The Doom of Kings_ Legacy of Dhakaan - Don Bassingthwaite [88]
“Any ideas?” Ashi whispered to Chetiin.
“Yes,” said the goblin. “Ekhaas.”
CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
She began singing before the camp came into sight over the last rise of the trail. The song was an ancient one, gentle and soothing, a song for lingering afternoons, composed in a time when the emperor of Dhakaan was the sun and the long night of the empire’s fall was something not even imagined. She took her time, walking up the trail in time to the song. When she reached the crest of the rise and stepped into the vale, the bugbears guarding the crude camp had already turned eyes and ears in her direction.
Her first sight of the camp brought a silent curse of disgust. It really was as foul as Geth had described. How far, Ekhaas thought, the dar have fallen!
The disgust never reached her voice or her face. She kept walking with a measured pace, still focused on the bugbears and singing to them as if each one were an emperor. None of them moved as she approached. They just stared at her, caught in the beauty of her song.
Ekhaas had found the music when she was thirteen, though sometimes she felt as if the music had found her. The duur’kala had taken her for training in her eleventh year, recognizing a quick mind and a zeal for the great history of Dhakaan. Not all of the children chosen for training with the mothers of the dirge found the music, but Ekhaas learned later that there had been very high expectations of her talent almost from the first. On the day that those expectations had been fulfilled, she had been singing a lament of the Haata Dynasty for one of the mothers when something had begun to resonate within her. She’d lost herself in the music, the words of the lament fading into the pure sorrow beneath. The performance had left the mother with tears in her eyes and Ekhaas forever tuned like the strings of a kiirin to the music of the ages. In her waking moments she could feel it in her bones; when she slept, she thought she heard it in her dreams.
After years of training, drawing it up to fill her songs and stories with power was as natural as the simple act of singing.
She stopped when she was close enough to the camp that the smell of pine pitch that bubbled in the firepit almost covered the fetid reek of rot. Bugbears had the most famously sensitive noses of all the goblin races, and she wondered how the tribe could stand their own stench. The guards still stared at her, unspeaking, big ears cupped in relaxation. There were no sounds from the other crude buildings of the camp—if the other members of the camp heard her song in their sleep, they would only drift farther into their dreams. Ekhaas focused on the largest of the three guards and wove a suggestion into her song.
“Rest,” she said. “This is a daydream. You see nothing.”
The guard’s eyelids drifted down until they were half closed and a contented smile spread across his face.
Ekhaas looked to the next guard and pointed at the peak that rose behind the camp. “Listen to the bird that sings on the mountain. Isn’t it beautiful? You see nothing.”
The second guard turned to look up at the mountain’s slopes, scanning them with rapt attention for a bird that didn’t exist. Ekhaas fought back a smile and sang to the last guard, “The sun is warm and your friends are watching for danger. Sleep and see nothing.”
The final guard’s head sagged down so quickly he must already have been half asleep before her song had caught him. Still singing to the bugbears, Ekhaas raised her hand in a signal.
She heard the quiet rush of feet as the others left the cover of the trail to slip past the camp and down into the valley. There were no hoofbeats—they’d left the horses in the forest, blindfolded to keep them calm, guarded by Marrow to keep them safe. Ekhaas winced at the speed with which the others moved