Remember the Dawn

by A M Macdonald

  “It doesn't matter anymore.”

  Takha immediately felt a chill, suddenly very aware of his exposure and vulnerability. The Five Constellations was barren except for the alekeeper, the chanter, and the three drunken gamblers.

  “I'm sorry, I can try ag—”

  “No, the leywheat is unimportant.”

  “But th—”

  The figure cut him off again, this time raising a hand and holding it in front of him, flat with palm facing down. Takha sucked his breath and winced, recognizing the threat, though no one made such gestures anymore. Why not just slay him where he sat and be done with it?

  “There is another matter that requires your urgent attention. It is delicate, but necessary.”

  Another opportunity to seize, a need to fill. Survival, that was all he had. He jumped at the chance.

  “Tell me, I will assist as I can.”

  “The Ferai have raised a shrine and brought back the faith.”

  Takha nearly spat out his water.

  “That cannot be true.”

  The hooded figure turned his head, white slits settling on Takha's face. Were they burning brighter?

  “You doubt me?”

  “N-no,” he sputtered, “no, of course not.”

  “As I said, the Ferai have reached into history, to the oldest of ways. The faith lives again.”

  “They are a curious family, to be sure. A shrine for the starless? Why?” Takha hoped the shadow man sensed his derision.

  “They seek a union between Astral and commoner.”

  “What?” This time, Takha did spit his water over the table, moisture darkening the old cracked wood. The hooded figure did not react. “There can be no union!”

  “Why not?”

  The shadow had posed the question with a strange calm. Everything in Takha’s nature told him to protest, to scream against a bonding of startouched and starless, but he did not know why. It seemed wrong.

  “I-I don't know. It would be unnatural.”

  “Yet it is more natural than you know.”

  Takha screwed his brows and sat back. “Please explain?”

  “It is enough to say that once there were no Astral and no commoners. There were only people.”

  “Once?”

  “A very long time ago, before what you call the purge.”

  Takha mouthed the words. The purge? It was a story from forgotten religious texts, nothing more. But, perhaps some truths lay buried in the history books.

  “The Ferai, they want to bring us back to that time? Before Astral, before the Starsingers?”

  The figure cackled again. “No. They seek only to stem the tide of discord that grows in Celaena. They wish to use the faith as a shield, a means to protect against a coming storm.”

  It made sense now. “Then they are fools. Do they really believe they can quell the resentment of the people by deceiving them with faith?”

  “Perhaps they can, though perhaps it is not the resentment of the people they seek to quell.”

  Steady words. Takha took a moment to contemplate, watching the gamblers tossing their ingots and hearing, but not listening to, the chanter's song.

  “It cannot be allowed! House Ferai's shrine must be torn down.”

  “Indeed.”

  “But to challenge the Astral, to outright defy their intentions—perhaps deface their property—is madness. I cannot do this thing.”

  “You can, and you will.”

  It was not a request. He bit his lip and took a drink of his water, attempting to steady his nerves. As a banker, he enjoyed a special status and access to information and services well beyond others in Celaena. But he was still starless, not even defiant.

  “Fine, but it will not be easy, nor inexpensive. I will require many more tokens than I currently receive...”

  “You shall have them.”

  Takha now gulped his water, eager to leave this place. He finished and wiped his mouth on his sleeve, presently unconcerned with staining his moonlight robes.

  “It will be in the same place?”

  “Yes, tomorrow at first light.”

  “Very well.” He stood and, without another word, rushed from the back of the alehouse, passed the gamblers now so drunk they had fallen asleep in their chairs, and fled out into the twilight. He breathed fresh night air before finding a boat in a nearby channel, oriented himself, and pointed north, back to the treasury and his residence.

  Damn that white-eyed bastard!

  Sotma Rayn inspected the calluses on his palms. He still felt strong after all these years of attendance at tiresome meetings and involvement in pointless councils, fulfilling his role as one of the triumvirates. Why his family had settled on three heads of House, he'd never know, for no one ever answered the question. Their constellation was one crown, not three.

  The fiction of three points of the crown was a ridiculous construct. The burden of consensus, the need to appease his weasel brothers—small things with pointy noses and whiny voices—was nothing more than a prohibition on progress. He squeezed his hands into fists, feeling the power he still carried.

  I am not a politician.

  Even if he was seated at the head of the table, where would he begin? In days long past, when younger, he’d earned his way to the top through a heretical blend of starlight and sword. While metal blades were for starless and the intolerable Arbiters, such crude weapons below the Astral, he’d recognized their lethality. If the Arbiters had been staying the singers with threat of steel, he’d wondered what a singer might accomplish with such fury?

  The answer had allowed him to seize a sliver of power, ultimately cultivated into his position as a Raynlord. Indeed, the harmony had almost won them the war. The Elegance, they called him.

  Ezai’s audacity astounded him. The man had no respect for his betters, strutting around the city-home in his metal cage, carrying himself with insufferable pride. All Arbiters acted the same, protected by their defiance. It enraged him, starlight held at bay by old men with old ways. His family wanted them gone, to be sure, the one thing in common between Astral. Their power was not meant to be saddled by outdated and archaic ideals of honor and virtue.

  The Order must be put down, and allies within the Lion's Keep shared the sentiment. The last righteous men indeed. It was time to spin the next strand of the web. So, in the early hours of the morning after discovering his slaughtered children, Sotma had sent for the purest—the most stubborn—to further his machinations and create a clever ruse.

  Earlier in the day, Sotma had confirmed with the cloudwatchers a forecasted cloudless night, a necessary precursor for the meeting of the families. Now, around a circular table, heads of House from Lokka, Tsac, and Vo eyed each other silently, ready to channel—the mistrust was palpable. Ferai hadn’t bothered to send a representative.

  In time, they will be dealt with as well.

  “I see we're all comfortable.” Sotma's words oozed beneath his thin lip. “No doubt you've heard by now; I trust your spies are worth the tokens you pay for their services.”

  “Is it true?” Marcinian Lokka did not mince words. Sotma nodded a confirmation, and Bril Vo muttered something under his breath. Kriv Tsac chewed on a piece of straw, but said nothing. None asked the question hanging in the air, so Sotma addressed it head on.

  “I will find out who did this, and then I will have my vengeance.” The House lords bristled. “Know that I have bonded an Arbiter for this purpose.”

  Marcinian sneered. “You bonded an Arbiter already? This is an internal matter! The deaths of two Starsingers is a threat to us all.”

  “It was my decision to make.” Sotma clenched his hands.

  “Tell me, Sotma, what do the other points of the crown think of this obscenity?” Marcinian kept his voice high and indignant. “Did you bother to consult them first? Do they even know you've called this meeting? You Rayn are so limited by the way you choose to govern yourselves. It's no wonder your children died; they were probably r
equisitioning consent to fight back.”

  He didn't react, though he squeezed his fingers into his palms until the calluses rubbed against each other painfully.

  “My children's deaths need not be in vain. We can use it, to all of our benefit.” That got their attention.

  “Use it how?” Kriv Tsac spoke up, his lithe figure emphasized by the uniform his family preferred, sleek black with a metallic finish. Sotma thought the man resembled a whipcord, a condensed ball of energy of ready to spring outward.

  Sotma tapped his fingers on the table in synch with the ever-present ache in his joints. “My Arbiter told me whomever killed my children resisted their starlight.”

  Reactions rippled around the table, but only among the starlords. The starless man who sat with them did not move.

  “Hah! Impossible.” Bril Vo, jolly with reddish cheeks and a permanent glint in his eye, shouted his disbelief. “Only the Arbiters are defiant. Not even the Astral are resistant of each other.”

  “A point I raised, of course, but the Arbiter prattled on about fairy tales.” Marcinian raised an eyebrow, but remained quiet. How Sotma detested that man, sitting there in his white finery, pompous and confident in his own superiority. “It seems the Order is sending us senile old men. Not surprising; their necessity is less and less and they clutch to a past made up of great deeds achieved by better men. Even the Lion spends most days in a chair, tending to the whimpers of the families who till the fields around his keep. And that is exactly what I mean—it's time for the Arbiters to go. The Order is no longer needed. They are nothing more than a nuisance, an obstacle standing in the way of our authority. Of course, we cannot openly declare war against them. Not again.”

  Marcinian keyed in before the others; Sotma saw it in the Lokka's face. “You want to pin the murders on the Arbiters.”

  “I do. It will give us a rallying cry to garner starless support and marshal all the singers we can. Even the pious Ferai will take issue with the Arbiter's disruption of the balance, and if they join us there will be no stopping our crusade. Celaena and the Dominion will be ripe for picking.”

  The others sat back in their chairs, grins slowly turning up on their faces as they thought over the plot. The starless man among them remained motionless. Sotma hoped the man stayed true to his word.

  “It is a gift, these murders. Of course, the real killer remains a mystery, and I will still find justice.” He eyed Marcinian, who pointedly returned the stare. “But for now, there is a greater endgame than simple retribution. I urge you to consider the proposal. Please, take my words to your city-homes, to your islands, and to your fellow Astral. Speak with them, let them think on it, and return to me with your position. Time is not on our side. We must strike while the clouds are parted.”

  With that, the meeting adjourned. Murmurs followed the starlords as the exited the chamber atop the Rayn's city-home, making their way to tethered boats which would carry them home. Sotma remained seated as he watched them go.

  At last he was alone with the starless man. Before Sotma addressed him, ready to sow the seeds of a devious plot, he took a moment to stare into the sky. He felt the warmth of his star, basked in its glow, and said a silent prayer for Valura and Antarro. The pain still traveled with him, though he stifled it and kept it deep and hidden. More important things required his attention.

  “Ota, come here and see this! Aren’t these numbers crazy? They don’t make any sense, and look at these wind patterns! What is going on out there? I've never seen anything like this. We've got to send word to the other towers, get all our sights trained to these coordinates. If I’m right, this could be huge for our research—for the Dominion. Historical!”

  The boy named Ota lumbered up the stairs one at a time. He'd grown used to Wuta's wild rants, as the man always found something in his charts that prophesied one doomsday or another. Usually it was a glitch in his math, or mistake in his symbol interpretation. Many nights Ota simply ignored him, choosing instead to go back to sleep. Tonight, though, Ota was restless, so he’d reluctantly come to see the new hype.

  He reached the top of the observatory dome to find his companion hunched over a crumbled mass of maps and whipping his head back and forth from the table to the large telescope pointed over the western ocean. Ota approached the table and looked at the cloud maps splayed over-top. Mostly they were rudimentary, displaying expected storm fronts at various locations throughout the known Dominion and waters beyond. Lines were dotted between clusters of clouds and intersected by waves of wind paths, and hastily sketched equations ran parallel. The source of Wuta's exasperation escaped Ota.

  “I don't see what you see, Wuta.” He never saw what Wuta saw. Crazy kid. Why'd they have to stick him here? What a pair of cloudwatchers they made.

  “What? Look, here.” Wuta pointed at the wind stream off the coast that drove the tides and high waves. “The stresses are being heightened—there's more drag, Ota—and that's having an effect on the storm tracks.”

  Ota frowned, an inner struggle taking place. Should he keep quiet and indulge the man, or tell Wuta what he really thought?

  “And?”

  “And? Are you serious? Ota, think on the possibilities if we see a big enough upwelling and equatorial cooling, just think!” Wuta gesticulated wildly, no longer studying the maps or peering through the telescope. Instead, Wuta’s crazy eyes were wide and his pupils dilated. Ota noticed Wuta's mussed hair and wrinkled robes and smelled a faint pungency in the air of the observatory dome.

  “When was the last time you slept?”

  “What does that matter? There is something important going on, Ota, and we must figure it out. It's our duty. The other towers need to know what's out there.”

  Ota placed a hand on his companion’s shoulder. “There's nothing out there, Wuta. There's never anything out there.”

  Wuta just stared at him, mouth agape with hair standing on end, as if he was frozen while being electrocuted.

  “Our duty is to protect the Astral, Wuta. We can't do that effectively without rest.”

  “But the-”

  “Enough. Now go and sleep, I will take over the watch.”

  Wuta twitched and looked as if he wanted to continue his theorizing, but instead he grabbed a few of his charts and made his way down the stairs of the tower to his quarters. Ota watched him go, and some part of him wanted to be sad. Gaining admission to the cloudwatchers was no easy task. It took years of dedicated study, with many long and lonely nights perched next to telescopes mounted on patches of dirt—nothing as fancy as the observatory. Maybe all that stress had gotten to Wuta, cracked something in his mind. Ota related, though he had never broken.

  Poor kid.

  Chapter Five

  “And Gethael said to his apostles, 'Go forth and bring light to these lands, and shape them as you see fit, so that these people may know serenity.”

  - The High Prophet at the Northern Isles

  Ahryn pulled her boat alongside the docks of the circular central market district connecting the city's quints.

  Before the Patron returned to Sanctus Mount, he’d forced her to check and double check the cloudwatcher reports. She was still only startouched and not yet a singer. Luckily for her, the reports foretold clear skies and she’d convinced the Patron of her safety.

  It's not like he had a choice, anyway. She always did what she wanted, when she wanted. Her parents called her stubborn. Maybe she was, but better stubborn and strong than blissfully ignorant and helpless. Like Feyd.

  She loved her brother, but saw the burden on her parents. What to do with Astral who were not startouched? The Ferai did not cast them out to suffer with the starless in a dark world, unlike the other families, who considered the Ferai weak for their mercy. Ahryn understood, even if bothered by the image of weakness; family was everything, and always came first. Even before the stars.

  She walked the leystone pathways from the docks toward the Nightmarkets, which were lit by the glow of torch
es hanging from shops lining the streets. The moon shone clear in a cloudless sky and the night was alive with voices, laughing and cheering at performers and other spectacles. Starsingers did not often venture from their city-homes, but when they did they came to the Nightmarkets.

  Calls greeted her immediately as she entered the central street, beckoning her to buy wares and fortunes and offering other avenues to part her herself from her tokens. Her Astral presence palpated in the crowd, the garments she wore and the constellation she bore unmistakable, and clever merchants sought to seize the opportunity.

  To her left, an old man sat in front of his shop and pulled thread through a needle, his mouth clamped on a bundle of material. Mystical patterns on colored robes lined the windows, sequences of tiny stars, which to Ahryn looked like a starless attempt at constellations. To her right, a woman of middling age churned butter inside, and she kept the doors and windows open to the smells of her moonpies wafting outward. Ahryn watched as a young starless couple sniffed the air and deviated from the path to venture into the bakery. In front of her, next to a crescent fountain spouting water high into the air, a child danced and sang while playing his harp. She recognized the song, a morning chant meant to invite an early evening with an unobstructed view of the stars above. The child was a worshiper—faithful.

  She thought back to her journey into Celaena and focused on the robed watchers she’d seen in the throngs at the city's gates.

  Has my father's faith spread this far already?

  Her journey to the Nightmarkets this evening was a calculated distraction, the shrine in the quarry district of the Ferai quint her ultimate destination. She intended to keep her promise to the Patron before returning to the seminary for continued study of the Doctrine.