I arrived early to the old temple in Sia’s Flooded Quarter. The concert was open to all, an act of Lady Aslim’s civic devotion to help commemorate the eight hundredth anniversary of Sia’s founding. I expected to find the old stone space brimming with people, but an hour before the performance half of the long wooden pews remained empty.
It made a sad kind of sense, I suppose. Due to the anniversary, the streets outside the temple were packed with jugglers and fire-eaters, acrobats and fruit vendors. On the walk over, I’d been unable to make my way through Adib’s Square because the Brotherhood of the Steel Flesh was putting on its macabre act, threading hooks through the muscles of their chests and backs, then suspending themselves above the flagstones to the horror and excitement of all. Lady Aslim’s Singers may have been famous in certain circles, but Antreem’s Mass was a long, reticent, stubborn piece of music, not ideally suited for drunken celebration. Judging from the relative crowds, most of Sia’s citizens preferred large-breasted, sword-swallowing women to ancient choral music.
Which was fine with me.
Though I’d come to Sia as part of my training to serve the god—to do our work, Ananshael’s faithful need to move confidently, fluidly through all manner of situation—though I’d spent the better part of a year living and working in the densely packed limestone warrens of the old town, crowds still made me nervous. The press of people reminded me too much of my childhood in Dombang, not enough of the huge sky of the Ancaz. I was willing to brave a crowd to listen to Antreem, but I was even happier to slide onto an empty bench at the very back of the temple, a dozen feet away from the next person.
And I was less than pleased when someone joined me on that bench, despite the ubiquity of other, better options.
I shifted down a foot or so, until my shoulder touched the stone wall at the pew’s end, then glanced over in irritation. My new companion—a young man in his mid-twenties—didn’t seem to notice me at all. Which was unsurprising, given that his right eye—haloed with the sick, shiny purple of a new bruise—had swollen entirely shut. The eye, in fact, was the least of it. His nose had been recently broken, then reset, and even as I watched, a drop of blood slid down his upper lip. He wiped it away absently with the back of a sleeve, leaving a smear of red across his teeth. His ear, too, had been viciously ripped near the bottom, as though someone had tried to tear it off with his teeth. Another trickle of blood snaked from the clotting wound down into the collar of his shirt. Part of a uniform, I realized—Annurian legion—though my understanding of the legions suggested he’d have been thrown in the stocks for half a week if he showed up to duty looking like he did.
A drunk, I thought at first, wandered in off the street looking for a place to sleep it off.
I considered dragging him outside, tossing him in some alley where he wouldn’t interrupt the Mass. On the other hand, he outweighed me and he obviously hadn’t come by that busted face avoiding fights. I could give him to the god, cut his throat where he sat, but if anyone noticed blood pooling on the ancient stones, the chaos would get in the way of the singing.
I sat there in irritated silence, shooting him glances while pondering the vexing question long enough that I realized, finally, he wasn’t drunk after all. He had closed his other eye, the unswollen one, but he wasn’t asleep—not judging from his breath and the set of his head. In fact, with his eyes closed he seemed more attentive, even reverent—the word climbed unbidden into my mind—than most of the concertgoers in the pews closer to the nave. While they whispered and gossiped, buzzing their impatience, he just waited, hands folded in his lap. Those hands, too, were bleeding, half the knuckles split open.
He made no move to applaud when the thirteen men and women of Aslim’s choir, all robed in black, finally filed through a low stone door to take their places at the temple’s nave. He didn’t twitch or open his eyes, but something in his posture shifted marginally, almost imperceptibly, as though he were an iron filing and somewhere on the far side of the city someone had nudged a magnet.
Irritation sizzled inside me. I had come to lose myself in Antreem’s Hymn. I had been waiting weeks. I had imagined a warm Si’ite evening brimming with lamplight, the whole night trembling with a piece of music dating back to the Atmani, and me lost in it. Instead, I found myself sharing a pew with this bruised, bleeding idiot, and worse than that, for some reason, even as the song began, I found my mind kept wandering back to him, wondering.
Should have killed him when he first walked in, I thought. There were other ways than opening his throat, more subtle ways, things I could have done quickly without jeopardizing the performance. Now that the music had begun, however, I was loath to slide over and wrap my scarf around his neck.
I tried to forget him, closing my own eyes as the singers began, abandoning myself to the music. The first moments of the Hymn sketch the central motif, a dissonant figure in a minor key wound tightly on itself, the structure incomplete, as though certain notes are missing, forgotten or torn away. When the second voice threads in beside the first, the ear aches for those lost tones. The counterpoint promises wholeness, then denies it. Finally, with eyes closed, I was able to wander the music’s broken ways. I forgot the bleeding man at my side.
When the first movement came to an agonizing close, however, when I opened my eyes, he was still there. He’d stopped bleeding, but started silently crying, which was worse. His fists trembled in his lap, the skin drawn tight over the scabbed, bloody knuckles. My own hands were still—they teach you that in Rassambur—but I recognized that trembling as something done to him by the music. Sometimes it seems the only way to survive Antreem’s Hymn is to make it to the end, but the man beside me didn’t wait. As the singers gathered themselves for the second movement, he opened his eyes, stared at nothing, shook his head as though to clear it, and then, to my absolute amazement, stood up. He met my gaze for just a moment, then turned away toward the temple door and the night beyond.
*
“You followed him,” Ela said. It wasn’t a question.
I finished my wine, then nodded wearily. The sun had long since dropped into the western haze. Red-scale lanterns illuminated the deck, swaying in the warm breeze as the flames danced inside. The servingman Ela had been flirting with all night brought over another carafe of wine. This time he lingered, a hand on her bare shoulder.
“Can I get you anything else?”
Ela shooed him away with a playful hand. “Later, Triem. Later.”
I eyed the brimming carafe dubiously. “I think I’ve had enough.”
“Nonsense,” Ela said, suddenly businesslike as she filled my glass. “I can’t get a good story out of you unless I pour you full of wine first. That’s becoming obvious.” She filled her own glass, then set the carafe to the side. “So. You followed him.”
“I followed him,” I agreed warily.
Ela studied me. “Why?”