One day he found Bren Antesh near the western gate, a hand shielding his eyes from the sun as he gazed up at a bird hovering overhead.

“Vulture?” Vaelin asked.

As was his custom the Cumbraelin leader gave no formal greeting, something Vaelin found irked him not at all. “Hawk,” he replied. “Of a type I haven’t seen before. Looks a little like the swift-wing from home.”

Of all the captains Antesh had reacted with the greatest calm to the crisis, placating his men and assuring them they were in no danger. His word clearly held considerable sway as there had been no attempts at desertion by any of the archers.

“I wanted to thank you,” Vaelin said. “For the discipline of your men. They must trust you greatly.”

“They trust you too, brother. Almost as much as they hate you.”

Vaelin saw little reason to argue the point. He moved next to Antesh, resting against a battlement. “I have to say I was surprised the King was able to recruit so many men from your fief.”

“When Sentes Mustor took the Fief Lord’s chair his first act was to abolish the law requiring daily practice with the longbow, and the monthly stipend that came with it. Most of my men are farmers, the stipend helped supplement their income, without it many couldn’t feed their families. They may hate King Janus with a passion, but hatred doesn’t put food in the mouth of your children.”

“Do they really believe I’m this Darkblade from your Ten Books?”

“You slew Black Arrow, and the Trueblade.”

“Actually, Brother Barkus killed Hentes Mustor. And to this day I still don’t know if the man I killed in the Martishe was really Black Arrow.”

The Cumbraelin captain shrugged. “In any case, the Fourth Book relates how no godly man can kill the Darkblade. I have to say, brother, you do seem to fit the description quite well. As for the use of the Dark… Well, who can say?” Antesh’s face was cautious, as if expecting some sort of rebuke or threat.

Vaelin decided a change of subject was appropriate. “And you, sir. Did you enlist to feed your children?”

“I have no children. No wife either. Just my bow and the clothes I’m wearing.”

“What of the King’s gold? Surely, you have that too.”

Antesh seemed agitated, looking away, his eyes searching the sky once again for the hawk. “I… lost it.”

“As I understand it, every man was paid twenty golds up front. That’s a lot to lose.”

Antesh didn’t turn back. “Do you require something of me, brother?”

The blood-song gave a short murmur of unease, not the shrill warning of impending attack, but a suggestion of deception. He hides something. “I’d like to hear more of Darkblade,” Vaelin said. “If you would care to tell me.”

“That would mean learning more of the Ten Books. Aren’t you afraid your soul will be sullied by such knowledge? Your faith undone?”

The Cumbraelin’s words summoned Hentes Mustor from his memory, seeing again the guilt and the madness in the Usurper’s eyes. The blood-song’s murmur grew louder. Did he know him? Had he been one of his followers? “I doubt any knowledge could sully a man’s soul. And as I told your Trueblade, my Faith cannot be undone.”

“The First Book tells us to teach the truth of the World Father’s love to any who wish to hear it. Find me again and I’ll tell you more, if you wish.”

In the evenings he would make his way to Ahm Lin’s shop where his wife would scowl murderously as she poured tea and the stonemason would coach him in the ways of the song.

“Amongst my people it’s called the Music of Heaven,” Ahm Lin explained one night. They were in the workshop, sipping tea from small porcelain bowls next to the statue of the wolf, which appeared more unnervingly real every time Vaelin visited. The mason’s wife wouldn’t allow Vaelin into the house itself where she invariably secluded herself after pouring the tea. He had once made the mistake of suggesting they pour it themselves which had provoked such an outraged glare that he waited until Ahm Lin took a sip from his own cup for fear she had poisoned the beverage.

“Your people?” Vaelin asked. He had deduced that the mason hailed from the Far West but knew little of the place beyond the tales of sailors, fanciful stories of a vast land of endless fields and great cities where the Merchant Kings held sway.

“I was born in the province of Chin-Sah under the benevolent rule of the great Merchant King Lol-Than, a man who knew well the value of those with unusual gifts. When mine became known to the village elders I was taken from my family at age ten and brought to the king’s court, to be tutored in the Music of Heaven. I remember I was terribly homesick but never tried to run away. It was the law that the treason of the son extends to the father and I didn’t wish him to suffer for my disobedience, though I longed to return to his shop and work the stone again. He was a mason too, you see.”

“There is no shame in the Dark in your homeland?”

“Hardly, it is seen as a blessing, a gift from Heaven. A family with a gifted child gains great honour.” His expression clouded. “Or so it was said.”

“So you were taught the song? You know how to use it, you know where it comes from.”

Ahm Lin smiled sadly. “The song cannot be taught, brother, and it doesn’t come from anywhere. It is simply what you are. Your song is not another being living inside you. It is you.”

“The song of my blood,” he murmured recalling the words of Nersus Sil Nin in the Martishe.

“I have heard it called that, a name that suits well enough.”

“So, if it cannot be taught, what could they teach you?”

“Control, brother. It is like any other song, to sing it well it must be practised, honed, perfected. My tutor was an old woman called Shin-La, so old she had to be carried around the palace on a litter and couldn’t see more than a foot or two beyond her nose. But her song…” He shook his head in wonder at the memory. “Her song was like fire, burning so bright and loud you felt blinded and deafened by it all at once. The first time she sang to me I nearly fainted. She cackled and called me Rat, little Singing Rat, Ahm Lin in the language of my people.”

“She sounds a harsh teacher,” Vaelin observed, reminded of Master Sollis.

“Harsh, yes she was that, but she had much to teach me and little time left in which to do it. Our gift is extremely rare, brother, and in all her long life of service to the Merchant King and his father before him, she had never met another singer. I was her replacement. Her lessons were harsh, painful. She needed no stick to strike me, her song could hurt me well enough. It started with the truth telling, two men would be brought in, one having committed a crime of some sort. Each would claim innocence and she would ask me which was guilty. Every time I got it wrong, and it happened often at first, her song would lash me with its fire. ‘Truth is the heart of the song, Rat,’ she would say. ‘If you cannot hear truth, you cannot hear anything.’

“Once I had mastered the art of hearing truth, the lessons became more complex. A servant would be given a token, a precious jewel or ornament, and told to hide it somewhere within the palace. If I didn’t find it by nightfall they could keep it, and I would be punished for its loss. Later, a large group of people would mill around one of the courtyards, talking at the top of their voices, with one of them carrying a dagger beneath their robes. I had only five minutes to find it before her song would stab me as the dagger would have stabbed our master. For, as she never failed to remind me, I owed all to him and to fail him would be my eternal shame.”