Trial of Intentions (6 page)

In the shadows, Sendera sat forward—something she'd never done—her chair creaking in the silence. “Revenge won't give you peace.” But her voice held no conviction.

Wendra thought it over for a moment. “You're wrong.”

Until the Quiet attack on Naltus, Wendra hadn't had any desire to do much more than stare out her window. She wasn't brooding with sadness. She was managing her anger.

It was an anger born in that moment when her own child had come into the world still. Dead, she believed, by the trauma of childbirth forced by a Bar'dyn who'd stolen into her home. That silence in the moments her baby left her womb … that awful silence. Followed by the theft of the child's body for some reason she couldn't understand.

So, she'd come with Vendanj and Tahn and the others out of the Hollows because she'd wanted to do something about the Quiet, for the sake of her little one.

Along the way she'd met Penit, a trouper boy. They'd grown close. And after separation from the others, they'd been captured by a highwayman and nearly sold to Bar'dyn as
stock
. And it wasn't just them. She'd learned of a wide human trade that did much the same all across the Eastlands. People—
families
—were being taken from their homes and sold into the Bourne.

Sitting here these last few days, it all fully descended on her: what had happened; what was happening; what would continue to happen, if she did nothing. Thinking about the auction blocks where buyers purchased stock to sell to the Quiet had only caused her anger to deepen.

“You're wrong,” Wendra repeated, and finally told her why, relating everything, beginning with the rape that had gotten her with child.

When she finished, she looked out at the garden of cedars and cropped junipers. “Have you found peace or forgiveness for your own lost child?”

It wasn't an idle question. Nor cruel. Nor sarcastic. She wanted to know. She asked with the earnestness of a childless mother. She asked because she wanted to get beyond the city walls, see her betrayers, and take her chances with the songs that played ceaselessly in her mind.

“My first child came early,” Sendera said, interrupting the quiet that had fallen between them. “He was so small.…”

No further words were offered. The Far woman fell back into her stoic watch. Wendra realized in a way she hadn't before that her attendant—groomed to fight, blessed with the gifts to do so—had also suffered the cheating nature of childbirth. And Wendra had been pressing her to relive it.

I'm a mother's shame.

Then, Sendera spoke again. Softly. “Even if my son had survived, I wouldn't have been his mother long. The Far live only until the age of accountability. I believe you call it your Standing. Eighteen years.” She looked at Wendra with some regret. “It leaves us free to defend the Language of the Convenant however we must. But it also means no child of ours will ever remember its mother's face.”

For their mutual loss, in a hushed voice, Wendra sang her first song in days. A lullaby. But turned sad. She offered it slowly, with long silences between phrases. She modified a few words, shifting the story into past tense. The tense of children lost. And she lent the sound a part of herself, in the same way she did when screaming out her rough-throat music. It was the power of being Leiholan, giving her music
influence
. She didn't fully understand the ability, and she hadn't learned how to control it. But she'd used it enough to know that her own emotions could give a song weight. Weight that others would feel.

When she finished singing, the room stood heavy with silence. Heavy with remembrance.

After several long moments, Sendera said quietly, “You're Leiholan.”

Wendra made no reply.

“Was this the Song of Suffering? I'm told only Leiholan can sing Suffering.” She waited for an answer with as much anticipation as Wendra ever remembered seeing in a Far.

Wendra shook her head. “Suffering tells the story of the dissenting god, Quietus, and of all those he created being herded into the Bourne and sealed behind the Veil. Suffering keeps that Veil in place. I don't know its music.” Wendra offered a wan smile. “But I wouldn't be surprised to find passages in it like my broken lullaby.”

Sendera shared a silent and intent gaze with Wendra. “Come.” She stood, and promptly left the room.

Wendra couldn't know if she'd manipulated Sendera with the influence of her Leiholan song, or if the words and melody had been enough. But she didn't wait to find out. She followed at a jog.

The city streets lay empty, a kind of autumn feeling in them. It seemed every Far had either gone to battle or found someplace safe to wait out the fight. She and Sendera hastened through a silent Naltus bathed in the bloody hue of a strange moon. They came quickly to the northeast rampart.

Sendera paused only to say, “I'm going with you.”

Her motivation didn't need to be explained. Wendra nodded.

The two passed through a dark corridor, negotiating past several sentries near the outer wall. A moment later, they emerged on the other side. Distantly, the clatter of weapons rose over the shale. Then they were moving, running fast for the eastern flank. Few cries or screams were heard. Occasionally one echoed out ahead of them, lifting into the daybreak above like a death knell. She'd never seen war. The cold reality of it hit her a hundred strides on, when she started navigating rock slickened with blood. And bodies.

Sendera raced to the left, disappearing in the battle fifty strides away. But Wendra stopped. Her stomach churned at the sight of bodies strewn about. And not just dead, but crushed and opened and torn apart. The copper smell of blood and bile overwhelmed her, and she vomited hard over the boots of a fallen Far.

Wiping her mouth, she surveyed the battle, her need for vengeance softening. Then, some hundred strides west, she saw a figure take hold of a child. As she watched, the child fell. Memories and bitterness rushed in on her like a cold floodwater. Wendra whipped around and rushed at the Bar'dyn closest to her. Ten strides from it, she called forth the dark sounds that lived inside her.

Shrill tones roughed from her throat like a shrieking cough. But she gave it a melody of descended halftones, until she struck notes she'd not thought her voice could touch, deep and rasping.

The air shivered with the sound of it, as she quickly found the strength of her song. She screamed it out with angry remembrance.

The dark music came not in words, but syllabic shouts that lent themselves to the sounds her soul needed to make. By turns blunt then sharp, her song cut a path through the battle, dropping everything it touched. Everything.

She had no control. And in her blinding rage, she didn't seek any.

Her eyes filled with a painful contrast of dark and bright, everything becoming a stark mosaic. White was black. Black, white. An unhappy silhouette of reality. She could see no detail, no faces, no suffering. She knew only the certainty of her anger. And she aimed her darkened song toward any movement, where things both white and black dissolved at the sound of her music, scattered like dust before a powerful wind.

But that was not all. Or enough.

She screamed louder and longer. She found new ability to soar beyond the rasping song, and strike a powerful, strident timbre in full-bellied pitches that approached the sound of a raptor. But deeper, more resonant. She began to run headlong into the Quiet, no longer connecting note to note, but barking her song in bursts, directing it with a twist of her head, letting the stabs of song pierce her enemies and usher their souls away.

She wrought destruction of a savage, brutal nature, taking no care for who or what she sang at. She cared only that they fell, as she cut a swath through the living.

And still it wasn't enough. She began to imagine each one being responsible for her loss, each one putting a hand on a child. Her understanding of this song deepened. Her ability moved past any previous attempt to sing this way.

Around her, shale burst, broken stone crumbled to rubble, flesh sloughed, steel melted, and the air shimmered as her song swept about and laid waste to all that heard.

Lost in the furor, she forgot time and place. Sometime later she collapsed to her knees on the dark, rocky stretches, utterly spent. Her body burned hot with fever. Her hair and clothes were drenched from her own exertion. She went facedown, heaving for air, as one held underwater for far too long.

She clung to the cool stone beneath her cheek, seeking relief from the heat inside her. And for a few blessed moments, she thought not of her baby or of Penit, or of those who had failed her in their rescue, or even of all the people being traded as slaves into the Bourne. Lying there, enduring the burn inside, she thought about her song. A sense of wonder filled her. The power in her voice was almost unbelievable. Almost frightening.

She had one fleeting glimpse of a figure draped in white, hair like alabaster, kindly face.
Belamae
. The music teacher, Maesteri at Descant Cathedral. Belamae trained Leiholan like her in the use of their song, and how to control it. He'd asked her not to leave Descant before she could be properly educated. He'd wanted her to stay behind, not come to Naltus, as if he'd known what would happen.

What
did
happen?
she thought.

With some returned strength, she got to her knees, and looked around.
Dear dying gods!
So many dead. Thousands. Maybe more. And many who had died … because of her …

I killed Far with my song. Innocent people.

She blamed the Quiet.

A new kind of anger filled her and she began climbing to her feet, surging with renewed energy. She'd almost gotten up, when a body fell on her. Then another. And another. In the tumble of limbs, her head struck—or was struck by—something, and she fell into the dark of unconsciousness.

 

CHAPTER FIVE

A Different Aim

Everyone and everything has substance of a kind. What a Sheason must learn is how to manipulate his own. Once he can, permanence means nothing. And everything.

—“On the Nature of Influence,” a fifth year discourse in Estem Salo

S
omething is wrong.

The battle raged all around Vendanj. On his right, Braethen fought hard, keeping the Bar'dyn at bay long enough for Vendanj to draw the Will. On his left, Elan marshaled the Far, putting distance between Naltus and the Quiet.

But something was wrong.

The Quiet fought to kill, and yet they hadn't tried to work a flank. They weren't even trying to push through the Far lines.

Why?

Tahn!

He rushed to the dolmen where Grant and Mira were fighting back Bar'dyn who had broken away to try and take them down. He didn't immediately see Tahn. On instinct, he ducked inside the dolmen. Chill air rested heavy over everything, including Tahn, who lay unconscious and bloody.

He quickly sought a tuft of dry grass and pulled it out of the soil. Dividing it into roughly equal parts, he twisted the two clumps together into the vague semblance of a man. He then bent to Tahn and rubbed the grass figure in the boy's blood.

Tahn stirred.

“Lie still. But get your wits about you. You'll need them soon.”

Vendanj extended a hand and caused a new kind of stillness in the dolmen air. A complete stillness. To hide Tahn from probing minds.

Then he ducked back into the morning light, searching for a horse. With so many Far already fallen, he quickly spotted a riderless mount and raced southward to catch it. After a gentle whisper on the wind, he quieted the riled beast and soon had hold of its reins.

He closed his eyes and focused his Will on the grass idol. He recalled the many things he'd seen Tahn do, his words, his mannerisms, his anger and laughter. He captured a mental picture of the Hollows boy, forming it in his mind until it seemed to have a separate—if simple—mind of its own. Last, he added fear—not the strongest emotion, but the easiest to track. He imbued as much raw terror and desperation as he could into the grass doll. When he'd transferred the whole of what he'd envisioned to the effigy, he opened his eyes and looked down. The straw had twisted more fitly together, braiding itself, crimping, looping in places, to roughly resemble the persona that gave it a strange bastard intelligence. It twitched in the Vendanj's hand with the distress he'd imparted to it.

Using the reins, he tied the bloodied straw figure to the saddle horn, and slapped the mount on the ass. The horse leapt and ran west, a wild look in its eyes.

The thunder of the mare's hooves clapped over the shale plain, receding fast, as the mount bore away Tahn's effigy.

Vendanj turned his concentration back toward the battle raging to the north. He looked with his eyes, but also extended his connection to the shale and sage and wind. He waited, patient, for the faintest of stirrings.

He didn't wait long.

Moments later, two forms at the far edge of his senses moved subtly, looking west and judging. He could feel them assessing the escaping rider, considering their response. The movements and assessments touched Vendanj the way a ripple at one end of a pond will reach the far shore.

Then stillness again. Vendanj had his answer.

He ran back far enough that his companions could hear him. “With me!”

Then he spun, and bolted toward the city wall. He glimpsed Mira and Grant and Tahn as they began to follow. Over the scree and shale he raced, dread filling him with each running stride.
How could I have been so blind!

He waved a hand twenty strides from the ramparts, signaling the guard to open a way for them. They passed through on a dead run. The clap of their boots on cobbled stone echoed through the vacant streets. Far children had been hidden. Far warriors were embroiled in battle. But a Far contingent would be standing guard at the vault library.
Grant a fool a prayer.