but could only kneel and stare out into the gathering night.
It was Aaspar’s voice, and all he could think was that if this was what her song sounded like, how had the songs of the great duur’kala of ancient Dhakaan sounded?
Slowly, he became aware that the chorus of the three duur’kala was changing and growing both deeper and fainter. At the same time, the charcoal outline of the circle within which he knelt seemed to be shifting and spreading across the rooftop. Soon the stones for a sword length around him were black, then two sword lengths. The circle was growing like the shadows of the setting sun.
The sun.
He looked up and realized that the sun had almost entirely vanished below the horizon, sinking just as the duur’kalas song had. He could almost imagine that the three women weren’t just singing along with the sun’s setting but that they were actually singing it down. Time seemed to slow as he watched the disappearing sun and listened to the fading song.
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
Geth blinked.
The night was silent—and complete. The sun had set, and even the last red smudge was gone from the horizon. The duur’kalas song had ended. Still kneeling, he twisted to look behind him. The rooftop was empty. It was also completely black. The charcoal of the circle had crept over every stone, leaving only its interior, where he knelt, clear.
In the east, the first two moons of the night were rising, the pale gray twins of Therendor, big and bulky, and Barrakas, a third its size but twice as bright. Geth stood and stepped out of the clean circle with a caution that struck him as ridiculous. Aaspar had said he could move about the roof after they’d left. He made certain he kept a tight hold on Wrath, though.
His knees were already stiff and protesting the time spent kneeling on the bare stone. He could feel the cool of the night creeping through the thin linen robe, and his hunger was a constant nagging. The night wouldn’t be pleasant, but that was the point of vigils, wasn’t it? At least he was allowed to move. He jumped and stretched, easing some of the pain and warming his body a little, then went to peer over the edge of the tower.
He immediately wished he hadn’t. The view down onto the moonlit sprawl of the city, the Ghaal River and its first cataract flashing in the distance, seized the light-headed feeling he’d had climbing the stairs of Khaar Mbar’ost and set it spinning. Geth stepped back from the edge and crouched until the spinning stopped. He considered trying it again, to see if he could get used to the view, but decided against it. There was enough to see by looking out and up at the unfettered view of the sky. He sat down as