Songmaster Read Online Free PDF

the window. Why did I do that? What was I doing?
    I was leaving the Songhouse.
    The thought made her shudder. Not that way. I will not leave the Songhouse that way. Leaving the Songhouse will not be the end of my life.
    She did not believe it. And, not believing, she gripped the stone and wanted not to ever let go.
    The room was cold. It made her numb, motionless as she was, and the whine of the wind through the spaces in the roof and the rush of wind through the windows made her afraid in a new way. As if someone were watching her.
    She turned. There was no one. Just the bundles of clothing and books and stone benches and a foot sticking out from under one of the bunches of clothing and the foot was blue and she went over to it and discovered that this bundle of clothing was the misshapen, incredibly thin body of Nniv, who was dead, frozen in the wind from the winter outside. His eyes were open, and he stared at the stone in front of his face. Kya-Kya whimpered, but then reached down and pulled on his hip, as if to wake him. He rolled onto his back, but an arm stuck up in the air, and the legs moved only a little, and she knew he was dead, that the entire time she had been in the room he had been dead.
    The Songmaster in the High Room died only rarely. She had never known another. It was Nniv who had ultimately decided her fate. He had declared her Deaf and decided she would leave the Songhouse without songs. She had hated him in her heart, though she had only talked to him a few times, ever since she was eight. But now she only felt repulsed by the corpse, and more than that, disgusted at the way he had died. Was the room always kept this bitterly cold? How had he lived so long! Was this some part of the discipline, that the ruler of the Songhouse lived in such squalor and misery?
    If this emaciated, frozen corpse was the pinnacle of what the Songhouse could produce, Kya-Kya was not impressed. The lips were parted and the tongue lolled forward, blue and ghastly. This tongue, she thought, was once part of a song. Reputed to be the most masterful song in the galaxy, perhaps in the universe. But what had the song been, if not the throat and lips and teeth and lungs, all now cold; if not the brain, that now was still?
    She could not sing because of lips and teeth and throat and lungs and because in her own mind she was not so single-minded that she could be what the Songhouse demanded. But did it matter?
    She did not feel triumphant that Nniv was dead. She was old enough to know that she, too, would be dead, and if she had a century ahead of her, it only meant time in which she might end up just as accidently cruel as Nniv had been. Kya-Kya did not pretend to unusual virtue. Just unusual value, which no one but her recognized. And it occurred to her that Nniv’s failure to recognize who and what she was (or had he, indeed, recognized it?) did not change her.
    She left him, went downstairs to find the Blind in charge of maintenance, an old man named Hrrai who rarely left his office. “Nniv is dead,” she told him, wondering if her happiness sounded in her voice (but knowing that Hrrai would not be likely to read her very well, being a Blind). Can’t let anyone hear that I’m happy, she thought. Because I’m not rejoicing at his death. Only at my life.
    “Dead?” Imperturbable Hrrai only sounded mildly surprised. “Well, then, you must go tell his successor.”
    Hrrai leaned down over his table and began worrying his pen back and forth across a page.
    “But Hrrai…” Kya-Kya said.
    “But what?”
    “Who is Nniv’s successor?”
    “The next Songmaster of the High Room,” he said. “Of course.”
    “Of course nothing! How should I know who that is? How am I supposed to figure it out if you don’t tell me?”
    Hrrai looked up, more surprised this time than he had been at the news of Nniv’s death. “Don’t you know how this works?”
    “How should I? I’m a Deaf. I never got past Groan.”
    “Well, you