Music Meister abhorred pure silence. One might as well have the absence of air. But there was none of that here--there was the sound of Ragdoll's breathing and his own heartbeat in his ears, and faintly beyond that the footsteps and indistinguishable murmurs of the house's other occupants.

And there was one more thing.

When the arms around him finally relaxed Billy slipped carefully out of Ragdoll's grip. In the drawer of the end table were a few pencils and a notepad, and he used the edge of a book to draw sets of straight lines across the paper. Crude, but he could copy it over onto real sheet music once he had returned to the theater.

Billy had no intention of going back to the compound in Ethiopia to retrieve what the cult had left behind, but he didn't need to. As he had said, the song was tattooed onto his brain. Even if he had no intention of singing it again there was worth to be found in ensuring it would not vanish with his death. It was a beautiful thing. You did not let beautiful things slip away.

With single-minded care Music Meister set pencil to paper and began to inscribe the notes of the first song in modern musical notation. Below it were the sacred words, with small explanations for pronunciation where the Latin alphabet could not complete the job. As he wrote he hummed softly to himself, barely noticing the noise against the sound pounding inside his brain.

The stars glittered at his fingertips.