Duet

Often when writing novels I explore characters and concepts in isolation. In this case those characters are Dorilian and Hans, and the concepts being explored are permutations of events that happened in the series ending.

Two characters coming to terms with who—and what—they have become

I also had fun while writing this story showcasing Leur's musical instrument: the mallyr. While this instrument doesn't appear directly in the Triempery Revelations series, other than in epigraphs, it does appear in other books and stories. In this tale, Dorilian and Hans are shown figuring out the mallyr... and themselves.

This story spoils the ending of the Triempery Revelations series and reveals events from The Rill Lord.

Duet

The moment Hans found the instrument, he recognized it as a mallyr. He touched the smooth, molded surface and shivered at the resonances a mere touch awakened from that skin. Long before the mallyr had appeared in the fabric of this Creation, music had been poured into its making. Music such as men now living had never heard. The blue-silver metal of the raised surfaces vibrated ever so slightly when Hans’s fingertips brushed delicate ridges; green-blue hollows added lower, less dulcet tones. In the hands of a musician trained to play it, a billion variants of sound could be coaxed from its splendid contours. Any sound, any note ever created by any instrument of lesser origin, could be reproduced by this one device that looked more like a piece of sculpture than an apparatus for making music. Only a few mallyri had survived the Devastation—three that Hans knew of. He had never heard one played, however.

Malyrdys.

The only human known for certain to have played one of the legendary instruments had been, or become, a god. Hans had seen a drawing once in an illustrated tome: Amynas Malyrdys, Aryati clone prince and Leur friend, founder of the ruling Highborn dynasty, father to the Three. Amynas’s sons had gone on to become gods themselves, the Leur cells of their immortal bodies transformed into the Entities. Those beings of power still presided over what remained of the Creation their Aryati predecessors had nearly destroyed.

Hans lifted the mallyr from the null field that had suspended and protected the instrument for uncounted years, perhaps millennia, and bore it from the chamber. He had entered this latest door on a whim. Two hundred doors now opened, and thousands—possibly millions—to go. Permephedon’s maze of towers and rooms would take several lifetimes to explore and Hans had come to accept that he might never fully grasp his inheritance. Part of him did not want to. He feared the consequences of knowing his enigmatic father too well.

More than a living City, Permephedon was an extended being, one of the Entities. A god and a newborn. Marenthro continued to appear at times in human form, though that form was now but a temporary manifestation Marenthro assumed so as to make conversation less bizarre. Hans found small talk easier when his father looked like the person he had known, rather than any of Marenthro’s more recent architectural permutations. But Marenthro was not around now—or was, more likely, simply otherwise—and Hans would have to look elsewhere if he was to learn more about the mallyr.

It felt unreal knowing what awaited. In the morning, Hans would have his coronation and officially become King. Handurin Marc Frederick Stauberg-Randolph, anointed monarch of Essera, sovereign of the Trans-Dazun and crowned head of the Royal North. One of the new Three, rulers of a reunited Triempery. After a long and brutal war of succession, Hans had emerged the victor, although the consequences of his victory had yet to become completely clear.

Being King was not entirely to his liking. However willingly he had pursued that job at the outset, he’d done so mostly because of family honor; he hadn’t wanted to be robbed of an inheritance. Had Hans truly understood what becoming a king meant, he would have faded back into the background, lost himself in the quiet hiding places of his childhood. He’d been raised a secret, in secret, and felt unprepared for the many demands soon to fall upon him. But after he’d seen the chaos that would descend upon these people—his people—if he did not put himself forward, Hans had known what he must do. He’d chosen to accept their fealty, seek order and affirmation through his deeds; for the most part, he had succeeded. The Khelds considered him their rightful King and champion, a man who would ensure their people a proper place among their neighbors. Essera and its Staubaun peoples thought Hans moderate and fair-minded, well-placed to be a just ruler in a troubled time. And the gods... smiled upon him.

At least, Hans liked to think they did.

“What’s this? A mallyr?”

Secluded on his coronation eve, Hans hadn’t expected visitors. He’d told his guards to turn away all lords and petitioners. But he’d known better than to discount Dorilian Sordaneon. Powerful and gifted, Dorilian had been the primary catalyst of every event of the War of Entities, including Hans’s ascension to Essera’s throne. Not that Hans hadn’t gotten the last word: when Dorilian had been badly wounded in battle and defeat seemed inevitable, Hans had given in to desperation and with his own hands had cast Dorilian into the supernatural force field of the Rill Entity. That act had destroyed the enemy and left Hans victorious... and Dorilian too, if becoming a god could be counted as a victory. Hans still wasn’t quite certain Dorilian had forgiven him.

“Yes, I found it in one of the chambers. Maybe Marenthro meant me to find it... or maybe not. But isn’t it beautiful?” As he had many times throughout the last hour, Hans let his fingers drift across the mallyr’s sublime surface. A string of glorious sound, like silver chimes and the memory of laughter, rippled for a breathtaking moment and hung briefly in the air.

“Perfection,” Dorilian agreed. The affirmation held meaning, coming from him. Dorilian understood beauty better than most. All of the Sons of Amynas did. Their very beings had been fashioned from it. “It was created for a master.”

“You know its history?”

“Some. This is the mallyr that Leur gave to Amynas during the time of the Star-Binding, when they wandered as minstrels.”

Hans looked at him in surprise. “Amynas—the god Amynas—was a minstrel?”

“He was, as was Leur—for a time. I suppose not many now know that.”

But Dorilian would know. Integrating with the Rill had given him access to the true memories of Derlon, one of the Three. Hans picked up the mallyr and carried it with him to a low bench before the room’s tall, jewel-screened windows. Crossing his legs, he cradled the instrument as he had seen in the picture, across his body. Even at rest as now, the mallyr seemed to live in his hands. Tentatively, Hans flicked his fingers across several silver ridges and plumes.

The noise that resulted could only be called cacophonous.

“Give me that!” Dorilian snapped. The look on his face communicated nearly physical pain. He settled on the other end of the settee. “You don’t know how to play it.”

“Do you?”

“No. But I’m uniquely suited to figuring out such things.”

“Do you play music at all?”

“Some. Not often.” Now it was Dorilian who cradled the instrument, his hands looking as if they owned it. With his right fingers, he lightly traced a sweeping pattern. His left thumb brushed lower, slower. This time the mallyr emitted a more pleasant sound, only slightly discordant.

“Is it similar to Rill technology?” Hans asked. “I mean, it’s not Aryati, is it?” Aryati technology had led to the Devastation and creation of the Diadem, among other horrors.

“No, it’s not Aryati. This is Leur work. Generative.” Dorilian made a few more passes before laying the instrument in his lap.

Generative. As Dorilian was. As all Leur creations were. As the Rill was—food-carrying, people-conveying, capable both of raising new empires and destroying old ones. Dorilian had already extended the Rill to Stauberg, Ogarth and Mormantalorus simply by willing it and unfurling his fingers. Mormantalorus, formerly his great enemy, had surrendered within hours after the Rill had suddenly revivified in the heart of the city, disgorging troops and conquest. Dorilian’s young Heir, Levyathan Sordaneon, was already proclaimed ruler there, crowned just the past week. Hans had appointed nobles and staff charged with helping Essera's noble rulers draft charters for Rill service to the Esseran capitals of Merath and Simelon.

With the awesome power of the Rill his to command, Dorilian could, if he wanted, generate enormous trouble. But Dorilian had never said, not truly, what it was he really wanted other than his life. Perhaps it was enough that he had survived his transition to godhood with at least a façade of his humanity intact, that he had freed the Creation from a primal menace, that he had found love and would soon be a father. Marenthro had told Hans during one of their recent conversations that human life, simple and rough as it could sometimes be, was also beautiful and surprising and rare. As such, the chance to be human held enormous appeal for an immortal.

Hans reached for a gitar he'd been playing earlier, for his own pleasure. He had often played during the war, while on campaign. His friend Arne and he would sit in his cramped, cold tent before a half-hearted fire and turn the winter into summer with song. Kheldish songs about harvests and hunts and soft, warm women. Or the songs Hans knew from his life before he had come to this land, strident lyrics riding uncomfortably atop the edges and stabs of outraged youth. He’d grown up in a land where youth had enjoyed the luxury of outrage. Here, youth was fortunate if it enjoyed a bit of childhood before adulthood claimed it.

“Sing with me,” he said to Dorilian, who had never sung with him before. The gitar nestled easily against Hans’s ribs and shoulder, his fingers lazy on the strings. Songs came easily to his fingertips, lines of melody too aimless to have sprung from design.

“What do you wish to sing?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think it matters.”

Did the song ever matter? Or was it simply the experience? Hans strummed in search of a tune, placing his faith that a song would emerge. Arne had been a good partner that way. No matter how dire their situation, the young Kheld had always fallen easily into a song. But Dorilian was a different entity… remote, complicated, all barriers and secrets. And to Hans’ chagrin, the gitar tonight seemed strung with knotted wire. 

“Choices matter,” Dorilian told him. “But you can put less effort into this one. Our relationship is substantial enough to withstand a little spontaneity.”

Now that sounded like the pronouncement of a god. Hans shook his head and continued to pluck random notes from the strings. “We’ve come so far that I no longer recognize myself or this World. Everything used to be wild, at least to me. All secrets and danger. I used to spend my hours scrambling to save my life, or the lives of my friends, or the people my friends loved. And now it’s… civilized. I am being asked to save not lives but livelihoods, not populations but fortunes. Every day I’m asked to choose between one person’s lies and another’s. Nine times out of ten, they’re asking me to intervene with you.”

“I believe I warned you about that.”

“You did.”

“It’s hardly a surprise,” Dorilian judged, “considering that intervening with me is what you’ve been doing all along.”

“Have I?” Hans’s fingers found a thread of a melody, something half-remembered. “The day in Sordan when I bloodied your lip.”

“And the day in the orchard in Amallar, when you showed me how much you understood about the World—and how little I understood it. And the day you saved my life. Both days, in fact. The first time, you did not know why you did it; the second time, you did.” Dorilian pondered him. “You know what you have done. So what’s troubling you?”

You. Always you. Hans could not bring himself to say it, and was glad for his ability to hide his thoughts. Dorilian, like all Highborn, read unguarded emotions as easily as the weather. It was a quality that other people found disconcerting. Hans did not because he could read thoughts himself. Because he was Highborn too. That simple fact had made them peers despite whatever politics arose between them. Dorilian had been many things to Hans: enemy, paradox, revelation, mentor, friend. For a brief time, they had been equals, or nearly so. But now....

“I wanted to change the World. And I did, because I changed you.”

“Then tell them that. That you think you’ve done enough.”

Hans liked the melody his fingers had remembered. It was a song he had enjoyed years before in the Dominion, on another world, in another life... a life before coming to this land and before meeting this man. He strummed it energetically and took pleasure in having Dorilian listen. He still wanted to get him to sing.

“Is that why I was born? Why I was finessed to this place? To facilitate your godhood?” There, he had asked it. He stopped playing and looked at his friend. It was a good sign that Dorilian looked more thoughtful than provoked. That he looked receptive. “Neither of us wanted that, for you to change. It was never part of what I wanted to do. I was just like the rest of them; I thought the Rill was a machine. Yet the Rill’s Awakening is the one thing for which I will be remembered, for which we both will be. And it’s the one thing neither of us will ever escape. Tomorrow, a nation will crown me as their King, but all they will talk about, all they will see, is their god.”

“Would you rather I not attend, or stand by your side?”

It was not an offer, but a challenge. As such, Hans rejected it. “No. Then people would say I am out of favor with the Entity.”

“And you thought I was difficult when I was just your enemy.”

Was that a smile? Of course it was. Dorilian possessed—had always possessed—a sense of humor. And of irony. It had been easier having to deal with people convinced that the two of them were enemies. There had been freedom in it which at the time Dorilian had appreciated and Hans had not.

“I liked it better before,” Hans admitted, waxing nostalgic. “I liked them better.”

Dorilian pressed his fingers lightly on the mallyr, bringing forth a string of clear, bright notes. Hans smiled as he recognized the harmony. The man had been paying more heed than he’d thought. Hans was impressed, considering the song was one Dorilian could not possibly have heard before in any incarnation. He saw Dorilian frown over the effort, having heard his own missteps. Hans played the tune again so he could adjust his playing.

“It’s an unusual tune.” Dorilian had picked up the bass line.

“It’s Mentan, from when I was younger.” He caught Dorilian’s look of laughter and added, smiling broadly, “Much younger. Sixteen, maybe.” In but a few more weeks, Hans would be twenty years, the same age Dorilian had been when he had become Hierarch of Sordan. The Entities, it seemed, were fond of heroic symmetry.

“This music has a kind of raw appeal. Like an assault. I hope the words are better.”

“Not really. But the song is compelling anyway.”

Arne had never quite gotten the hang of the deep, driving rhythms. Like most Khelds—indeed, most inhabitants of this sparsely populated World ruled by gods and frontiers—Arne had cleaved to the traditional, familiar tunes of his people. Kheld songs were mostly simple, complex only in their weaving harmonies. Even Staubauns, disdained by Khelds for perpetually inventing new art forms, enjoyed pretty ballads to the exclusion of music that spoke straight to the viscera. They considered the percussive pieces Hans liked to play barbaric.

It was somewhat startling to realize that Dorilian was following his lead, the mallyr producing precisely the wailing chords that Hans’s wooden gitar could not. Hans stopped playing to stare at him accusingly. “How did you know what to play? Have you been fishing inside my head again?”

Dorilian stiffened. “You know I cannot do that without you knowing. The song proclaimed its integrity to me.”

The man was attuned to things people around him never sensed—the scent of love or anger, the color of pain, the texture of truth. The full extent of the Rill’s physical existence. The integrity of song. Hans sighed, remembering occasions he had himself sung foreign words while his fingers strummed tunes he had never heard. “I’m tense tonight,” he confided, apologizing with a look of contrition. “I’m afraid I’m not the hero my people believe me to be.”

“You don’t have to be heroic. They will make you that all by themselves.”

“In the same way they make you a god?”

“Yes.”

Dorilian looked like a man because he had been born a man. He only looked like a god when he allowed the Rill to flood his skin and become visible. His dimensions then were mutable, place-shifting and deadly. But most of the time, nearly all the time, Dorilian appeared as he looked now: tawny-haired, handsome and indisputably human.

Dorilian shrugged. “Because I am now a being they cannot remove or silence, and whose power they fear because it is so much greater than theirs, people call me a god. They want me to have some kind of divine plan for their existence. I do not. They believe I am the Hand of Leur, the Godspear of Heaven, Amynas’s Golden Promise brought to holy fruition. I am not. It would do no good for me to tell them that I am none of the things they believe me to be or that my sole plan for their existence is to so thoroughly change the face of this World that it will be centuries before they can again attempt to chain or destroy me. Before my coming they had closed the World within spear-drawn borders, built high walls by which to shut out their enemies and keep in their advantages. I will throw down those walls, let their enemies in and their riches out. I will make their borders meaningless. Some will love me and others will hate me, but none will be able to stop me.” Dorilian’s silver gaze bore no trace of malice as it measured Hans serenely. “And that is why they need a hero.”

Someone who would confront the challenge for them. Someone who would lead them into that unknown. A god carved the way, but it would take a leader to persuade them to follow. Already Hans had shown them what he could do. When Dorilian had caused the Rill to appear in the wilderness of Amallar and enabled Khelds to travel throughout the Triempery in an instant, where before only Staubauns or their allies had done, Hans had smoothed the transition between the old way of life and a new one in which Khelds would play a part. That part had led to his conquest of Essera and his reclaiming of his family’s throne. And it was just the first step. There were lands beyond the Triempery to which the Rill might run… lands across the ice and sea… on the other side of the impassable Pillars of the Sky... to which the World’s destiny that of this kingdom would lead. Dorilian was not a reckless man, nor would he be a reckless god, but he would set a path men would follow for a thousand years.

“Where the Rill goes, there our people will go,” Hans said softly.

“Our kindred must carry forth Leur’s work. I am not just remaking the World, Handurin, I am unmaking it. I am casting down the last empires the Aryati seeded. Already Dazunor-Rannuli of the golden palaces has become just another river port. Towns yet to be built will become great capitals. Old domains will fall and new ones rise to glory. Together, we will throw down the hard work of princes and set to ruin the ancient schemes of potentates.”

Dorilian appeared to have figured out something about the mallyr. At the level of his collarbone, he pressed his fingers along measured points while with his right hand he brushed the notched ridges nearer his hip. Hans felt the chord in his very soul.

“And you don’t find it even a little bit overwhelming?”

“I’m less overwhelmed, I can see, than you are.”

Hans sighed. This man had been his friend, and was still his friend in the deepest meaning of the word. The only thing Dorilian had not done for Hans had been to surrender the fate of the Creation itself to a monster in exchange for Hans’ life. At the time, Hans had prayed fervently to die rather than have Dorilian doom the Creation. Ultimately, he had gotten his wish; Dorilian had been willing to let him die, and had nearly lost his own life as a consequence. They were bound by life and death, and it reassured Hans to know the astonishing power that had destroyed their enemy resided in Dorilian, whose grasp of priorities was balanced by integrity and hope.

“At one time,” Hans said, “you called your destiny ‘monstrous’.”

“Only because it is. That which is Leur in me extends far beyond what men see. Do you want to know if it is raining in Amroset? Or the texture and scent of the nallu blossoms that nightly flower upon high stalks above the sacred city of Jharbala?” Dorilian extended his hand and, turning it over, and presented to Hans an umbral of lantern-shaped blossoms that abruptly filled the air about them with seductive fragrance. The flowers were pale saffron and violet, and would be nearly invisible to human eyes. “I am no longer a man, Handurin, but a chimaera. So are you, though none might see it. Such the Highborn have ever been, such is the Wall and this very Citadel of Permephedon in which we dissect our natures. And such is the Rill. If men could see my body now, my full and true body, they would scream.”

But all any human of this World would ever see would be the body of a man. Or the structure of the Rill. Separate and not One. Human eyes could not see the two-body integration. Human touch might detect it somewhat, a tingle of power overlaying warm human skin; but touching any Highborn, and Dorilian especially, was forbidden. Hans, however, understood what Dorilian meant. Unlike his subjects, Hans could sometimes discern the extra-dimensional extensions that emanated from Dorilian, a splendid halo of energy that sheathed him like armor from which tendrils of phase-generated matter streamed to the Rill host.

“Heroes are usually expected to slay monsters.” Hans reminded them both of childhood myth.

“Then I suggest you re-define your monster to one you can convincingly slay.”

“Yes, I suppose I ought.” The usual course of human civilization was to have gods do the hard work: create life or understanding, impose order, amass natural resources and sometimes treasure. In the due course of things, men would subvert or denounce such gods, even slay them, so that the gods’ lessons could be rewritten, their riches confiscated. But this god had outwitted his oppressors. Now it was Dorilian who would impose change. “Perhaps instead of fighting gods I shall wipe out monsters such as intolerance, or hunger, or ignorance,” Hans mused.

“The old ways.”

“Yes, the old ways.” Because wasn’t that what Hans had started out to do? Bring new ways, new hope? Hans recalled a song that seemed to speak to him about his own youthful ambition. His fingers found the chord anew. “This King business isn’t quite what I thought would happen to me.”

“It never is,” Dorilian said. He picked up the bass, the mallyr reproducing exactly the harsh rhythm.

This time when Hans launched into song, Dorilian joined in, his voice strong and sure, lifting the words above and clear of the pounding beat. To Hans’ delight, they sang together the songs of the World before this one, until dawn dusted the sky of stars, bringing a clear true morning.