Trial of Intentions

by Peter Orullian

  Once outside, Sutter let go of Mira, thinking he’d help brace the door. The Far dropped to her knees, her eyes shut tight in discomfort.

  From the dark corridor shouts rose up. He had just started toward Yenola, who’d begun to close the door, when a dagger flashed through the thin opening and buried itself in the girl’s shoulder.

  Yenola flew back, hitting the ground hard. Sutter launched himself at the door. Before he could get it shut, a man wearing the Relothian lion slipped through, brandishing a sword as he rushed for Yenola.

  Sutter finished closing the door, turned, and drew his blade. As he did, he watched his lover get to her feet, pull the dagger from her shoulder, and circle on the man. The solider made a quick sword-lunge at her. With expert grace, she deflected the attack and stepped in close, burying his own dagger in his belly. He groaned and dropped to his knees. A look of hard determination lit Yenola’s face as she pulled the dagger out and put it into the side of the man’s neck. His eyes closed and he slumped to the ground.

  Before Sutter could get there, she dropped and rolled over on her back.

  Sutter rushed to her side and knelt, breathless. “I’ll get help.”

  Yenola grabbed his sleeve. “You don’t have time for that. I’ll be fine.” She swallowed, the look of it difficult. “Is it possible to fall in love so fast? Or is that just me wanting to think I was not a—”

  “It’s possible,” Sutter said, and smiled to share his own feelings. “But you might have wanted to die. Save yourself from a life beside a rootdigger.”

  She smiled back, blood now over part of her lips.

  Guilt seemed still to linger in her face. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I was a fool.”

  “I think you turned that around,” Sutter replied, nodding.

  Then her expression became determined again. “I won’t let this court forget what you’ve shown us. You’ve reminded us of who we are. Our honor. I’ll be sure it’s carried through.”

  Looking at her, Sutter had no doubt of it.

  Through the quiet, the sound of hooves approached. None of them rose when the rider stopped nearby. If this stranger meant them harm, they’d be little help to themselves. The man jumped to the ground and walked directly to Sutter and Yenola, leading two mounts. He handed Sutter the reins to their horses. “The lady told me to meet you here,” he said, looking at Yenola. “Your mounts are fed and rested, and your saddlebags are ready with food and water. There are ointments, too.” He glanced at Mira. “But you should go quickly. It’s likely I was followed.”

  Sutter looked back at Yenola. “You’ve thought of everything.”

  “Well, clearly not everything.” She reached up to the wound in her shoulder.

  The rider went around and helped her up. “My lady, we should go.”

  Yenola nodded, and stepped close to Sutter, wrapping him in a one-arm embrace. “You come back. I’ve no idea how to plant a garden.”

  Sutter laughed, and kissed her. Then the rider helped her into his saddle, and they started off in the other direction at a canter.

  He’d only known her a few days, though it seemed longer. She’d meant more to him than he realized. And he instinctively knew it wasn’t simply that she’d been the first woman he’d lain down with. He wasn’t such a fool as that. A different kind of fool, sure.

  He helped Mira into his saddle, and climbed up behind her. He spared a look down at Relothian’s sword on his hip. It reminded him that he shouldn’t show his Sedagin gifts. He removed his glove and once again adopted the persona of his friend. He would play the part of Tahn now until they reached the Randeur. Taking hold of the reins, he led them southwest, moving at as brisk a pace as he dared, given Mira’s condition.

  With a new kind of determination, he looked into the darkened horizon toward Estem Salo. Dear absent gods, but he missed his roots.

  CHAPTER NINETY-TWO

  Echoes of a Song

  What you need to understand, what you’ll learn, is that we don’t sing Suffering for ourselves.

  —Final instruction offered to Leiholan before their first day of Suffering

  Wendra raced through the corridors of Descant, rushing toward the Chamber of Anthems, toward Suffering. Something now sounded … wrong. Strained.

  Wine-colored moon.

  She turned down a final hall, stirring candles as she ran. Her own shadow leapt in the light of the silent flames, coursing up vaulted halls and down the corridor ahead. Besides the low hum of Suffering, only her feet made any sound, marking a desperate rhythm in the silence.

  A moment later she was at the Anthem door, and pushed through. Inside, she came to an abrupt stop.

  The great domed hall appeared to have no walls. Instead, at the center of a vast plain stood a lone singer, head tilted slightly back, intoning what at that moment sounded like a plea. The woman raised her arms in a kind of supplication. Her song lifted softly but certainly into a vast sky and out against faraway peaks that Wendra thought were themselves alive, listening. The power of Suffering had virtually transported this Leiholan woman, who took no note of Wendra as she stood watching in amazement.

  The song grew more agitated, more staccato. The horizon darkened with the shapes of countless flying things moving against the far range of mountains. The air charged as it does in a lightning storm, growing musty and warm and pregnant with the imminence of a strike.

  Then came rain. Real rain. Falling hard from a cloud-darkened sky above, pelting down on the Leiholan and Wendra and the floor, which appeared like a hardened, varied terrain, and not smooth Descant stone.

  Into the storm, a crack of lightning sizzled. A thunderous roar followed, rumbling not up the walls of the Chamber of Anthems, which Wendra could no longer see, but out across the land.

  The song grew strident and loud and challenging, tearing through the wind and rain. At that moment, Wendra heard the wrongness again. And the Leiholan faltered. Fell. She struggled to keep singing, but she’d landed on her face. Her nose and lips were bleeding. And she was out of breath besides. The dark shapes grew larger, more clear. They filled the sky. They came by foot, too. And they pushed ahead of them a feeling of sorrow like a wave you could feel pressing on your skin.

  The Leiholan gasped and choked out what song she could.

  From the other side of the chamber, a door seemed to open in midair, and a young man stepped into the scene. He crossed toward to the fallen young woman, his own lips beginning to move, picking up the lyric and melody and rhythm in perfect unison. But stronger. Then he was at the first singer’s side as she stopped singing altogether. Wendra rushed forward on instinct, helping support the young woman as the young man focused his attention on the Song, his commanding voice rising into the coming gloom.

  Wendra had only gotten a few steps back toward the door, when she heard the crack of bones on stone. She turned to see the new singer fallen, clutching at his throat, fighting hard to keep the song alive. He looked over at her, panicked and pleading. Wendra gave him a firm look. Sing hard!

  He turned back into the scene, the greys and silvers and blacks, and pushed. He did well for a few moments, but then his tones grew strangled, and he went forward onto his hands, barely able to utter a note.

  What’s happening? What do I do?

  She thought of Soluna. She thought of the Quiet army on the Soliel plain. She thought of broken instruments, and breed stock traders, and shotal, and singing to the inside of someone, and a dysphonic Suffering.

  She let go the Leiholan she was carrying, and rushed not to the young man but to the music stand. She glanced down at countless pages written in music notation. Notation she could read. She picked up the top sheet, feeling its waxen surface—to protect it from the elements—and scanned. She did the same with three pages, taking them not note for note, but in general. Movements. Key changes. Feel. Tempo. The words. The meaning.

  Then the young man ceased to sing. There was a deafening silence that lay under the wind and rain and roll of th
under over the hard ground. A deafening silence that came ahead of whatever raced toward them out of the deep places brought to life by Suffering.

  Pray the deafened gods I don’t get this wrong.

  She started to sing. The words were what she’d read. The notes were the same. She caught the meter and sound of it all. But the feeling. The shotal. The intention. These things she changed. Or perhaps she sang them the only way she knew how.

  She started low, soft, getting the music underneath her, using those first passages to warm her throat.

  In those moments, the young man struggled to his feet. She caught his eye, seeing gratitude and some worry, too. She nodded toward the woman lying a few strides away. Get her out of here.

  He nodded back and went to the other Leiholan, lifted her up, and carried her out. Wendra was alone in the Chamber of Anthems. Singing Suffering. The vision around her was a place and time she didn’t know. But it was more than a vision. There were no chamber walls. The sky was filled with dark clouds dropping rain. The air hung with the smell of old dry earth struck by that rain. The wind pulled at her hair. And the Quiet came. She saw them. But more than that, she could feel them. She could feel their long bitterness, and indifference to the sufferings of men. This was not simple remembrance. This was war. It was real. And paralyzing.

  Not today, she thought. Come Quiet or chorus, not today!

  And she let go.

  Her voice rose in a crushing crescendo of dysphonic staccato. It echoed like a great torn bell out over the darkened plain. Up into the grey skies. It shrieked toward whatever was shrieking toward her. Defiance. A warning. It was Suffering. But it wasn’t simply a recounting of what had been. Or even a reenactment. This was new. It was the voice of pain in every way she’d ever known it.

  She hit a great, high note. And began to find a cadence. Everything on the page she’d read, she sang an octave up. And roughened. And voiced in clipped, harsh beats like the strike of a hammer against stone.

  And as her song gave Suffering life, it connected to that wave of sorrow. Connected to the Quiet that descended toward this chamber, as though it were a great Telling that had opened a way into this place. This time. And while she took in a new ache, connected to all this, she also made sure they felt what she had to share. She made use of that connection to be sure they knew what her song had done. Could do. Made damn sure they knew that, in these next few pages of song, she was willing to die if she had to, if they came.

  Your song finds the darkness, doesn’t it, my girl.

  She had no idea if this was what always happened when singing this passage of Suffering. But it was all she could think to do. And it felt right.

  The Quiet did not slow.

  And somehow she thought the song had changed. Not because she sang it her own way. But because this attack was different from the way the story of Desolation had actually occurred when the world broke. And from the way it had been sung for ages ever since.

  From the sky above, over broken stone, and from inside her own fractured memory, Wendra endured the assault. Suffering had grown beyond a relation of events. Or a song. It had become this moment. It was all these things, and her own brokenness besides.

  She raised her chin and began to sing-shout the next set of phrases, calling the Quiet out. Challenging them to come at her. And they did. It was too dark to know exactly what descended from the sky, or rushed over land. But each one that came she shouted down. Her body was soaked with rain. The ground around her slippery. Weapons were raised. Massive arms swept toward her from high, from low.

  But as each came, she drew up from inside her resonances she felt would touch them. And she found those same resonances inside the song, inside these creatures out of history. I am attuned. Attuned to them. And they fell. One after the other. They fell.

  She knew she’d taken a step closer to absolute sound.

  Before her now rushed an army, a legion of Quiet memories come here to tear away the barrier between them and this place. Between then and now.

  The dark flying shapes fell heavily around her, crashing and crushing the soil and rock. Figures large and immense dove toward her. Wendra shouted a note or two at each. And they, too, fell. The bodies stacking.

  She thought she might tire. But in some way, the song strengthened her. Each passage made her feel she could sing longer. Louder.

  And soon, the shapes stopped running and rushing. They slowed. Walked. They were regarding her from far away, aware that she was singing the Song differently. They watched, waited, measured.

  It infuriated her. She leapt up on top of the largest downed Quiet and renewed Suffering. She focused on the resonance she could feel inside them, on that connection she’d known before. But it became everything now. And she made her song travel that connection, unseen, but direct and into the bodies and minds of her enemy.

  As Belamae did when he was a young man fighting in his own war …

  More Quiet fell. Their thoughtful, placid faces slackened, their eyelids closed, and they fell. Scores of them. Her song swept outward like a wind coursing across a field of wheat, undulating like a wave. And the roll of it was Quiet deaths, races unknown to her falling as a resonant note inside them rang too loud. A suffering note that grew too much for them to bear.

  Then something in the air changed. She was like the charge in summer air before a lightning storm. A moment later, they came at her again. Not rushing, but with a steady march they came. And not all at once, but individually.

  She turned her song on each of them as they approached. But the sound didn’t find them, didn’t slow them. Why isn’t it working now? No glee or wicked indignation shone in their faces. They simply came, staring at her with awful indifference. Some looked like Bar’dyn. Some winged gracefully down as if coasting on great thermals. There came Maeres, like those that chased her from the Hollows. Creatures on four legs. On six. Others looked very much like men. And women. None growled or gnashed. They simply came.

  Inside this very performance of Suffering, the need of the Song had changed. How it must be sung had changed. Or had they adapted? Is that even possible? Perhaps she just hadn’t found the signature of these Quiet.

  Looking into the slowly advancing faces, she began to worry. They were close. And she didn’t know how to resonate with them. She couldn’t find the right Suffering.

  Then a thought. Maybe some songs can move only one. Some Sufferings individual.

  In those moments, she found the center of her intention, shotal, the current of life in these Quiet. In each. One by one. You both are changed.

  She faced the closest one of them, a creature with limbs as thick as trunks, hide like old elm. It came hard, eager and indifferent, to strike her down with its one arm. She sang to it alone.

  An image of it working in a camp filled with humans. Of one man grown tired, falling in a dredging field, and this Quiet reaching to stop his fall.

  Later, a saw-blade had removed its arm for doing so. To make an example.

  She saw the lost limb. It saw the lost limb. It was not stirred. It came on, carrying an impossibly long sword. It brought it around to cleave her in two. She shout-sang, finding the resonant note inside what was left of it.

  Its eyes fluttered and it crashed down hard before her.

  She shifted fast to a Quiet flier descending on her now in a rush. This creature had the features of one of the sculpted stone beasts that stood watch over burial grounds and churches.

  Images rose of family, parents that were too old to be useful. Their old wings were clipped, and their scrabbling bodies tossed into open-air gardens on the side of a great mountain where younger of their kind ate them.

  This child-creature had starved, because it would not eat.

  The flier dove at her, remembering, and struck loud notes inside Wendra. But she embraced them and lifted Suffering to it, stilling its wings. She had to jump out of the way as it nearly fell on top of her.

  Next came a creature with a heavily
corded neck and the scars of brands over its entire body. Hollow cheeks set in a narrow face. Sinewy muscles in a tall frame. And a placid expression. Wendra sang to it alone.

  Images of forced copulation. The get of those unions being deemed inadequate and silenced. If they came at all.

  The creature’s eyes widened slightly, and it began to rush her. Still no anger, but some urgency. It raised a long hammer.

  Wendra shifted her song to a stabbing shout and gave his resonant notes all their awful sound. His body went limp, his face fell to peace, and he crashed down at her feet.

  One by one, she faced them, modulating Suffering to strike the notes of their hearts. And the things she saw, witnessed … lived, they remade her. A little, anyways. Her own sound and song changed. The vibrations of her life were altered. Wendra’s own anguish deepened.

  And as she sang these moments of Suffering, this movement of the song known simply as “War,” she noted something more: a measure of control. It was her song. It was filled with her shotal sound. But it wasn’t random or blind. She’d taken Suffering and sung it the way it needed today to be sung.

  And over the next several passages, the attack ended. The army that she could see and hear and feel—those that remained—simply stood, looking at her. In the connection she shared with them she sensed no anger. No shame.

  The rain subsided. The movement of music that followed was a different kind of singing. Mournful. Resigned. Like endings. It was called “Self-slaughter.” Wendra sang it at the dark shapes as they retreated back into the far mountains and night skies. And even that song changed in the singing. Somewhere along its sad passages, she stopped singing it at them. And started singing it for them.

  She didn’t know how long she’d been at it when she realized she stood alone on the darkened plain, singing about one taking her own life. Or the life of someone who wants to die but cannot do it for herself. That song wasn’t rough and loud. It was low tones. It was a barrow weeper’s broken cant.