Garden of Embers: Beneath Devouring Eyes #2

Chapter 7, Part B

Somewhere deep in the onyx palace, someone was playing music. The notes drifted, lazy and forlorn, down black and silver hallways all the way to the servants' quarters where Radix now lived.

Even with its ruler's Rite of Solitude slowing down palace life, the grim, dark royal residence still bustled with the endless bizarre activities Promethidae considered important.

Radix could imagine ten thousand reasons a palace musician might believe it crucial to practice the same bloody song over and over all day. But the real reason was probably way grander and more absurd than anything Radix could dream up.

The Pullatus had no clue what instrument it was that they were hearing. Some kind of string instrument, judging by the squeaks of missed notes, but whether a violin or harp or lyre, they had no idea.

Radix knew of a book that might be able to help them identify the culprit. They'd scanned most of the titles in the small tablinum office library and seen the short but thick encyclopedia of musical instruments on the fourth shelf, seventeenth book from the right, sandwiched between a volume on magically-modified lifeforms and another on Provincia Bacaliae's pastoral love poetry.

Part of them longed to dart out of their bedchamber, get the book, go find that mysterious instrument, and make its identity a mystery no longer.

They quelled the desire, that strange new urge that had been coming upon them more and more ever since they had first learned to read a few weeks ago. Books, to their delight and frustration, opened whole new worlds of knowledge, and they longed to drink it all in as fast as possible. To know everything. But there were way more books to read and things to learn than time in the day.

And they wanted to use their time on this little project.

Humming off-key under their breath along with the mysterious string instrument, they surveyed their creation.

It didn't look like much. They had borrowed a consecturum--well, alright, a whole chest full of the crystalline promenia weapons--and other things they'd found around the palace. One of Fons's spectacle lenses. A mirror. A bunch of candles. Several potted plants from the greenhouse. And their slender knife, one of the few belongings they'd brought with them from Urbs Hostiae.

They could not believe how easy it was to thieve in the palace. Snatching had been a piece of cake back at the collegium too, but at least there they'd needed to sneak in and out of buildings and rooms where they didn't belong. But as a palace servant and personal attendant to the Princeps Worldholder himself, there were no spaces in the onyx palace that were barred to them. All they had to do was pick up a mop or feather duster and waltz in, and no one even looked askance at them. And the luxurious, flowing fabrics of a palace servant's tunica and paenula, shorter and simpler perhaps than a Promethides's but still quite fine, had ample space to squirrel away all kinds of interesting things.

The most interesting things, however, weren't in Radix's bedroom but their head.

Promenia. Lots of people seemed to have written about promenia, but Radix swore no one was actually thinking about it. The Promethidae were so set in their ways and the Pyrrhaei in their superstitions that no one seemed to give much actual thought to the magical particles and the weird silent songs those particles sang as they reshaped reality.

For the thirtieth or fortieth time that week, Radix lit the candles and arranged them beneath the mirror. Heat seemed to be the key they had been missing. They'd thought at first that the particles' silent songs behaved like light, and in some ways the magical songs did, but the magic also behaved like, well, songs. Sound. And heat helped bend soundwaves just as a lens helped bend light.