Trial of Intentions

by Peter Orullian

  Vendanj slammed the balls of his fists together. His flesh rent at the force of it, blood spraying from the torn tissue. Time seemed to slow, the spew of blood hanging in the air a moment before whipping into an abrasive red wind that descended on the beast. The haze tore at its face and eyes and skin, dropping it to the ground, before rushing to nearby Bar’dyn.

  The bodies consumed by the blood-wind had scarcely hit the ground before more Bar’dyn had filled their places. One heaved a two-tined spear at Braethen, forcing him off balance as it barreled toward him. Braethen managed to get his footing in time to take the brunt of the charge. They went down, the creature’s shoulder driving the air from his lungs in a painful gust. Thick hands wrapped around his neck, trying to crush his throat. Braethen swung his sword wildly at the creature’s head.

  One of the Bar’dyn’s arms went up to ward off the blow; several of its fingers fell to the ground. It didn’t cry out, only squeezed Braethen’s neck tighter with its good hand. Then Elan was there, driving his sword through the Bar’dyn’s ear. It fell instantly limp and slumped to the ground.

  The Far king pulled Braethen up, and the two turned in time to see the horde part and a smaller figure stroll forward. She wore a dull crimson robe, and had the gaunt face of one who hadn’t eaten for a very long time.

  Velle.

  Braethen rushed to take a stance between Vendanj and the dark renderer. He expected the Sheason to call him back, ask him to find a safe position because of his inexperience. Vendanj did neither.

  “Callow youth to defend you, Sheason? Some new sodalist to die for your impertinence.” The Velle’s tone came low and broken, like the smoke-damaged voice of a nightly tavern singer. “I’ve a young helpmate of my own.”

  A Bar’dyn came forward, leading a small figure with a chain around its neck. It may have been the dimness of the morning light, or the dark still in Braethen’s eyes after escaping his sword’s influence, or perhaps because he didn’t want to see this … that it took several moments to focus and realize …

  A child.

  The girl was maybe seven. She wore a brown burlap smock over thin shoulders. Her hair stood dirty and clumped. She had the careworn face of a girl who has seen degradation at too young an age. And yet, when she saw Braethen standing there, defiant and holding up his sword, a spark of hope lit her eyes. It reminded him … of a blade of grass. And that image lingered an instant before the Bar’dyn roughly yanked her neck collar and pulled her to her knees beside the Velle.

  Children, because they can’t fight back. Because their spirits are more vibrant.

  His anger burned hot. And before any of the others could speak, he stepped closer, his heart pounding. When he spoke, the sound resonated in the weapon in his hands.

  “If you harm the child…”

  The little girl cried silent tears of hope, while Braethen glared into the Velle’s stoic eyes.

  “Your indignation comes ages too late, Sodalist. Besides, what are you threatening? Death? That is an entirely human frailty.” The Velle gave a casual laugh deep in its rough throat.

  Without looking back, Braethen held up a hand to Vendanj. He wanted no intervention this time. The Sheason said nothing, honoring his unspoken request. They both knew the time had come for him to stand his own defense.

  A strange silence grew, even as farther down the line the battle raged. Nearby Quiet waited on their exchange. Vendanj, and the First Legion, and the king himself waited, watched; he could feel their resolve to stand behind him.

  The Velle remained still, staring at Braethen with unsettling apathy.

  Finally, with a tone of indifference, she spoke. “I am already in hell, Sodalist. You have no power to save or condemn me. I will cut you down in front of your kings and Sheason, and I will lay bare the sadness of your oath … taken by a silly, reading boy who hasn’t the manhood to raise the blush to a woman’s cheek when she asks, nor the wit to esteem a father who suffered his son’s ingratitude.”

  How does she know all this? About J’Nene? About da?

  The words slipped into Braethen’s mind, chiding him, undermining his confidence. The sword in his hand grew suddenly very heavy, foreign. Darkness crept in at the edges of his vision, and with it came the feeling of being in two places again, threatening to consume him.

  Then, spoken softly, in an unyielding voice, came a single, bracing word: “Courage.”

  It was Vendanj, uttering, for him alone to hear, the invitation and command.

  Braethen refocused on the Velle. “Let the child go.” He thought his heart would burst, but he took two steps forward.

  The Velle gripped the chain holding the little girl and pulled her around in front, as a master would a mongrel. A strained look of hope and fear shone on the girl’s face.

  Before Braethen could react, the Velle seized her by the back of the neck and thrust a bony hand at him. In a long, horrific moment the girl’s life was drained from her frail, emaciated body to fuel the Velle’s dark art. Pain and sadness leapt to her face. She reached for Braethen. A rush of black wind began streaming around him, through him, and he dropped to the hard shale, feeling a burn inside. Others around him fell, too.

  He pitched forward onto the rock of the Soliel, his left hand still clenching his blade. I’m a godsdamned fool!

  He looked ahead to where the little girl had likewise fallen to the shale. Her delicate, dirtied features were lifeless, her eyes open and empty and staring.

  The scream began in his heart, where the ache of the child’s death churned. That scream erupted from his throat like a clarion come to call all the living to war. It resonated in his hand as the Blade of Seasons thrummed, demanding to be wielded. He pushed himself to his feet and strode toward the Velle with the purpose of an executioner.

  Behind him rang the clash of swords. The air itself seemed to rend—the Sheason calling the Will to his aid. But these things sounded distant, unimportant. He focused on the Velle, who stared back with unsettling indifference.

  A massive Bar’dyn stepped into his path. Braethen sidestepped a blow and struck the beast in the throat with a single thrust of his blade. The creature fell, trying to stanch the flow of its own blood.

  The Velle raised her hands again, forgetting she had no vessel to render. Braethen shook his head and stepped close, raising his weapon for a hammer stroke that he brought down with all the strength he had.

  His sword’s edge pulled through the flesh of the Velle with satisfying drag. Dark images rose in his mind as the creature gasped. A moment later, she wailed, the sound like the bitter penance of one receding to a lasting prison. The cry faded in long echoes over the silent armies battling across the shale. And the Velle fell.

  Braethen took no pleasure in it, staring down instead at the child lying on the hard, cold ground. But he had no time to mourn.

  He leapt back to the Sheason’s side, swinging his sword at the surrounding Quiet with all the fury inside him. For the first time, he began wielding this burdensome blade with comfort, if not great skill. And as he fought beside Vendanj, thinking of the Sheason’s steeling admonition—Courage—he also thought about the strange power of the blade.

  Two places at once.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Songs of Retribution

  Revenge has a sound. Dear absent gods, a sound. And it doesn’t come sweetly.

  —From “Suppositions on the Mor Nation Refrains,” a Divadian conservatory text

  Wendra sat staring out her bedchamber window at a garden bathed in the light of a wine-colored moon. Stillness and shadow lay across her room, deeper here on the west side of the Far king’s manor. The chamber held the musty smell of a shut-in, the air sour and warm. Her things lay strewn about where she’d thrown or dropped them days ago. She hadn’t bothered to change out of her clothes in all that time. And she certainly hadn’t brightened any of this with song. Not a single note. Not once.

  “Did you ever try to have another child?” Wendra asked.

&n
bsp; She spoke to the Far woman, Sendera, who kept Wendra company, protected her. The Far sat in the corner, unmoving, as she had for days. Word of the attack on Naltus had come from Vendanj, who’d ordered Wendra to stay put: You haven’t learned to control your song.

  “Yes,” Sendera answered, but said no more.

  For the last few days it had gone like this. Wendra had learned that Sendera had lost a child during childbirth. But she’d offered little more than direct answers, mostly keeping her sentinel silence. Still, by slow degrees, the two had begun to find common footing.

  “Did any of them live?” Wendra pressed, turning to watch the Far’s response.

  “One.” In Sendera’s reply Wendra heard a truth most women shared: a great many more children came still, or died soon after birth, than was talked about.

  The steady expression never left Sendera’s face, and she resumed her silent, protective vigil.

  “If you could hold someone responsible … if you could do something to settle the guilt and emptiness left when your child was taken from you … would you?”

  Wendra turned back to the neatly tended garden. This plot of ground, patiently nurtured in the middle of the stark shale city, offended her in a way she couldn’t quite name. But for other offenses she had great clarity and names: Vendanj for denying her the chance to avenge Penit, swept away by Bar’dyn in the Saeculorum; Tahn, her damn brother, for letting Penit be taken when he might have saved him.

  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, d
ropping 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.