The Unremembered: Book One of The Vault of Heaven

by Peter Orullian

  If prison could descend further than its own dank breath, and if Sutter could have imagined something worse than to be caged with thieves and murderers, then being manacled in the company of players was certainly it.

  There were reasons. Old reasons. But he would not let himself remember it all. The blind hate was enough. He preferred it to the despair the stone and beatings inspired.

  He looked through one eye, the other swollen shut from where a boot had caught him during the first night of his stay in Recityv. He stared across through shadows at two men and two women shackled to the opposite wall. Their jailer had painted their faces in rough, garish mockery of their profession, and from time to time made them stand and dance or prattle out some folliet. Whether their performance was to his liking or not, the whip seemed to come with the same intensity. Sutter saw that whip take the eye of one of the women during a song she’d sung unaccompanied to a simple skit.

  But neither did his compassion rise too high.

  Old wounds.

  So when Sutter discovered another cellmate, it was a welcome relief. He had not seen or heard from this other before. This new cellmate had kept himself hidden far back in the crook of the stair, but was given away finally by a moan in his sleep; no other sound came. Sutter, listening closely, realized this other’s bindings were of rope rather than chain.

  “Why are you here?” Sutter asked.

  The man remained silent for a time, then finally said, “I was deemed unfit for my throne.” A sad laugh followed. He sounded young.

  Sutter liked the genuine sound of it. “You’re from Recityv?”

  “Not hardly. You won’t have heard of my homeland: Risill Ond. We’re nestled against the eastern ocean beyond the Wood of Isiliand.”

  “You’re right. Never heard of it. And you’re the king?” Sutter’s skepticism rang in his words.

  Again the easy laugh. “My people put away courts and high politics so many generations gone that we had to consult our oldest books to remember our own sigil.”

  “And what was that?” Sutter found himself grateful for the sudden conversation down in the dark.

  “A scythe,” the young man said.

  Sutter could feel the honest surprise on his own face. “And why a scythe?”

  “We’re farmers.”

  A full silence settled between them.

  “What is your name?” Sutter finally asked.

  “I am Thalen Dumal. But I am no king. All our land has ever known is the peace of planting and harvest. We’ve lived our lives by the cycles of the crop for as long as there’ve been people in Risill Ond. But we did once have royalty of a kind. And when the convocation was called, a very old oath was remembered. My ancestors made those promises when we still had a palace and courtiers. I would rather be with my crops again than have come to Recityv.”

  At that, Sutter nodded agreement. “My name is Sutter. I’m familiar with the dirt myself.”

  “Then you see the senseless waste of this whole affair.”

  “I don’t know. But if you feel that way, why come?” Sutter probed at his swollen eye.

  “We were obligated. I was obligated. When the Second Promise was issued long ago and we were asked to answer, my ancestors went. But we had no army, so a vote was held, and our unmarried men who had seen the Change were called upon. They marched to Recityv, bearing the only weapons they knew, scythes. For it, the contingent out of Risill Ond were named the Reapers. They were among the few who went into the fray beside the men from Recityv. And in fulfillment of our oath, we vowed to honor Recityv’s call should it ever come again.

  “It came. But because we don’t observe all the traditions of a ruling class in Risill Ond, there were no special vestments to wear or standards to fly. My mother stitched our emblem into an old, thin carpet.” There was no shame in Thalen’s voice. “And when we arrived, I was promptly taken in by some leagueman and questioned. But it was not a mere routine check, or worry over what vices we might observe. They seek to push their influence into Risill Ond. Imprisoning me leaves our lands essentially unclaimed. Which means our seat at the convocation is unclaimed. The League will claim it, and then a civil contingent will come to our lands—something we’ve been able to avoid until now.”

  “How have you managed that?” Sutter asked.

  “I told you. There are no palaces. No royalty. We are small and remote. But then … the Reapers are known for the steadfastness they showed when the Second Promise failed. So we have a seat here by tradition. The League is trying to gain as many votes as it can so that when the convocation convenes, they’ll be able to achieve their own ambitions. The regent…” Thalen’s voice softened. “It will be the end of her when they do.”

  “We must tell someone,” Sutter exclaimed.

  “Who, the guards who beat us? Or the scops here who keep us company?”

  Sutter looked over at the troupe, who seemed to be listening to Thalen’s story from the darkness. Then he turned back to Thalen, anger evident in his voice when he spoke. “I don’t understand how they can hold you here.”

  The fellow laughed again. “Therein lies the irony. They accused me of being a false applicant to the Seat of Risill Ond. They looked at my hand-sewn banner and meager clothes and used them as a judgment upon me.”

  Sutter fumed. It didn’t help that this fellow accepted what had happened so temperately.

  Thalen spoke again, his voice becoming sad and wistful. “I would like to be back in my fields, and smell the dew of morning on the crops and soil; till the earth, and look out upon the endless tracts of harvest under a mild sun. That is my court … I am no king.”

  The words stole some of Sutter’s ire, as he thought again of his own home, his own parents. His adventure had brought him to the depths of a dark prison. And yet his first thought of the Hollows didn’t remind him that he sat in chains, but of the man and woman who’d given an orphan a home. He felt suddenly homesick.

  Hearing Thalen talk about his love of his work reminded Sutter of his own feelings, which he’d hardly bothered to acknowledge. His anger fell away as he sat quiet then and thought, maybe for the first time, about the things he loved.

  It was, to his reckoning, the end of his second day in the bowels of Solath Mahnus. They’d separated him from Tahn, muttering something about keeping accomplices away from each other. Sutter found himself wondering if Tahn was all right as he finally fell down into sleep, and saw the dead in his prison cell.

  * * *

  Tahn had sat chained for two days in the dungeon chamber without food or water. The dank smell of sweating stone lay just under the stench of waste and filth and stale straw used to cover the mess. He had occasionally heard someone in the shadows squatting over a chamber hole in the corner. But down here it hardly seemed to matter. A shaft of light fell slantwise from a barred window in the door, seeming to grow weaker as it finally met the junction of wall and floor down a set of stone stairs.

  The square of torchlight cast from the window fell between Tahn and the other prisoner occupying the cell, and he was grateful for it. In the night, the man moaned in his sleep. Whatever his unseen companion had dreamed about had caused the man’s arms to thrash about, scraping heavy chains across the stony floor. Perhaps he moaned because of bruises caused by the unforgiving hardness of the floor which was their bed.

  The manacles binding Tahn’s wrists and ankles chafed until the iron stung his raw skin. He barely noticed; the guards had beaten him almost unconscious before shackling him to the wall. The ache in his ribs from hard boots and the cuts in his lips and across his cheeks throbbed with the beating of his heart. A gash in the back of his head made lying down intolerable. He slept sitting against the wall, his chin on his chest. His left eye had taken some damage. And though he didn’t remember it, he thought someone had stomped on his fingers, leaving the joints too bruised to flex.

  No outer window freshened the stale air. When he or his cellmate shifted or sighed, the sound of each move
ment reverberated loudly off the high ceiling.

  They’d stripped him of his bow and belt, and ripped his cloak from his shoulders. He wished they’d left him that, at least. The cold stone chilled his flesh through his clothing. They had stripped him of Sutter, too, taking Nails to some other place. Just now he could use some of Sutter’s wit, to hear how he’d respond to a dare of digging up a root in this cellar.

  Tahn drifted in and out of sleep, scarcely aware of night and day save that he had awakened twice in the manner to which he was accustomed. Always able somehow to know which was east, he looked into the darkness and imagined the torchlight falling in a wan rectangle as being the greater light coming to dispel another night. The thought gave him little comfort as he looked at the prison bars cutting dark lines across the brightness there. But he felt the coming of the day in those moments, and counted the cycles as they came and fled. And when the weight of the silence threatened to crush him, he pressed the back of his left hand to his one good cheek and felt the familiar shape across his skin. The scar comforted him, if only because it was still his.

  In his first imprisoned hours he had hoped that Vendanj, Mira, any of his friends might come and reclaim him from this darkness. He’d sat watching the door through his one clear eye, growing tense each time a guard paced the outer hall and passed the window. Each time that square of light dimmed with the shadow of a man’s head, Tahn lost a small portion of hope. He no longer raised his head at the sound of boots beyond the door. The moments stretched on like days; hours passed like weeks. Confined by the darkness, and beaten down by the denizens of a strange city eager to witness a man hanged, Tahn felt trapped.

  His own jumbled thoughts also trapped him. He tried to remember moments of freedom and happiness: hunting deep in the Hollows, swimming in the quarry with Sutter as sun glittered on the ripples of the water, and Wendra cutting apples to fill a sweet pie that she would top with grape jam and spice. But each memory clouded, shifted, became ash falling from a burning mountain on a forest slope, dragging cold water into his lungs beneath the death grip of a tracker, the Bar’dyn holding Wendra’s dead babe and he unable to stop the monster …

  All of these things Tahn eventually surrendered—at least for a time—to the serenity of the blackness, the quiet that came around him.

  Except Wendra. His failure to Wendra.

  They had always shared a special bond. Brother and sister yes, but more. Friends. True friends. When Tahn did for her was not simply the obligation of blood. It was honest affection and concern. That was the truth of it. And on her side of things, never had she questioned any of the small strangenesses she’d surely seen in him. Indeed, when his dreams had plagued him, it had been the soft sound of her voice singing to him in the dark hours of the night that had eased his mind and made him feel at peace once more.

  Which was why these recent events hurt him so deeply. Even here, where he’d been stripped of virtually all emotion and dignity. But at last now, he had no further choices. Or so he thought.

  “Two days and not a word. Where are your manners, son?” The voice penetrated the darkness, but Tahn paid them no more attention than any other dream that fevered his mind.

  Again, the voice: “There’s just the two of us here, so you must know I am addressing you.”

  Tahn raised his head in the direction of the voice. It came calmly, with patience and clarity.

  “You’ve not spoken to me, either,” Tahn said. He tried to peer beyond the shaft of light to see the man.

  “That is a matter of caution,” the disembodied voice replied. “The council has sent informants and spies before you to wear your shackles for a few hours, a day perhaps, believing that I might make one of them a confidant, to share my woe, and discover what they could not force from me any other way.”

  “Then why speak to me now?” Tahn still could not see the man.

  “Because no man here by choice has ever remained as long as you.” Tahn heard the man’s chains rattle as though he shifted his seat. “The darkness gets to them, the light from the door mocks their little game, and they call to be let go.” The man chuckled in the darkness. “My silence disturbs them. Such oaths I have heard from men to whom I never uttered a word.” He heard another soft chuckle.

  “So you have decided to trust me because I’ve been here two days?” Tahn said with incredulity.

  “I did not say I trusted you,” the man’s voice changed, becoming flat and precise. “That I’ve broken my silence does not mean I’ve taken you to my right. But anyone beaten as you were … I would be pleased to know what crime causes the Recityv guard to lay into you with such enthusiasm. Even I did not suffer so much when first I came to this place.” Tahn again heard chains rattle, and imagined the man raising an arm to indicate their shared cell.

  Tahn considered. If he told the man what he’d done, the fellow might want to know why, and what would Tahn say? But Tahn had already learned something in the dark of a stinking cell: You heard the truth because there was nothing else to distract you from it. Tahn sensed that in this chamber where debts were paid, secrets came like confessions.

  Tahn’s cellmate broke the silence. “You may be ashamed of your deed,” the voice said with a tone of doubt. “Or you may fret that I am the informer, here to discover your plans. Or you may even think that I simply cannot understand.” The man paused; air whistled through his nostrils. “You should consider what type of man would volunteer to be chained beside a pile of his own foulness for so long just to question a prisoner. What shame could I judge here? And as to understanding, son, you must believe that my days in this place have instructed me in ways that scholars will never know.” He again laughed gently. “Though I’d have been glad to forgo this training.”

  Tahn still did not speak. A thief, a murderer, whatever manner of miscreant this man was, Tahn did not believe he could unburden himself of all the suspicions and events that had occupied him since first meeting the Sheason. Vendanj would not want him sharing such things. And what might a man confined to a cell do with such information once he was free? Tahn raised his hand and again touched the pattern on his hand to the skin of his unmarked cheek.

  “Still cautious,” the man said with appreciation. “Then consider this, my young friend. I’ll have no reprieve. No second stand before the Court of Judicature. When my turn is done here—a long turn to repudiate me—I will stand to face my death and wonder if my final earth could be any colder than this stone bed.”

  “At the gallows?” Tahn asked.

  “Whatever they deem appropriate,” the man said. “So you see, your story, whatever it is, will never reach another soul. But down in this prison it may offer us each some respite for a few moments.”

  An earnest undertone in the man’s voice caught Tahn unaware. Patience still measured every word the man spoke, but now it sounded as if long exposure to the murk and indifferent stone edged the man’s request. Yet it was more than that. Tahn could hear his honesty. The honesty that the man needed to hear a story, something to carry him beyond the walls of this cell, and the honesty that some night here would be the last he would sleep in this world before he met his end.

  Still, Tahn asked simply, “Why?”

  The sound of the man standing came out of the dark, and Tahn saw a shadow rise near the shaft of light that slanted in from the window up the stairs. A raised chin showed defiance. “Because the soldiers here don’t brutalize simple lawbreakers whose offense is against another citizen of Recityv. And no one victimizing an immigrant is ever placed in chains; there’s too much distaste for the unwashed among the footmen who keep the law.” His shadowed head lowered as though he could see Tahn through the darkness. “A young man who smells of the road, whose face is new to the touch of a razor, but who excites such venom from his captors as you did, my friend, is one who has caused a wound to the guard itself, perhaps the League, and that is a story to melt away the walls of this place, if only in the telling.”

  Tahn swa
llowed against the thickness in his mouth, and suddenly felt the pains of thirst and hunger. “My mouth is dry,” he said.

  “You’ll be fed your fourth day, and whatever you eat and drink will run through you like rain down a spout. It will likely be moldy bread and water left to sit since you came here.” Tahn thought he heard a smile. “Still, it tastes good, though the rush of it into an empty stomach will give you pain.”

  Tahn groaned and drew himself up against the wall at his back.

  “I will split my ration with you,” the man said. “To keep your strength up for the words you generously share.”

  Momentarily, Tahn considered refusing still, when an arm emerged into the light from the window pushing a metal plate with a slice of bread and slice of cheese toward him. A moment later came a cracked decanter. The face and shoulders of the man yet remained in the shadows beyond the shaft of light. The man was silent while Tahn ate.

  Never had warm water quenched his thirst so completely. He hardly noticed the sting of his shackles over his raw wrists. When he was done, the arms appeared and retrieved the plate and decanter. Tahn half expected the man to harangue him to begin. But he soon heard the long intake of a sleeper’s breath, and knew the man had gone to sleep.

  In the depths of his own shadows, Tahn watched the square of light, a growing feeling of abandonment gripping him. He didn’t know how long he stared before he began to talk, hearing the echo of his own voice against the indifferent stone. He spoke just above a whisper, his small voice carrying in the fetid air. Almost immediately he knew the man was listening. Never did a chain stir or a scrape interrupt, but his audience heard every word, an audience of one, who lay against unyielding stone.

  Somehow it did feel like confession.

  He included every detail he could remember, holding back only two things: the sticks entrusted to him by the scrivener, and drawing an empty bow at Sevilla. He told of Vendanj and his strange appearance in the Hollows on the eve of Wendra’s attack. He told of the Sedagin and Sutter’s dance with Wendra. He related the dark mists, and his and Sutter’s separation from Mira and Penit and the others, and what had caused him to flee headlong into those roiling clouds. He spoke of the Lul’Masi and the tenendra tents, of the fire at the library of Qum’rahm’se, of Stonemount and his fight with the insubstantial creature. He retold with disgust the burning of the woman by league order. Several times he went back to fill in portions he had forgotten to include.