I felt another hammer strike me. But it seemed somehow far away, and only hit me in the elbow—maybe breaking it, but that pain felt distant, too.
The real pain came each time I sang the notes of the Sellari song. The large sphere, now twenty strides away, amplified the music and reflected it back toward me. It didn’t deflect the song from striking at the hearts of the Sellari. But it more than doubled the personal cost of the resonation I felt. The pain grew fast, much the way one’s palm begins to burn when held close above a candle flame.
But I did not stop. The alternating songs wove in and out of one another, reminding me of waves rolling onto a shore and back.
Then, again, sometime later, all motion stopped. Heaps of bodies lay across the field, some stacked three deep around me. When I ceased to sing, silence returned to the world.
My face and hair, and all my clothes were drenched with blood.
I thought I heard the distant song of mockingbirds in the poplar trees. I couldn’t be sure. My ears rang with the remnants of my own music. In those first moments of stillness, my cynicism, and the terrible ache that only singing destruction would assuage, began to plague me again. So once more, I wished for someone to hate. Looking far ahead, I saw several thousand Sellari stepping tentatively from the shadows. I started to smile. Then stopped.
Walking slowly toward me, across the bloodied field, came a line of Sellari women . . . and children.
At this new sight, I felt my mind break. That was the only way I could explain it.
Behind them strode fresh Sellari bladesmen and archers.
I watched them come, sensing an awful truth. This was not simply an invasion force. They’d come to occupy the Mor Nations, bringing with them their families, which they’d now turned into a walking shield.
A distant pluck and hum sounded, like a chorus of cellos being tuned. A moment later the sky darkened with arrows whistling toward us. Questions vied inside me. Could I let fly my own weapon, and sing the Sellari song into the bodies of the innocent? On the other hand, could I let them rain down death on my own people?
My struggle seemed endless, but in truth lasted only a moment. I felt my song rising, and hated myself for it.
Belamae?
The name came at me as though I stood at the bottom of a deep, dry well.
Belamae? It’s over. Can you hear me?
I felt my body being shaken, but ignored it, my song touching my vocal chords, ready to be loosed.
Belamae? A sharp crack on my cheek stalled my song, and I was suddenly staring into Baylet’s concerned eyes. “Are you all right?”
Confused, I slipped to one side, looking south to the line of poplar trees. Nothing. The field still lay quiet with thousands of the dead. But there were no archers. No women. No children.
“You found their song,” Baylet said, his voice solemn.
I only nodded, slowly realizing that my mind had conjured a need to sing out Vengeance again. Oh dear merciful music, what I was prepared to do.
I fell to my knees and buried my face in my hands, weary, ashamed, relieved . . . changed. Song had become something I would never have imagined. A burden.
I also thought I finally understood what it would truly take to sing Suffering.
And I meant never to do it.
TWELVE
WHEN THE DESCANT doors were pulled open, Divad looked out on an emaciated, disheveled figure. If he hadn’t been told in advance, he might not have recognized Belamae. But it would not have been because his returning student looked as if he hadn’t eaten in weeks or that his cloak was tattered and reeked of his unbathed, filthy body. Rather, his face was changed, his aspect. The useful intent in his eyes had gone away.
Everything about him gave Divad the feeling that he’d come here only because he didn’t know where else to go. Belamae made no attempt to enter, or speak. He didn’t even look up, simply staring downward, his hands hanging at his sides.
He looked too fragile to embrace, so Divad gestured him inside. The heavy doors closed with a deep, resounding boom. In the lamplight, he hummed a very low, very soft note. It was brief, but enough to resonate with the change that had gotten inside his prodigy. He gave a sad smile that the boy did not see, and turned, motioning Belamae to follow.
He walked slowly, without speaking, knowing that the soft resonant hum of Suffering that could be heard in the very stone of Descant would reacquaint the lad with the purpose of this place. That’d be a good start to righting his sense of things. The boy had a form of what the early Maesteri called Luusten Mal. Sound poisoning. It was a rather simplistic way of referring to it, but accurate in its own way.
Divad considered returning to the Chamber of Absolutes, where he’d first tried to impart a sense of absolute sound by way of aliquot strings and the viola d’amore. Instead, he turned down a different hall, and went up four levels by way of a spiral staircase, where the granite steps had been worn enough to resemble thin smiles.
Eventually, he led Belamae into his eastern-facing lutherie. He came to the worktable where he’d spent so many hours over these last many cycles, carefully repairing the instrument his student had destroyed.
He lingered a moment in the clean scent of spruce shavings made by recent work with a hand plane—he’d begun a mandola as a gift to a prospective Lyren he’d denied admission. But the viola was the reason for coming here. It rested on a three-legged stand very like an easel. He gently picked it up and turned toward the lad.
With slow deliberateness he stepped forward, watching as realization dawned in Belamae’s face. He saw shame pass to surprise, to wonder, then to delight. That last came as little more than a faint smile, not unlike the surface of the stone steps they’d just climbed.
Relief held in his prodigy’s eyes more than anything else, though. And he liked the look of that. It made every moment of remembrance and backaching work bent over his table worth the pain. But there was still an emptiness in the boy. He could feel it, like the reverberating resonance felt in the head of a tightly covered drum.
As he stared at Belamae, the right thing to do occurred to him. He extended the viola to him again, as he’d done what seemed like many cycles ago. Belamae tentatively reached for the instrument. But before his student could take it, Divad whipped it around and brought it crashing down on the hard oak surface of his worktable. The viola strings twanged, the spruce split and splintered, the body smashed into countless pieces, and the neck ripped in three parts. The soundboard he’d labored over lay in ruins. He felt a pinch of regret over it.
But his own loss was nothing compared to the shock and horror that rose on Belamae’s face. It looked like the boy had been physically wounded. His mouth hung agape, his hands held out, palms up, as if beseeching an answer to the violent, incomprehensible vandalism.
“My boy,” Divad said, his voice softly intoning some reason to all this. “Won’t you help me collect the pieces. We’ll see what’s salvageable.”
“Maesteri?”
Divad smiled warmly. “Instruments can be mended, Belamae.” He tapped the lad’s nose. “Come. We’ll see about this together. I’ve decided I rather like this part of instrument care.”
He began to hum a carefree tune, as they gathered in the shattered viola.
Read on for a preview of the
AUTHOR’S DEFINITIVE EDITION OF
THE UNREMEMBERED
BOOK ONE OF
THE VAULT OF HEAVEN
by
PETER ORULLIAN
THE
UNREMEMBERED
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
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 heavens.”
“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!”
The Sound of Broken Absolutes Page 8
