‘Winged ones?’ She found she was whispering as if they were sharing a secret of great import, and she feared they might be overheard.

‘Look at the engravings. These are not dragonflies, they’re winged people.’

‘Angels, maybe?’ Jolaine’s excitement was infectious.

‘We must go back into the Undercity and look carefully at your Lotos Princess. That’s what you named her, didn’t you? I seem to recall that there are two winged creatures hovering behind her. I have managed to unravel a little of her inscription. I know it will intrigue you.’

Orial looked at Jolaine questioningly as she took the book again and read:

‘Spinner [of the] invisible songthreads/that knit us together/that [make us] One with Ea’stil.’

‘Spinner?’ she asked. ‘Songspinner?’

‘Songspinner. As in the monograph I showed you. It’s not too fanciful, is it? The real title of the Lotos Princess was – Songspinner.’

CHAPTER 8

Khassian sat brooding over the first pages which Orial had transcribed for him.

What a strange creature she was, his little amanuensis – by turns eager to please, then wilful; shy, then acutely forthright. Not for the first time he found himself thinking that she was only a little younger than Fania would have been now, if she had lived – and not for the first time, found the thought so painful that he shut his mind to it. Fania, his beloved sister, dead of the smallpox at the tender age of twelve. Fania, his father’s treasure. Fania, so gifted, so pretty… Was that why he was so awkward with Orial, so abrupt? Because she remained him of Fania and the disintegration of his family? She did not deserve this brusqueness.

But then there was her gift. It disturbed him. How could she hear the music in his head? And if she could hear what was in his head, how could she simultaneously block out all the music emanating from other people’s minds, the repetitions, the scraps of tunes?

Yet here, on paper, painstakingly achieved, lay the first bars of the last act of the opera in short score, instruments sketched in… It had taken an hour to notate these thirty-one bars. She was slow, struggling still to sort out theoretical complexities which she had never had to contend with before. He found it hard to keep patient when he could not seize the pen from her fingers and show her how it should be done. Sometimes he could have bellowed aloud with frustration.

How long would it take before this blotted, untidy score could be handed to the copyists and work could begin on staging it?

He was so engrossed in thought that he did not hear the knock at the door. It was only as it opened and the visitor came in that he glanced up and saw Acir Korentan.