Trial of Intentions (10 page)

After the digging, they stood back, resting their arms. The stillness of dusk had settled in around them. Grant broke the silence. “We haven't really spoken since Vendanj restored your memory. How are you?” There was a moment's hesitation before he added, “You probably have questions. Maybe I can help.”

Tahn looked out over the shale where the Velle had almost rendered the lives of these children. “The Scarred Lands were formed by Velle. Did they do it this way?” He pointed at the six wrapped bodies.

Grant leaned in on his shovel. “No, they drew energy from the earth during the Battle of the Round. That's what left everything barren.”

Tahn could see it in his mind. A wide place of dryness, of black dust, of red stone, of bleached wood, of hard sun.

“You had to live there because you tried to stop the regent's child from being revived by a Sheason.” Tahn looked at his father, wondering how anyone could do such a thing.

Grant sighed with understanding. “Reviving a child violates the most basic principles of the Charter, Tahn: Men are not gods; the dead should be allowed to rest.…”

Tahn looked down at the little ones laid across the hard shale. If he had the power to revive them, he'd do it in an instant.
Let the Charter burn.
Then he looked up at Grant, whose eyes were locked on the same blanket-wrapped bodies. There was a weariness in his father's face that Tahn couldn't remember seeing before, as if the man had been caring for children in a dry, rough place for a long time … and failing.

“I was seven when you sent me to Aubade Grove.” Tahn turned his gaze to the southwest, where nations away the Grove stood. “I was happy there. Studied the stars. Other sciences, too. For a while.”

Tahn had been torn away from the Grove after four short years, and sent back into the company of his father. Into the Scar. Half a year later, Alemdra and Tahn had been out on patrol. They'd shared a first kiss. And they'd witnessed Devin's jump.…

He found he did have a question for his father. “How many have taken their own lives?”

There was no surprise in Grant's face. He knew what Tahn meant.

“Thirty-seven.”

And from the way he said it—with such sad certainty—Tahn guessed Grant knew every name, too. They kept a mutual silence for those dead wards of the Scar.

After a time, Grant interrupted their quiet moment. “Tahn, you'll learn this sooner or later. And I should be the one to tell you. One of the thirty-seven … was Alemdra…”

Tahn grew weak in the legs. He dropped to one knee, his eyes suddenly hot with tears. He shook his head.
No, Alemdra.

Grant put a hand on Tahn's back. “I don't think she was the same after Devin. Blamed herself. It was a few years.…”

Tahn understood. Since remembering Devin, he'd felt the same guilt.
Damn me.
All because he'd wanted his morning sunrise. And a kiss.

Grant removed his hand from Tahn's back and took a deep breath of the cooling air. “People will disappoint you. It's not usually malicious on their part. And it's not usually done with good intentions, either … as I tried to do with you. But motivations won't matter when someone fails you.”

He looked over at his father. “You mean the way thirty-seven wards failed
you
by giving in to the Scar.”

Grant shook his head, his voice raw with grief when he said, “I mean the way I failed my wards. Especially those thirty-seven … Especially you.”

It was the first time Tahn had seen the man hurting. Grant swallowed hard. “That's the wisdom of an exile. Others will have brighter things to tell you. But they won't make what I've said untrue. And at some point, Tahn, you'll have to decide that you do all this,” he gestured around them, “because
you
want to. Not because the Sheason asks it.”

Tahn turned his sight skyward. The moon and stars shone brittle and bright, casting silvery light on the edges of stones and dolmens and patchy grasses. As it always had, it comforted him to simply gaze up and lose himself in the vastness of the heavens.

But the comfort was brief. At his feet were six dead children. As dead as Devin. As dead as Alemdra, who'd kissed him and spoken of leaving the Scarred Lands. As dead as the thirty-seven.

He hated the Scar. He hated the Quiet for creating the Scar—a desolate land that grew each year, as if the effects of the Quiet weren't done. More barren terrain. More wards. Every cycle of the moon.

And every
few
cycles, a ward chose to leave, using death as an escape.

“That's one of the reasons we took your memory,” Grant said, sounding confident of the decision, but still tired. “It started to get to you. It gets to all of us in one way or another, I guess. But in you, it was taking a toll.” Grant looked him straight, hesitating a moment. “I'm not sure you'd have made it, otherwise.” The thought chilled Tahn. He might have joined Devin, Alemdra. “We thought it would be easier for you to deal with when you got older. So, we veiled your memory and sent you to the Hollows. Safer there, too.” His father sounded less sure of the last part. “Fewer friends to watch die, anyway.”

He remembered many of their faces and names. Terrible thing to lose a friend as a child. Hard to make sense of it. No one to blame. Nothing to be done about it. And saying good-bye to a friend—good-bye, Alemdra—who had already gone to her earth … was a hollow good-bye.

That's what the Scar meant to him. That's what the Quiet meant. In that moment, he decided which side of things he was on.

“I didn't use the old words today.” Tahn paused a long, painful moment. “It was my choice. I imagined their lives. Imagined how they'd die. I couldn't save them. But I couldn't watch them suffer either. And if there's a next life, I sure as every hell wasn't going to let the Velle steal their chance to be family there.” He stopped, breathed. “So, I killed them.”

Grant squeezed Tahn's shoulder in a comforting way. Then offered another sad smile when he said, “Much as you'll hate to hear it, you sound like me.” He then spared a long look at the graves they were digging. “You showed them mercy. A tough mercy. But mercy just the same. You may need to live with your guilt for a while, which isn't a bad thing. Guilt tempers a man the way forge coals do a good steel. But not for long, Tahn. For a while, then let it go.”

“The way you've let go of
your
guilt.” Tahn smiled weakly.

“Ah, but I'm a bastard, Tahn. Or didn't you know.”

They both laughed. The sound of it was the best eulogy they might have offered over the six small ones.

Tahn gazed upward again.

Grant looked in the direction he saw Tahn staring. “What is it?”

“We had a lunar eclipse last night,” Tahn said. “Did you see it? Red moon.”

“I'm no good with moons and such. I'm better with people.”

They laughed again. Easier this time.

“Stars are as clear here as they are in the Scar,” Tahn observed. “But not nearly as bright as they are in the Grove.”

The Grove.
Those had been good years. Kind years. Spent in a place where his natural affinity for the heavens could be fostered, pushed.

“I never visited you there. But I'm told you made a name for yourself.”

Tahn then pointed into the northwest at a planet he knew all too well. “Pliny Soray. See her?”

Grant scanned the sky and fixed on Soray. “I do. I wouldn't have if you hadn't pointed her out.”

“She's off her course,” Tahn replied with the distraction of memories that were fitting together like puzzle pieces in his head. Memories of the Grove. Of Pliny Soray. And one memory in particular.

*   *   *

“A good astronomer can learn as much observing a vacant stretch of sky as he ever will measuring out the procession of a great starry field.” Scalinou Dechaup huffed the words out as he led Tahn up the tower steps. All 998 of them. The same as the other four towers.

“So, we're going to look at empty sky tonight?” Tahn asked, a wry grin on his face.

Scalinou, savant of the College of Cosmology, paused in his ascent, and gave Tahn a sidelong look. “You up to the challenge?”

“Of staring at nothing?” Tahn teased again. He was as comfortable with Scalinou as he was with the savant of his own College of Astronomy. “I'll manage somehow.”

Scalinou reached the glass dome, pausing at the top step, out of breath. “When my heart stops pounding in my ears, we'll begin.”

“We should have just taken the pulley-lift.” Tahn said it to goad Scalinou a little.

“Nonsense. Against the rules. And hells, stairs keep me young!” The old man's voice echoed songlike in the wide observation dome.

Tahn stood beside his older friend and mentor, scanning the glass panes that made up the great dome. Each was a full stride high and wide, and held in place by an impossibly thin strip of ironwood. From the dome floor, it was like there were no panes at all, leaving an unobstructed view of the sky in every direction.

Some of the towers had alchemical lamps, or light-stones activated by motion or heat. Scalinou forbade such nonsense in his dome, where oil lamps were the high technology. The man actually preferred candles.
Give me a good chandler,
he was fond of saying.

Here and there tables stood in the dark. On them: armillaries, orreries, quadrant maps, water-clock gears that turned the dials on timepieces set to different rotations of the planets. They all worked in silence, but a good astronomer walking the dome would see a hundred calculations laid in and being tracked. There were a few low bookshelves. Scalinou's books. And of course, at the center of the dome, on an inset rotating floor, was the second-most impressive skyglass in Aubade Grove—the
most
impressive stood in the College of Astronomy's dome. Tahn thrilled just looking at it.

The whole affair resided in a hemisphere fifty strides in diameter. The domes were Tahn's favorite place in Aubade Grove. He never tired of visiting them.

When Scalinou had steadied himself, he shuffled over to the long skyglass pointed at an open shutter. With the same warmth another man might show when patting a favored pet, Tahn gently tapped the brass tubing of the skyglass. A tuneless
tep tep tep
sounded in its broad hollow. Then he stared up past its gathering lens, some nine strides away.

Scalinou got himself into his armless chair—he didn't like having his elbows encumbered in any way. Then he bent forward over his workbench and a quadrant map laid out atop it. The map was held flat by sand weights at each corner. He made a satisfied noise in his throat—part surprise, part relief. “Young fusspot cosmologers left it the hell alone for once.”

Then, by the light of a thin crescent moon and countless stars, he bent close to his armillary sphere and dialed in a slightly modified direction.

“Finding our empty stretches?” Tahn inquired.

Scalinou harrumphed, then cross-checked his armillary with his map. Last, he pulled a ledger out and read over entries with notation dates that ran back more than a year.

Once all this was done, he sat up and rolled his shoulders like an athlete preparing for a contest. For Scalinou, it would be a wrestling match with his bit of sky.

Tahn held up a hand, as one set to referee the bout. “Isn't this why you invited me?”

Scalinou seemed momentarily bothered. But a grin soon spread on his wrinkled face. He stood up with flair, and gestured extravagantly for Tahn to assume the armless chair—a cosmologer's throne.

Tahn laced his fingers and turned them outward—as he'd seen musicians do—adding some pomp to it all. Then he swiveled on Scalinou's throne and began slowly to turn two hand cranks on the skyglass catapult stand. He carefully matched the degree and minute, as well as longitudinal mark, of the armillary.

That done, he took a long, slow breath, exhaled, and gently leaned in to stare through the eyepiece.
Empty stretches.
Then he settled in for a long, patient looking.

For a few hours he rarely left that position, fidgeting less than other observers his age. Far less. Patient looking suited him fine.

“There's quite a bounty of peace to be found looking at an empty spot in the heavens.” Scalinou sat nearby, having put his nose in a first-edition copy of
Scant Evidences of Eternal Truths
—a philosophical tract one couldn't find even in the college annals.

“Damn pretty thing to see,” Tahn said, not realizing he'd just cussed in front of a savant.

“Haha! Yes! This is my cosmology.” Scalinou grinned with satisfaction. “This is why you're the only astronomer whose company I can stomach for more than an hour's time. Now, back to the show.”

It was Scalinou's way of telling Tahn to attend his skyglass eyepiece. And the
show
. Scalinou's name for the dance of stars.

It was Pliny Soray they were watching—a wandering star. Soray was actually a planet, but Scalinou—like Tahn—found the old term more poetic, so here they referred to Soray as a “wandering star.”

He watched closely, time passing, as the familiar ache crept into his neck and shoulders, cramping his muscles. He wanted to take a break, stretch, but he was glad he'd remained watchful, since a moment later … it happened.

He let out a weak sigh when Soray completed her retrograde. No loud slapstick, no stomping of feet on wagon boards, no show-ending tune. Just the silent, immeasurably distant completion of the wandering star's loop. And she was off. This was not the ellipse she usually made. The length of the loop had changed.
She's farther away …

He sat back, dumbstruck.

Seeing Tahn's expression, Scalinou nearly squealed with glee. The old cosmologer poured himself a tall glass of pomace brandy. While Tahn thought through what he'd just seen, Scalinou drank, waiting on Tahn's thoughts.