The Unremembered

by Peter Orullian

  As the auction wound down to two bidders, one of them waved his stick. At that, the auctioneer removed the young girl’s dress so that her buyers could view her naked body.

  Wendra fell weak against Jastail. But a song stirred deep inside. The tingling began to crawl into every part of her, leaving her disoriented—weak but angry, unable to act but desperate to do something.

  More came to the boards. Chalked feet. Vacant eyes. Mostly women and girls, occasionally a frail man, but never the old.

  And then a young boy was put upon the boards.…

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Wards of the Scar

  For me, calling them Quiet is as much about the way they look and feel and die as it is about them following Quietus. What scares me more is wondering how they got this way.

  —From a missive written by a Reaper, sent home two days before the Battle of the Hand, in which he died

  The nine silhouettes were too tall to be more of Grant’s wards. But not thick enough to be Bar’dyn. They came. Unhurried. Directly toward Braethen and the others.

  Meche and the other wards fanned out into a staggered line. They’d never let go their weapons. Mira took several steps forward, putting herself between the strangers and Vendanj, who squinted against the dusk to try and see who approached.

  Braethen pulled his sword from its sheath, reticent. I am I, he thought, trying to steel himself.

  Moments stretched. The nine drew nearer. And when they came into close view, they looked like … men and women. Braethen glanced at Vendanj to gauge his reaction. The Sheason stared ahead, a severe expression on his face. Disgust and readiness to kill. As he always had when facing the Quiet.

  But the only remarkable thing about the nine, besides the fact that they had weapons in their hands, was the indifference in their eyes. The cool reason and lack of regard. There seemed something ruined in them, turned. They wore no armor. No cloaks. Only well-used, practical coats, buttoned high.

  “They look like an autumn harvest crew,” Braethen muttered.

  Vendanj shook his head. “They are Quiet.”

  The air thickened. The early evening chill deepened.

  They spoke no words. Never paused. Simply walked to Mira first, staffs and steel coming up only when they were finally necessary.

  Mira ducked under a clever feint and thrust, then struck the first in the stomach with both blades. The Quiet never cried out or showed the pain of death. The man folded to the ground.

  To the right, each ward met one of the Quiet. They moved with grace, anticipating strikes and sweeps as if they’d seen them two moments earlier. Mira engaged a stout-looking woman who, like her, carried two swords. The three remaining Quiet came at Vendanj.

  Braethen stepped in to defend the Sheason.

  Vendanj pulled him back. “Not these ones,” he said. Then he pointed at the closest Quiet man. The stranger’s neck cracked, his head falling at an odd angle. And he slumped to the ground.

  A Quiet woman made a quick throw of a knife, trying to catch Vendanj off guard. He swept his arm to the right and the knife went sailing off into the sage. But she followed close, lunging at him, and taking him to the ground.

  As they rolled, the third got in close to Braethen. He raised his sword, wondering if the darkness would take him again and hint of another place and time. Hint at a painful remembrance. There wasn’t time. As the Quiet woman stepped close, her face plain and unexpressive, he began … not to feel. A kind of apathy came from being so close to her. He suddenly cared less about succeeding as a sodalist, cared less about his books, about his father. Even Vendanj and getting to Tillinghast, it all cascaded down to nothing.

  And he began slowly to lower his blade.

  The woman stared at him as he lost his own regard for things, including his own misspent life. But it wasn’t sadness he felt. It was nothing. It was a lack inside. And he didn’t regret the loss.

  In those long moments, he saw the four wards fighting the Quiet back. They moved in easy rhythms almost as if the battle were choreographed. And though they were outsized, one by one, the wards took the Quiet down. And not a single one cried out or showed emotion as they fell to death.

  Beyond the woman standing in front of Braethen, Mira finished off the Quiet woman she’d been fighting. And to his right, Vendanj pinned the woman to the ground and placed a hand on her chest. Another time, it might have looked like a gesture meant to calm a panicked mother. Tonight, it made her body go still, her eyes glaze.

  He had an instant to wonder why only he seemed susceptible to the feeling emanating from this breed of Quiet. Then the Quiet woman in front of him pulled back her arm, set to run her steel into his gut. He fought the lethargy. He fought the apathy. He tried to remember A’Posian and reading on the porch. Something warm.

  It was no use.

  Only in the last moment did it occur to him. Disregard. Disregard for this Quiet woman. Not anger. Not defense. Not better cause. He simply took in the waves of indifference and turned them back on her. And to be safe, instead of his sword, he drew his short knife and put it in her belly.

  He’d expected to see surprise in her eyes, staring at him from a hand’s length away. Maybe a grimace. But he didn’t even see a storyteller’s gratitude for release. She carried her disregard with her to the hard earth and her eyes lost their sight in her expressionless face.

  A rush of feeling came in his body. Painful. Running hot and cold. He fought not to laugh then cry then scream. He sank to his knees beside the Quiet woman and saw feet gather around him.

  “What happened? What were they?” he asked, staring at the dead Quiet. Softer, “Did you feel it?”

  Vendanj put a hand on his shoulder. “I’m too much a bastard to have felt it deeply,” he said. “And these,” he nudged the woman with his boot, “are just another Quiet race. Sometimes called ‘heedless.’”

  Braethen looked the same question at Mira, then the wards of the Scar.

  Did you feel it?

  Mira only frowned.

  Meche stared at the Quiet woman. “We are a long time in the Scar.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Tracker

  All things have a signature inside them that may be identified. No matter where. Or when.

  —Last-level study of the Leiholan—Rudiments of Absolute Sound

  Tahn struggled to get free. He pushed his hands into the soft river bottom, trying to rise up. No use. Whatever had him was much too powerful. His lungs started to burn, and he thrashed from side to side, twisting his neck and bucking his feet. The water around his head clouded red, the fingers digging into his skin and cutting his neck.

  He collapsed his arms, hoping to surprise his attacker and win some advantage. His face quickly met the bottom, his nose filling with wet sand.

  His chest spasmed, trying to force a breath. He stifled the need, but would soon suck water in and start to drown.

  Around his face, the water clouded, obscuring his vision. He reached back desperately, hoping to grab his assailant’s arm and pull him into the water. He couldn’t get hold. The water roiled. Murky light bent and shadowed in his eyes. He twisted, and began trying to kick the man off his feet.

  The legs didn’t give, rooted like iron in the river bottom.

  The urge to draw breath became too much, and Tahn heaved a huge rush of cold water through his nose and mouth. The feel of it down his throat came like a dagger. He immediately began to cough. Panic swelled in him, and he thrashed, trying not to breathe again.

  Getting his feet under him, he pushed up with all his strength, and broke the surface. He gasped a breath, and saw a water-blurred image of Sutter rushing to his horse twenty strides away, just before the creature thrust his head back into the river.

  He clawed at the hand around his neck, beating at the fingers and wrist. The man’s grip held him. Tahn’s lungs began to burn again, and in his eyes he could see red dots flashing. His resistance ebbed, his arms tired, grew heavy.

/>   Then vaguely, the sound of rapid splashes echoed under the water like dull thuds. They grew nearer, deeper, louder.

  His lungs began to spasm, and then suddenly the hand pulled free, the fingernails tearing away thick strips of his skin.

  Tahn shot to the surface, gulping air in a loud, hoarse rush. He retched and fell back down, coughing and choking. His gut still felt like ice, like he was drowning.

  He whirled and saw a figure in simple charcoal-colored clothes regaining its balance. The tracker that had been following them since before the high plains. Sutter had been thrown aside in the shallow water. Tahn realized the splashes he’d heard were Sutter’s running steps as his friend had thrown himself at the tracker. The figure lashed at Sutter, who scrambled out of the way and fell back into the river. The creature wheeled around, fixing its eyes on Tahn. Its pale skin glistened with water beneath a drenched cloak that clung to its emaciated frame.

  “Patience, child,” the creature admonished. “I’ve no intention of killing you. Just breaking your spirit before taking you back.”

  Tahn scrambled away like a river crab, trying to regain his feet and reach his bow. He stole a look over his shoulder at the horses, which had run some distance away and milled nervously near the trees.

  The tracker came on, its feet gliding through the water without breaking the surface.

  A bare smile spread on its face as it fast closed the distance between them. The grin drew rough, unnatural lines in the tight, thin skin, which threatened to split over the tracker’s sharp, angular features. It came on, hunched, bent as though stooped forever to the ground. Its fingers coursed across the river’s surface, likewise making no mark.

  Tahn tried to stand, his wet cloak catching beneath his foot and tripping him back into the shallows. He flipped over to meet the tracker, who rushed at him.

  The keening of a blade drawn from its sheath.

  Sutter’s longblade lodged itself in the tracker’s right shoulder. A grimace of anger and hatred twisted on its lips. It swung around to deal with Sutter, giving Tahn time to get up. Pain shot through his foot with each running stride, but he forced himself to move faster.

  Reaching his horse, he pulled his bow and wheeled about, knocking an arrow.

  The tracker was almost on Sutter, who knelt at the riverside, blood on his hands, staring helplessly toward Tahn. The Quiet raised a hand. Tahn drew, the old words racing through his mind. One arrow, a second, and a third whistled from his string, biting the tracker in the back one after the other.

  A scream split the air, waves welling in the river, leaves quaking on their branches.

  The tracker slowed, turned toward Tahn, and came on. Tahn backpedaled, fumbling for more arrows as he retreated. The sound of running footfalls came across the riverbank. The tracker turned again, to meet Sutter’s charge.

  Nails skidded to a stop, using his momentum to swing his sword with reckless abandon. The sound of steel biting the air echoed across the water. But the tracker evaded the blow and shot one long arm at Sutter, taking his neck in its powerful grasp. Sutter dropped his blade, using both hands to try and loosen the tracker’s grip. His face reddened. The veins in his neck and forehead swelled with blood. The Quiet lifted Sutter from the ground. A terrible stream of clucks and choked words fell from his friend’s lips.

  Sutter’s legs flailed, trying to kick the tracker. But he only feebly hit the body wrapped in the wet folds of its cloak. His friend’s mouth gaped open, trying to draw air. Blood welled onto Sutter’s lips and began dripping from his nose.

  At last, Tahn fingered some arrows. Already speaking his cant as he nocked them, he let three more arrows fly into the tracker’s humped back. The creature reared, releasing Sutter, who fell to the ground clutching his throat.

  The wizened visage turned on Tahn, bloodied lips rasping curses Tahn didn’t understand: “Je’malta yed solet, Stille. Sine ti stondis roche.” It crumpled to the ground, one withered hand creeping forward toward him. Then it ceased to move altogether.

  Giving the tracker a wide berth, Tahn rushed to Sutter’s side. His friend sat huddled, wheezing, his hands working ineffectually at his throat. Lifting his wet cloak, Tahn wiped Sutter’s face and helped him lie back on the ground.

  “Slowly, breathe slowly,” he instructed.

  Sutter shook his head, gulping air. His neck had already purpled from the attack, dark blood suffusing the skin. Tahn began taking exaggerated breaths in a slow, steady rhythm to lead Sutter in his own breathing. After several moments, they both calmed, lying wet and bloodied in the shade of a river tree just strides from the dead tracker.

  When the pounding of his heart eased beneath the sound of the river, Tahn looked at his friend, whose eyes seemed lost in the nearness of his own death. “Would it be too much to ask you to find that balsam root now? I’m kind of sore.”

  Sutter rolled his head over to look at his friend. “Foot still bothering you, is it?” Neither laughed. “The tracker wasn’t interested in me, Tahn.”

  “Not until you picked up that sword of yours,” Tahn said in a grateful tone.

  Sutter shook his head. “Even after I knocked it off you, it just turned back.” His friend’s eyes darkened momentarily. “What did it want?”

  Patience, child, I’ve no intention of killing you. Just breaking your spirit before taking you back.

  Tahn looked at his friend. “I think it wanted to take me into the Bourne. But I’m not the first. And I doubt I’ll be the last.”

  Sutter studied Tahn’s face for several moments, his eyes moving over every feature as if he’d never seen Tahn before. Then he propped himself up, grimacing with the effort. “We’d better get moving. Where there’s one, there may be more. I can’t promise to save you more than once a day.”

  While his friend looked for more balsam, Tahn filled the waterskins and gathered the horses. Sutter quickly mashed his harvested roots into a paste, and he and Tahn both spread it liberally over their abrasions and cuts, wrapping them with strips of cloth. They grinned at the similarity they bore one another with their necks thickly swaddled. Sutter applied poultices to cuts across each forearm. And Tahn took some of the paste under his tongue, sucking the bittersweet juice to ease the throbbing in his foot.

  Before setting out, they dragged the tracker to the river and cast it facedown in the shallows. Tahn fell to his knees beside the body, the panicked feeling of not being able to breathe still aching in his chest. He dropped his bow and looked toward Sutter, who stood over the Quiet, a grimace twisting his lips.

  “It’s dead,” he said, sounding like he was trying to convince himself. “It’s dead.”

  Then Sutter pushed the shape from the shallows into the deeper water, where the current began to pull it downriver. The tracker floated away into the scarlet-tinged water of sunset. Soon, the lump might have been nothing more than a fallen log pulled from the shore during a heavy rain. After another moment, the body was gone, swept south and away.

  “I didn’t hear it coming,” Tahn said.

  Sutter continued to watch the river where the figure had disappeared. He shook his head. “It didn’t make a sound. Even in the river.” His friend’s hands and arms shook, trembling from cold and fright and weariness, the blade in his hands dangling in the water. “We were lucky.”

  Tahn followed Sutter’s gaze. “Part lucky, part brave.”

  Sutter shook his head again. “Instinct. Survival.”

  “That, too,” Tahn admitted. “But we got the best of it the way we always beat Maxon Drell or Fig Sholeer.”

  “Yeah, but you were under a long time. I thought you drowned for sure.”

  “Me?” Tahn said with mock confidence. “I was just letting you test that sword of yours.”

  Sutter turned back to Tahn, and the two shared nervous laughter in the waning light of day.

  When quiet returned, Sutter looked Tahn in the eye. “You know what I thought about?”

  Tahn didn’t understand the question.<
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  “When I thought it might kill us? When I thought this was truly the end?” A pained look drew Sutter’s eyes and mouth taut again. “I thought of that root farm. I thought of Father and Mother, and that they must think they failed making me feel loved. And when I thought it, part of me wanted to kill that thing so I could go back and tell them the truth.” He stopped, swallowing back emotion. “But part of me wondered if dying today…”

  Tahn looked out at the river, letting the admission pass without comment or judgment.

  But Tahn’s friend had struck a chord. “You know what I thought about?”

  Sutter wiped moist eyes and shook his head.

  “I thought about my parents’ funerals. The sound of the earth covering them over one shovel at a time. And Wendra, and how I wasn’t there to protect her when she was raped.” Tahn shook his head in self-reproof. “But then I saw her grow happy as she became excited for her baby. She’s all the family I have left, and it was good to hear her sing again.” Emotion thickened in his own throat. “Then I thought about that Bar’dyn taking her child.”

  And Tahn finally shared a secret of his own, the very old compulsion to utter those words before he could release a single arrow. He shared how it had kept him from his own sister’s defense in her time of greatest need. And when he was done, he hung his head for a long while.

  When he looked up at his friend, he saw him bleeding beside him, a gift sword laid across his knees, less than a day removed from Bourne poison in his blood, and remembering the two people who had taught him to farm the dirt.

  They shared wan smiles.

  Under a crimson and violet sky, they led their horses north, taking a course just inside the river tree line, each carrying his weapon in hand. A few hours later, they returned to the river, and found a shallow cave in the high bank from which the water had receded. They made camp there, eating a cold meal to avoid the smell of fire on the wind, too weary even to jest. Alternating their watch, they finally slept.

  * * *

  Images from the mist spun in his dreams like bits of flotsam in a river eddy. And under it all was the vague dream of scorched earth feeling bruised by an endless, savage sun and touched by the taint of the Bourne. And a faceless man teaching him how to aim, how to focus …