Trial of Intentions (55 page)

Slowly, he strolled the circumference of the room, looking out through the dome glass. He'd come at dark hour to be sure the sky was at its blackest, and because both moons were currently deep below the horizon. The long plain around Aubade Grove was uninterrupted by hills or forests, giving the widest possible view of the sky. Only the other college towers blemished a completely unobstructed field of view.

Tahn noted stars and constellations as he went, speaking them softly. And only when he'd walked a full circle, and drunk in the settled, patient feeling of the dome, did he turn inward to his task.

Quillescent
.

The Quiet had used the word to describe him more than once. Vendanj didn't know what it meant. Tahn hoped he might find some reference to it here, in the Grove. He'd already visited the college annals, searching in the ways he knew how to find the word. Unsuccessful, he'd come here.

In addition to the great skyglass and other instruments used to map the sky, the domes were used to store a select number of volumes. They were both safer here and easier to access when inevitable sky questions arose that required reference to prior studies.

He found a hooded lamp, lit it, and began to peruse the rare books. By the time he got to the table used for star charting, he had four volumes: Jalen's
Reference to Celestial Movement;
a very old compendium of star charts;
The Language of Heaven,
author unknown; and the diary of Pealy Omendal. Omendal was considered by many the father of astronomy, being one of those to break off from the Sheason to establish the Grove.

Tahn sat and began to leaf through his selections. Jalen's reference book didn't appear to hold any clues. He moved on to the compendium, a book he'd retrieved more from curiosity than any sense that it could help him answer his question. But a third of the way in, he stopped, staring down at the name written under the pole-star: Quilesem.

He quickly checked the legend on the map, looking for any clarifications. The map was old. So old that it predated the tradition of noting the year of its authorship. Leaving the compendium open, he slid it to the side and opened
The Language of Heaven.
Surely he'd find a language reference here. This volume was like the astronomer's dictionary, but of a complete nature, before reductionists began to consolidate terminologies for consistency.

Tahn found nothing, and eagerly moved on to Omendal's diary. There was no internal reference guide to this book. Just daily entries. Tahn began to scan, but he didn't have to do so for long before finding an entry that felt close. His heart began to beat hard as he started over, reading slowly, carefully.

The diarist spoke of navigation by star alignments. He described the fashioning of a new instrument to assist the “men at sea.” And then he spoke of the great pole-star, which never moved from its place in heaven. A star he called Quilesem.

The great star is the perfect guide, the perfect reference point. It is a gentle reminder and instructor in its motionless state. So, we call it Quilesem because it is at rest. It is quiet. It is still. From its unwavering point, we can measure so much of the sky, which may lead to the truest meaning for this name: Something from nothing.

Tahn looked up from the books to the pole-star, which to his recollection had never carried the name Quilesem.
I'm close.
He'd just turned his attention back to the diary, when a voice sounded from the other side of the dome. It came deep and clear as a bell heard tolling on a winter morning. But it came softly, as though its owner kept the same reverence for this place. The stars.

“Find what you're looking for?”

As the words touched the air, the air changed. Quickened. In the tower dome a feeling of danger spread. It felt to Tahn like malice born of disregard. Reflexively he reached for his bow, but he hadn't brought it with him.

From around the great skyglass a man emerged. Ordinary enough. His clothes showed no college emblem. He might be unaffiliated, but then how did he gain access to the tower? The man was Tahn's height, more slight of build, older by twenty years or more. He walked with casual certainty, his eyes never leaving Tahn. And his face … his face remained expressionless. Very much like the Bar'dyn.

That was the feeling. The Quiet. But this man looked like someone's father. Not a farmer like Sutter's da. More the way a struggling inn owner might. With a worn, weary face, but a focused, watchful stare.

It's the man I saw across the street from Perades.

“Who are you?” Tahn asked, closing his books.

“You want a name?”

“You're not with the college. Or you forced your way past the dome guards.” Tahn slowly stood.

“No, I'm not with the college” was all the man said, coming to a stop a few strides from him.

“What do you want? Who are you?”

The stranger stared, made a slow blink. “I'm here to learn, just as you are.”

Tahn shook his head. “I doubt it.”

The man's head tilted subtly to one side, and Tahn's throat began to burn the way it did from a deep winter cough, when it had grown raw and every swallow seared as it went down. The man simply watched as Tahn's face pinched with the pain. Tahn struggled not to swallow, trying to avoid the sensation of a thousand stabbing splinters.

“Let's not speak any more about doubts,” the man said.

Almost immediately the pain in Tahn's throat subsided.

“You're here to argue for Continuity.” The stranger spoke with certainty. “It can be the only reason you'd come here, now.”

Tahn stared back, his fear mounting, but with a grain of anger. This man had to be Velle.

“Leave Aubade Grove,” Tahn said, keeping as much command over his voice as he could. “There's nothing for you here.”

The man looked up at the dome above. Tahn felt a stirring, not of air, but something more subtle. A half moment later a pane of glass shattered and rained down around him. The sound of glass splintering as it hit the floor was loud in the quiet dome. Then, in rapid succession, several other windows burst, here and there. But it didn't seem random. And when Tahn looked at them, he saw it. The man had broken open views where several of the wandering stars could be found at this hour in the sky.
He knows the placement of the planets.

But that realization faded fast beneath the simpler truth Tahn had just witnessed.

Resonance
. The stranger was making a simple display of it. Just as he'd done with Tahn's throat.

“What shall we break next?” The man's voice held no humor. “So that we learn together.”

Tahn's anger and fear swelled. He imagined drawing his bow, as he had done before, with no arrow. Just the idea of firing something of himself. From habit he made the motion as if raising his weapon, and let go a string that wasn't there. A rushing swept through him, a warm wave that exited his outstretched arm and struck at the man with unseen force.

But the energy of it broke around the stranger as a wave does on a breakwater. A disturbance in the air made the other appear watery for a moment, as though floating beneath the surface of a clear lake. Then the rushing was gone. Stillness returned in an instant.

The man's eyes narrowed ever so slightly. And this time the Resonance Tahn felt was not a burn in his throat, but an opening in his mind, his memory. He saw for the briefest moment a day at the edge of the Scar he'd spent with Grant, his father. He saw them laughing together, and sharing a pair of molasses sticks at the side of a river where they sat fishing. He saw his father listening to his questions and answering them and sounding hopeful. He talked about a day when they would leave the Scar. And in the dusk when light-flies lit the water's surface, he heard Grant tell him he loved him. And that he would never stop trying to undo the Scar—what it meant, what it was, what it had done to them.

Tahn's heart ached at the memory, one so deeply buried that it hadn't surfaced yet. Maybe never would have.

And then, after lingering a few sweet moments, it began to burn away. The stranger shifted his resonant render inside Tahn to erase the memory.

“No!” Tahn raised his arms as one might to ward off a blow, and pushed his own life's energy to resist. He felt the rushing again, but this time handled it better, focusing it on the attack.

Bits of the memory continued to go, like a paper puzzle left on a park table that finds itself caught in a light breeze. He'd loved his father. Through all the painful lessons, when it seemed the man had not loved him back, Tahn had kept loving him. And here, now, he could see a memory of a time that helped him know his father had loved him back. A simple memory. But one with clear feeling. He couldn't let it go!

Tahn pushed harder, feeling like he was wading upstream against winter runoff. But the stranger simply showed him another blank look, nodded, and the memory was gone. Tahn cried out again in anger and loss. He didn't know what it was anymore that had been taken from him, but the hole it left felt like love gone away. It hurt deep down where feelings start.

And it made him furious.

In a breath's time he summoned his memory of those six small ones on the Soliel, of friends taking their own lives in the Scar—a place created by creatures like the one standing in front of him now—and he focused it all into a blind rush that he thrust at the man.

This time, Tahn's attack drove the man back hard against the skyglass. The loud thump resounded in the instrument's hollow body, and the man slumped to his knees. Tahn didn't let up. He brought to mind Wendra and Mira, their losses, his own failures, and shot another brutal wave of energy at the man.

The Quiet man raised a hand, deflecting the attack. He then lifted his head to stare at Tahn. The awfulness Tahn saw in the other's eyes was not malevolence, but ambivalence. The stranger simply didn't care about Tahn, his life, or death. The stare caused Tahn to falter and step back.

The next moment the man was searching Tahn's mind. Tahn tried to deflect it, but he was tired and cold. As the other stood, his face came the closest Tahn would see it to smiling.

“Resonance,” the other intoned, the sound unmusical. “Of course. Like what you are about to feel.”

The man raised a hand, fingers apart, and dropped his chin. Inside himself, Tahn felt as though his heart and lungs and belly had been pressed in a vise. The muscles in his neck stiffened. His jaw locked. And as his body clenched, memories began to draw together. Just a few at first. Then more. It reminded him of standing at Tillinghast, except now the associated images in his mind were … selective. Some came to him from the Scar. Some from here in the Grove as a young boy. Some from the Hollows. More than a few returned to him from his time since meeting Vendanj: his flight to Tillinghast, and his actions on the Soliel plain. Seen together, they told a different story about Tahn. And when he focused through the pain in his body and looked at the ordinary man standing across from him, resonating with Tahn along particular strings in his life, he began to understand. He and this man … were not so different.

But then why follow me here? What does it want from me? It could have killed me already.

He struggled, trying to muster enough strength to break free. The other was too strong for Tahn to fight with brute force. It held him in this viselike grip, and wove a picture of who Tahn was that scared him to the bone.

Is this what Quillescent means? Feels like?

Then a sweet epiphany distilled in Tahn's mind. If the stranger was using Resonance to do this to him, then Tahn could likewise stir something inside the other. The moment he had this thought, his body jerked painfully back, rushing toward the edge of the dome. He slammed against the glass, breaking two broad panes. The bright, splintering sound of glass surrounded him again. A light wind swept through the opening here at the height of the tower. He lay crumpled on the floor, feeling a moment's relief from the pressing in his body and the story of himself he'd witnessed. He gasped, trying to breathe, as he heard footsteps approaching.

With no prior thought to give him away, Tahn imagined and brought forward simple images and feelings. Uncomplicated things. A green shoot risen near a trickling stream. The moment when light first brightens the east. Laughter with Sutter. Not knowing quite how to do it, Tahn probed the stranger, seeking to find in him a chord he could strike with these things. Something to resonate with. He thought he could cripple the man by making him see the better side of his life.

But either Tahn was completely incapable of this, or there was no such feeling or idea in the man with which to resonate. Tahn saw him slowly shake his head as he came.

A moment later, his body began to seize again. He stiffened, and looked up into the stars, trying to think of how to escape. The stranger dragged him through the glass a short way with an act of rendering. An act of Resonance. He was sure the man meant to cast him from the tower. He'd tumble hundreds of strides to his death.

“If you could kill me,” the man asked, “would you? And how would you know if that was right?”

Tahn shot the man an angry stare. The stranger somehow knew that Tahn, for most of his life, had sought such confirmations.

“You should die!” Tahn spoke through clenched teeth, scared and angry. “There's no mystery in that!”

He had to do something. Trying to find something gentle inside the man with which to resonate hadn't worked. Brute force hadn't worked. Tahn was now weak and empty.

“You might be right,” the other said, “but I'd like you to be certain.”

Tahn began to feel something new, something blindingly painful. He felt as though parts of who he was were being stolen, remade. Just enough that he understood his life was being rendered.
As the children on the Soliel would have been!