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  DAW Books presents classic works of imaginative fiction by multiple award-winning author TANITH LEE

  THE BIRTHGRAVE TRILOGY

  THE BIRTHGRAVE

  SHADOWFIRE

  (originally published as Vazkor, Son of Vazkor)

  HUNTING THE WHITE WITCH

  (originally published as Quest for the White Witch)

  TALES FROM THE FLAT EARTH

  NIGHT’S MASTER

  DEATH’S MASTER

  DELUSION’S MASTER

  DELIRIUM’S MISTRESS

  NIGHT’S SORCERIES

  THE WARS OF VIS

  THE STORM LORD

  ANACKIRE

  THE WHITE SERPENT

  AND MORE:

  COMPANIONS ON THE ROAD

  VOLKHAVAAR

  ELECTRIC FOREST

  SABELLA

  KILL THE DEAD

  DAY BY NIGHT

  LYCANTHIA

  DARK CASTLE, WHITE HORSE

  CYRION

  SUNG IN SHADOW

  TAMASTARA

  THE GORGON AND OTHER BEASTLY TALES

  DAYS OF GRASS

  A HEROINE OF THE WORLD

  REDDER THAN BLOOD

  Sung in Shadow

  Tanith Lee

  DAW Books, Inc

  Donald A. Wollheim, Founder

  1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019

  Elizabeth R. Wollheim

  Sheila E. Gilbert

  Publishers

  www.dawbooks.com

  Copyright © 1983 by Tanith Lee.

  All Rights Reserved.

  Cover design by Lila Selle.

  DAW Book Collectors No. 530.

  Published by DAW Books, Inc.

  1745 Broadway, New York, NY, 10019.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  All resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.

  The uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Ebook ISBN: 9780698404472

  First Paperback Printing, May 1983

  First New Electronic Edition, December 2021

  DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED

  U.S. PAT. AND TM. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES

  —MARCA REGISTRADA

  HECHO EN U.S.A.

  PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

  pid_prh_6.0_138667525_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Tanith Lee

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  Part One: The Rose

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Part Two: The Blade

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Part Three: The Bell

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Part Four: The Gate

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  About the Author

  Author’s Note

  The novel is set in the Renaissance Italy of a parallel world, as certain discrepancies will demonstrate. Correct Italian pronunciation must not, therefore, be applied to the names, which are spelled phonetically, and should be read or spoken as written.

  —T.L.

  PART ONE:

  The Rose

  ONE

  Who can tell where love will lead us.

  Love the color of a rose—

  Love the ever-sounding bell—

  Does she summon to a close,

  To the bitter of farewell?

  To the gorgeous gate of Hell?

  Ah, who knows, who knows?

  “And do you not know, then?”

  “Oh, I know. Or I did, once. Before you corrupted me and made me so virtuous.”

  “Hah! Virtuous. You?”

  “I. Do I not sit here, conversing with an enemy? With a foul Montargo, no less. (And who’s less than a Montargo?)”

  “One of the Estembas, possibly.”

  “One only, then, for the rest of us are saints.”

  Raising his grey-gold head, Flavian Estemba plucked notes off the mandolin with ringed fingers, and embellished the verse of the song with various asides, in a frivolous yet still very musical voice.

  Behind him, over the terrace of the old garden, the sky and the town married with sunset. Everything grew mysterious there, alleys constricting, walls melting into the courts they enclosed. The powderings of dust, which all day rose and fell with the birds at the coming and going of men, sank down like a succession of veils, turning first amber, then apricot, ultimately the shade of ashes. The town also sank downhill to the north and west. In the broad square some three or four streets distant from the garden, the Basilica rested, pale, like a ghost and with its ghostly graveyard at its back. From the square, too, the campanile sounded its own bell as Estemba’s verse once more finished. Elsewhere and everywhere, like a forest of daggers, the multitude of towers pointed up, catching the last rays of the sun on their myriad cupolas, carvings and escutcheons.

  “Golden Sana Verensa,” the second young man said, gazing dreamily at the town, “smoothed by fading light. If only she were as magical in fact as she looks this moment.”

  “If only anything were true to itself. Oh if only!” cried the singer of the song. He threw the mandolin in the air, snatched it, and leapt suddenly to the top of the low narrow wall that bounded the terrace, beyond which eighty feet of broken brick and creeper tumbled to the thoroughfare beneath.

  “Come off the wall, for God’s sake. Why break your neck?”

  “Ah, do you love me so well?”

  “I love you well, you fool. Not well enough to pay for your funeral, and how should poverty-stricken Estemba afford it?”

  “Romulan, my good angel, I suppose we would have to steal the money from some hapless one, as Montargo always does.”

  Flavian Estemba, generally called “Mercurio” by those who knew him, stared toward the street, feigned vertigo; swayed first forward over the drop, next back, and so gracefully and bonelessly fell into the garden, and into the arms of Romulan, who, with a curse, caught him.

  Straightening, Mercurio examined the mandolin solicitously.

  Romulan turned away, playing anger, almost on the verge of it, and beheld, like his fate, the Montargo Tower, framed between two urns, on the peach-tinted sky. This familiar sight at once absorbed, disturbed him. The tower suggested instantly his father, and that father’s father, and thereby all the decades that had gone, both into the construction of its stones, and of Romulan’s own atoms: genealogy, lineage. To be nineteen and feel such a weight of time was curious.

  The young men,
back to back in the garden, had a classical stance. Each was handsome, a handsomeness attractively flawed in Estemba, and in Romulan Montargo unnervingly flawless. His looks approached sheer beauty, which had a fine, almost terrible edge to it. Demon or angel, who could be sure: such a face, endorsed by its mantle of modishly long black hair, its black brows, the black-lashed metallic blueness of the eyes—it seemed capable of any emotion or deed in its savage innocence. And then this savagery was gone, instinctively blurred. The face became merely immature, worldly, eager, bored, for Estemba was saying, “What dangerous adventure do we try this evening?”

  Romulan turned back warily. Mercurio was already in the process of leaving the garden. He gave his habitual impression, that he was prepared to leave everything, anyone, unless they hastened to keep up. The impression, in Romulan’s case, might be false.

  “Danger? You mean the Bhorga, which is currently full of the Ottantas and the Feros?”

  “Not to credit the Castas, who are abroad in multitudes. Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe I alluded to entertainments.”

  “My father says I neglect study. Perhaps you should find me a tutor.”

  “That I may yet do.”

  Mercurio swung over the broken shoulder of the terrace, and vanished onto the path below. The notes of the mandolin plinked up in his wake, and the careless, perfect voice:

  “Who can tell where love will lead us,

  To the loss of several coins,

  To an ailment of the loins—”

  Romulan followed slowly, sullen and melancholy. He could have given no reason for his mood. He expected the friend below on the walk presently to notice, comfort and divert him.

  Behind him, three centuries older than he, the Montargo Tower, and all the other towers of Sana Verensa’s horizons, were starting to open the lamp-lighted slots of long slim windows. Inexorable vertical eyes of brass and blood fixed on the town, the darkening hills that embraced it. The towers seemed all alive in this moment, like serpents risen on their tails, pitilessly intent. Who, with their antique hatreds, would they venomously bite and devour tonight? Any who dwelled in Verensa were used to the phenomenon, consciously or unconsciously observed. These baleful snakes reared over their heads, which were in reality fortress-palaces sculpted with emblems: Ottanta, Montargo, de Casta, Belmorio, Chenti, Vespelli, Estemba, de Fero. . . . Many more. Many, many, many more. Patrician strongholds, each housing an aristocratic family of profound and unassailable ancestry, proud as eagles, ferocious as bears. Each family fed and armored by its history, its Name, its sigils, its banners, its prejudice, its xenophobia. For each House was a planet, peopled as if by a unique race, mostly contemptuous and in loathing of others. From such soil feuds, political in origin, growing but too personal with deaths on every side, proliferated, sure as night and day.

  The streets leading to the Basilica square were now obscure with shadows. The brown sun had disappeared, delegating formlessness, which blended with the negative dun-colored clothes of the two young men—to sport house colors unattended on the streets after dusk was unwise in the extreme.

  The Basilica bell, which prompted some to think of Heaven, or of death, or of nothing, depending on temperament, grew still. As Romulan and Mercurio went across the square, a grey cat sprang from the rim of the public fountain and darted into an alleyway. Nothing else seemed stirring. The ghostly facade of the Basilica loomed over them. Bronze angels above the doors troubled Romulan, as they had always troubled him. He did not understand why; perhaps he had heeded, unaware, some frightening resemblance to himself.

  To the west side of the square, a maze of alleys accumulated. The broadest of these, humpbacked and only partially cobbled, was yet here and there lit by the lamps and occasionally unshuttered windows of adjacent houses. The mercantile quarter lay almost directly behind the Basilica, and beyond this (the area to which the broad alley led), the Lower Town, the Bhorgabba.

  Down the alley, almost it might appear from force of habit, Estemba and Montargo swung, Mercurio still idly sounding the mandolin. Torches, song, shouts, were not uncommon on this way, nor the slash and ring of blades. The bright hilts of swords were obvious against the nondescript clothing of both adventurers, whenever they passed through a light. Also the masks both had put on as they vacated the square. Mercurio’s, a most Satanic devil with gold-spangled lids and leering mouth, covered all his face. Romulan’s mask of plain white leather concealed only the upper features. Vanity was less likely the cause of this than the general impatience of Romulan’s nature.

  It was full dark when a twist in the alley and a variation in the slope and surrounding architecture abruptly revealed one of the more notorious entrances to the Bhorgabba: the old squat wall with its round open arch, torches nakedly flaring in their brackets with a slightly fiendish look of welcome. On the far side of the arch the seethe and teem of life, whose noise had been audible for some minutes, and which made the spot as low in reputation as in geography.

  Tonight, however, an impediment to carnal sin had positioned itself before the arch.

  Mercurio halted. Romulan did the same.

  Striking an avid chord on the mandolin, Mercurio softly and unnecessarily announced:

  “Damnable Feros, playing peacocks.”

  And so they were, the five who blocked the archway. Though masked, they had disdained the courtesy and prudence of disguise, and were arrayed in the colors of the de Fero family—unmistakable as the colors of any House—jet black and flame, and decorated besides with every sort of ornament that was worked with Fero’s sigil, the Wolf. Even the masks were wolves’ heads. Their swords, last and best clue, were unsheathed, leaning on their knees as they stood or crouched dicing, affecting unnotice of arrivals on the slope above.

  “Back, or onward?” said the devil to Romulan.

  “On, I suppose, or be ready for pursuit.”

  “There’s clever thinking.”

  Mercurio strolled forward and down the alley, touching the strings of the mandolin at intervals, Romulan in step with him. As the torches by the gate struck them, the nearest of the de Feros glanced up, and made a parody of surprise. One by one the others reacted, and with a feigned velvety sloth, spread out across the gate, letting the loosely held blades jangle.

  “Good evening, sirs,” said a de Fero to the left of the arch.

  “An excellent, delicious evening,” said another to the right.

  “Well, well, well,” said Mercurio, strolling on into the midst of them. He was so nonchalant, so barely conscious of them, they almost parted in error to let him by. Then a tall one shouted, and stepped directly in his path. The bulk, and the florid complexion visible in the mask holes, gave the giant away as Old Fero’s second son.

  “I cannot permit you to pass the gate, sir,” said Fero Duo, charmingly. “There is a lot of wickedness the other side.”

  “So I’ve heard,” said Mercurio. “My reason for being here.”

  “And your noble friend?”

  “I have no friends,” said Mercurio promptly.

  “Enemies, perhaps?”

  “A few of those.”

  “Name them, if you would be so kind.”

  “Oh, Casta, Lippi, Floria—”

  “Fero?”

  “Fero?” Mercurio was astonished. “Who is Fero?”

  “You never heard the name?”

  “Indeed I heard it.”

  “When?”

  “Just now, when you spoke.”

  Fero Duo turned theatrically to his Lounging friends and kinsmen.

  “We have a wit here, it seems.” He lifted the sword, which had black and pink jewels in the pommel. He showed it to Mercurio. “Have you wit enough to say you love and honor the Wolf Tower?”

  “I wonder,” Mercurio said. He inclined his head toward Romulan. “Do you think I have the wit for that?”

  “If
you do, then I do not,” said Romulan.

  A blade left its sheath like red lightning under the torches, and lanced forward with a delicacy and artistry Fero Duo might have envied, had he not been in receipt of it. In three seconds Romulan’s sword had scored through the drawstring of Fero’s shirt, which now fell apart, revealing a mottled hairy breast and the cameo of a lady on a chain.

  Mercurio balanced the mandolin carefully against the convenient wall of a neighboring yard, and moved nearer. He patted Fero’s arm.

  “My dear, I do trust you were recently shriven. Are you confessed? In a state of grace? Otherwise, my companion will be sending you to a warmer night than this.”

  Fero Duo thrust him off, fell back a pace, and lugged his sword into the air. It was a dangerous cut, the more so for its raggedness. But where Mercurio had stood was only space. There came a second song of steel lifting from sheath, less couth than the note of a mandolin. Estemba’s own blade shot upward in a silken arc and Fero’s steel clattered on the intermittent cobbles.

  “Name yourself!” Some other Fero, much embroidered, shouted as their big leader scrambled for his weapon.

  “You name me,” invited Mercurio. He fenced like the accomplished dancer he was, every movement choreographed. Someone lunged sideways yelping as the dancer’s sword licked his chin, shaving a little line on it. Someone else swore vilely as Romulan thwacked him across the shins with the flat of the blade. Romulan laughed slightly as he did battle, showing teeth as beautiful as the rest of him. He did not analyze what he did, or its mortal potential. Death had seldom suggested itself to him save as an illness to which strangers were sometimes prone. His swordsmanship, fly and glamorous as Mercurio’s—Mercurio had indeed taught him some of it—had a playful reckless edge Mercurio’s did not. Mercurio Flavian Estemba, who as a boy had seen his own two brothers die on the street in duels such as this, fought neatly and treacherously. Though to fight was second nature to him, he never engaged to fight without apprehension. His one weakness was that he was stimulated by his own fear, enjoyed it, frequently sought it out, as Romulan sought mere action, for its own sake.