The Silent Pavane

They broke the surface, and the world turned like a dial. As the submersible, designed with an eye to this reversal of gravity, tumbled to right itself, only white-knuckled willpower saved Erlain from screaming.

The thief was whooping with giddy laughter, like a farmboy leaping from a height into a waiting stack of hay. “Fuck me,” she crowed. “What a ride! You all right?”

“Wait,” Erlain whispered, her eyes shut tight. In vain she bade her thundering heart slow. “Hold on. Wait.”

By her master’s left hand, she couldn’t do this. Why had she let Calla talk her into this? By the light of day, on the sea’s other surface, courage had come easily, but now…

A shifting close by. Too close; Erlain’s nose had been full of Calla’s sweat and that damned sheep jerky she ate for the past half-dozen hours. “We’ve gotten this far,” said the thief. “Don’t lose your nerve now, bedwetter.”

Erlain’s eyes flew open. “You—”

She stopped with mouth agape. There was Calla, her grinning face dusky in the mortuary gloom; and there, past her shoulder, outside the porthole, was the underside of the sea. Beyond the blue froth of their surfacing, the water lay like black glass, untouched by any wind. On the horizon, a ship drifted with slack and rotting sails; nearer at hand, on a gray spit of coast, fishermen’s hovels stood scattered like the playthings of a dispirited child.

“Gods,” Erlain muttered.

“Yes,” Calla said. “It’s something, isn’t it?”

She spoke with infuriating nonchalance, as if an analphabetic picklock like her saw such sights every day. By rights, she should be terrorstruck—she, and not the estimable Noren Erlain, student of the Winter Tower and disciple of the dread mysteries of sorcery, who had sent her spirit wandering the twisted paths of many a far world.

It was another thing entirely, Erlain now knew, to journey in the flesh. She had no cause to doubt the integrity of the submersible’s wards, for she had woven them herself, yet she had spent the descent twitching at every creak of the hull. How thin the shell that separated them from the sea! And all the while, Calla had munched jerky without the faintest sign of alarm.

It stung Erlain’s pride; that, in turn, tempered her dread. “Heed me, thief,” she said, unbuckling herself. “Do not slur my profession again.”

“What, the bedwetter thing? Come on, Erlain—it’s just a bit of fun.”

“You’re free to make your own way,” Erlain snapped. “I’m sure the Prince will receive you warmly, should you even attain his door.”

Calla made an obvious and aggravating effort to school her grin. “You’re right, of course. I’m lost without you.”

“I’ll remind you that it was you who sought my services for this fool errand.”

“Right. Of course.”

“And I’ve never wet the bed.”

“Right.”

Erlain glowered at the thief, who was trying not to smile and mostly succeeding. Black water lapped at the porthole.

“Let’s just go,” she sighed at last.

 

“A darkling place, this,” Calla observed as she hopped down into the shallows. “Couldn’t you conjure a little light?”

“Of course I could,” Erlain said testily, “had I a burning desire to get us both killed. Get me down from here, will you?”

She suffered Calla to lift her onto the gray shore, and so set foot at last in the crypt-country of the dead. Here it was: the desert land, the atramental mirror of the living world, cheerless under strange and cheerless stars.

“Aye,” Calla mused, “better to be discreet. High time we donned our disguises, is it not?”

“Yes. Stand facing me.”

Erlain spoke a few droning syllables and passed her left hand through the air between them. She felt the magic, greedy as a sponge, siphon power from her blood—and Calla began to wither before her eyes. The thief’s skin turned to gray paper; her nose caved to a hole. By the expression, equal parts horrified and delighted, on the handsome ruin of her face, Erlain knew she had herself been similarly changed.

“Gods,” Calla said, and her voice, at least, remained that of a woman living. “And, pray, am I as pretty as you?”

“No,” Erlain said, primly. “Nor will you ever be.”

She suppressed a shiver. Working magic always sapped her of warmth, and the underworld chill pressed against her, frog-slick and eager, caressing her skin like drowned men’s hands.

Still. She had dwelt in the Winter Tower. Cold was an old familiar companion.

Calla looked down at herself and groaned. She had established her preference for men’s clothing in no uncertain terms, but a woman in a gentleman’s doublet was sure to turn heads at the Prince’s court; the dead cleaved joylessly and absolutely to strictures of decorum, and if she wished to see the sun again, the living interloper must do the same. Part of Calla’s disguise, therefore, was a fine gown, tattered as if by long years in the tomb. “You put me in a dress!”

She was merely caviling, so all Erlain said in reply was, “Keep your voice down.”

As they crept from the cove where they’d hidden their vessel, Erlain felt the sound of their footsteps must carry for miles. The undersea hushed where its sunlit sister would have roared, and a pall of silence lay over the huts and hovels of the coast. No hounds barked, no children cried. Somewhere a caulking hammer sounded, that was all, beating out a rhythm even and funereally slow.

Inland, wreathed in cold light, their destination rose above the sagging roofs.

“Locals,” Calla breathed. “Look alive.”

“I hope not,” Erlain muttered. She had gone over the spell of seeming time and again, but this place abided by its own strange rules. She wasn’t wholly certain her glamour would fool unliving eyes.

The fishermen of the dead land were sad things, forever plying their trade in waters where no fish lived. These two sat on the stoop of a lightless shack, unspeaking, mending rotting nets. Erlain’s heart leapt as they looked up, but it seemed her illusion held, for neither of them raised the hue and cry. Not a flicker of feeling showed on their dry gray faces. If they were surprised to see two ladies in such fine dress down here by the piers and pilings, it was impossible to tell.

“Gentlemen,” Erlain murmured, curtseying.

One of the fishermen nodded. “My lady,” whispered the other.

Only when they were well out of earshot did she release her long-held breath.

“It seems a dreary business,” Calla observed, “this being dead.”

“Yes,” Erlain said. “I suppose that is why they say one should enjoy life while it lasts.”

Calla hummed and studied the drab landscape. “Are you?”

“Am I what?”

“Enjoying yourself? Seems a dreary business, too, sorcery. Do you ever get to have any fun?”

Erlain glared. A smile tugged at the corner of Calla’s mouth, but it was only a product of long habit; she seemed earnestly interested in Erlain’s reply. That, for some reason, was more irritating than straightforward mockery.

“Fun?” Erlain sneered. “What use is fun? As well ask the architect about fun. He produces works of great beauty, and he does so with consummate skill, lest they collapse and kill all within. Such is my art. It is a dread and beautiful thing.”

“Right,” Calla said. “But do you like it?”

For a moment, neither of them moved or spoke. Then Erlain turned away with an impatient huff. “I told you to keep your voice down,” she said, and swept up the path.

 

See the child, small and pale, bundled in bearskin against the northern weather. From her perch on the driver’s seat of a merchant’s cart, she stares in awe and apprehension at the horizon, where a solitary shape rises from the scrubland like the trunk of a lightning-struck tree. There it is: her new home.

Even inside the Winter Tower’s doors, her breath steams in the air.

Her master is a narrow, austere man, as cold and stern as the land he inhabits. She mistakes the switch he carries for a wand, until the first time she reaches for something and he lashes out, adder-quick, to cane her across the knuckles.

A sorcerer’s dominant hand, he says, is his left. Explanations will come later, when her education has begun in earnest—how the left is the hand that works in shadow and reaches beyond the veil, how a mainline of power runs between it and the heart—but until then it seems a cruel and arbitrary rule. Whenever she forgets and favors her right hand, she comes away with burning fingers and burning eyes, and her master’s tart voice in her ears, saying only, Wrong hand.

Later still, leaving the Winter Tower in the unsmiling spring of her twenty-first year, she learns the slur “bedwetter,” from the idea that the sorcerer’s practice of training himself to lefthandedness engenders in him nocturnal incontinence. It is ever thus—what little the layman knows about sorcery, he twists into absurdities, and the rest he fears. He whispers that sorcerers cut out their souls with silver knives, that they couple with demons and drink babies’ blood. Soon enough, she stops wasting her breath trying to correct such misconceptions.

Her life as a sorcerer-errant turns out less glamorous than she had imagined. Outcast, she perforce associates with other outcasts: lunatics and lepers, whores and thieves. She and Calla have contacts in common, and so it’s perhaps not so strange that, when Calla finds herself in need of a sorcerer for her latest scheme, she thinks of Noren Erlain.

 

The riches of the dead land were the stuff of legend. Everything lost and untouched by light—every dropped coin and mislaid earring, the grave goods of every ancient king and every pirate’s storm-sunk trove—it all came, by shadowed ways, to this shadowed country.

At first, Erlain had dismissed Calla’s plan out of hand. Calla’s reputation was not for her skill or success as a thief, but for her ambition, which far outstripped her luck. Then again, one who acquired such a reputation was bound to possess a certain persistent streak. Again and again, Calla had appealed to Erlain’s ambition, until at last Erlain allowed herself to be swayed. Similar expeditions had been mounted in the past—there were plenty of stories about colleagues of Calla’s who had sailed the undersea for a time, winning plunder by feats of strength and subterfuge—but no one had ever dared attempt this particular feat.

None, at least, who had lived to tell the tale.

The Prince’s castle towered over them, bleak and beautiful, lit by cold blue lantern-glow. It had been erected in some immemorial age and then left to fall to disrepair, and its facade was now scabrous with broken windows and missing tiles. The high wall girdling its grounds had been built solely for the look of the thing; the wars of the underworld were slow, silent, choreographed affairs, their outcomes decided long ago.

“And now?” Calla murmured. “We just walk in?”

A pair of liveried pikemen flanked the gate-arch, but it was the arch itself that made Erlain’s stomach hurt; it seemed a mouth, a yawning maw with portcullis teeth. “Naturally,” she said, with more assurance than she felt. “We belong, it’s plain to see.”

And indeed the pikemen did not bar their way, though they did bow, with such suddenness that Erlain must bite back a scream.

The castle was as grand and sepulchral within as without. Timeworn opulence lay on every hand. Fraying carpet whispered underfoot. Little by little, as she and Calla passed through halls and galleries empty of people and full of rich and rotting furnishings, Erlain’s horror of the place waned, and she was struck instead by how sad it all was. Such grand purposelessness. What was the point?

“I do enjoy it,” she said, startling herself by speaking.

“Enjoy what?” Calla murmured.

“My profession. My life. I do enjoy my life.”

“If you say so.”

Nettled, Erlain opened her mouth to make a sharp reply, but they turned a corner and the words died in her throat.

Why the dead did the things they did, no one knew. They fought and refought ancient battles, or worked barren land, or engaged in any of a thousand other pursuits, night after dayless night, without the slightest apparent pleasure; and as the commoners of the underworld went about their toil, so too did its nobles approach their amusements. The Baron had his hunts, the Viscountess her awful salons. And the Prince had his Silent Pavane.

The ballroom was cavernous and cold as a mortuary temple. Its fireplaces were empty, its long tables set with empty platters. Tapestries moldered on its walls like wisps of hair clinging to a skull. Entering, Erlain steeled herself, but her appearance occasioned not the slightest stir. Of course: in the dead land, new arrivals must be a singularly unremarkable sight. Only a scant few guests, those nearest the entrance, bothered to bow or whisper some empty courtesy. Their eyes were incurious, set in faces that had forgotten how to smile.

There was no music. Save the tread of dancing feet and the rustle of age-brittle regalia, utter silence reigned.

Erlain followed Calla up a flight of stairs to a second-story gallery. From above, the dance had a certain mechanical quality, like the automatons of a clock tower she had once seen. The dead danced, palm to cold palm, their steps precise and passionless. She wondered how they managed it, without at least a drummer to keep time.

She did not look to the far end of the hall, where the Prince held court as always, for fear that his ancient eyes would meet hers. She focused instead on the task at hand, kneeling to work a complicated bit of magic, the first half of a greater spell.

“Ah,” Calla breathed. “That’s a problem.”

Erlain raised her head over the balustrade. Calla was peering at their royal host. The Prince was tall and gaunt, erect of bearing and forbidding of aspect, clad in ragged ermine and a coronet of age-dulled gold. By comparison, his scepter, long as Erlain’s forearm and fashioned of bronze-banded wood, was an unassuming thing.

Erlain gaped like a drowning fish. “Why does he have that?” she spluttered, barely managing to keep her voice down. “What does he intend with it?”

“Perhaps nothing,” Calla said. “Perhaps he merely wished to flaunt it. After all, it is ‘the jewel of his collection’—your words.”

In the Prince’s hands, the Scepter of Alsam Gemri gleamed in the pelagic light.

 

It was said that Alsam Gemri had ruled the world. It was said that, at the end of his life, rather than dying, he had ascended to some rarefied state of being, and so was not to be found anywhere in the underworld. He was a figure of such antiquity and puissance that it was impossible to sift fact from myth.

He had existed, though. The Scepter was proof.

The Scepter of Alsam Gemri contained only a fraction of his power, but that fraction nonetheless far outstripped the power of any sorcerer now living. The sole reason no one had yet claimed it was that no one dared risk the Prince’s ire. Erlain had thought to circumvent the issue by avoiding a direct confrontation, but now…

“We must leave. We’ll… we’ll return later for another attempt—”

“We’ll do no such thing. We cleave to the plan.”

“The plan! The plan is in shambles, you obstinate—”

“Hist!”

Calla seized Erlain’s arm and drew her into the alcove behind a statue. They stood pressed so close together that Erlain felt Calla’s heartbeat against her chest, and when the servant from whom they hid shuffled past, she welcomed the distraction.

“We cleave to the plan as far as we’re able,” Calla whispered, once the servant had gone. “We’ll let ourselves into the treasury first. We’ll acquire my share, then worry about yours. Yes?”

“You don’t understand,” Erlain whined. “The Scepter—”

“The treasury, Erlain. Concentrate.”

That was easier said than done. Calla led the way, and Erlain followed, lost in fretful thought. All these weeks of planning and preparation—were they now to prove a waste? Was she really to be thwarted by such careless chance? The Prince was supposed to keep the Scepter under lock and ward in his subterranean treasury. He wasn’t supposed to hold it in his hands.

“Here are the stairs now,” Calla murmured.

The cellars were awful: a maze of bare identical rooms that would never see use. A few more turnings—Erlain had sent her spirit into the underworld on several occasions, and Calla had studied well the floor plans she had produced—and they reached a hallway terminating in an iron door. Before it, like a quartet of unsightly statues, stood four of the Prince’s guards.

Calla drew back behind the corner and gave Erlain a nod. With some difficulty, Erlain gathered herself enough to consummate the spell she had laid in the ballroom. She slashed her left hand through the air, and there was a faint noise in the distance: an inharmonious blare of horns, like a twelve-piece band of drunken musicians striking up. Even down in the cellars, the sound was shocking. Erlain couldn’t imagine what it must sound like in the ballroom.

It was eerie, the way the guards snapped abruptly into motion, like marionettes animated by an unseen hand. Without exchanging a word or a look, they set off towards the noise. Erlain and Calla hid in an empty storeroom and let the dead men run right past.

“Well done,” Calla murmured. “Come. Before they return.”

They worked in concert to open the door, Calla kneeling to pick its locks while Erlain set palm to metal and charmed its wards. The blare had faded—perhaps the Prince, with Scepter in hand, had unraveled her spell—and Erlain listened with one ear for the clatter of returning boots, but none came.

The door yielded. They stepped into the Prince’s treasury.

Calla whistled low. Everywhere in the long, vaulted chamber, the eye fell upon profusions of gold, upon tapestry tongues lolling from the mouths of gem-crusted chests. Here, an intricate puzzle-box of mulberry and jade; there, a jeweled sword straight out of some dead king’s tomb. But what did Erlain care about such earthly riches? Leave them to Calla and her cutpurse ilk. Erlain drifted to the rear of the room, to the empty display case where by rights the Scepter ought to have awaited her. Alsam Gemri’s wand—that was a sorcerer’s prize. It was the only reason she had agreed to this mad scheme.

Calla drew the door shut behind them, then joined Erlain before the case. “This wand,” she said. “If you had it, could you magic us back home? With all the loot?”

“I don’t know,” Erlain said irritably. “No one knows. Besides, before anything else, I must claim the damned thing.”

“Well, mightn’t you just… take it?”

Erlain stared at her, appalled. “What—just snatch it from the Prince’s hands?”

Calla was grinning, of course. “Well, I doubt he’d see it coming.”

Erlain gave no reply; such idiocy deserved none.

“Fine, fine.” Calla studied the empty case. Her grin faded by degrees. At length she said, “You might leave it.”

“I might what?”

“Leave it,” Calla repeated. “We’ll take as much of this stuff as we can carry and go home.”

“Oh, yes, I see,” Erlain sneered. “As long as you get your share—”

“We’ll split the earnings. Half of this will set a person up for life. You’d never have to scrape by on a mendicant sorcerer’s wages again.”

“You oaf! You don’t understand a thing—”

“I understand avarice. I’ve seen a lot of friends overreach and end up feeding the crows. Your Scepter’s a powerful thing, I know, but surely it’s not worth dying for?”

Erlain gaped, aghast at this cravenness. She had heard people say that Calla would put her life on the line for a copper penny. Could that woman and this one truly be one and the same?

“Come on, Erlain,” Calla said. “Soon enough you’ll be back down here for good, and you’ll spend the rest of forever kicking about on a cold sea or, gods forfend, going to balls where they can’t even bother finding a decent troubadour. You’ve got a few precious decades in the sun left, if you’re lucky. Don’t squander them.”

And at last Erlain understood. It was not fear making Calla say these things, but concern. Concern for her.

All at once, Erlain went cold with fury, perfectly cold, as if all the arctic winters of her childhood were raging inside her at once. “Fuck you,” she hissed.

“Erlain—”

“Fuck you! How dare you speak to me so familiarly? Do you believe, you lowlife, that we are equals? That we are friends?”

Calla ran an exasperated hand through her spell-brittled hair. “Come on, bedwetter—”

“I told you not to call me that!”

It was only then, listening to the echoes of her voice, that Erlain realized how loudly she’d spoken. Shouted, really.

She and Calla stared at each other. From beyond the door came answering sounds: hurried footfalls, hissing speech.

“Hide!” Calla barked.

Without thinking, Erlain dove between the display case and the wall. It was only as the guards shouldered into the room that she realized Calla was making no attempt to conceal herself. Horrified, Erlain peered around the edge of the case in time to see Calla snatch the age-old sword from its shelf.

The thief was a spirited fighter, but the longsword was not her weapon. Before long the guards had disarmed her and were dragging her off, snarling and spitting, in the direction of the ballroom.

 

The Pavane had stopped. The guests crowded together in the middle of the checkered floor. Erlain pushed her way to the Prince’s side just in time to watch the guards force Calla to her knees.

The Prince swept aside the glamour Erlain had laid upon Calla as if it were a spiderweb. With a flick of the Scepter, the dead woman in her fraying gown was gone, and in her place knelt the living thief, clad in mannish leathers. Her shoulders, bare and lovely, gleamed in the lanternlight. Even now, a smile tugged at her lips.

The guests watched in silence. If the prospect of an impromptu execution discomfited them, or if the scandal beguiled them, they made no sign. Every face in the room was slack and gray and void of life—all save Calla’s, whose eyes now sought Erlain’s, briefly, and only once, as if by chance. As if to avoid implicating her. And why had Calla faced down the guards alone and allowed herself to be captured, if not for Erlain’s sake?

Erlain felt sick.

One of the guards knelt and presented the Prince with the jeweled sword. The Prince freed up his hands to take it. He didn’t even look as he did so; he simply pressed the Scepter, with the porphyrogene’s thoughtless expectation of service, into the hands of the nearest person—

—who just so happened to be Erlain.

So there she stood, holding the artifact of untrammeled power for which she’d come, and she couldn’t think how to use it. The magic of the Winter Tower, the expertise her master had taken such great care to beat into her—it was all gone, crowded out of her mind by panic. She didn’t know what to do.

“Your Majesty,” she whispered. “Wait.”

The Prince didn’t spare her so much as a glance.

“Your Majesty, please, there’s no need for this.”

Her hands twisted uselessly on the Scepter. Her whispers were loud in the stillness. A man in rotting dress uniform turned to eye her coldly.

“Majesty, I beseech you.”

One of the guards forced Calla’s head down, exposing her neck.

“Please, please, Your Majesty, sire, don’t…”

The Prince raised his sword.

“I said don’t!”

In a frenzy of desperation, doing the one thing she could think to do, the sorcerer Noren Erlain raised the Scepter of Alsam Gemri and brought it down like a club upon the Prince’s royal skull.

The blow made a dull sound. The Prince did not fall—she had never held a weapon, and a life spent in study had not left her strong—but he staggered. He lowered his sword.

There was a long silence.

Erlain stared down at the Scepter in her right hand, quite unable to fathom what she had just done. The guests and servants seemed to be having the same trouble. Slowly, the Prince reached up and touched the back of his head, where one of the Scepter’s bronze bands had torn his skin and exposed pale and bloodless bone.

Calla alone had the presence of mind to act. She exploded out of her kneeling position like a runner at a race, seizing Erlain’s arm in passing and pulling her roughly along, and Erlain squawked as the Scepter fell from her nerveless fingers. “Wait—”

“Leave it,” Calla shouted, her voice echoing like thunder. “Run!”

Erlain ran.

They were at the door when the Prince’s people snapped out of their shock and gave chase, all of them at once, soldiers and servants and nobles in regalia, an indiscriminate gray wave. They did not cry out, but a noise went up from them: a hateful sibilation, the hiss of a cold, stale wind.

It was all so awful that Erlain had to laugh. By the time they left the castle, she and Calla both were in breathless, terrified hysterics. “This way,” Calla managed, as ahead of them the iron teeth of the portcullis snapped shut. Erlain’s lungs were twin fists of agony, but she followed the thief up a flight of steps and leapt from the top of the wall, and now the magic came easily, more easily perhaps than ever before, and she wove a net of air to catch them and set them down unharmed.

“Well done back there,” Calla wheezed, clapping her on the shoulder. “I was expecting a spell, but whatever works, eh? You’ve got an arm on you, bedwetter!”

“Fuck you!” Erlain crowed, laughing, exultant, heedless of the noise she made. “You look good on your knees, you know that?”

And they were off again, racing for the shore with the whole of the Pavane on their heels, and ahead of them a party of sailors armed with rusty boathooks closed ranks, and with a sick and giddy thrill Erlain realized she might never see the sun again, that she might spend the rest of forever in this cold drear land—but for now she was alive, alive and running, and she almost couldn’t run for laughing and she almost couldn’t laugh for wheezing, and the blood pumped hot as summer in her chest.