Evening, First of One, Harvest, 236 CR

Dinner passed in a flash, a blur of mounting excitement that even the adults of Kibosh couldn’t hide.

I hadn’t forgotten what Hitz had told me. Zitqín Yáng had stayed on after Ease for First’s day in order to put on a concert in the death-zone of Kibosh, the fortified killing ground that was the entrance and exit of the dungeon that made this a Dungeon Village. Gossip blazed to life and stoked itself higher and higher every hour, but there was too little concrete to meaningfully speculate as to why she’d done so. Ultimately, the only people who might know—James and Hitz, in Kelly’s opinion—weren’t saying anything, other than to confirm that the hammered threadsong player would, in fact, be playing an evening concert where the mana from below poured out into the surface world.

It was far more than merely a surprise; judging by the level of excitement, it was closer to an unasked-for miracle.

Getting to the concert-grounds was simple enough. We walked on the path as it wove around the layers of living, engraved, anchored, and otherwise emplaced spells between the five-houses-around-a-garden quints and the inner walls—it had extensive safeguards, centuries and centuries of not killing anyone, but trampling the vines was rude. We walked into one of the towering structures that served as civic headquarters and bastions of the inner wall, avoiding the Hall of the Thousand by dictates of tradition and social proprieties, and we took the stairs up two flights to the roof.

The roof of the Hall of Writ—southeast, and winner of the coin-flip between that and the southwestern bastion—was host that evening to an array of chairs and benches, each elevated a few inches over the next. That wouldn’t have been enough difference to give everyone a look, but the distance would have been prohibitive regardless without magic; as it was, some sort of lensing trickery gave us the perfect viewing angle and distance regardless of mundane geometries.

The oh-it-wasn’t-me dance between Kartom and Shuli was cute, each trying to deflect credit onto the other, but Kelly and I—and everyone else around us—just solved that by praising both of them. Vision amplification, sound that would all come from one specific place in that flat, empty killing zone, climate control spells, and more; they’d done a substantial amount of preparation, and we all made sure to appreciate them for it.

So did Ketka, which was the first I noticed of her presence.

She was very obviously delighted by that, when I spun around and practically lunged at her, freezing a moment before I threw myself into her arms. It took about two seconds for her to figure out from my stammering what the problem was, that I didn’t know well enough what we were to each other then, in public and after the night we’d spent together, and she resolved the situation with typical decisiveness.

Wrapping me up in a grinning hug, she sat down on the edge of a bench and dropped me unceremoniously—and with a shameless joy—on her lap. Which, well, was one way to resolve those questions.

We made small talk, which didn’t manage to encode itself in my memory in the slightest—it might have been revelatory discourse and I still wouldn’t have paid any attention, since the important thing was the way her fingers were playing with my hair. And then, with a soft snap of his fingers, Elaneir summoned our attention and conjured our silence.

The young man—young by Shemmai standards, at least, and he acted young by my standards even if he was over a hundred years old—was from Yaro, the only other Yarovi in Kibosh other than Ketka. He was the leader of a team of delvers, the team I kept thinking of as Teasag’s team despite Elaneir being the leader in both formality and practice, and I hadn’t spoken with him much, but I knew he was a singer and chanter, and that these things were distinct to him.

He had an amazing voice, and a solid stage presence to boot.

“We are grateful for your presence.” He smiled, visible through the same magnification spells that made him so clearly audible. “Zitqín Yáng has departed her home on her journeying days, and is not accounted among the apprentices of her home; but not having returned with a True Song woven in the means of her people, she is not yet Journeyed.

“This, then, is not a concert.” He was still smiling, but he projected at the same time an attitude of complete seriousness. “As part of her practice, it is not objectionable that you listen, and that your presence might change the music Zing creates, just as our presence here with her shall change it. But you are not an audience, and this is not a concert—come and go, speak amongst yourselves as you will, and give no acclaim.”

Despite his words, a total silence rippled out across the crowd, or at least the part of it that was audible to me, and the… exhibition began without any ado.

Within seconds, the truth of what Elaneir had said was clear. Zing, dressed in a plain, light-blue robe, was walking slowly around the emplacement of her instrument, playing simple scales. Up and down the octaves, slow and quiet, her hammers tolled out pure notes one at a time, and she let each one fade before playing the next.

It was still fascinating. There was a… deliberateness, maybe, to the way she hit every note, like she was trying to make every movement the most sublime, most perfect version of itself. And the air itself around her and her instrument shivered as she did so, distorting in a way that wasn’t physical at all.

The mana-flow out of the dungeon dances and shifts at her will, Spark informed me. This is the purpose of her position; perhaps even the reason for her presence.

That, I said right back, is totally plausible. Good eye-equivalent, and thanks.

Every few notes, the hammered threadsong player would stop to limber up, and then she’d get a dyspeptic look on her face and squat, pressing her hands together. As she rose from the squat, the strings of her instrument would turn more vertical and rise a little bit higher, and she’d shift the way she was moving in ways that made Ketka murmur and hiss in appreciation.

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Which, well, I appreciated, but somehow even being in Ketka’s lap wasn’t enough to more than momentarily distract me from the instrumentalist.

Once Zitqín Yáng was apparently content with the height and verticality of her strings, she stood tall and pressed her hands together for a long moment as a rippling chord rang across the world in a way that had nothing to do with the ears. Turning and picking up a thin metal bar about three feet long, she spun it lightly in her hands—at Ketka’s gasp, I saw the way that Zing’s muscles were bunched and flexed, as though it weighed hundreds of pounds—and, as a flash of uncertainty crossed her face, planted it in the exact center of her instrumental emplacement.

Her body uncoiled explosively, driving it into the ground. The force of the slamming strike rippled the ground itself for dozens of feet around her, kicking up dust, and she let the impetus of the strike turn her away—and then she sprinted.

Hard on her heels, the thin bar seemed to blink out of existence and then back in… as a thick pole that reached eight feet into the air. The whump of displaced air was audible, if only barely, and a spark snapped at her heels. She had one of her hammers in her hand, and she caught the lightning with it in what looked like a solid bar of discharged current—the penumbra of it promised to sear the eyes, but the direct view was dampened by the viewing enchantments, and I heard Shuli and Kartom both laughing the same laugh, and then the music really began.

It wasn’t a concert. It really wasn’t; I’d been to enough of them, and I’d studied the art of performance in the abstract as part of learning how to orate and chant, and this wasn’t that. But it was incredible and compelling nonetheless, and left me utterly consumed with a yearning to live long enough to hear someone play that instrument again after I’d studied it for twenty years, after I’d learned enough about it to even begin to appreciate her mastery.

Hitz’s drums were the foundation of the sound, giving a complex weave of beats on what looked like three drums but sounded like an entire percussion ensemble—including instruments they absolutely did not have with them. Elaneir provided what I could only think of as a support column, a shifting vertical platform of chordage under which a murmur of something that was pretending, almost perfectly, to be Chorus but which was very definitely more complex than that.

And with an escalating speed and complexity, Zitqín Yáng played the hammered threadsong.

She started out slow enough that I could track her every movement. One hammer blazing with light, one hammer drinking in the shadows that light cast, she spun lithely across the ground as she struck and played. First with one note at a time, then playing in thirds, and finally playing in complex chords, she rang her way up and down the scales she’d done earlier, and I started to shiver at the sheer beauty of the sound.

If anything, despite the increased complexity and the elemental energies she’d added to her practice, despite her vastly increased pace, she was moving with more perfection and precision than she had been before. And then she started to really move, and to really play.

I couldn’t comprehend it. No, it was more than that—I couldn’t distinguish it. I couldn’t follow her movements with my eyes, I couldn’t hear where one note ended and another note began, and I was pretty sure there was an entire dimension of the music that I wasn’t experiencing because I couldn’t directly sense magic and the flow of it in the world. And that was while she was only using the two hammers and moving on her own two feet; at some point she started flitting around in bounding leaps, leaving the echoes of her hammers to strike again and flicking bolts of lightning to rebound across anywhere between three and seven of the strings.

The power in the two hammers grew steadily as she played and as she moved, and that turned out to be where the pole came in. When it blazed high enough that it was making my eyes water even through the screening magic, she would strike the pole with both hammers in a great reverberating sound, and the pole would coruscate in bright shadows and pitch-black lightning that cascaded across the strings. It would shake the world with a screaming triumph of notes that slid up and down the octaves, and then she would play the world back to stability and normalcy, howling in joy.

That last was, perhaps because of its mundanity, the thing I was most able to focus on. She yipped in excitement as she picked up speed and screamed as she went in for a pole-strike. She ululated as she swung around the pole with one leg, throwing her hammers with enough speed to bounce them off three strings and return to her hands even as she flew through the air like a wild-eyed fusion of dancer and musician.

And she howled, howled to the sky while she blurred in her run and swung her hammers in intricate patterns, leaving swirling, swooping shapes in light and shadow in motion-blurred afterimages.

It felt like it lasted forever, and at the same time like it was over in just a moment—it felt like it shattered the world, and like it fit a broken world back together. And then it was over, and it was one of the hardest things I’d ever done in my life not to stand and applaud and scream in adulation.

I managed. We all managed. Ketka, shaking and face full of awe; Kartom and Shuli, stunned; Kelly, transfixed; after a long, fragile silence that shattered at the scraping of Meredith’s chair on the rooftop, we all successfully broke into excited chatter instead of stunned acclaim.

Well, they all broke into excited chatter. I was still staring into the arena even after the viewing spells came down, as Hitz started to disassemble their drums and Elaneir handed the panting, heaving Zing something that was probably water from how she guzzled it.

Still staring after long moments, trying to grapple with the sheer mastery I’d seen and my vicious, almost overwhelming feeling of envy at that sublime degree of skill.

Still staring, uncomprehending, at how such a woman could be accorded anything other than the title of grandmaster—at the idea that this was a woman who couldn’t call what we’d heard a concert, because she didn’t consider herself good enough.

The conversations wound down around me as the two Tower mages drifted away, still going on about elemental resonances and pattern-woven fractals and other, more esoteric things. Meredith and James were gone, and I’d drifted into a daze as the energy levels gradually ebbed. I was nonetheless still present enough to follow the quick conversation on my behalf about how Ketka was welcome as a guest in our home… and about how I’d been using a mattress pad not much larger than myself as a bed.

Laughing, tears streaming down my face for reasons that had nothing to do with sorrow, I kissed Ketka back when she started to tease me. I smiled a smile that had no emotional regulation in it whatsoever and I asked her what she wanted, and then I said yes—unadorned, unmodified, and uncomplicated—and followed her back to her bed.

She had to help me undress, and I was asleep before she joined me.