The Unremembered

by Peter Orullian

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  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

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  For Cheyenne, in the hope of more Daddy stay-home days

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  You’ve read it before: too many people to thank. That’s true here, as well. But like so many good things in life, the thanks this time come in threes.

  First, my family. I remember reading an introduction to a Dan Simmons book by Harlan Ellison that talked about how Dan’s writing would affect his family. Competing priorities or somesuch. I’ve thought about that damned introduction every day this past year. For my part, it’s safe to say I owe a forgiving wife and two patient kids more than I can say. And I’m capable of saying quite a lot.

  Second, my editor. Claire Eddy and I have been friends about ten times longer than she’s been my editor. That’s a damned cool thing. She took me on about a year ago, well after the first version of this book was published. And when we began to unlock the possibilities together, well, I hit her up with old ideas about a new edition of The Unremembered. Enough can’t be said about a writer and editor sharing the same vision for a book. A vision, in this instance, that reshapes the story, adding and subtracting to arrive at the volume you hold in your hands right now. A volume rather different from the first. Claire and the many talented folks at Tor are quite simply the best. Many thanks to them for embracing this project with enthusiasm.

  Third, my readers. All of them. Let me enlighten you (yes, that’s a Disturbed reference), there’s not a better lot. And this includes my beta-readers, among whom, this time out, I’ll mention Steve Diamond. Thanks, dude.

  I’m incredibly honored and humbled to have the support of these good people. And others besides. My books don’t happen without them.

  Prelude to The Vault of Heaven

  One is forced to conclude that while the gods had the genius to create music, they didn’t understand its power. There’s a special providence in that, lads. It also ought to scare the last hell out of you.

  —Taken from the rebuttal made by the philosopher Lour Nail in the College of Philosophy during the Succession of Arguments on Continuity

  What hadn’t been burned, had been broken. Wood, stone … flesh. Palamon stood atop a small rise, surveying the wound that was a city. Beside him, Dossolum kept a god’s silence. Black smoke rose in straight pillars, its slow ascent unhindered by wind. None had been left alive. None. This wasn’t blind, angry retaliation. This was annihilation. This was breakage of a deeper kind than wood or stone or flesh. This was breakage of the spirit.

  Ours … and theirs, Palamon thought. He shook his head with regret. “The Veil isn’t holding those you sent into the Bourne.”

  Dossolum looked away to the north. “This place is too far gone. Is it any wonder we’re leaving it behind?”

  “You’re the Voice of the Council,” Palamon argued. “If you stay, the others will stay. Then together—”

  “The decision has been made,” Dossolum reminded him. “Some things cannot be redeemed. Some things shouldn’t.”

  Palamon clenched his teeth against further argument. He still had entreaties to make. Better not to anger the only one who could grant his requests. But it was hard. He’d served those who lay dead in the streets below him, just as he’d served the Creation Council. Someone should speak for the dead.

  “You don’t have to stay,” Dossolum offered again. “None of the Sheason need stay. There’s little you can do here. What we began will run its course. You might slow it”—he looked back at the ruined city—“but eventually, it will all come to this.”

  Palamon shook his head again, this time in defiance. “You don’t know that.”

  Dossolum showed him a patient look. “We don’t go idly. The energy required to right this … Better to start fresh, with new matter. In another place.” He looked up at evening stars showing in the east.

  “Most of the Sheason are coming with you,” Palamon admitted.

  “All but you, I think.” Dossolum dropped his gaze back to the city. “It’s not going to be easy here. Even with the ability to render the Will…”

  Palamon stared at burned stone and tracts of land blackened to nothing. “Because some of those who cross the Veil have the same authority,” he observed.

  “Not only that.” Dossolum left it there.

  “Then strengthen the Veil,” Palamon pled. “Make it the protection you meant it to be.” He put a hand on Dossolum’s arm. “Please.”

  In the silence that followed, a soft sound touched the air. A song. A lament. Palamon shared a look with Dossolum, then followed the sound. They descended the low hill. And step by step the song grew louder, until they rounded a field home. Beside a shed near a blackened pasture sat a woman with her husband’s head in her lap. She stroked his hair as she sang. Not loud. Not frantic. But anguished, like a deep, slow saddening moved through her.

  Tears had cleaned tracks down her field-dirty cheeks. Or maybe it was char. Like the smell of burning all around them.

  But she was alive. Palamon had thought everyone here dead.

  She looked up at them, unsurprised. Her vacant stare might not have seen them at all. She kept singing.

  Palamon noticed toys now beside the home.

  “The city wasn’t enough,” Palamon said, anger welling inside him. “They came into the fields to get them all.”

  The woman sang on. Her somber melody floated like cottonwood seed, brushing past them soft and earthward.

  Dossolum stood and listened a long while. He made no move to comfort the woman, or to revive the man. His face showed quiet appreciation. Only when she’d begun to repeat her song did he finally speak. And then in a low tone, like a counterpoint.

  “Very well, Palamon.” Dossolum continued to watch the woman grieve. “Write it all down. Everything we tried to do. Our failure. The Bourne and those we sent there. The war to do so.” He grew quiet. “A story of desolation.”

  Tentatively, Palamon asked, “And do what with it?”

  The woman’s song turned low and throaty and bare.

  Dossolum gave a sad smile. “To some we’ll give a gift of song. They’ll sing the story you write. And so long as they do, the Veil will be added to. Strengthened.” He nodded, seeming satisfied. “But it will be a suffering to sing it. Leaving them diminished.”

  “Thank you, Dossolum.” Palamon then silently thanked the woman who mourned in front of them. Her mortal sorrow had touched his friend’s eternal heart.

  “Don’t thank me.” Dossolum’s eyes showed their first hint of regret. “Like every good intention, a song can fade.”

  Palamon looked up at the same evening stars Dossolum had watched a moment ago. “Or it might be sung even after the light of the stars has fled the h
eavens.”

  “I hope you’re right, my friend. I hope you’re right.”

  BOOK ONE

  The Unremembered

  PROLOGUE

  Stillborn

  The Church of Reconciliation—Reconciliationists, so called—preach that the Framers left behind protections. And these protections were given proper names. Names we’ve forgotten. Would these protections cease, then, to serve? Or would we have to question the origins of the doctrine?

  —Excerpt from “Rational Suppositions,” a street tract disseminated by the League of Civility

  An open door …

  Tahn Junell drew his bow, and kicked his mount into a dead run. They descended the shallow dale in a rush toward that open door. Toward home.

  The road was muddy. Hooves threw sludge. Lightning arced in the sky. A peal of thunder shattered the silence and pushed through the small vale in waves. It echoed outward through the woods in diminishing tolls.

  The whispering sound of rain on trees floated toward him. The soft smells of earth and pollen hung on the air, charged with the coming of another storm. Cold perspiration beaded on his forehead and neck.

  An open door …

  His sister, Wendra, wouldn’t leave the door open to the chill.

  Passing the stable, another bolt of white fire erupted from the sky, this time striking the ground. It hit at the near end of the vale. Thunder exploded around him. A moment later, a scream rose from inside his home. His mount reared, tugging at his reins and throwing Tahn to the ground before racing for the safety of the stable. Tahn lost his bow and began frantically searching the mud for the dropped weapon. The sizzle of falling rain rose, a lulling counterpoint to the screams that continued from inside. Something crashed to the floor of the cabin. Then a wail rose up. It sounded at once deep in the throat, like the thunder, and high in the nose like a child’s mirth.

  Tahn’s heart drummed in his ears and neck and chest. His throat throbbed with it. Wendra was in there! He found his bow. Shaking the mud and water from the bowstring and quickly cleaning the arrow’s fletching on his coat, he sprinted for the door. He nocked the arrow and leapt to the stoop.

  The home had grown suddenly still and quiet.

  He burst in, holding his aim high and loose.

  An undisturbed fire burned in the hearth, but everything else in his home lay strewn or broken. The table had been toppled on its side, earthen plates broken into shards across the floor. Food was splattered against one wall and puddled near a cooking pot in the far corner. Wendra’s few books sat partially burned near the fire, their thrower’s aim not quite sure.

  Tahn saw it all in a glance as he swung his bow to the left where Wendra had tucked her bed up under the loft.

  She lay atop her quilts, knees up and legs spread.

  Absent gods, no!

  Then, within the shadows beneath the loft, Tahn saw it, a hulking mass standing at the foot of Wendra’s bed. It hunched over, too tall to remain upright in the nook beneath the upper room. Its hands cradled something in a blanket of horsehair. The smell of sweat and blood and new birth commingled with the aroma of the cooking pot.

  The figure slowly turned its massive head toward him. Wendra looked too, her eyes weary but alive with fright. She weakly reached one arm toward him, mouthing something, but unable to speak.

  In a low, guttural voice the creature spoke, “Quillescent all around.” It rasped words in thick, glottal tones.

  Then it stepped from beneath the loft, its girth massive. The fire lit the creature’s fibrous skin, which moved independent of the muscle and bone beneath. Ridges and rills marked its hide, which looked like elm bark. But pliable. It uncoiled its left arm from the blanket it held to its chest, letting its hand hang nearly to its knees. From a leather sheath strapped to its leg, the figure drew a long knife. Around the hilt it curled its hand—three talonlike fingers with a thumb on each side, its palm as large as Tahn’s face. Then it pointed the blade at him.

  Tahn’s legs began to quiver. Revulsion and fear pounded in his chest. This was a nightmare come to life. This was Bar’dyn, a race out of the Bourne. One of those given to Quietus, the dissenting god.

  “We go,” the Quietgiven said evenly. It spoke deep in its throat. Its speech belied a sharp intelligence in its eyes. When it spoke, only its lips moved. The skin on its face remained thick and still, draped loosely over protruding cheekbones that jutted like shelves beneath its eyes. Tahn glimpsed a mouthful of sharp teeth.

  “Tahn,” Wendra managed, her voice hoarse and afraid.

  Blood spots marked her white bed-dress, and her body seemed frozen in a position that prevented her from straightening her legs. Tahn’s heart stopped. Against its barklike skin, the Bar’dyn held cradled in a tightly woven blanket of mane and tail … Wendra’s child.

  Pressure mounted in Tahn’s belly: hate, helplessness, confusion, fear. All a madness like panicked wings in his mind. He was supposed to protect her, keep her safe, especially while she carried this child. A child come of rape. But a child she looked forward to. Loved.

  Worry and anger rushed inside him. “No!”

  His scream filled the small cabin, leaving a deeper silence in its wake. But the babe made no sound. The Bar’dyn only stared. On the stoop and roof, the patter of rain resumed, like the sound of a distant waterfall. Beyond it, Tahn heard the gallop of hooves on the muddy road. More Bar’dyn? His friends?

  He couldn’t wait for either. In a shaky motion, he drew his aim on the creature’s head. The Bar’dyn didn’t move. There wasn’t even defiance in its expression.

  “I’ll take you and the child. Velle will be pleased.” It nodded at its own words, then raised its blade between them.

  Velle? Dead gods, they’ve brought a renderer of the Will with them!

  Tahn’s aim floundered from side to side. Weariness. Cold fear.

  The Bar’dyn stepped toward him. Tahn’s mind raced, and fastened upon one thought. The hammer. He focused on that mark on the back of his bow hand, visually tracing its lines and feeling it with his mind. A simple, solid thing. He didn’t remember where he’d gotten the scar or brand, but it seemed intentional. And it grounded him. With that moment of reassurance, his hands steadied, and he drew deeper into the pull, bringing his aim on the Bar’dyn’s throat.

  “Put the child down.” His voice trembled even as his mouth grew dry.

  The Bar’dyn paused, looking down at the bundle it carried. The creature then lifted the babe up, causing the blanket to slip to the floor. Its massive hand curled around the little one’s torso. The infant still glistened from its passage out of Wendra’s body, its skin red and purple in the sallow light of the fire.

  “Child came dead, grub.”

  Sadness and anger welled again in Tahn. His chest heaved at the thought of Wendra giving birth in the company of this vile thing, having her baby taken at the moment of life into its hands. Was the child dead at birth, or had the Bar’dyn killed it? Tahn glanced again at Wendra. She was pale. Sadness etched her features. He watched her close her eyes against the Bar’dyn’s words.

  The rain now pounded the roof. But the sound of heavy footfalls on the road was clear, close, and Tahn abandoned hope of escape. One Bar’dyn, let alone several, might tear him apart, but he intended to send this one to the abyss, for Wendra, for her dead child.

  He prepared to fire his bow, allowing time enough to speak the old, familiar words: “I draw with the strength of my arms, but release as the Will allows.”

  But he couldn’t shoot.

  He struggled to disobey the feeling, but it stretched back into that part of his life he couldn’t remember. He had always spoken the words, always. He didn’t release of his own choice. He always followed the quiet intimations that came after he spoke those words.

  Tahn relaxed his aim and the Bar’dyn nodded approval. “Bound to Will,” it said. The words rang like the cracking of timber in the confines of the small home. “But first to watch this one go.” The Bar’dyn
turned toward Wendra.

  “No!” Tahn screamed again, filling the cabin with denial. Denial of the Bar’dyn. Denial of his own impotence.

  The sound of others came up the steps. Tahn was surrounded. They would all die!

  He spared a last look at his sister. “I’m sorry,” he tried to say, but it came out in a husk.

  Her expression of confusion and hurt and disappointment sank deep inside him.

  If he couldn’t kill the creature, he could at least try to prevent it from hurting her.

  Before he could move, his friends shot through the door. They got between Tahn and the Bar’dyn. They fought the creature. They filled his home with a clash of wills and swordplay and shouted oaths. Chaos churned around him. And all he could do was watch Wendra curl deeper into her bed. Afraid. Heartsick.

  The creature out of the Bourne finally turned and crashed through the cabin’s rear wall, rushing into the dark and the storm with Wendra’s dead child. They did not give chase.

  Tahn turned from the hole in the wall and went to Wendra’s side. Blood soaked the coverlet, and cuts in her wrists and hands told of failed attempts to ward off the Bar’dyn. Her cheeks sagged; she looked pale and spent. She lay crying silent tears.

  He’d stood twenty feet away with a clear shot at the Bar’dyn and had done nothing. The lives of his sister and her child had hung in the balance, and he’d done nothing. The old words had told him the draw was wrong. He’d followed that feeling over the defense of his sister. Why?

  It was an old ache and frustration, believing himself bound to the impressions those words stirred inside him. But never so much as now.

  For there are two eternal truths that may not be put asunder: that Forza and Forda, or matter and energy, or body and spirit, can be neither created nor destroyed, only rendered, changed, made new—yea, and all power within them lies, yea even the First Ones were bound by these very laws in framing this world as in all the worlds that came before and all those that will come after; and next that these eternal elements may choose for themselves.