Trial of Intentions

by Peter Orullian

  The three of them quickly jumped to their feet. Tahn didn’t need to ask why they were here. Rithy had obviously been at work hand-selecting the members of each college who would help them. That was the way of Succession. He might have some core ideas, and even have a knack for finding the seams in arguments. But he’d been away a while. He would be glad of the critical thought from each college as they tried to prove Continuity this time. Prove Resonance. And this would be their core Succession team.

  “You invite them?” he said, smiling.

  “We were planning to come back here after showing you the birds and introducing you, yes.” She shook her head, and returned his smile. “Figured you’d want to get started tonight. Just didn’t figure on an evening sprint.”

  Tahn looked at each of these new additions and nodded greetings. Then he got moving again, his team falling in behind him as they leapt up the main stairway and onto the second floor: the almanac library. Its aisles and rows shaked like a warren fashioned of bookshelves.

  They stood there, lightly panting. Soon they heard Polaema lumbering up the stairs behind them. She reached the second story, and swept out in front of them.

  “What is it, Tahn?” she said, gasping.

  “Commonalities,” he said, his own breathing already settling into a natural rhythm.

  Then he turned to his Succession team. “Remember one thing. Everything we do. Every hour of research. Every word you read. Every moment of debate in the Discourse Theaters. It’s all about one thing: proving Resonance so we can strengthen the Veil. That’s the lens to look through. At everything. We’re going to prove that two things can resonate and be magnified by one another at a distance. The weeks ahead will be spent digging deep into the annals and our own understanding to find the mechanics and math and philosophy and ideas that can support this. We need to be thoughtful. And we need to be fast. Understood?”

  Eager nods were had all around.

  “Good. Now, do you all know the Karle Tonne categorization of astronomical phenomena?” he asked.

  More nods.

  “You, what’s your name?” Tahn pointed at the physicist.

  “Seelia,” the young woman replied, giving Rithy a look that revealed some unspoken desire.

  “Seelia, can you find the historicals that document significant conjunction in the deep sky, changes in the magnitude of the sun, recurrences of these kinds of phenomena?”

  “How far back?” she asked, confident.

  Tahn shook his head, impatient. “Everything we have. Go.”

  The girl disappeared at a fast clip into the almanac bookshelves.

  “Myles,” the philosophy student said before Tahn could ask his name too, and stepped forward, giving Rithy the same brief, wanton look.

  Tahn began to explain. “Find a succinct and accurate timeline for any recorded social change or epidemic or upheaval—wars, riots, plagues—just anything unnatural enough that a historian would put it on a timeline.”

  “Historians generally don’t agree—”

  “Myles,” Tahn cut in, “we’re not yet looking for nuances. And you probably won’t find this here. Search your own college’s annals first. Go.”

  “And I’m Tetcha,” the cosmology student said, introducing herself with a slight bow. “How about I gather everything we have from the last Succession run at Continuity?”

  Tahn nodded agreement, glancing sideways at Rithy to see if the mention of the last Succession caused any change in her face. Not this time. Tetcha had gotten to the door when a thought laid hold of Tahn and he called after her, stopping her in her tracks. “And start thinking about whether Resonance is impersonal … or personal.”

  Tetcha’s brows went up, surprised at the question. But eagerness lit in her eyes. “You’re going to frame an argument that Resonance could be the personal touch of the abandoning gods, aren’t you? Not just a principle of planetary mechanics. That we produce it ourselves—”

  He smiled. “I don’t know just what we’ll do with the old dual argument. But I can tell you this much: We’re not leaving it to philosophers to define for us.”

  She hurried away, nodding. Tahn wanted to start preparing now for the argument that Resonance was more than a vibration. That it was a principle meant for people, too, not just inanimate mechanical systems. It would have to be if he hoped to convince them not just of the Veil, but that they should strengthen it, keep races bound behind it.

  Polaema gave Tahn a strange look. “It’s bigger than just the Veil, isn’t it?”

  His mother of astronomy had seen to the heart of it. Something he’d begun to believe after his encounter in the astronomy tower. He gave both Rithy and Polaema an excited look. “I think Resonance might be the highest governing principle. Think about it. We’re going to try and prove it’s what makes the Veil possible. But if the Song of Suffering strengthens the Veil, then Suffering must work off the same principle.” He began to talk faster. “Sheason, too. They’re called Inner Resonance sometimes. They move things by the use of their own Will.”

  Polaema spoke, wonder in her voice. “Many different systems—”

  “All accessing the same dynamic, vibratory power,” Tahn finished. “It might be the unifying principle, the scientific basis for every form of magic.”

  “That which stirs,” Polaema whispered.

  “And my order,” Rithy said, grinning, clearly feeling the excitement. Tahn turned back toward his friend, who seemed earnest enough. Maybe the scars from the last Succession were behind her.

  “To tell me which one of these three has the sweetest lips.” He pointed after his recently departed Succession team members. He held up his hands to stop her retort before she could speak it. “No, I don’t want to know. And yes, I’m a bit jealous.”

  “You were the one who left—”

  “The task at hand, please,” Polaema chided them gently.

  Rithy’s face showed a moment of real regret and anger, but the look faded as quick as it came.

  Tahn stood there, staring at his old friend, realizing that his observations about the physics and philosophy students weren’t casual; he was jealous. Despite his love for Mira, he couldn’t ignore the resurgence of the feelings he’d cultivated for Rithy in his years here. They’d been of a more innocent nature then. Time had given them the sweet, smooth bite of a good winter wine.

  “There’s a lot to do,” Tahn said reluctantly.

  Rithy nodded. “So, what about me?”

  He quickly considered her strengths. Like him, she’d proven herself adept at much more than her college’s central research. But above the rest, the clarity of mathematics had been her passion. He knew enough to play to that strength.

  “The evening aurora, do you have solid math to explain it?” The rush of excitement immediately resumed.

  Understanding lit in Rithy’s face. She moved to a window and drew open the shutters. “That’s what you saw that got you running from our field of dead birds.” She pointed toward the horizon, where flows of red and green dimly lit the night sky.

  “When I left the Grove, there was only a hypothesis as to its cause.” Tahn came to stand beside her.

  “Still just a hypothesis. Better accepted now, but I’ve no solid math for it yet.” She turned to him. “What about it do you need to know? I could work up some statistical computations on frequency and relative strength—”

  “Beneath you,” Tahn cut in. “I can do that myself.” He surprised himself to realize he could, in fact, do just that—base astronomy stuff. “I think I know how we’re going to present to the physicists. What I worry about is the College of Mathematics. We need to start thinking about them now. I need to have you doing that.”

  “Oh, now you need me, huh?” She gave a playful grin.

  “But work with us here. Some of what we learn may be helpful to you.” Tahn reached out and put a hand over hers. He’d meant it as a gesture of thanks, but touching her soft skin made it something a whole lot more … intimat
e.

  When he’d studied here as a boy, Rithy had been a very good friend—a girl who hadn’t been put off by Tahn’s obsession with the stars. Maybe because her own aptitude with numbers put her in a class of her own. And despite the lapse in years, and these new affections, he didn’t feel the least bit awkward. Apparently, neither did she.

  Rithy leaned in and kissed him. When she pulled away she remarked, “Five seconds of kiss, probably a half pound of lip pressure, and I’ll get back to you on the relative friction of my tongue on your teeth.”

  “Math has come a long way in eight years.” Tahn laughed.

  “That’s nothing, wait until you see my geometry—”

  Polaema cleared her throat. “The task at hand,” she repeated.

  Tahn nodded and let go Rithy’s hand. Then, the three of them cleared two long tables and pulled them together. Several lamps were brought and extra wick turned up to brighten the room. Polaema disappeared into the deep almanac shelves and returned with an armful of tomes that she set down in meticulous order and began opening to chapters about the aurora. Shortly after, Seelia wheeled in a book cart loaded down with more than twenty volumes. One by one they set them out, opening to chapter descriptions and finding passages that spoke of deep sky events and unexplained phenomena and recorded anomalies.

  They had gotten all this organized to Tahn’s liking when Myles came clambering up the stairs, huffing over an armload of books. He dropped them indelicately on the table and quickly took a seat to rest.

  “Bottom one has the best timeline,” he said, chuffing. “But the volume on anatomy is the most interesting.” The philosopher then sat back to gather his breath.

  Tahn looked a question at Rithy. “He can read a page at a glance,” she explained.

  Tahn looked back at the philosopher with admiration. His own Dimnian training—received from Grant in the Scar—made him an exceptionally fast reader, with great recall. But not like Myles. Tahn then put out the books, and went to the first one the philosopher had mentioned. Over the rough parchment, a line had been drawn across both pages of the opened book. Time-markers intersected this horizontal line, giving it the look of a quadrant map. And beside each marker, a tight-handed scrawl spoke of the event at that moment in the timeline. Prominent on the pages were the wars of the First and Second Promise. But similarly, other wars were noted, as were the famines of Thalese and Monalav. The historian had also captured important political changes like the establishment of the regency in Vohnce when King Nevil Sadon ended the line of kings for that nation.

  The historian had made reading the chart easy, drawing the vertical lines that intersected the timeline at uniform lengths based on type. Wars were all noted at the top of the pages, at the end of the longest intersecting lines. Political change and unrest slightly below that. Notable religious movements and periods of pentacost occupied their own space beneath the row of political notations.

  Surveying the time-map in this way showed that while there always seemed to be something significant happening at any point in time, there were clusters where this meticulous scrivener had been forced to catalog much information all in a crowded column on the page. These columns of ink always had at their top the name of one war or another.

  Rithy ran her finger down one of these.

  “The question you should be asking,” Myles said from his chair, “is whether war induced all the other events, or if there are external factors responsible for these things independently.”

  “Thanks, Myles,” Rithy said with mild sarcasm over the obvious observation.

  “It appears the historian has classified the events in ascending risk or cost,” Polaema observed, motioning from the horizontal line upward. “Perhaps another way to read this is that each occurrence contributed to the next, eventually leading to war.”

  “I think war breeds the rest,” Rithy countered.

  Tahn listened, but had ideas of his own. He glanced at Seelia, who stood at the end of the tables watching them, or mostly Rithy. “What do you think?” he asked.

  “I think it’s kind of obvious,” the young physicist said. “You’re looking for astronomical correlations, which is why you had me fetch these.” She gestured at the line of books she’d retrieved from the almanac shelves. “But I doubt you’re going to find any solutions in the deep sky, and,” she paused, looking around at them all, “if this is the argument you’re preparing for the physics theater, I don’t hold out much hope for you.”

  Tahn laughed. “I see why you and Rithy are friends.” He then began to pore over the almanacs, lifting many and browsing to additional passages as he went.

  Over the next few days, they worked tirelessly in the room, all but cordoning it off so that others couldn’t enter. Polaema was the only one who left, and that was to put together grab bags of cheese and pumpernickel breads, along with apples and some dried thin-meats—pork mostly. She didn’t allow wine in the almanac library, but a plum cider—only days from going hard—kept them loose, as they grew a bit cage-weary.

  They began to smell one another, which Tahn might have imagined would become increasingly unpleasant. Strangely, with the women anyway, it became more of a pleasant musk. Could be that the continued excitement of their pursuit clouded his senses.

  At first, before diving deeper into the annals they’d collected, they decided to see if they could put together some practical demonstrations. Physicists, after all, were more about the see than the tell. Book proofs, says a physicist, are for sophists and politicians. Building off what they found from the last Continuity Succession, they dialed in a few rather compelling physical models using lodestones and pendulum gears. But it didn’t seem to cohere into a final argument. So, they made sure they could reproduce their material demonstrations with sufficient accuracy to be taken as proofs, then moved on to the books.

  “When the Quiet came to Naltus,” Tahn explained to them, as they started to peruse the many volumes they’d retrieved, “it was at the time of the lunar eclipse we just had of the first moon. It makes me think there are correlations worth exploring.”

  As they pored over the initial volumes, and several more besides, they slowly began to build something of a map. They copied out the original time line on a half-dozen sheets of parchment laid end to end. And began to add more events to it: vague accounts, apocryphal bits, speculative information. Anything. Everything.

  And then they lined up the almanacs around the time-map, laying them open to pages that cataloged various noteworthy astronomical events recorded over the last several centuries. Some, he noted, were inferred from astronomers who had determined the position of stars and planets and moons by calculating where they would have been, given their annual cycles and orbits. He appreciated the masterful work shown here. It reminded him how much he loved the study of the sky. The scratch of ink and graphite over the imperfections of old parchment … Memories filled him of perusing star maps all night here in the almanac library to prepare for discourse in the theaters. He missed this place.

  Tahn forced himself to put the past away, and focus on their current preparation, this time for his own Succession. After staring at the opened pages for several minutes, Rithy spoke what Tahn had already seen.

  “There’s no real alignment. The significant events in the sky aren’t occurring at the same time as notable historical moments. And frankly, tying them together would have been a neat trick, anyway.”

  Tahn looked askance at his old friend. “Whose side are you on, anyway?”

  “Are there sides?” she retorted.

  He shook his head, and laughed. “Thanks for your unrestrained honesty.”

  “And yet,” Polaema said, still staring at the pages of the almanacs, “there do seem to be some patterns here.”

  Returning his attention to the books and timeline, Tahn refocused. And almost immediately, the patterns leapt out at him from the pages: There were heliacal rhythms. Sunspots had been recorded for millennia. These wouldn’t have r
equired a skyglass, and the astronomers of Aubade Grove had begun documenting any observable changes in the sun from the very beginning. Then, over the last few hundred years, after the Grove had invented the skyglass, constantly refining its design and reach, they’d made an interesting discovery. Sunspots produced simultaneous flares of light, as though by being cooler, the sunspots were causing more intense temperatures and activity at their edges.

  Tahn looked up, making the simple deduction: These solar flares had also been happening for millennia, and at predictable intervals of time.

  But they didn’t correspond to the columns of social activity seen in the timeline.

  “Wait,” he said, practically pouncing on the historical text that contained the map of time. He riffled back through the book to the front pages, where the legends and indices were held. He read wildly, scanning, until he found what he’d been searching for. “The timeline is demarcated using the Baellorean Calendar.” Tahn moved quickly to three of the almanacs, nodding as he went. “The College of Astronomy has always used the Tonnian Calendar. They’re offset by three hundred and eleven years.”

  Rithy pushed in front of him, already finished with the math, calling out conjunctions and dates. “The full alignment of the eleven known wandering stars, TC 488.”

  He added the delta of time, his finger landing precisely on the war of the First Promise. A shiver rippled over his skin.

  “The passage of the Perades aéirein showers on the same day as both Northsun and a full solar eclipse. TC 2043.” Rithy looked up as Tahn slid his finger horizontally across the timeline to the war of the Second Promise.

  He paused there. The Scar had resulted from the last battle of this second war. It reminded him of his friends, those living in that dry, wide place, and feeling hollowness. It reminded him of Tamara. And Alemdra. It reminded him why he was here. The thirty-seven.

  Stop this whole damned mess before it gets messier!