Chorus for Solo Voice

Marie Brennan brings Sunday Morning Transport readers another gorgeous tale from the world of "The Poison Gardener" and "The Final Voyage of the Ouranos" this week!

August travels with the Sunday Morning Transport include stories by Christopher Campbell, Curtis Chen, Marie Brennan, and Rick Wilber.

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Chorus for Solo Voice

by Marie Brennan

The Chorus was eternal.

Their song began after the Eirene and her apostles spread her message throughout the Empyrean, unveiling the aetheric nature of reality, the secrets of the tekhne that shaped aether into form. It had not stopped since. Five voices, singing five parts, each with four replacements standing ready to take their place. When a singer stepped aside, for drink or rest or death, the next stepped forward, melody or harmony passing seamlessly to their lips.

For aeons the song had continued without pause, ringing from the crystal walls of the chamber atop the Great Pyramid.

In that holiest of places, where voices should only ever be raised in harmony, a shout:

“The Heresiarch’s forces have broken through into the palace!”

The five currently singing did not miss a note. While they stood under the apex of the Pyramid, their sole duty was the maintenance of the song. But around them, an organized scramble began, because all the Chorus had followed with rising worry the rebellion of the Heresiarch. Surely, they thought, it would never come to the Aetharch’s sphere. Surely, they hoped, it would never threaten the palace. Surely the Great Pyramid, the Chorus, the song of the Eirene itself, would remain sacrosanct.

He was called the Heresiarch for a reason. Nothing was sacred to him. And so the Chorus must prepare.

The neophytes had been sent away the day before. No one had much hope for them; they were all too green, too untrained. For experienced Choristers, the song’s tempo was graven on their hearts, steadier and more familiar than their own pulse. And experienced Choristers had mastered the somatic tekhne that allowed them to sing all day, breathing in the ambient aether, integrating it with their flesh to soothe throats scraped raw with strain. The neophytes lacked tempo and tekhne alike: their dispersal had been a precaution only, against a disaster everyone had prayed would never arrive . . . even as they braced for it.

Now, with that disaster on their doorstep, no one else wasted an instant. They packed into the crystal-walled chamber atop the Pyramid, every remaining Chorister—even guards and psalmists and a few frightened faithful nobles of the Aetharch’s court. The song swelled to mighty force as they all joined in.