The Harp and the Ravenvine

by Ted Sanders

“The sign at the warehouse wasn’t really meant to keep out the Riven,” Brian explained. “The Riven should never have been able to find the door in the first place.”

  “But they did,” Chloe said. “And they got past your little sign.”

  “Because of you,” Brian shot back. “I heard a rumor that the Mordin had been stalking you for weeks before you came to the warehouse. You were the one that led them there.”

  Chloe hopped down off the bench. She lifted her arms up toward the cavern walls all around them. “Well, at least I’m out there doing something. At least I’m not letting someone lock me up my whole life so I can futz around making stuff that doesn’t even work.”

  “Chloe—” Horace began again, but again Brian interrupted him.

  “Oh, I see,” he said. “Not only am I weak, but I suck at what I do. Meanwhile, you’re the hero.”

  Chloe shrugged. “Your words, not mine.”

  “You have no idea what I do or how I do it. Look, you guys probably think very highly of your Tan’ji. The Fel’Daera, the Alvalaithen—Meister struts around here bragging about the new recruits and their instruments of legend.” Brian held up his hands. “And I’m not saying that’s wrong. No disrespect. You guys are packing some serious heat. But you have to understand.” He bent his head. His voice got heavy as he began to speak—no, not speak, recite.

  “From the starlit belly of the Loom, the Firstfound,

  the nine Loomdaughters were drawn.

  And from these few, the One and the Nine,

  everything after came.”

  Horace and Chloe stared at him. Chloe looked as though someone had just asked her for directions to the moon.

  “What the hell was that?” she said.

  “Old words. A translation. The original version rhymes, if that makes you feel better.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “How do you think Tanu get made?” Brian asked. “Including yours?”

  “I never thought about the actual process,” said Horace, a little embarrassed that he hadn’t.

  Slowly, as if he were talking to small children, Brian said, “You have to wield an instrument to create an instrument.”

  “Duh,” Chloe said, as if all of this had occurred to her before. But her face was lit with interest, her keen eyes locked on Brian.

  Brian continued as if he hadn’t heard her. “Generally speaking, Tanu can only be made by the Keepers of very specialized Tan’ji. And only ten such Tan’ji have ever existed: the Starlit Loom itself—the very first Tanu—and then the Nine. The Nine are the Loomdaughters, rough copies of the Loom. Every Tanu worth mentioning that has ever existed was made either with the Loom, or with one of the Nine.”

  “So are you the Keeper of the Starlit Loom?” Horace asked.

  “Big no. If I were the Keeper of the Starlit Loom . . . well, that’s major superstar territory. But I am the Keeper of one of the Nine.” He pushed his glasses up on his nose. “Behold the secret of Brian,” he intoned, briefly striking a pose and making jazz hands. “Meister didn’t want you to know about me, not at first. But you’ve been spilling your hero juice all over the place. He trusts you now. Why it had to be today, of all days, I don’t know. But he wants me to show you.”

  “So show us,” said Chloe.

  Without another word, Brian turned and led them deeper into the workshop. He led them around a bend and through a low opening that led into a separate cramped round chamber beyond. Horace’s claustrophobia clutched at him again as he entered, but quickly loosened. The room felt vaguely churchy, somehow sacred.

  There was a faint electric smell, like the scent of an old vacuum running. Illumination filtered down from the amber light that fumed dimly above, falling onto a stout wooden table that seemed to float in the gloom. Atop the table sat an oval block of stone, dusty black, about eight inches thick and eighteen inches across. The stone was massively and unmistakably Tan’ji, like nothing Horace had ever seen before. It burned with power, and Horace thought of the flows of energy his mother had described to him. He felt almost as if he could sense that energy himself now, coursing deep through the heart of this stone.

  They approached the table, Brian going around to the far side. He looked different as he leaned over the stone—older, taller, more severe. The top surface of the mysterious Tan’ji was rough, unmarked except for a narrow ridge around the edge and, near each end, the deep outlines of two crude circles.

  “This is a Loomdaughter,” Brian said. “One of nine. Her name is Tunraden.” He held up his hands. And now Horace saw that a thin, dark band tightly encircled each of Brian’s wrists, glinting in the dim light. Brian let one hand dangle over each of the two crude circles in the stone. Horace stepped nearer still, but even as he did, he was aware of Chloe taking a step back.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked her.

  “This is serious stuff,” she said.

  Brian looked at her quizzically. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  “I’m not afraid, caveman. I just . . . don’t want to be any closer.”

  “Some don’t,” Brian said. “Being this close to the raw Medium makes some people feel sick.”

  Horace just had time to register the word—the Medium!—when Brian said, “You may want to close your eyes.”

  And then he plunged his hands into the stone.

  His hands vanished to the wrist inside the crude circles, and the surface of the Loomdaughter exploded into golden light. Horace cried out and leaned away, throwing up his arms. The air all around him began to quiver and thrum, making his hair stand on end. He clutched at the Fel’Daera, feeling from it a sensation he’d never encountered before—not alarm, but a kind of knife’s edge of exhilaration, like a strong tree bending deeply in a raging wind.

  Chloe, meanwhile, had taken another step back. She held one arm in front of her face, shielding her eyes, while with the other she clutched at the Alvalaithen. Its wings beat furiously. Her lips were parted wide in shock.

  Brian leaned back, his lit face straining slightly with effort, and from the glowing pit the Loomdaughter had become he pulled a great pile of—there was no other word for it—light. Thick, drooping coils of light, golden and smooth and pulsing and heaped in his hands like the tentacles of some ocean beast, running through his fingers like honey. He spread his hands, and the light moved with them, looping and curling.

  “The Medium,” Brian said quietly, and at first Horace couldn’t understand why he didn’t have to shout—but of course the storm that rampaged now wasn’t real, or if it was real it was happening only between the boy’s hands; the room was utterly silent. The circlets around Brian’s wrists glowed brightly.

  Brian reached into the Loomdaughter again and pulled out more of the golden substance. He pinched some between his fingertips and pulled it into a webwork of lace that thinned into nothingness. “This is what we weave into the Tanu,” he said. “The presence of the Medium gives the Tanu their power, and the pattern of the weaving gives them their function.”

  He carved off a piece of the Medium with the edge of his hand. The chunk coalesced briefly into a sphere and hovered over his palm. Grooves began to appear across the surface of the sphere, rows of furrows that interlaced and spread, like a tapestry, or a circuit board. Eventually so many lines scored the sphere that it was sliced into pieces, and the pieces poured back into and over Brian’s hand like salt, rejoining the rest of the Medium. Horace watched the display in wonder, transfixed. He had never seen anything so beautiful before, so . . . elemental.

  “Stop it,” Chloe said. “Put it back. Let it go.”

  Brian looked up, his hands still full, his pale skin glowing. “It’s not alive or anything. Don’t be upset.”

  “I’m not upset. It’s just those colors . . . they hurt my eyes.”

  “Colors?” Horace said, squinting into the yellow fire of the Medium. Brian bent forward, dropping the thick cables of light into the Loomdaughter and spreading his ar
ms toward the ends of the oval surface. He pulled his now-empty hands up from the stone, the rings around his wrists reemerging, black once more. Abruptly, the stone swallowed the light whole, and the room plunged into darkness. The electric smell was thick in the air.

  Horace stilled his own heavy breathing. Across the way, he could hear Chloe’s breath hissing sharply in and out through her nose.

  “You saw colors?” Brian asked, still unseen.

  “Yes,” Chloe replied. “At least, I think so. There were these . . . these thin jagged lines. Like bolts of electricity.”

  Horace had no idea what she was talking about. He’d seen nothing like that.

  “That’s right,” Brian said wonderingly. “But normally only Tuners can see the colors. Tuners and Meister and, well, me.”

  The room was coming back into focus now as Horace’s eyes adjusted to the dark. Horace spotted Chloe’s small, solid form, far back against the wall. “Whatever,” she said. “It doesn’t matter.” She pushed off the wall and walked up to the table. Leaning over the Loomdaughter, she held a palm above the surface, as if feeling for heat. “Do you know how old it is?”

  “Let’s see . . . what’s today? Tuesday?” Brian ticked off some numbers on his fingers. “Five thousand years, give or take.”

  “Holy freaking cow,” Horace said. That was older than the pyramids.

  The room went quiet. All their gazes lay heavily on the Loomdaughter. Tunraden, Brian had called it. Had its Maker given it that name? And who had that Maker been? Chloe gnawed intently at the corner of her mouth, her face troubled. At last Brian said brusquely, “Let’s go. This room isn’t really for talking.” He stepped around the table and slipped through the door, leaving Horace and Chloe to follow.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Daktan

  BACK IN THE WORKSHOP, BRIAN TOOK HIS SEAT AT THE WORKBENCH again. He glanced at something unseen across the room and then glanced at his watch. He picked up a tiny vial of some glittering red substance and examined it closely. He seemed suddenly reluctant to talk.

  But Horace, riled up by what he’d just witnessed, wanted to hear more. “How does Tunraden work, exactly? I mean, what do you do with the Medium?”

  “Man, I don’t know. How does an egg become a chicken? I guess the simplest way to say it is that the Medium can be structured, kind of like a very complicated circuit board in three dimensions.” He glanced at the Fel’Daera. “Or four. The structure determines the power. Once I have the structure I want, I connect it to a physical object, let the energy flow, and presto: Tanu. I was messing around in there just now, but the real thing is very time-consuming. Exhausting.”

  “So only Tuners and the Keepers of the looms can manipulate the Medium,” Chloe interjected, listening intently.

  “Basically, but Tuners can only manipulate the Medium in structures that already exist,” Brian said. “They can’t make anything new because they can’t permanently attach the Medium to an object. Even if they did manage to create a new structure, it would be simple and temporary—a flimsy knot instead of a heavy anchor. But Tuners are actually way better than me at tweaking the flows between an instrument and its Keeper.”

  “So you can’t sever like a Tuner can?” Chloe asked.

  “I don’t unmake. I make.” Brian slipped the red vial into a small rack full of similar vials, each with a tiny amount of powder in them, each a different color. “Why are you so interested in Tuners?” he asked.

  Horace hastily changed the subject. “So basically in order to do what you do, you have to be the Keeper of the Starlit Loom, or of a Loomdaughter.”

  “Yes.”

  “And there are only ten of those.”

  “Not even. I am an extremely rare commodity. Many of the Loomdaughters have been destroyed, and apparently most of the ones that remain don’t have a Keeper. The Riven would give anything to have me on their side—or, failing that, to take Tunraden away from me, in the hope that one of their own might have the talent to use it.”

  “The Riven don’t have anyone like you?” Horace asked.

  “Not quite. Let me explain. The first Keeper of the Starlit Loom used it to make—what else?—copies of the Loom. And that’s all she made. Not that you can really blame her, because the Loom was the only thing there was to imitate. There were no other Tanu. And even though she didn’t know how to make anything else, she did get better and better at copying the Loom. Each Loomdaughter she made was more powerful and more refined than the last. Eventually the Loomdaughters found Keepers, too, and each instrument was named after its first Keeper.” He paused and then began to recite softly: “Sephet, the first. Dalrani, the second. Aored, Nev’fel, Domari, Filfora, Lan’ovro, Tunraden. Viskesh, the ninth.”

  Chloe fussed intently with the tail of the Alvalaithen. Horace followed her gaze back into the dark room behind them, where the curving bulk of Brian’s Tan’ji could no longer be seen. Now that he knew it was there, though, Horace was sure he could still feel its massive presence.

  “Tunraden is the eighth?” Horace asked. “That means it’s powerful.”

  “Yes. The most powerful, because Viskesh, the ninth, was destroyed a long time ago. But none of the Loomdaughters are anywhere near as powerful as the Starlit Loom itself. Keepers of the Loom have been few and far between, and instruments made with it are extremely rare.” He pointed casually at the Alvalaithen, and at the Fel’Daera at Horace’s side. “That’s why everyone’s talking about you. Your instruments were made with the Starlit Loom.”

  The news hit Horace like a slap of cold water, invigorating but shocking. He found himself feeling monstrously small, once again overwhelmed by the hugeness of this story into which he had wandered.

  “But we’re not the only ones,” said Chloe, who never seemed to have much difficulty taking her rightful place in things. She nodded back into the dark toward Tunraden. “Your instrument came from the Starlit Loom too.”

  Brian gave her a thin smile. “True. I guess that makes us like . . . littermates or something, doesn’t it?”

  “I’m going to try not to think of it like that,” Chloe replied.

  Horace was only half listening, his thoughts churning forward. If Brian was right, that meant Sil’falo Teneves, maker of the Box of Promises, had once been the Keeper of the Starlit Loom. “So where is the Starlit Loom now?” Horace asked. “And what about its Keeper?”

  “I don’t know,” Brian replied. “The location of the Loom is a major secret, obviously. Sometimes Meister tries to imply that the Loom is gone forever, but . . .”

  Gone forever. Would that mean Falo was gone too? “But you think he’s wrong,” Horace prodded hopefully.

  Brian shrugged. “The Loom still exists. I can’t tell you how I know, but I know.”

  Horace was very familiar with that sensation—knowing things without knowing how he knew. Talking to Brian was stirring something big and powerful inside Horace. It was partly the thrill of peeking beneath the surface into how Tanu were made and how they worked, a process that pushed every nerdy button in Horace’s brain. But it was also the sensation of sinking deeper into this long story, and getting glimpses of the bottom. The very first Tanu. The names of Keepers long dead. A boy whose Tan’ji was so old and valuable he couldn’t even be allowed to leave the safety of the Warren.

  Perhaps sensing the floodwater of questions Horace was barely holding back, Brian poked around on the workbench some more. He glanced across the room at something again, as if checking a timer, and let loose a frustrated sigh. “Meister should be back any minute now,” he said. “Not sure why it’s taking him so long.”

  Horace followed his gaze, but the chamber was so cluttered it was hard to tell what Brian was looking at. Casually Horace started strolling in that direction.

  “So what’s the fanciest thing you’ve ever made?” asked Chloe, seemingly unaware.

  “Mr. Meister’s vest,” said Brian immediately. “My first Tan’ji.”

  That stopped Horace
in his tracks. “The red vest?” he said. “What do you mean?”

  “It’s Tan’ji,” Brian said with a grin. “One hundred percent homemade. You might not have noticed right away because it’s a little rough, and not the genuine Altari article.”

  “Mr. Meister already has a Tan’ji,” Chloe pointed out. “The oraculum.”

  Brian shrugged. “Yeah, well, Mr. Meister has his ways of breaking rules the rest of us can’t—or won’t. That’s why he’s the boss.”

  Another surprise. “But the vest is definitely Tan’ji?” Horace said.

  “Oh, yeah. It doesn’t always work like it’s supposed to, but only Mr. Meister can use it. I got the idea when I saw his office. He likes red. I designed the vest, Mrs. Hapsteade actually sewed it, and then I strung the function into it with the Medium.”

  “What do you mean, the function?” Horace asked. “What does it do?”

  “Almost every one of those pockets—there are a hundred and sixty-seven of them, if you ever wondered—connects to a compartment in Meister’s office upstairs in the Great Burrow. He can reach into different pockets and pull out items from his office, even when he’s away. Didn’t you ever notice?”

  Horace thought the surprises would never end. “I knew something weird was going on. I guess I never thought it through. But how do you do something like that?”

  “It’s not that complicated, really. A little triangulation, a little entanglement. Even then, the vine only has a range of about fifteen miles. The hardest part was making it Tan’ji instead of just Tan’kindi. Meister insisted that it could work only for him. It took me weeks, and I gave him a lot of headaches—literally—but I finally did it.”

  Horace clung to every word, fascinated. Not that complicated. Triangulation and entanglement. He barely even knew what those two words meant. “So basically you’re a genius,” he blurted out.

  “Oh, lord,” Chloe muttered.

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to say,” Brian told Horace. “Without actually saying it.”

  “No wonder they don’t let you leave,” said Horace.