From the hole overhead comes a familiar sound with no perceptible beginning. I recognize the drone of the tower Thrushchurl climbed, but the timbre of this sound is clearer, with many transparent layers like sheets of breath. The tone is deep at its heart, and wind stirs through it. It’s as if the sensation of being watched, like barely palpable wisps of air slithering on the skin of my back, or creeping just below the skin, were given a counterpart in sound. It billows over us like a sail. It’s the drone I heard the tower make, but I’d recognized that too—now I remember Keen howling on the floor of the house we’d visited outside Tref, and the inhuman drone, like the deep groaning buzz of a resonating box, inside his howls.

The laughter suddenly erupts from him again.

“The war!” he raves, “The warrr! We won!”

His head snaps up on his neck and he stares into my eyes, hissing “We won!”

Keen subsides into idiot chuckling, his face folded down against his throat. He’s laughed himself out. His laughter trickles around the room, his voice comes from the walls, the furniture, the fireplace. It jumps from the window, runs cackling into the distance. We can hear it go, we can hear it for a long time.

From outside, through the wall, I can hear an even, answering note, like the whisper of air escaping from a reedless organ pipe. Let me be there, let all of this have been a long vision and I am back in Tref.

“That’s the trees ...” Thrushchurl says.

I almost believe I see something like an envelope of light in the open space between the floor and the ceiling. The note from overhead elongates me, as though I were being pulled off the earth.

It’s music—that comes in a flash to me. The idea makes me smile. Who would have guessed, who else would have guessed, that they made this to make music—and the tower as well? Dead body, music, and Predicanten, always associated. The dead hares against the floor haven’t changed at all, but they seem to peek out at me with an expressive look of mutual understanding. Thrushchurl stands abstracted, listening; I can’t tell what he’s thinking, but a secret has been entrusted to me and I intend to keep it. Let him find out on his own.

*

“What do you see?” Makemin is barking.

“I don’t know yet—” I bark back.

“Well use those slanty eyes of yours damn you,” strangely tired there. Weary of me, not too tired to go on with his war.

“It’s a clearing like any clearing.”

Brightening up for a change, icy light although the day is ending, brilliance soft on the eye, not dazzling.