Chapter 13
The Raven’s Song
I have received a number of letters, and have even been confronted in the public square, with complaints that this text does not sufficiently explore the phenomenon of the undead.
To these unhinged commentators I reply: did you not understand the title of the book you selected from the Library’s shelves?
As found in the Archival Dictionary, which is available to any and all who may require the clarification it so freely offers: Sapient, noun, possessing wisdom or self-awareness.
Thus the undead are not, according to any tortured interpretation, sapient.
They cannot learn. They cannot change. They are no more self-aware than stones.
They single-mindedly pursue whatever catharsis will satiate them, and then disappear—into some afterlife, perhaps; otherwise entirely, which is a question far beyond the remit of this text.
They are impressions left behind by souls in their moment of greatest agony, yes, but that does not make them sapient any more than a charcoal rubbing of a leaf is, in fact, a leaf.
In the event of confusion, please peruse this Library’s nearly infinite selection for further edification instead of wasting my time.
Leaflet tucked inside the front cover of The Taxonomy of Sapience by Archivist Eltan Oora, YC 1102
Dusk brought a stream of folk from the city of Parwys, whose gates would stand open until late into the night during these weeks of revelry. A gesture, however futile, in defiance of darkness and the threat of the haunting.
No more than a glamour, Llewyn mused while the troupe prepared to take the stage. A projection of strength during the delicate days between one king’s death and the crowning of the next.
‘Back in the day, the festival was to welcome the new king to the city,’ Damon said while Roni fussed about his hair and make-up, tinting his face red, sharpening his cheekbones, creating lines that drew the eye up to the ram’s horns that curled around his ears.
‘The gates stood open as long as he remained at the Old Stones in Bryngodre, and the people gathered on the road to greet his return. I should put that in a play. D’you think? ’
‘Well, Afanan?’ Harwick said with a wry smile.
The burly, blond strongman lounged in a tattered old camp chair, the make-up to transform him into Vangar of Cilbran still drying on his face.
Spil stood behind him, muttering in annoyance and mending a rent in the fake chain mail he wore—really little more than a loose woollen knit.
‘You’re the only other one here with a head for telling tales,’ Harwick went on.
‘I’ll tell you a tale if you don’t stop fidgeting,’ Spil snapped.
Harwick laughed and tilted his head to plant a sudden kiss on Spil’s russet cheek, smudging the painted wrinkles he wore to become Warryn of Afondir.
Spil glowered and threatened Harwick with his sewing needle.
Harwick, stifling his laughter, put up his hands in surrender and made a show of settling into his seat.
Llewyn lurked nearby, waiting his turn in Roni’s chair. He never had any lines, but when extra bodies were needed, particularly for battle scenes, Damon and Afanan twisted his arm until he agreed to go on stage. Fortunately the make-up defrayed some of the agony of so many strangers’ eyes.
‘Why not add to this one?’ Afanan suggested, organising the stones she would deploy in the night’s performance—none more than a single-faceted chip, carrying little power.
She kept her more potent magics—the gem that bound the greater half of the raven fiend among them—under lock and key in her wagon.
‘After Abal defeats the monstrous horde, he spends some time at the green tower before riding home to his castle, and is greeted by cheers and roaring applause. You could bring the audience into it. Have Jareth walk through them to the stage, turn them into Abal’s liberated subjects. ’
Damon frowned, eliciting a tut from Roni and a reminder to keep his face still.
‘That wouldn’t be accurate,’ he mumbled, trying to move his mouth as little as possible. ‘Abal already had the power of the Old Stones when he won his victory.’
Afanan looked up from her table with a soft smile. ‘Ach, my boy, no history is accurate. A map cannot be as vast as the territory it depicts, can it? There must always be details left out, others added, to suit the use and purpose of the mapmaker.’
‘Entertainment is paramount, but not at the expense of honesty. I strive for accuracy, even if they are just plays on the stage,’ Damon said firmly, eliciting a pinch to the ear from Roni.
‘An admirable goal,’ Afanan said. ‘But every history is only a tale we tell ourselves. For comfort. For context. Or, yes, for amusement. We shape them to justify cruelty or motivate kindness, or to explain the present world. Perhaps the First Folk, in their immortality, wrote true histories. But their tales are lost to us, alas.’
The tent flap whipped open as Siwan burst into the room, dressed all in black lace.
‘Ta-da!’ She twirled, making the layers of her skirt spin around her knees. Roni paused in painting Damon to applaud. Harwick followed suit, prompting Spil to pinch his ear until he sat still.
‘It looks lovely, dear,’ Roni said.
Siwan beamed at her, then at Damon. ‘What do you think?’
Damon’s make-up did little to hide his blush.
Llewyn suppressed a smile. Though he had never experienced such affections himself, it amused and delighted him to witness the feelings that moved between Siwan and Damon—so obvious to the adults of the troupe, though neither youth had yet acknowledged them.
But a worm of worry always gnawed at his mind.
However adorable their budding romance, if Damon broke Siwan’s heart, the consequences might be far more dire than bruised feelings and fractured bonds.
The raven fiend had nearly broken free of Afanan’s spell before, and at far less provocation.
‘Gorgeous,’ Damon sputtered at last. ‘The dress, I mean. How long did it take?’
‘Oh, a while.’ Siwan shot Llewyn a meaningful look. ‘I’ve been waiting for this night for ages.’
‘And the mask?’ Llewyn said.
She rolled her eyes, then crossed to Roni’s foldable sewing desk and retrieved it with a flourish.
A construction of paper, rags and paste, lightweight but layered for strength.
Unlike the other masks in the troupe’s wardrobe, its eyes were clouded by hemispheres of darkened glass to hide the yellow tint to her sclera.
The mask had been dyed with ink until it was black as a moonless night—nearly as black as her hair.
Raven and crow feathers swept down to cover her cheekbones and jaw, leaving only her mouth and chin exposed.
‘There,’ she said dryly. ‘Is that enough?’
Of course not. The mask was a glamour, but every glamour could be broken.
No defence would ever protect her fully from the searching eye of the Grey Lady.
Nor from the dogmatic brutality of the Mortal Church, nor the grasping hands of those sorcerers and druids who would see her only as a font of power or a threat, and not as a young girl, once bright and bubbly, slowly clawing her way back from the shadowed depths into which her father had cast her.
‘You think she can do this?’ Llewyn asked Afanan. ‘Without …?’
Afanan sighed, as though his fears were not perfectly founded. ‘Siwan, if you start to get overwhelmed …?’
‘Pause, keep playing, take slow breaths.’ Though the mask hid her expression, Llewyn could hear the aggrieved boredom in her voice. ‘Calm myself down, then launch into the next verse.’
‘No one will notice anyway,’ Damon offered. ‘They’ll just think it’s your own spin on the song. A little tweak for personal flavour. Ayden does it all the time.’
Llewyn didn’t care a tin bit for the audience’s reaction—only for Siwan’s safety, and that the monster bound to her soul did not wake.
Another tent-flap flew open. ‘What are you lot waiting for?’ Jareth fumed through the lines of his make-up, all artfully placed to accentuate his jaw and the heroic planes of his face.
He pointed at Damon with his prop war hammer.
‘There’s a crowd of dozens waiting out there, and you’re still in make-up?
You have the opening soliloquy, jackass! ’
Minutes later, they were all in their places: Roni still in the tent with brush and needle and thread to repair any smudges or tears; Siwan with Ayden and Mirelle in the musicians’ pit; Llewyn lingering anxiously, while Damon strode out to scattered cheers and applause and one drunken shout of ‘Finally!’
Afanan lingered a moment backstage. She touched Llewyn’s arm, gently. ‘You should be proud of her,’ she said. ‘And of yourself. Fear so deep-set in the body and mind is no easy thing to overcome.’
A protest came to his tongue—that he had far from overcome his fear, that it gnawed at him constantly. But she winked and was away to her place behind the stage.
Siwan and the other musicians played a few bars of a heroic theme to quiet the audience, then Damon launched into his opening speech—a harrowing account of the days of chaos that had gripped the world in the wake of the First Folk’s Vanishing: the fading of what gifts they had left to mortalkind; the unleashing of the weapons, plagues, and monsters they had created and abandoned without guard; the wars and ruin as would-be kings and emperors battled to fill the void left by their absent power.
Gradually the account narrowed on the northwest corner of the world, on Abal the Protector and his desperate band of survivors as they fled the rampaging hordes of the Beast-King of Galca, seeking a new home in what would, in time, become Parwys.