Chapter one: "The Last Party, The Last Song"

The first chapter of Other-Song, my serialized novel-in-progress

Other-Song is a serialized fantasy novel-in-progress. It’s a tale of disenchantment, of abusive technology, of heresy, and of a world hidden in plain sight.

Each Saturday, I’ll publish a new chapter until it is complete, along with a constantly-updated master page of chapter summaries.

---

Chapter One: The Last Party, The Last Song

“Grenadur, dah-ling, how happy for you!”

Lurian hated, more than anything, that voice.

He heard her above the clattering of dishes, above the music from the sullen-faced Fel’lal, above the sporadic roar of mirthless, dignified laughter. She was at the other end of the table, next to his mother, her voice carrying all the volume and urgency of a forgotten kettle. He reeled around to look at her, long enough to sneer, and then just as quickly turned away.

Another more urgent voice, his father’s now: “Get that fool to play something else, Luri. And when's the gnarr coming out?”

The diseased animal his drunken father brought back from yesterday’s hunt had taken Lurian several hours to bury. “Sick animals make easy prey” he grunted back, and before his father could respond, he added, “you're having lamb.”

Quickly, he rounded the edge of the table, dodging chairs and ignoring demands for more wine, keeping his eyes always on the Fel'lal as if she might just disappear were he to blink. She was his ally in disgust, his anchor. And she was very, very angry at him.

“What now?” Tri'aln demanded, before he even reached her. She didn't stop hammering against the strings as she looked at him, purposefully missing a few notes.

“Something else?” he answered meekly, his heart sinking against her stern glare. “I don't know what.”

“This I do not like, these songs. Something Fel'lal then, and I sing.”

Lurian bit his lower lip, too hard. “Maybe quietly, then?” Then, to her set visage of betrayal, he shrugged. “Nevermind. Do what you want. They will hate it anyway.”

“Then no more this box. Too so am’erel.”

He’d never understood what am'eral meant. Tri'aln would never translate the word for him, would only roll her eyes a little when he asked. He was sometimes am'eral, she said, and sometimes not. He nodded anyway, then added, "they'll complain, though.”

“Already they complain,” she spat back. “But one more, then. A Fel'lal song on the box, good?"

There was nothing to do but agree. His mother had demanded an Isyln dulcimer, and Tri’aln was the only one he knew who could play one, especially on such short notice.

“Good,” he answered, and then turned back to the guests. He clenched his jaw against a new plaint: his mother, now, loudly demanding more wine. Lurian opened another bottle and tried to make his way towards them. But between him and his mother, several guests stood suddenly, making little indignant grunts against the absence of servants to pull out their chairs.

“My lords,” he snarled. “You are in my way.”

“Such —” started their protest, but he pushed passed them before they could finish, ignoring a foot under his own and its owner’s muffled squeal as he crushed it. Skirting more demands as he passed, he reached the head of the table just as Tri'aln began her new song.

“Oh, no,” he said aloud, gritting his teeth, and then started laughing.

He was horrified, but also now manic: it was all too bitterly funny. The night was already going poorly, all his careful planning and his mother's status collapsing before his eyes. He suddenly saw no reason why the night shouldn't end as quickly as Tri'aln had just decided it should.

His eyes searched quickly for the Queen's nephew, the guest of honor, sitting across from his mother. It was he, Arun, for whom his mother had demanded the dulcimer, his aunt’s favorite instrument. So it would also be him for whom its ensuing destruction would be seen as a deep insult.

Arun’s expression betrayed no hint of notice. All Lurian saw in the man's face was a look of resigned boredom. His eyebrows were raised, but not in surprise. Lurian had done this himself many times, trying to look like he was listening. It worked best on the most vapid sorts, those speaking to someone only to have an audience, not to actually communicate anything. And though Lurian might have been imagining it, he thought he saw Arun’s lip twitch in disgust as someone tried to get his attention.

The man seemed almost an uneasy ally against this twittering crowd, but this phantasm of fraternity faded quickly, as did Lurian’s composure, when Lady Anadora's shrill voice eructed again.

“Where is your boy, Grenadur? My lips are just parched.”

“No, they're not,” Lurian spat back, jolting the overwrought woman with the suddenness of his voice. “They look as full as when you put them on this morning.”

“They do?” she started, comprehension lagging long enough behind her words that Lurian could fill the cup in her hand before she could say anything else. He turned his back to her quickly, facing now his mother, searching her face to gauge the degree of her fury.

But his mother wasn't looking at him, nor had she, apparently, even heard his remark. Instead, the matron of Horynal manse sat tensed, staring across the table at the Queen's nephew. She’d asked him a question, and her body was poised to pounce upon any hint about the Queen’s pleasure with her other son, Trendal.

His mother’s left hand extended an empty chalice towards Lurian, while the rest of her body inclined toward Arun. Lurian looked, and smiled. The edge of his mother’s left sleeve, fallen to her elbow as she awaited more wine, lightly dipped itself into the chilled soup bowl.

He thought to tell her, but then filled her glass and said nothing. He then raised his head and met the glance of the Queen’s nephew. He was smiling: he’d seen his mother’s sleeve, too. Lurian decided he liked the man.

Arun nodded slightly, then suddenly turned his attention towards his host. "My Aunt certainly is pleased, you should not doubt that.” Then, gesturing towards Lurian, he asked, “this is the Vizier's brother?”

Lurian's mother swung her head sharply towards her son dismissively, before turning her attention back to Arun. “Adoptive, yes.”

Lurian thought to answer her lie, then caught himself. It was half-true, anyway. He wasn’t his father’s son. But none of this was worth explaining here, especially not now as Tri'aln's pace with the hammers began to quicken. Lurian set down what was left of the bottle of wine next to his mother, slipped between the standing guests again, and walked as quickly as he could back to Tri’aln’s side.

“I can’t believe you’re doing this. How long?”

Without looking up, Tri'aln muttered, “Soon enough. Then I run. Come with me, am’erl."

Lurian didn't answer her. It wasn't the first time she'd demanded that he leave home.

“You complain all the time, so am'erl. Do nothing, also so too am'erl. Just leave this night.”

“Maybe, Tri'aln. I think you're making the choice for me.”

The Fel'lal played faster, hastening the end of the last-song, but looked up this time. “No-body has choice yet. I this tell you ever-more.”

This wasn't the time to argue with her, so he smiled and sighed, and then he heard it: the first broken string. The hall around him fell suddenly silent except for Tri'aln furious playing. They’d heard it too, then, the beautiful shiver and dying keen of the instrument’s last-song.

Plucked from harp or strum from lyre or bowed from fiddle, the last-song destroyed the instrument upon which it was played. A string snapped, and then another and another until nothing remained. Not until no note could be played again upon the instrument did the song end. It could be played on pipe or flute or drum, though the obliteration of sound from those always came right at the end: one final sounding and then the flute cracked, the pipe snapped, the skin on the drum tore.

Lurian had heard the last-song played twice, both times at Festifal, once upon a flute, the other time upon a nine-string. Both times, he’d listened enrapt, an almost erotic passion paralyzing his body through his ears. It felt like delicious panic, or a death-mania, awakening something so deep inside him he’d felt embarrassed to be around strangers. Yet the others who’d been there had obviously felt it, too: they all seemed waiting for exalted release, leaning into each final note.

Four strings now of the fifty-two were gone. Tri'aln's eyes were closed, sweat and maybe tears glistening her cheek. She seemed to him in rapture, in such ecstasy that Lurian thought she might faint. But she didn’t, and her playing came faster and faster, each note somewhere between fury and passion.

Lurian turned to look back at the shocked faces behind him, all the nobles of Coryl, their mouths agape, their bodies tensed. He scanned for Arun’s face, and then for his mother’s.

His mother’s face was red, her eyes wild. Arun, however, was smiling.

Turning to face the guests seemed to awaken them from the reverie the last-song created. Some of them started to shift in their seats, a few shakingly lifted glasses to their lips. One, however, stood.

“Stop that animal,” squealed the voice from the standing figure. “She's insulting the Queen!”

Lady Anadora's shrill cry awoke the rest of the guests from their stupor. A few of the men with whom his father had gone hunting rose from their seats. His father pushed out his chair and stood with them, reaching for the dulled, ornamental hunting knife at his belt.

Lady Anadora’s opened her mouth to scream again, but the room brightened around her, around all of them. Then, an explosion of burgundy and glass in her hand stopped the words in her throat.

Lurian watched dumbfounded, caught in a moment that felt like beauty. Time expanded outward in slow waves, carrying each note of Tri’aln’s last-song into little eternities. Great splashes of wine coagulated the layered talc on Anadora’s face, which fell in clumps past her nose, dripping in globs from her fleshy chin. It looked like wound-gore, an image completed by her white dress now stained red.

Lurian turned his eyes to the others, watching their own crystal chalices shatter in hand, one and then another, and then another. Each time he looked, another broke, exploding as if in time with his own attention, his own shifting gaze.

What caught his attention most caught their attention too, not the exploding glass or Anadora’s screams, but the garish, searing illumination in the room. The wyrd-lights flared in their sconces like exploding stars, brighter and brighter until he could not handle their intensity.

Lurian closed his eyes to shield them. But too late, he realised, when he opened them again to completely blackness.

He’d lost his sight — he could see nothing. He heard Lady Anadora screaming, her voice trilling in piercing mortal terror. Others were screaming too, the room erupting in violent, panicked cries.

Lurian blinked, then blinked again. He thought he saw a glimmer of light from farther off, something that looked like pale moonlight. He blinked one more time, saw shapes, outlines, silhouettes. Then he understood.

He’d not gone blind at all—the wyrdlights had all burned out.

Just then, his body shook in what felt like orgasm as he heard the last note of the last-song shatter the mahogany box of the dulcimer. Somewhere close by, he heard Tri’aln say to him. “Am'erl, you leave now. I find you after.”

Lurian didn't move, didn't try to follow Tri'aln's voice or even to find her in the carnival of insanity. Someone had taken his shoulder, a strong grip pulling him away from her voice. It didn’t feel threatening, but he still resisted the tug. The hand on his shoulder was suddenly gone, then replaced now with an arm around his chest, and then a second, just under his own arms. He was being dragged away now, the lightless, stuffy room becoming the starlit darkness and clarity of open air.

Lurian turned to see who’d forced him outside, but found no words when he saw Arun’s face.

“There is a heretic in there, man. Be careful.”

Lurian wiped his eyes with the sleeve of his tunic before answering the Queen's nephew. “A heretic?”

The man nodded gravely, but there was something in his strange expression Lurian couldn't read. “Yes. Watch yourself. It’s dangerous.”

Lurian tried to say more, but the word “heretic” stuck still in his throat, as if it had been a confession, not a question.

Arun spoke again. “Stay out here, man. I think the Fel'lal woman got away.” And just as quickly, the man was gone, running back into hall, into the crowd, and out of Lurian's sight.

“Heretic,” he muttered again, under his breath. Then, he stumbled down the two short steps into the outer garden and sat down upon a stone bench, staring into the myriad of stars above him, shaking with a surge of feeling somewhere between terror and joy.