A Season of Rendings

by Adam J Nicolai

  She turned and started back. She should have been reeling, aghast at the abdication of her lifelong beliefs, but she wasn't. Instead she felt free, more awake and aware than ever before.

  She didn't understand everything. She didn't know why the Fatherlord was able to claim godhood, why Akir didn't strike him down for his insolence. She couldn't explain how the Church could have operated for so long in Akir's name without inviting His wrath. And she couldn't comprehend how they could work miracles after all this time, when they consistently did so in a manner Akir Himself did not condone.

  But she was accustomed to leaving certain mysteries in the hands of God. And what she did know, she knew with certainty:

  That the man who would be delivering that day's sermon, and all the clerics who followed him, did not speak for Akir.

  Possibilities whirled in her mind as they made their way back through the empty streets to Red. Her faith in the Church had been a crusty scab, one she'd been picking at for months. Now that it had flaked away, she found the skin beneath whole and new. There was no veil between her and her God. His plan for her had never been more clear.

  Feed them, body and mind.

  She would. Every morning, with all who would listen, she would share His food and His wisdom. She had no books, no history or authority like the Church had, but she had His command. His purpose. She had her faith, stronger than it had ever been.

  She wanted to sing.

  And when it grew dangerous, when the Church came looking for her, she would move on before risking harm to those she taught. Hopefully, by then, enough of them would be able to read that more of them could work in the city and support themselves. They could break the boundaries of Red Quarter not to hunt through the merchants' trash, but to work for them. Some, like the Bahiri brothers Bashiid and Falaan, might even become merchants themselves. Or—

  Another possibility occurred to her, so brilliant she could barely face it.

  Maybe, if Akir finds favor with them, some might even come to work miracles of their own.

  That, if He saw fit to give it, would be the greatest gift possible.

  Josef, an elderly beggar who lived on the streets of Red, shuffled out of the alley clutching a fistful of manna as they returned. He spotted her and waved. "They said you were gone," he said.

  Lyseira shook her head. "Not what Akir wanted. I finally realized that."

  "Don't tell me I gotta sit through a lecture, now. I saw the sign—it said no more class."

  Lyseira laughed. While many had been eager to learn, Josef had argued that he was too old for such nonsense. "No. You're off the hook today. Tomorrow's another story."

  He gave her a quizzical look. "Are you staying, then?"

  She smiled. "I am. For as long as I can."

  Josef whistled. "Lotta folks will be glad to hear it." He clapped her on the shoulder.

  We should fix up a place for him, Lyseira thought. Red was full of crumbling buildings, but many could be shored up and made into decent shelters from the weather, at least. And people listened to her now. She could direct them.

  "Lyseira," Seth said as they entered their hovel.

  "I know." She'd known the arguments would come again soon, she'd just been hoping for a little more time.

  "It's still not safe here. If we're skipping the Dedication, there is no more reason to stay."

  "No," she said. "There's every reason for me to stay as long as I can. I'm doing real good here, Seth. You've seen it." It had been good for him, too—more than once, she had caught him furtively practicing his writing when he thought no one was watching—but looking at him now, he was plainly ready to go.

  She touched his arm. "Look, I'll be careful. I swear. I'll ask Syn and Angbar to . . ."

  She trailed off as Seth glanced around their empty living space.

  "Where are they?" he said. "They were supposed to stay here."

  "They took our packs." Lyseira's pulse quickened. "Something must have happened."

  "No." Seth crossed to a pile of debris in the corner, where a stray strap had fallen loose. "They just hid them—poorly." He set to uncovering the packs. "If they had time to hide them, they had time to plan." He pursed his lips. "They planned this."

  That didn't make sense. Lyseira shook her head. "They―"

  A woman's scream split the quiet outside, giving way to quiet weeping. Lyseira locked eyes with her brother before darting for the door.

  "No!" he whispered. "Wait! Listen!"

  She stopped at the threshold, her heart thundering.

  Low voices. Snarling demands. "It's coming from the street," Seth breathed.

  The gangs? she wondered. It was hardly unheard of to hear screams in this part of town. But there were other sounds, too. The creak of leather. The whicker of a horse.

  A horse? Seth had heard it, too; his posture bristled with apprehension. No one owns a horse in Red.

  He tossed over her pack. She gave him a warning look—I said I'm staying. He returned it with one that said, I don't care what you said.

  Then Josef was at the door, red-faced and heaving, his thin hair wild. He hung on to the doorframe like a man overboard while he fought for breath, but between gasps he managed one word:

  "Tribunal."

  iii. Angbar

  He stepped through the door of light, and on to an endless plain of stone.

  It had no cracks or marks; it was a single, smooth plane that extended in all directions as far as he could see. Except for the floating window behind him, through which he could still see the Hall of the Council, it had no landmarks of any kind. And no sky, either—only a vast, unblemished beige which, had it been the same color as the ground, would have blended seamlessly into the horizon.

  "This . . ." Words failed him. At a loss, he stammered the obvious. "This is not a normal Rising."

  "No." Syntal sounded vindicated. "'Above yet beyond.' This is it."

  He looked at her. "This is what?"

  "This is the right path. I cast the right spell at the right place—just like using Slumber on the wolves outside Veiling Green, just like the Spellsight guided me through the curse to the Safehold. Lar'atul left a trail. He wanted someone to break these Seals, but each one is based on the powers unlocked by the one before it. I think it's some kind of test. There are these obstacles—the wolves, the curse on the wood, the Hall of the Council—but he left a . . . a kind of trigger on each one. Chant the right spell at the right place, and it activates the trigger." She threw out an arm, taking in the endless emptiness. "This was the right spell." She pointed at the window, showing the Hall beyond. "That was the right place."

  "M'sai," Angbar answered slowly, still wrestling with what she'd said. "So you're saying the third wardbook is here somewhere?"

  "Somewhere, yeah." She turned around, slowly panning the horizon for any deviance.

  She was ready to start marching, to start chanting. Angbar was still taking the place in: a surreal, impossible dreamscape. We need to be careful walking, he thought. If we lose sight of that window, we may never find it again.

  "Maybe Spellsight again," Syntal mused. "May tell us which way to walk."

  "Won't that tire you?" He remembered their days hiking through Veiling Green, remembered Syntal staggering on her feet and sometimes even collapsing before the sun set. "You're already keeping the Rising open, right? Can you manage two at once?"

  She twisted her ring, nodded a grudging concession. "The Rising isn't easy. I think I could maintain them both, I'm a lot stronger than I was last fall, but . . ."

  "How long, you think?"

  She pursed her lips. "Not long."

  "And what happens if you pass out? What happens to the Rising?"

  An apprehensive sigh. "I have no idea. I assume the window vanishes, and . . . we're trapped here."

  "No way to get the window back?" A note of panic trickled into his voice.

  "I . . . don't know. I don't think so."

  He sighed. "All right. How abou
t this. Let me do the Spellsight, see if I can find anything."

  "Good." Syntal looked relieved. "Yes, perfect."

  He had been too preoccupied with puppet shows and Lyseira's classes to study his chants lately, but he'd made a particular effort the last few mornings to reacquaint himself. Now he was glad he had. He whispered the mantras twice, then Ascended and rattled off a quick chant. He felt the Spellsight settle into him, and clenched his will around it to keep it going.

  Everything about the place seemed to ignite: the ground, the Rising window, the sky. It was like waking on a winter morning and peering outside, only to have his rusty eyes dazzled into blindness by the glaring snow.

  "Is the Pulse stronger here?" Syntal asked.

  "I . . . no, not really."

  "You're squinting."

  "It's . . . bright. Everything's really bright." He turned in a slow circle, peering into the brilliance.

  "I looked at a Rising with Spellsight once, back at the Safehold. It was like that. It makes sense, I think—the whole place is a Pulse construct."

  He let the spell fade, wincing, and rubbed his eyes. "No good. I can't see anything that way."

  "M'sai. It's all right. There has to be―"

  He blinked as his sight slowly reacclimated. "Syn?"

  "Yeah." She laughed. "Right there. Right above the window."

  He followed her pointing finger and saw a single blot against the sky. With no landmarks to gauge against, it was impossible to guess its distance from the ground. But it sure looks pretty high.

  "Of course," she said. "We need a chant from the second book."

  "Which one?"

  "This one." She layered her hands in front of her, palms down, and rattled off a quick chant. At its culmination, she pressed her hands down—but instead of her hands moving down relative to her body, her body moved up.

  "Right," Angbar breathed. "Of course."

  Syntal grimaced and rubbed her temple. "Two of these stronger ones at once—not pleasant. I'll be back."

  "Be careful," he said, but she was already ten feet off the ground and rising, her face turned toward her goal. Watching her drift upward triggered a surprising queasiness, forcing him to look away before his stomach rebelled. That would be one way to make a new landmark, he mused.

  Once the nausea had passed, he glanced up again just in time to see Syntal step onto the floating ledge and out of his view, leaving him alone in the endless emptiness, swallowed by deathly silence.

  He was fine for two heartbeats. Then anxiety crashed into him like a tidal wave.

  What if she doesn't come back? What if she can't figure out the next riddle, and passes out trying, and we end up trapped here? What if she has another part to this plan, something she kept secret even from me, and doesn't care what happens down here? This last fear was surprisingly plausible. He didn't want to believe Syntal was capable of such a thing . . . but he did.

  The storyteller tried to start up in his head, framing everything into a safe, distant narrative, but it stammered to a halt each time it started. He couldn't even write a story about this—it was too bizarre for fiction.

  Just breathe, he told himself. She'll just be a moment.

  I don't have the spell to get up there. She never taught it to me. I would have to try to create the effect without a chant—that's really dangerous, it could kill me.

  Just breathe. She'll be back.

  I hate this place. I hate this place. I hate this place. I hate this place.

  "Fun fact about me," the hero said with a smile as he sat down with his friends to tell the tale. "Turns out I'm claustrophobic!"

  That's not even the right word. "Claustrophobic." I'm not in a tight space here. It's wide open.

  But it felt close. It felt like he was suffocating.

  Agh, I hate this place, I hate this place, I hate this place . . .

  He looked up again, heart thudding and palms clammy, and saw no sign of her. "Syntal?" he called, but this place was the opposite of the Hall—instead of echoing it back to him, the endless nothing swallowed his call as soon as it left his lips. "Syn?"

  No answer. He shook his head, started to pace . . . and felt a sudden tremble in the ground, saw a silent ripple in the sky of every color he had ever known. There was no lightning—not in this bizarre nether-place—but he knew a Storm when he saw one.

  The ground warped, stretching out. He didn't know how he knew this—it had no features that would let him see it happening—but he could feel it. He knew. And the Rising window—

  Ah, a'jhul—

  The Rising window was shuddering, growing translucent as if it were fogging up.

  "Syn!" he shrieked.

  "Coming!"

  She stepped into the empty air without so much as a flinch, and began to descend. Behind her, the bizarre non-sky shivered with color that cast no light.

  "I think it's collapsing, or warping, or something!" he shouted. "We have to get out of here!" The window had become nearly clear again before starting to mist over once more. "The window back, it's . . . it's fading!"

  She touched down gently as an angel, one foot and then the other, a line of blood trickling from one ear. The massive book in her hands look distinctly familiar, a broken clasp hanging from its covers.

  You couldn't wait? he wanted to demand. You couldn't wait until we were out of this place, at least, to make sure it would be safe?

  "The clasp was stone," she started to explain. "But Lar'atul left a chant in the second wardbook that breaks―"

  "Later! Syn, come on!" He gestured at the thrashing sky, at the ground stretching like taffy. He thought he could feel his own flesh stretching with it.

  She glanced around as if she had just noticed what was happening, then gestured at the window. Through the translucent view, a flare of light unfolded into a stairway in the Hall of the Council.

  Angbar didn't wait for an invitation. He ran through—but while every other passage into a Rising had been a single step from one side to the other, this one was like running into a wall of wet mud. He had to push through it, one step after another, and his footing grew less sturdy as it lost the solid ground of the nether-place and was forced to push off from that formless sludge.

  He could see the Rising's stairway just in front of him. He should be there already, but he wasn't, and he—

  Oh, God! Oh, God!

  —he couldn't breathe. There was no air here. He was stuck in between, with no air—

  He burst onto the stairway with a sickening pop—whether it was an actual sound or just the pressure in his ears, he had no idea. With the resistance suddenly gone his momentum carried him forward, stumbling and sucking at the air, right over the glowing stairs' edge.

  Before he hit the floor and broke his leg he experienced an instant of freefall, precisely long enough to think a single word:

  Sehk.

  iv. Lyseira

  The Tribunal.

  "How far?" she asked Josef. "Outside?"

  He nodded, still fighting for breath. "Right . . . behind me."

  Lyseira peered through the boards that passed as the hovel's fourth wall. A hundred feet up the street she saw a swarm of mounted soldiers in the scarlet livery of the Church's guard. Two of them shoved a young man against the wall, cracking his head to the stone, before barking questions; four more swarmed over a group of children, rounding them up and snapping on shackles. A woman lay at the feet of another, her body still.

  She couldn't make out all their words, but two of them reached her: Grey Girl.

  "Come on." Seth pushed past Josef into the alleyway, his gaze flashing left then right. "It's clear," he said, and pointed toward the old courtyard. "We'll go that way. Try to avoid the streets." He took her arm, tried to pull her into a run—and she jerked it back.

  "No."

  The shock in his eyes nearly changed her mind. For once, he was stricken silent.

  "They're here for me. I heard them."

  The incredulity on Seth
's face made it clear he understood this.

  "I can't let them punish my students because they can't reach me. I can't let them kill . . ." She thought of Cosani and Angna, of Josef, even Gial. Her heart was a stampede in her chest. She waited for a sign, a word from God, but He was silent.

  "I can't." She turned toward the street.

  "Lyseira!" Seth darted in front of her, grabbed her arm again—but arguments failed him. His eyes gleamed with naked pleading.

  Gently, she took her arm back. Kissed him on the cheek.

  "They'll kill you," he finally managed.

  She nodded. Then she walked around him.

  "I'm here!" she shouted as she came around the corner. "You can stop your hunt, I'm here!"

  One of the mounted soldiers—the commander, by the looks of his insignia—gave a sharp whistle. The others drew up. "Are you the 'Grey Girl'?" he called.

  "I am." As she began to close the distance to him, Seth fell in behind her. She wanted to shoo him away, to force him to run, but it seemed he would not even let her martyr herself alone.

  If I run, I damn my students. If I turn myself in, I damn Seth. A tear burned down her cheek. No, no, this is not what I wanted . . .

  "Fahnelal, no!" Matheson shouted—another old man who had joined her classes daily. A Bahiri who, unlike Josef, had been eager for the lessons if not particularly adept at them. "Run!" A soldier jogged over to him, cuffed him across the cheek.

  "You can let them go!" she shouted. "I won't fight!"

  The commander cantered down the street to her, flanked by two of his reports. "Grey eyes," one of them said—a kid not much older than herself, with dusty blond hair and delicate features. "Same as the stories."

  "Are you the girl that's been working sorcery in Red?" the commander demanded. "Calling manna, speaking against the Fatherlord?"

  "I am," Lyseira said again. "And I'll come peacefully as long as you leave the people here alone."

  "Anyone could say she's her. Can you prove that?"