Trial of Intentions

by Peter Orullian

  “Of staring at nothing?” Tahn teased again. He was as comfortable with Scalinou as he was with the savant of his own College of Astronomy. “I’ll manage somehow.”

  Scalinou reached the glass dome, pausing at the top step, out of breath. “When my heart stops pounding in my ears, we’ll begin.”

  “We should have just taken the pulley-lift.” Tahn said it to goad Scalinou a little.

  “Nonsense. Against the rules. And hells, stairs keep me young!” The old man’s voice echoed songlike in the wide observation dome.

  Tahn stood beside his older friend and mentor, scanning the glass panes that made up the great dome. Each was a full stride high and wide, and held in place by an impossibly thin strip of ironwood. From the dome floor, it was like there were no panes at all, leaving an unobstructed view of the sky in every direction.

  Some of the towers had alchemical lamps, or light-stones activated by motion or heat. Scalinou forbade such nonsense in his dome, where oil lamps were the high technology. The man actually preferred candles. Give me a good chandler, he was fond of saying.

  Here and there tables stood in the dark. On them: armillaries, orreries, quadrant maps, water-clock gears that turned the dials on timepieces set to different rotations of the planets. They all worked in silence, but a good astronomer walking the dome would see a hundred calculations laid in and being tracked. There were a few low bookshelves. Scalinou’s books. And of course, at the center of the dome, on an inset rotating floor, was the second-most impressive skyglass in Aubade Grove—the most impressive stood in the College of Astronomy’s dome. Tahn thrilled just looking at it.

  The whole affair resided in a hemisphere fifty strides in diameter. The domes were Tahn’s favorite place in Aubade Grove. He never tired of visiting them.

  When Scalinou had steadied himself, he shuffled over to the long skyglass pointed at an open shutter. With the same warmth another man might show when patting a favored pet, Tahn gently tapped the brass tubing of the skyglass. A tuneless tep tep tep sounded in its broad hollow. Then he stared up past its gathering lens, some nine strides away.

  Scalinou got himself into his armless chair—he didn’t like having his elbows encumbered in any way. Then he bent forward over his workbench and a quadrant map laid out atop it. The map was held flat by sand weights at each corner. He made a satisfied noise in his throat—part surprise, part relief. “Young fusspot cosmologers left it the hell alone for once.”

  Then, by the light of a thin crescent moon and countless stars, he bent close to his armillary sphere and dialed in a slightly modified direction.

  “Finding our empty stretches?” Tahn inquired.

  Scalinou harrumphed, then cross-checked his armillary with his map. Last, he pulled a ledger out and read over entries with notation dates that ran back more than a year.

  Once all this was done, he sat up and rolled his shoulders like an athlete preparing for a contest. For Scalinou, it would be a wrestling match with his bit of sky.

  Tahn held up a hand, as one set to referee the bout. “Isn’t this why you invited me?”

  Scalinou seemed momentarily bothered. But a grin soon spread on his wrinkled face. He stood up with flair, and gestured extravagantly for Tahn to assume the armless chair—a cosmologer’s throne.

  Tahn laced his fingers and turned them outward—as he’d seen musicians do—adding some pomp to it all. Then he swiveled on Scalinou’s throne and began slowly to turn two hand cranks on the skyglass catapult stand. He carefully matched the degree and minute, as well as longitudinal mark, of the armillary.

  That done, he took a long, slow breath, exhaled, and gently leaned in to stare through the eyepiece. Empty stretches. Then he settled in for a long, patient looking.

  For a few hours he rarely left that position, fidgeting less than other observers his age. Far less. Patient looking suited him fine.

  “There’s quite a bounty of peace to be found looking at an empty spot in the heavens.” Scalinou sat nearby, having put his nose in a first-edition copy of Scant Evidences of Eternal Truths—a philosophical tract one couldn’t find even in the college annals.

  “Damn pretty thing to see,” Tahn said, not realizing he’d just cussed in front of a savant.

  “Haha! Yes! This is my cosmology.” Scalinou grinned with satisfaction. “This is why you’re the only astronomer whose company I can stomach for more than an hour’s time. Now, back to the show.”

  It was Scalinou’s way of telling Tahn to attend his skyglass eyepiece. And the show. Scalinou’s name for the dance of stars.

  It was Pliny Soray they were watching—a wandering star. Soray was actually a planet, but Scalinou—like Tahn—found the old term more poetic, so here they referred to Soray as a “wandering star.”

  He watched closely, time passing, as the familiar ache crept into his neck and shoulders, cramping his muscles. He wanted to take a break, stretch, but he was glad he’d remained watchful, since a moment later … it happened.

  He let out a weak sigh when Soray completed her retrograde. No loud slapstick, no stomping of feet on wagon boards, no show-ending tune. Just the silent, immeasurably distant completion of the wandering star’s loop. And she was off. This was not the ellipse she usually made. The length of the loop had changed. She’s farther away …

  He sat back, dumbstruck.

  Seeing Tahn’s expression, Scalinou nearly squealed with glee. The old cosmologer poured himself a tall glass of pomace brandy. While Tahn thought through what he’d just seen, Scalinou drank, waiting on Tahn’s thoughts.

  “Perhaps your skyglass is out of true,” he suggested. “Let’s check her bearings.”

  Scalinou blew air through pressed lips, making them flap in a mocking sound. “That’s a doubter’s trap. A sky coward’s way. You know what you saw. Write it down.”

  Tahn picked up a short knife and sharpened a piece of graphite. No star man committed a fresh find to paper in ink. But when he did make his notation in Scalinou’s journal, the math wasn’t hard. They’d be lending it ink permanence soon enough.

  Once he’d jotted it down, he stood up and rolled his shoulders several times, trying to loosen his neck and back. A little more relaxed, he poured a room-temperature glass of water and stared at Scalinou through the shadows. The man’s grin threatened to break his face.

  “What do you think of my empty stretches now, Gnomon?” The appellation was a reference to a sundial stylus, the part that casts a shadow, as Tahn did every morning when he watched the sun rise.

  “What does it mean?” Tahn asked.

  “I don’t know yet,” Scalinou replied. “But isn’t it wonderful?”

  Then the older man gimped over to the edge of the dome. Tahn followed. There, Scalinou stared up “unassisted,” as the young astronomers called it—no sky tools.

  The man put one hand against the dome glass, breaking another of his dome rules. Tahn did the same. The glass was cool to the touch.

  “That’s our city, Tahn. Aubade Grove.” He stared down at the rooftops and streets and out at the other four towers.

  Scalinou’s voice then took on a different sincerity. Simpler. “You love it, too, don’t you? The inquiries and arguments. The study of the sky.”

  He did. He loved the old man, as well. They had these kind of talks every time they were together. Saying out loud the stuff that mattered. No clever language about it.

  Except tonight was a little different. He thought he heard a subtext in the man’s words. It didn’t change Tahn’s answer, though. “I don’t ever want to leave.”

  Scalinou’s smile tapered.

  “You didn’t really need my help with the empty stretches tonight, did you?” Tahn deduced.

  “Nonsense. I can always use your help,” Scalinou scolded mildly.

  Tahn gave the man a forgiving smile. “But it’s not the only reason you brought me here, is it?”

  The Grove had been through a Succession of Arguments recently—a ritualized discourse and
debate where one scientist sought to prove a hypothesis by successively arguing and defending it against each Grove college. Tahn and his best friend, Rithy, had helped her mother bring the Succession this time. She’d argued for a unification of celestial mechanics, calling it Continuity.

  “Your life’s stars are turning rather fast,” Scalinou noted.

  “You’re sending me away, aren’t you?”

  Scalinou closed his mouth tightly, chewing on words that sought to escape his lips.

  Tahn was quiet for a few moments before saying, “It’s my fault.”

  “What’s your fault?” Scalinou asked carefully.

  “That Rithy’s ma … did that to herself. I should have been more help to her in her astronomy argument in the discourse theater.”

  The comment visibly shook Scalinou. Rithy’s mother, Nanjesho, had been a brilliant mathematician. But her argument had failed when she got to the College of Astronomy. Tahn and Rithy had shared their budding skills with Nanjesho throughout her Succession. Ordinarily such help would have been viewed as an amusement. But not from Tahn. And not from Rithy.

  Regardless, a few days after the woman’s failure to prove Continuity, she’d taken her own life.

  Like a ward of the Scar.

  “It’s an unfortunate thing,” Scalinou said. “Unfortunate for her. For her daughter. For all of us. But”—he gently shook Tahn’s shoulder—“not unheard of. It was a large argument she was making. Large arguments—the kind that reshape our understanding of the sky—well, they consume a person. Become everything to her.”

  “But I—”

  “And no matter how bright a young astronomer you are, Gnomon, the blame for what happened doesn’t belong to you.” Scalinou looked down at him with serious eyes. “Nor is it why you’re going away.”

  Tahn fell quiet, and looked up to where Soray was wandering. Now truly wandering. Then in a small voice he said, “Don’t make me go. Not back to the Scar. All the kids there, they’re like scarecrows. Waiting in dry fields. But no parent ever comes to claim them.…”

  Scalinou’s face filled with sympathy. “But your father is there.”

  This fetched a heavy sigh. “He cares more for the other children he takes in than he ever did for me. And we don’t study the sky there. We just train. Patrol.” He looked up with a new worry. “And Rithy will think I’m abandoning her.”

  “Rithy will be fine. Not right away. But eventually. And you, you’re always welcome here,” Scalinou offered, his face full of sincerity. “I think right now your father and his friends just believe you’ll be safer with them.”

  “Safe from what?”

  Scalinou looked like he might actually lie to Tahn for the first time. But whatever touched his face left as quickly as it came. “The Continuity argument drew a lot of the wrong kind of attention, Gnomon. I think your father is right to want you out of Aubade Grove.”

  He pulled Tahn closer, and together they stared up past the skyglass to where Soray defied her regular rhythm and pattern.

  “If Nanjesho had succeeded,” Tahn observed, “you might have had a way to explain Soray.”

  * * *

  The memory of Scalinou and Rithy and Nanjesho slowly faded as Tahn continued to look up into the night sky. Memories of the Grove and his studies there flowed as through a burst dam.

  “I can’t believe how much of the sky I’d forgotten.” Tahn shook his head.

  “I take a spoonful of credit for that. The amount of knowledge, I mean,” Grant clarified. “I taught you—teach all my wards—Dimnian study techniques. Children in Masson Dimn know more than two handfuls of adults anywhere else. And with you … you’ve been looking at the stars since you could lift your head on your own. One doesn’t squander an interest that strong. That’s why we sent you to the Grove.”

  “I have friends there.” Gods, did he miss that place. “I could find them again.” He pointed up. “Use the boreal star. Make my way.”

  Grant nodded, seeming to like the idea. “Maybe you should, at that.”

  “I have friends in the Scar, too, though,” Tahn added with soberness. “Let’s finish.” He began to clear out the loose dirt and rocks from the graves.

  Grant joined him. And in short order they’d cleaned the barrows, laid the children inside, and gently covered them over. Grant spoke an old prayer.

  When his father had finished, Tahn hunkered down, as though by being closer to the dead they might hear his whisper. “I won’t let the Scar widen. It won’t have one more of us.”

  He was thinking of these six, certainly, but also of the thirty-seven. Of Devin. Of Alemdra.

  By every absent god, this time he meant to stop the intruder from strolling where he shouldn’t. Whether one man … or a whole damn army of Quiet.

  No more asking whether he should release his arrow.

  No more choices about which friend to save.

  No more rescuing a little one by ending her life before the Quiet could.

  And no more orphans and foundlings sent into the Scar.

  No more!

  The Quiet must be stopped.

  He gave a last look at the sky above, feeling a small measure of peace. It was a peace he’d learned to appreciate so much more during his time in the Grove, where his father had sent him to escape the Scar.

  “Thanks, Da,” Tahn said, and started toward Naltus.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To have a long-overdue conversation.”

  * * *

  Thanks, Da, Tahn had said. Grant had never thought he’d hear the boy call him that again. Da. It was the first time Tahn had said it in more than twelve years. And it left him feeling like a father for the first time in just as long.

  He wasn’t naïve enough to believe all was right between them. But he’d stopped pretending that it didn’t hurt him to think that after tomorrow he might never see his son again. He’d decided that even if Tahn couldn’t forgive him, he could at least offer the boy some clarity about things. And he’d done that. Mostly.

  When he’d come out to help bury the dead, he’d meant to share with Tahn an even fuller truth. Something he believed might forever drive a wedge between them: who Tahn’s mother was.

  His son knew Grant had been sent to the Scar because he’d tried to stop a Sheason from reviving the regent’s stillborn child. What he didn’t know was that Grant had been married to the regent, Helaina. She was Tahn’s mother. And the child Grant had tried to prevent from being revived … was Tahn.

  He loved his son. But men had no right to disregard the Charter that framed their world. The conflict of those two things was a godsdamned briar.

  But he’d not shared any of it with Tahn, because then the boy would have known that Grant being exiled to the Scar had everything to do with him. And Tahn would then have blamed himself for all the wards of the Scar. Including those they’d buried too young. The thirty-seven. And the moment Grant had seen the light in his son’s eyes—when Tahn had remembered the Grove—he’d decided this wasn’t the time to share it. Some secrets were right to keep.

  Soon, the scrape of iron through soil—the digging of barrows—seemed to fade. There was only the low whisper of grass stalks brushed together by wind.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Lamentations: The Present

  The severity of one’s suffering after breaking an oath reveals their true nature. Anyone who feels nothing when breaking their word isn’t worth the spit to shine a boot. Garbage, really.

  —From the published journal of Isabelle Rycher, member of the Circle of Poets

  Under a clear night sky, Mira walked the field of battle. Across the wide, rocky plain, barrows were being dug for the fallen. The tradition of erecting dolmens for Far who’d gone to their final earth would be broken tonight; there were too many dead. Instead, simple graves.

  The sound of heavy iron tearing at the earth created a steady, calming music. Around her, she took in the smell of old earth newly turned, and thought about l
osing a step.

  The reality of what was happening to her returned with its suffocating consequence: She was no longer Far. Not completely. She was slowly losing the traits that were naturally given to her people. I’m an oathbreaker.

  All her years, she’d looked forward to what followed this life, that moment when she’d be reunited with her mother. A mother she’d never known. Her girlhood had been spent with so many caregivers. She’d never felt the warmth of a mother’s embrace. She’d never fought beside her mother. No quiet conversations as mothers and daughters should have. No laughter of the kind that only they would understand. Nothing.

  But the Far promise had made it bearable. She’d see her mother when this life was through. Except that she wouldn’t. In bearing Tahn’s stain, the promise was no longer hers. She would never know her mother’s embrace. As simple a thing as that might be, she ached with the loss of it.

  She breathed deep, taking in the stench of coagulated blood. She might later grieve what she had lost, but for the moment, she put it aside. It just didn’t seem to matter in the face of such overwhelming loss.

  A few Far came near, pulling a cart. They knelt in turn beside each dead kinsman, respectfully collecting personal effects and lashing them together in large squares of leather. A name was written with care in dark ink on the outside of the bundle, and placed in the cart.

  Behind them came more Far, who kicked rocks out of the way and began to dig in open patches on the shale plain. Mira asked for a pick and shovel. Wordlessly, a stoic Far handed her his own and went to retrieve a new set for himself.

  She wandered the battlefield another half hour before she found Elan, as she knew she would, digging a grave. She cleared an area next to him and began to strike at the earth. The heat of her labor rose in her arms and neck and face. She worked faster, breaking caked soil for the resting place of someone whose name she didn’t know.

  Her breath soon rasped over dry lips, but she didn’t stop. Stroke after stroke she pounded at the hard dirt, remembering faces from her own girlhood, then the face of her sister, even the face of the boy Penit. All gone. She thought of Tahn, which brought a fury of pick strikes—she had genuine feelings for him.