The great star is the perfect guide, the perfect reference point. It is a gentle reminder and instructor in its motionless state. So, we call it Quilesem because it is at rest. It is quiet. It is still. From its unwavering point, we can measure so much of the sky, which may lead to the truest meaning for this name: Something from nothing.
Tahn looked up from the books to the pole-star, which to his recollection had never carried the name Quilesem. I’m close. He’d just turned his attention back to the diary, when a voice sounded from the other side of the dome. It came deep and clear as a bell heard tolling on a winter morning. But it came softly, as though its owner kept the same reverence for this place. The stars.
“Find what you’re looking for?”
As the words touched the air, the air changed. Quickened. In the tower dome a feeling of danger spread. It felt to Tahn like malice born of disregard. Reflexively he reached for his bow, but he hadn’t brought it with him.
From around the great skyglass a man emerged. Ordinary enough. His clothes showed no college emblem. He might be unaffiliated, but then how did he gain access to the tower? The man was Tahn’s height, more slight of build, older by twenty years or more. He walked with casual certainty, his eyes never leaving Tahn. And his face … his face remained expressionless. Very much like the Bar’dyn.
That was the feeling. The Quiet. But this man looked like someone’s father. Not a farmer like Sutter’s da. More the way a struggling inn owner might. With a worn, weary face, but a focused, watchful stare.
It’s the man I saw across the street from Perades.
“Who are you?” Tahn asked, closing his books.
“You want a name?”
“You’re not with the college. Or you forced your way past the dome guards.” Tahn slowly stood.
“No, I’m not with the college” was all the man said, coming to a stop a few strides from him.
“What do you want? Who are you?”
The stranger stared, made a slow blink. “I’m here to learn, just as you are.”
Tahn shook his head. “I doubt it.”
The man’s head tilted subtly to one side, and Tahn’s throat began to burn the way it did from a deep winter cough, when it had grown raw and every swallow seared as it went down. The man simply watched as Tahn’s face pinched with the pain. Tahn struggled not to swallow, trying to avoid the sensation of a thousand stabbing splinters.
“Let’s not speak any more about doubts,” the man said.
Almost immediately the pain in Tahn’s throat subsided.
“You’re here to argue for Continuity.” The stranger spoke with certainty. “It can be the only reason you’d come here, now.”
Tahn stared back, his fear mounting, but with a grain of anger. This man had to be Velle.
“Leave Aubade Grove,” Tahn said, keeping as much command over his voice as he could. “There’s nothing for you here.”
The man looked up at the dome above. Tahn felt a stirring, not of air, but something more subtle. A half moment later a pane of glass shattered and rained down around him. The sound of glass splintering as it hit the floor was loud in the quiet dome. Then, in rapid succession, several other windows burst, here and there. But it didn’t seem random. And when Tahn looked at them, he saw it. The man had broken open views where several of the wandering stars could be found at this hour in the sky. He knows the placement of the planets.
But that realization faded fast beneath the simpler truth Tahn had just witnessed.
Resonance. The stranger was making a simple display of it. Just as he’d done with Tahn’s throat.
“What shall we break next?” The man’s voice held no humor. “So that we learn together.”
Tahn’s anger and fear swelled. He imagined drawing his bow, as he had done before, with no arrow. Just the idea of firing something of himself. From habit he made the motion as if raising his weapon, and let go a string that wasn’t there. A rushing swept through him, a warm wave that exited his outstretched arm and struck at the man with unseen force.
But the energy of it broke around the stranger as a wave does on a breakwater. A disturbance in the air made the other appear watery for a moment, as though floating beneath the surface of a clear lake. Then the rushing was gone. Stillness returned in an instant.
The man’s eyes narrowed ever so slightly. And this time the Resonance Tahn felt was not a burn in his throat, but an opening in his mind, his memory. He saw for the briefest moment a day at the edge of the Scar he’d spent with Grant, his father. He saw them laughing together, and sharing a pair of molasses sticks at the side of a river where they sat fishing. He saw his father listening to his questions and answering them and sounding hopeful. He talked about a day when they would leave the Scar. And in the dusk when light-flies lit the water’s surface, he heard Grant tell him he loved him. And that he would never stop trying to undo the Scar—what it meant, what it was, what it had done to them.
Tahn’s heart ached at the memory, one so deeply buried that it hadn’t surfaced yet. Maybe never would have.
And then, after lingering a few sweet moments, it began to burn away. The stranger shifted his resonant render inside Tahn to erase the memory.
“No!” Tahn raised his arms as one might to ward off a blow, and pushed his own life’s energy to resist. He felt the rushing again, but this time handled it better, focusing it on the attack.
Bits of the memory continued to go, like a paper puzzle left on a park table that finds itself caught in a light breeze. He’d loved his father. Through all the painful lessons, when it seemed the man had not loved him back, Tahn had kept loving him. And here, now, he could see a memory of a time that helped him know his father had loved him back. A simple memory. But one with clear feeling. He couldn’t let it go!
Tahn pushed harder, feeling like he was wading upstream against winter runoff. But the stranger simply showed him another blank look, nodded, and the memory was gone. Tahn cried out again in anger and loss. He didn’t know what it was anymore that had been taken from him, but the hole it left felt like love gone away. It hurt deep down where feelings start.
And it made him furious.
In a breath’s time he summoned his memory of those six small ones on the Soliel, of friends taking their own lives in the Scar—a place created by creatures like the one standing in front of him now—and he focused it all into a blind rush that he thrust at the man.
This time, Tahn’s attack drove the man back hard against the skyglass. The loud thump resounded in the instrument’s hollow body, and the man slumped to his knees. Tahn didn’t let up. He brought to mind Wendra and Mira, their losses, his own failures, and shot another brutal wave of energy at the man.
The Quiet man raised a hand, deflecting the attack. He then lifted his head to stare at Tahn. The awfulness Tahn saw in the other’s eyes was not malevolence, but ambivalence. The stranger simply didn’t care about Tahn, his life, or death. The stare caused Tahn to falter and step back.
The next moment the man was searching Tahn’s mind. Tahn tried to deflect it, but he was tired and cold. As the other stood, his face came the closest Tahn would see it to smiling.
“Resonance,” the other intoned, the sound unmusical. “Of course. Like what you are about to feel.”
The man raised a hand, fingers apart, and dropped his chin. Inside himself, Tahn felt as though his heart and lungs and belly had been pressed in a vise. The muscles in his neck stiffened. His jaw locked. And as his body clenched, memories began to draw together. Just a few at first. Then more. It reminded him of standing at Tillinghast, except now the associated images in his mind were … selective. Some came to him from the Scar. Some from here in the Grove as a young boy. Some from the Hollows. More than a few returned to him from his time since meeting Vendanj: his flight to Tillinghast, and his actions on the Soliel plain. Seen together, they told a different story about Tahn. And when he focused through the pain in his body and looked at the ordinary man standing acro
ss from him, resonating with Tahn along particular strings in his life, he began to understand. He and this man … were not so different.
But then why follow me here? What does it want from me? It could have killed me already.
He struggled, trying to muster enough strength to break free. The other was too strong for Tahn to fight with brute force. It held him in this viselike grip, and wove a picture of who Tahn was that scared him to the bone.
Is this what Quillescent means? Feels like?
Then a sweet epiphany distilled in Tahn’s mind. If the stranger was using Resonance to do this to him, then Tahn could likewise stir something inside the other. The moment he had this thought, his body jerked painfully back, rushing toward the edge of the dome. He slammed against the glass, breaking two broad panes. The bright, splintering sound of glass surrounded him again. A light wind swept through the opening here at the height of the tower. He lay crumpled on the floor, feeling a moment’s relief from the pressing in his body and the story of himself he’d witnessed. He gasped, trying to breathe, as he heard footsteps approaching.
With no prior thought to give him away, Tahn imagined and brought forward simple images and feelings. Uncomplicated things. A green shoot risen near a trickling stream. The moment when light first brightens the east. Laughter with Sutter. Not knowing quite how to do it, Tahn probed the stranger, seeking to find in him a chord he could strike with these things. Something to resonate with. He thought he could cripple the man by making him see the better side of his life.
But either Tahn was completely incapable of this, or there was no such feeling or idea in the man with which to resonate. Tahn saw him slowly shake his head as he came.
A moment later, his body began to seize again. He stiffened, and looked up into the stars, trying to think of how to escape. The stranger dragged him through the glass a short way with an act of rendering. An act of Resonance. He was sure the man meant to cast him from the tower. He’d tumble hundreds of strides to his death.
“If you could kill me,” the man asked, “would you? And how would you know if that was right?”
Tahn shot the man an angry stare. The stranger somehow knew that Tahn, for most of his life, had sought such confirmations.
“You should die!” Tahn spoke through clenched teeth, scared and angry. “There’s no mystery in that!”
He had to do something. Trying to find something gentle inside the man with which to resonate hadn’t worked. Brute force hadn’t worked. Tahn was now weak and empty.
“You might be right,” the other said, “but I’d like you to be certain.”
Tahn began to feel something new, something blindingly painful. He felt as though parts of who he was were being stolen, remade. Just enough that he understood his life was being rendered. As the children on the Soliel would have been!
That’s when he realized he’d fought this wrong.
He looked into the stranger’s face, and began with the idea that this Quiet man was muscle and bone. Just like Tahn. He didn’t try to shove the stranger back. Instead he sought to be one with the idea of the man’s flesh. And he took hold of that idea … with animosity.
The other flinched, losing his grip on him. Tahn took a staggering breath, but kept at his own sense of Resonance. He slowly eased himself back from the edge of the dome and stood. For the moment, he had control, and he pressed his advantage, clenching the man with the notion of shattering his bones from inside his body.
The man began to fight through Tahn’s grip. Tahn had anticipated it, and shifted his attack to the obvious Resonance he’d missed.
He reached out with the loss and loathing he’d known in his own life and sought it in the life of the stranger. He followed those strings to the bottom, their lowest note, found a chord in the man. And struck it.
In his mind came a new rushing. Images from the stranger’s life, emotional resonance at a pitch Tahn couldn’t explain. There was a level on which they were the same. It was a disquieting thought, but Tahn exploited it, pushed it, believing he could break the other’s will.
Resonance thrummed inside him. The feel of it was like the vibration of a chilling melody felt more in the wood of the instrument that plays it than in its sound.
It’s changing me.
But for the moment, Tahn had control, and he could tell that finding something to resonate with inside this man was also changing the part of him that could resonate with the Quiet.
He deepened the feeling, seeking to crush the stranger. And as he did, he sensed that the energy he expended was greater than his own. But no glass shattered. No orrery metal bent or sagged. No wood seared and smoked. No strange winds engulfed them. No paper fluttered in warm funnels and whipped through broken windows.
The fight would have been a quiet one to witness. Just Tahn and this stranger, staring at each other, focused in a way no observer would understand. Yet a great, invisible storm was taking place. A flurry that tore at them. It filled his mind with noise and dread, like a tempest, images raining down hard as hail. But it was all a storm inside him. And inside the other.
The man gave Tahn a searching look, shook his head once, slowly, and the storm abruptly ceased.
Tahn was as still and calm inside as the dome around them. The man had simply canceled Tahn’s effort at Resonance.
Had the man been playing a game? Testing him? Helping him?
The idea of Resonance had been made more real. More practical. More dangerous. And Tahn had learned that two very different people could be brought into resonance with one another.
If it had all been a lesson to Tahn, why?
With terrible suddenness, the man seized Tahn again, and began throwing him about violently. He hit his worktable, scattering his books. His body whirled left into the dome again, shattering more glass. Then forward, like a hurled doll, he slammed into the skyglass, ringing it like a deep bell. Tahn fell hard to the floor, gasping.
But through the attack, the man hadn’t wounded Tahn’s memory or touched his life’s energy. Tahn had been rattled like a toy, as if to remind him where he stood.
The man casually walked to where Tahn lay on the floor, and looked down. He spoke softly, showing no signs of exertion for what had just happened. “Most have lost faith in you. But not me.” The stranger looked Tahn over. “Not yet. I’m interested in what path you’re on now. What you’ll learn about Resonance. What you’ll do with that knowledge.”
Silence fell across the tower dome, until the man simply walked away. Tahn could hear his footsteps receding down the stairs, as he lay bruised and beaten.
Dear silent gods …
Tahn’s mind reeled at what had just happened, at how he’d reshaped the act of firing a bow, firing a part of himself. Resonance. He’d looked inside to find moments of ache and pain and used them to find the same in the Quiet man. And even now, he could feel the residue of the other’s deep agony inside himself.
He shivered, realizing that his attempt at this new Resonance had been nothing. The other had handled him like a doll. What did it say about the resonances inside the Quiet?
Succession now meant more to him. He still intended to try to strengthen the Veil. More than ever, in fact. Especially if there were others like this man waiting inside the Bourne to descend into the Eastlands. But he now wanted to learn more about Resonance for himself. Just as he had during this fight. Because he had a feeling that sooner or later this Quiet man would no longer find him interesting. And it was clear he could end Tahn with little more than a thought.
He also wanted to understand what the Quiet man meant when he said, Most have lost faith in you. But not me. And something told him he’d only understand that by truly understanding his own Succession argument. He needed to win Succession, keep the Grove focused on the question until they found an answer. Until they could prove Resonance with every science. Use it.
But weary and hurting, he couldn’t focus for long on the questions. He lay down flat, stared up through the d
ome at the stars, and slowly caught his breath.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
A Touch of Resonance
A person’s signature, to a Leiholan, isn’t their name. Not some thing they write or say. Rather, it’s the set of notes that defines who and what they are. It’s their resonant harmonics at a fundamental level. Know these, and you have the all of them.
—Framing statement in the study of harmonics and personal signatures, Descant Cathedral
Wendra stepped into an open atrium hidden somewhere deep inside the sprawl of Descant Cathedral halls and buildings. The young music student who had guided her here retreated without a word. Across the square, Belamae stood waiting. He’d not called for Wendra until after meridian, leaving her the morning to reflect on the memories of her mother that had flooded her mind.
Almost immediately, those memories had become like an old, familiar afghan that she might draw around her shoulders when the evening turned chill. The last half of the prior night, she hadn’t slept. She’d sat at her bedside, mourning as though she’d lost her mother again. She was grateful to have memories of the woman returned to her, but it made her mother’s absence a sharper thing to bear.
Belamae beckoned her to him. She crossed the atrium to a high table set with several tuning forks. He stood on the other side of the table like a barkeep ready to offer her a drink. He picked up one of the forks and struck it soundly against the tabletop. The fork began to hum.
“Vibration,” the Maesteri said, and placed the fork in a hole drilled into a small box set on the table. While the fork continued to hum, Belamae picked up another tuning fork and set it in the hole of an adjacent box. He then put a hand on the first fork to still it. To Wendra’s surprise, the second fork was humming at the same pitch as the first had been.
She glanced up at Belamae to find a satisfied-looking smile on his face. “The two forks are calibrated to the same pitch. The second one is humming what we call a response note. What you’re hearing is the transfer of vibration, Wendra. We call this—”
Trial of Intentions Page 42
