‘It did not start with fires, nor riots, nor violence of any kind. It was the music. It was always in the music. We thought we sang our devotion to the blessed dead. But we sang out, and it was not the God Emperor or His saints that answered.’
Nyme Etzebar had slept poorly for a week, and on the eighth night she had ceased to call it sleep at all.
There were hours in which her eyes closed and her body slumped, and when she startled awake with her cheek to a page or her fingers cramped around a pen, she could not say what had visited her in the dark. She struggled to recall the dreams that plagued her, except that they had not been good.
There seemed little Nyme might call good about that week, and if she dwelled on it, it had started even before that. She felt mad to speak it, even to herself, because the business of Selpetua continued around her, and surely it was merely passions and tempers set to motion by the business of tithing time. The holy Emperor’s voidships would claim their measure from Selpetua, and from Hecate, and they would go on their way into the stars, and all would be well again. She hoped.
The Belverine Chapelhouse sat in a fold of the Temererra, one of the first shriner districts to push up against the bleak industrial wounds that Whelvertail and the port inflicted on the topography of the City of Bones. Bisected by canals feeding into the river delta, the buildings were long, narrow affairs that crept skyward with crooked reverence, and the chapelhouse, one of many, was no different. In better seasons it was a place of modest utility: a dormitory for choristers, a hall for scholam lessons, a scriptorium where tired young women like Nyme copied hymns until their wrists and fingers went numb. It had never in Nyme’s lifetime, and many lifetimes before, been a fashionable life, but as tourism from other worlds, and even other cities had evaporated, many young Imperial citizens of Selpetua found the lot of a church laborer a better bargain than they might be offered on the docks.
Nyme, who had enrolled at the Belverine the very same day she aged out of scholam care, had wanted only a roof, a hot meal, and the promise of more to come without backbreaking labor or the predations of dockmen. But she had found in the ensuing years that she enjoyed the quiet piety, and the relative freedom she was still afforded compared to true Sisters of the church.
Which was why on that day, the eighth day, the events that occurred took her by such surprise.
The parchment nailed to the cloister door practically shouted it, like a half-crown newsbill from a street hawker. It was stamped with the seal of the Belverine choir, and beneath it, a smaller flourish: three near-faceless ovals.
Nyme found herself in the dining hall, asking her fellow choristers what in the name of Terra she had missed. They told her.
Choirmaster Sanpavel had simply dismissed the Belverine choir. Told them they were not needed. Indefinitely? Just for the ‘Grand Oratorio?’ Nobody could say. They were not expelled from the chapelhouse, nor punished in any way anyone could specify; they were simply made irrelevant. Their hymns were ‘small’. Their voices were ‘provincial’, which was baffling to Nyme, because Selpetua was the capital of Hecate. Their harmonies were ‘admirable but inadequate.’
New singers arrived in their place, she learned, brought by patronage. They were making themselves at home in the cathedral at that very moment, evidently. The virtuosi came in pairs and trios, dressed in the Droctulf style that Selpetua had adopted and darkened, with little affectations of crimson and burgundy in the form of scarves or gloves or ribbons.
When Nyme went to see Sanpavel, he spoke of them with a reverence bordering on hunger.
‘They understand proportionality,’ he told Nyme, as if describing holy virtues. ‘They understand the architecture of sound.’
Nyme did not argue, did not even have the vocabulary to argue. She had never heard Sanpatel describe music in the terms he was using, and certainly had no notion of them herself. She could sing and read musical notation, and keep time, because it was expected of her. But she hardly considered herself any kind of musician.
It was only because she copied notation well that she would be permitted to remain in the loft above the main hall. Sanpatel told her that the virtuosi would need lodgings, and many choristers were being sent away to make room. He seemed to take a kind of pity on her when he saw her crestfallen look. ‘Remain,’ the choirmaster had said, making it sound like the merciful pronunciation of a high priest. ‘Copy what you hear. We shall need many hands to disseminate it. Selpetua must learn.’
Nyme had nodded, bowed her head, and carried her tools up into the loft.
The loft was a narrow gallery that ran along the hall’s length, half hidden behind carved and woven screens. From there one could see almost the entirety of the cathedral hall below without being seen too clearly oneself. The hall had been dressed for the Oratorio. Red banners hung from the rafters. Lanterns had been brought in - too many lanterns, too bright, too artfully placed, to cast shadows here or there just so. The floor had been cleared of benches so an audience might stand about while they pretended they’d come for piety rather than novelty, or whatever this thing was.
Nyme sat at a small desk under the loft’s window with parchment spread in front of her and a pot of ink that smelled faintly sour. She laid her rulers and pens out with care. She arranged her tools meticulously, because it was in that moment a rare thing she might actually control.
When the first rehearsal began, she understood why the regular choir had been sent away.
The performance did not begin like a hymn.
It began with a single voice, a single held note that was almost beneath hearing. It did not declare itself. It simply existed, hanging in the air, thin as wire. The virtuosi stood very still. One of them - tall, with a lacquered red mask that made his eyes seem too intent - raised two fingers as if conducting not the singers but the air itself.
A second note joined the first, a precise distance away. Then a third.
Nyme’s hand hovered over the page.
The sound was not loud. It carried no obvious menace. It did not even sound, at first, like something beautiful. It sounded, Nyme thought, like a feedback tone, a test signal on a hand-vox.
Then the hall seemed to change shape around it.
The lantern flames quivered in their glass. Dust motes rose from the floor and held in the air as if suspended on invisible threads. Nyme felt the wood of her desk tremble - not enough to spill ink, but enough to rattle the little jars, and make the fine hairs on her forearms stand at end.
Below, Choirmaster Sanpavel stood at the front of the hall with his hands clasped, his eyes half-lidded. He looked like a man at prayer, though Nyme could not recall any supplicant she had ever witnessed who looked quite so satisfied as Sanpavel did then.
The virtuosi did not sing words at first. They sang harmonic intervals.
They built something slowly - one line, then another line that braided through it, then a third that did not quite belong and yet could not be removed without collapsing the whole. It was a kind of arithmetic made audible. When the words finally entered, they entered like an afterthought, as if the meaning of the hymn were less important than the harmonic geometry it described.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Nyme tried to write.
Her fingers moved, her pen scratched. She caught the opening phrase, the first shift, the ascent of the counterline. She annotated as she had always done: diligently, mechanically, with her mind held at a safe distance.
And then, without her choosing it, her foot began to tap.
She stopped it at once, furious with herself, and put both feet flat on the floor.
A moment later, her tongue touched her teeth, tracing the shape of the note echoing around her.
She closed her mouth so hard she tasted blood.
Sanpavel was making a wordless, appreciative sound, his fish-hook smile growing broader.
Nyme lowered her eyes to the page and forced herself to continue copying.
The music progressed through sequences that made her stomach tighten for no obvious reason. A phrase would repeat, and in repeating it would shift by a fraction - so small she only noticed because her pen lagged behind it. The repetition did not soothe; it constricted. It took hold of the mind, and thus the body, and made gentle demands.
Once, midway through, the sound dipped into a register that Nyme did not so much hear as feel. It was as if the stones and timbers of the Belverine Chapelhouse were being addressed directly by the virtuosi. The old mortar in the walls answered with a faint sympathetic hum, the sort of sound Nyme truly wished she might blame on the wind.
She looked up from her page and met, through the latticework, the eyes of a younger chorister she recognized from another section - one of the boys who had been dismissed and then, inexplicably, permitted to stand at the hall’s edge as a kind of witness to his own redundancy. His face was pale. His jaw had gone slack. He did not seem frightened. He seemed - Nyme could not find a better word -
When the rehearsal ended, there was a moment of silence in which Nyme expected, absurdly, applause.
No one applauded. Sanpavel and the few choristers with him stood quiet and still. The virtuosi lowered their hands with slow grace, as if setting down something heavy and fragile. Nyme heard a sort of exhalation, a communal sigh, which made her skin crawl.
Sanpavel addressed the choristers present.
‘You heard it,’ he said, awed. ‘Do you feel how it settles? How it—’
He paused, searching for a word.
‘How it us.’
A murmur of agreement rose, low and intimate.
Nyme bent over her page and wrote the last barline until her pen scratched too hard and tore the paper.
She sat very still and waited for her hands to stop shaking.
After the rehearsal, Nyme found she was not permitted to leave.
Nobody had said it aloud, but more of the virtuosi clustered around the gates to the chapelhouse property, and when Nyme strayed close to the street, she found suddenly they would be standing in her way, obstructing passage. After being frustrated at the rear gates as well, she returned to the loft.
By late afternoon, Nyme’s writing hand was numb. She had resigned herself to copying, dozens and dozens of pages of music from the rehearsals, which made her mind feel oddly hollow. She stood at the loft rail, looking down through the lattice at the hall, and realized she could still hear the opening note even in the silence between sessions. She could feel it like a pressure at the base of her skull, gentle but firm, squeezing tight by slow degrees.
At last, Sanpavel called for her, and offered her his best attempt at a kindly smile.
‘Go,’ he said. ‘Wash your hands. Eat something. Then return. We will require many copies of the notation by morning.’
Nyme nodded and went back to the loft to gather her papers.
As she passed down the stairs to the dining hall, she heard voices in the side corridor - men speaking in low tones, with careful confidence. She slowed without quite deciding to. She did not press herself against the wall, nor flatten her breath, but instead advanced at the pace she had been, until she neared the half-ajar door the voices escaped from.
Choirmaster Sanpavel’s voice was unmistakable, soft and fervent.
‘...the vaults were quarried from the bedrock of Kalastikon,’ he was saying, ‘the stone is contiguous, each chamber hewn out of the greater whole. And stone remembers, you see. If the harmonies are just so—’
A second voice replied. Male. Educated. Amused, but not warm.
‘You speak of it as if it were a lute, man.’
‘As if it were a bell,’ the choirmaster corrected, and there was irritation in the correction, the irritation of an artist being misunderstood. ‘A bell buried in the earth. You must strike it at the correct frequency, the precise location. Precision. Proportion. Those are the watchwords.’
‘And what,’ the second voice asked, ‘does this buried bell call to service?’
Sanpavel laughed quietly. In that moment, it was a terrible sound to Nyme’s ears, but her mind hitched on something the second man had said. He had not asked this metaphorical bell might call, but
‘The sleepers,’ Sanpavel said.
Nyme’s fingers tightened around the rolled up sheet music she carried, creasing and crumpling the parchment.
The second voice made a thoughtful sound.
‘You believe Hecuba’s stories, then?’
‘I have seen it!’ Sanpavel replied, eagerly. ‘The demonstrations for the Circle. They did not understand, but their ears are untrained. I saw it, heard it. It is real.’
Nyme swallowed, throat constricting even as she tried to steady her breath.
‘And what the Circle? Surely the Prefecture must respond.’
A pause.
‘The Prefecture is all show. Their attentions can be… diverted. It will be an issue.’
‘Even if the little mouse spying at the door as we speak runs to tell them?’
A shadow interrupted the thin blade of line spilling from the gap in the door, and Nyme started. She turned quickly, walking away even as she heard the creak of door hinges behind her
Then she realised she had been humming.
It was not loud. It was barely a sound at all. She stopped, shocked, and pressed her mouth tight until her jaw ached. The humming did not stop, but instead moved into her throat. It became a vibration under her tongue.
She put a hand to her own neck as if she could hold it in.
‘Nyme, is that you there?’ she heard Sanpavel’s voice call behind her.
Her stomach turned over. Then she was running.
She had not gone to Kessa’s tavern.
Kessa’s was a place where Selpetua pretended it remained ordinary, or at least Nyme and her friends pretended. She did not trust herself to enter and not bring that accursed melody with her. Even now, it echoed in her mind, and she felt with certainty that it would spread like contagion if she dared voice it among others.
So she went the long way around the Temererra, bypassing trams and street cars to take back alleys and narrow lanes into Whelvertail. It was two hours of this before she found herself standing in the sputtering light of a streetlamp before Glevedan’s lodging. When she saw him emerge - coat done up, hat pulled low, a man trying to look like he had not been unravelled by his own curiosity - she stepped forward and said his name.
‘Glevedan.’
He stopped so abruptly that he looked as if he’d seen an actual ghost. His eyes darted around wildly for the briefest moment before recognition dawned on his face.
‘Nyme,’ he said, mouth twisting into some kind of grimace. ‘What-’
‘Not here,’ she whispered.
He looked around. The lane held only a few passing figures and the distant sound street hawkers and traffic from the higher streets. Yet Nyme felt as if the brick and mortar around them was listening, like Sanpavel might step out from a corner at any moment to… to what? She could not say.
Glevedan nodded once, and turned back to the tenement steps, beckoning her.
His lodging was small, as she had expected. Clean, mostly, though Nyme felt that was more due to its spartan nature than any special effort at tidiness. A lamp burned low, and she could smell recaf, cheap soap, old candles.
Nyme stood just inside the door, shivering. In her flight from the chapelhouse, she had not paused to retrieve her coat or gloves.
‘What is it,’ Glevedan asked again, and his face suggested he was forcing himself to be calm for her benefit. ‘What’s spooked you?’
Nyme drew in a breath.
‘It’s the chapelhouse,’ she said. ‘They’ve taken it.’
Glevedan did not ask who. She saw in his expression that he did not need to. There was only one ‘they’ in this circumstance, even if ‘they’ remained obfuscated.
‘Sanpavel dismissed the choir,’ she continued. ‘He’s brought in… virtuosi. Up-district salon singers. He has some business with this Circle Benevolent.’
He watched her for a moment. ‘Nyme,’ he said, careful, ‘you’re exhausted. Tithing time has been hard on all of us.’
With sudden fury, she rounded on him. ‘You cataclysmic shit!’
‘What-’ Glevedan reeled back.
‘Do you think I’m stupid, Glev?’ Nyme clenched her fists, staring at him. ‘You damn near jumped straight out of your skin when you saw me. I know you’ve been doing exactly what you told Jaro not to do. The statue thing. I know you didn’t let it go, because you look like you’ve slept even less than I have.’
Glevedan leaned back against his small table, and the wood creaked in protest. He raised his hands placatively.
‘Nyme, I’m sorry-’
‘Shut up and listen to me,’ she said. She took a deep breath, met his eyes. ‘There is something very wrong in Selpetua. I do not know the shape of it, but I know it. You know it.’
She realized he was staring, not at her face, but her feet. She looked down. Her booted foot was tapping out a time signature on the floorboards. She looked back at Glevedan, desperate, and saw he recognized it. Because of course he did. He had heard them in the streets, singing, night after night.
‘Glev,’ she pleaded, as if he might somehow set the world right. ‘They are about to do something horrible.’
‘Okay, Nyme, okay. Tell me what happened.’
And so she told him.
‘Do you know the name Urdis Hecuba?’ she began, and saw immediately that he did.
