Trial of Intentions (81 page)

Maybe in some ways, the darkness in her song was better suited to that.

When she looked again into his eyes, he seemed to know her thoughts. “Wendra, I go to my earth soon. And I'm scared.”

“Belamae—”

“I'm scared that when I leave this world, everything I've done here,” he gestured high, to indicate Descant, “will fall apart. Fade. It's my life's work, you see. And I don't know who will replace me. I don't know who will hold it all together when I'm gone.” He smiled with some regret. “I'd rather hoped it might be you.”

Her heart slammed in her chest, as she realized his hope and her own desires might never meet. He must have seen that, too. His face slackened, and something bright disappeared from his eyes.

Disappointing him hurt. She didn't want to do that. And after a short moment, her mind latched onto a new idea. She gently took his hand in hers, gathered him in an intent gaze, and started again to sing. She found the wellness in her own heart and lungs and muscle and bone. She let her melody weave until she knew the resonance of her own health, and then she reached out to him. She let the perfect sound of well-being and vigor flow, until she'd identified the last vestiges of real health inside him, and then she let go.

With the love she felt for Belamae, she sang with all the strength she possessed. There was deep sickness in him. It had laid hold of his organs, not just his breathing. It was like a long-moored ship rife with barnacles. She felt its every surface and edge. But to the tissue and functions of his body she lent a song of restoration like nothing she'd ever sung or heard before. It wove gentle sweeps with the strongest dysphonic progressions she'd ever sung.

At times the song drew down to something low and slow. But more often it ascended and filled up all the space in the lutherie. She fought it. She fought his sickness with her song. She'd never resonated so intensely. There was a euphoric feeling in it. She embraced that feeling. That sound. And she sang the heart of him.

Then, sometime later … she simply stopped.

His eyes were wide and bright. In the warm sun of his lutherie, Belamae looked a different man.

“My dear girl … My. Dear. Girl!” He laughed deep in his chest and his belly, as if testing this thing she'd done. He was the same silver-haired elder Maesteri, but by gods, he had the heart and lungs of a man twenty years his junior. She could see it in him.

He took great deep breaths like a man suddenly freed from prison. And after the shock of it was gone, they laughed together. Loud and long they laughed, testing this new breath inside him. And when the laughter died to smiles, she could see in his eyes that he still hoped she'd stay. But there was relief, too, as if to say he could now manage if she did not.

There was still a decision to be made. And questions, besides. But she let those slip away. For now, she relaxed into the easy comfort of Belamae's company and the warmth of his lutherie, and tried to ignore a new feeling. The deep kind. The kind that whispered something had changed in her, as it always did when she resonated with someone.

 

CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE

A Succession Team

This inquiry is an embarassment to the Grove. If the argument for Continuity were defensible, then it wouldn't matter if a member of the Succession team was sharing her team's approach in advance of the discourse theaters.

—Statement taken during the probe that followed the failure of Nanjesho Alanes's argument for Continuity and her subsequent death

T
housands of dead speckle-backed sparrows, as well as several field hawks and starlings, littered the fields for as far as Tahn could see.

“What happened here?” he heard himself ask, surveying the strange sight in the failing light of day.

Polaema's brows went up. “We were hoping you might tell us.” She paused. “It doesn't feel coincidental that it happens at the same time you return to the Grove.”

“Hail? High winds?”

Rithy shook her head and squatted, taking a closer look at the nearest sparrow. “Hard to say how long they've been here,” she said.

“We've had no storms for nearly the cycle of the first moon,” Polaema added. “This is not the work of weather.”

“Could it be the work of the Quiet?” Tahn asked, speaking softly and mostly to himself.

“To what end?” Polaema questioned. “The destruction of flocks of birds seems a poor use of their talents. Even as a warning. No, I don't think that's our answer.”

Tahn hadn't meant to suggest the Quiet as a direct cause. But he couldn't help the feeling that what he saw here bore some relation to his larger worries.

“It's not a native bird to this region,” he said, beginning to reason it out. “So, they were migrating.”

“Exhaustion then,” Rithy said.

“Except there are field hawks and starlings,” Polaema pointed out.

Rithy stood up, her eyes seeming to calculate the sheer number of fallen birds. “Could they have been fighting? Or perhaps there was an eruption of dry lightning?”

Polaema's eyes narrowed in concentrated thought.

But Tahn dismissed these explanations quickly. He could see no blood. And the stretch of land covered with the fallen birds appeared too broad for a lightning strike to have brought down such a flock.

The shadows of dusk lengthened until darkness took all. And gradually, Tahn's attention turned east, then to the northern sky. Far against the horizon a faint luminous red glow could be seen. He studied it a moment, curious. Then a flash of anxiety and insight tore through him.
Lunar eclipse!
He sprinted away, heading back toward the Grove. He scarcely heard the voices calling after him.

*   *   *

By the time Tahn reached the College of Astronomy, Rithy had caught up to him. Shouts of protest followed them as they swept past sentries who sat at registry tables beside two sets of doors. Far behind they heard Savant Polaema silencing these evening clerks as she followed Tahn and Rithy into the annals halls. In the main room, they found a young physicist, a somewhat older philosophy student, and a cosmologist who looked young
and
old, depending on how the light caught her. They all seemed to have just arrived.

They were easily identified by the insignias embroidered on their overcloaks. Black thread on black cloth showed the symbol for the colleges, in the traditional subtlety. For physics, a gear wheel with eight outer teeth. Sometimes, Tahn knew, the emblem took on the vague form of the sun—a nod to celestial mechanics.

The philosophy sigil was a perfect circle with a single line vertically bisecting it and running a finger's width above and below the circumference. Some said it signified the intersection of the finite with the infinite, of recurrence with endless possibility. Some saw the rotating world and horizon, with night on one side and day on the other. And linguists were fond of a letter conflation:
I
for
istola
from the Divadian root tongue, meaning “simplicity” or “indivisible”; and
O
for
odanes
from the sister tongue, Itolous, a dead language, the word meaning “at last” or “found in the end.”

Cosmology had, perhaps, the oldest insignia of them all—a swooping line that wove in and around itself to make what appeared vaguely like a three-petal flower. It was the cipher in it that made it uniquely cosmological. Most often, the symbol was rendered dimensionally, showing how the delicately curving line or tube wound itself into a loose knot. It could be hypnotizing to look at.

The three of them quickly jumped to their feet. Tahn didn't need to ask why they were here. Rithy had obviously been at work hand-selecting the members of each college who would help them. That was the way of Succession. He might have some core ideas, and even have a knack for finding the seams in arguments. But he'd been away a while. He would be glad of the critical thought from each college as they tried to prove Continuity this time. Prove Resonance. And this would be their core Succession team.

“You invite them?” he said, smiling.

“We were planning to come back here after showing you the birds and introducing you, yes.” She shook her head, and returned his smile. “Figured you'd want to get started tonight. Just didn't figure on an evening sprint.”

Tahn looked at each of these new additions and nodded greetings. Then he got moving again, his team falling in behind him as they leapt up the main stairway and onto the second floor: the almanac library. Its aisles and rows shaked like a warren fashioned of bookshelves.

They stood there, lightly panting. Soon they heard Polaema lumbering up the stairs behind them. She reached the second story, and swept out in front of them.

“What is it, Tahn?” she said, gasping.

“Commonalities,” he said, his own breathing already settling into a natural rhythm.

Then he turned to his Succession team. “Remember one thing. Everything we do. Every hour of research. Every word you read. Every moment of debate in the Discourse Theaters. It's all about one thing: proving Resonance so we can strengthen the Veil. That's the lens to look through. At everything. We're going to prove that two things can resonate and be magnified by one another at a distance. The weeks ahead will be spent digging deep into the annals and our own understanding to find the mechanics and math and philosophy and ideas that can support this. We need to be thoughtful. And we need to be fast. Understood?”

Eager nods were had all around.

“Good. Now, do you all know the Karle Tonne categorization of astronomical phenomena?” he asked.

More nods.

“You, what's your name?” Tahn pointed at the physicist.

“Seelia,” the young woman replied, giving Rithy a look that revealed some unspoken desire.

“Seelia, can you find the historicals that document significant conjunction in the deep sky, changes in the magnitude of the sun, recurrences of these kinds of phenomena?”

“How far back?” she asked, confident.

Tahn shook his head, impatient. “Everything we have. Go.”

The girl disappeared at a fast clip into the almanac bookshelves.

“Myles,” the philosophy student said before Tahn could ask his name too, and stepped forward, giving Rithy the same brief, wanton look.

Tahn began to explain. “Find a succinct and accurate timeline for any recorded social change or epidemic or upheaval—wars, riots, plagues—just anything unnatural enough that a historian would put it on a timeline.”

“Historians generally don't agree—”

“Myles,” Tahn cut in, “we're not yet looking for nuances. And you probably won't find this here. Search your own college's annals first. Go.”

“And I'm Tetcha,” the cosmology student said, introducing herself with a slight bow. “How about I gather everything we have from the last Succession run at Continuity?”

Tahn nodded agreement, glancing sideways at Rithy to see if the mention of the last Succession caused any change in her face. Not this time. Tetcha had gotten to the door when a thought laid hold of Tahn and he called after her, stopping her in her tracks. “And start thinking about whether Resonance is impersonal … or personal.”

Tetcha's brows went up, surprised at the question. But eagerness lit in her eyes. “You're going to frame an argument that Resonance could be the personal touch of the abandoning gods, aren't you? Not just a principle of planetary mechanics. That we produce it ourselves—”

He smiled. “I don't know just what we'll do with the old dual argument. But I can tell you this much: We're not leaving it to philosophers to define for us.”

She hurried away, nodding. Tahn wanted to start preparing now for the argument that Resonance was more than a vibration. That it was a principle meant for people, too, not just inanimate mechanical systems. It would have to be if he hoped to convince them not just of the Veil, but that they should strengthen it, keep races bound behind it.

Polaema gave Tahn a strange look. “It's bigger than just the Veil, isn't it?”

His mother of astronomy had seen to the heart of it. Something he'd begun to believe after his encounter in the astronomy tower. He gave both Rithy and Polaema an excited look. “I think Resonance might be the highest governing principle. Think about it. We're going to try and prove it's what makes the Veil possible. But if the Song of Suffering strengthens the Veil, then Suffering must work off the same principle.” He began to talk faster. “Sheason, too. They're called Inner Resonance sometimes. They
move
things by the use of their own Will.”

Polaema spoke, wonder in her voice. “Many different systems—”

“All accessing the same dynamic, vibratory power,” Tahn finished. “It might be the unifying principle, the scientific basis for every form of magic.”

“That which stirs,” Polaema whispered.

“And
my
order,” Rithy said, grinning, clearly feeling the excitement. Tahn turned back toward his friend, who seemed earnest enough. Maybe the scars from the last Succession were behind her.

“To tell me which one of these three has the sweetest lips.” He pointed after his recently departed Succession team members. He held up his hands to stop her retort before she could speak it. “No, I don't want to know. And yes, I'm a bit jealous.”

“You were the one who left—”

“The task at hand, please,” Polaema chided them gently.

Rithy's face showed a moment of real regret and anger, but the look faded as quick as it came.

Tahn stood there, staring at his old friend, realizing that his observations about the physics and philosophy students weren't casual; he
was
jealous. Despite his love for Mira, he couldn't ignore the resurgence of the feelings he'd cultivated for Rithy in his years here. They'd been of a more innocent nature then. Time had given them the sweet, smooth bite of a good winter wine.