Song for the Basilisk

The moon grew full, then slowly pared itself down until it shriveled into a ghostly boat riding above the roiling dark. Then it fell out of the sky. They climbed into it, left land behind, and floated out to sea.

He had made tiny pipes of feathers he had found along the streets; birds answered him here as they had in the hinterlands. A night-bird, singing back to his playing, showed him the loose bar in the iron fence, the furrowed earth along which the bar swung sideways, that told him, as the bird did, that others came here secretly. Around him, the sleeping city dreamed, tossed fretfully, muttered, dreamed again.

she was, like the paintings and marble pillars, a background detail in the house of the Basilisk. Only her bowing, the unexpected, enthusiastic shrieks she got out of the peasant’s instrument, made her incongruous, and therefore real.

What you say, when you say a word. What you think when you say it. What I see and hear when you speak. Words are ancient; visions and echoes cling to them like barnacles on the whale’s back. You speak words used in poetry and song since the beginning of the world we know. Here, you will learn to hear and to speak as if you had never listened, never spoken before. Then you will learn the thousand meanings within the word. What you say when you say fire.

Hexel’s blue eyes were narrowed, his long, black hair looked suddenly windblown, though the candles behind him burned still. As a dramatist and composer, he had an exhausting passion for dramatics. He was lean, moody, intense; students at the music school constantly pushed notes under his door, or set his discarded scribbles to music, or dropped roses or themselves across his work.