Vault Of Heaven 01 - The Unremembered (123 page)

“I don’t know if I have learned what A’Posian meant to teach me by such lessons, Tahn. Because all I can think is that our time is dreadfully short. There is knowledge here.” He hefted his book and replaced it again in his lap. “But I don’t seem to glean what is necessary. And each time I lift my sword, I fear being consumed. It opens…”

Tahn put a hand on Braethen’s arm. “Later, you’ll better understand what I’m about to say, but for now take comfort in the decency of the life of your father. I know he wanted you to be an author, and I know your dream to become a sodalist sometimes caused strain between you, but those moments with those flowers, Braethen … you are fortunate to have had that man at your back from the cradle. I think … I know it makes being here, this far from the Hollows, easier.”

Braethen said, “Indeed, my friend. But I have neither Sutter’s desire for battle, nor the patience you seem to possess.”

“Patience?”

“I’ve watched you pull your bowstring, Tahn, as though something hinged on the result of your draw. It seems a considered—”

Tahn held up his hand. “There is more indecision than consideration in my actions, Braethen. Look what it has earned me.” He pointed toward Wendra. “And things in my own life are turned upside down…”

The sodalist looked away at Tahn’s sister. Then he offered, “Family is yet stronger than her pain.”

At that, Tahn showed him expressionless eyes that yet carried something deeper behind them. Moments later, an anguished frown came upon his friend’s face that for some reason reminded Braethen of when he had broken his father’s goblet.

Tahn finally blinked and focused a look on Braethen, focused on someone else’s burden—the quality Braethen had always liked best about him. He looked down at the book in Braethen’s lap. “Perhaps you’re not reading the right stories,” he suggested. “What exactly are you hoping to find?”

The sodalist lifted his finger from the book. “I’m not sure. I’m trying to learn about Restoration, but most if it is cloaked in riddles, or written in ancient tongues I can’t decipher. The Sheason gives me little instruction.”

Tahn chuckled. “It is his gift of evasion.”

Then Braethen remembered the day Ogea finally arrived at the Hollows, and the reader’s slow climb up the ladder of Hambley’s inn. The old man had broken the seal on a scroll, and spoken from memory the words all had assumed were written on the parchment. Speaking mostly to himself, he said, “What of the story Ogea spoke at Northsun last?”

“What does it say?” Tahn asked.

Braethen put his hand over the satchel at his side. “I’ve opened it three times…”

“Only opened it?” Tahn asked, confused.

Braethen turned calm eyes on Tahn. “It’s blank.”

They shared a long, troubled look.

“What have you discovered?” The voice startled them.

Both Tahn and Braethen looked up to find Vendanj standing over them. The Sheason wore his hood up, shading his hollowed cheeks. He spoke quietly, as though conserving energy.

Braethen spared a glance at the empty scroll. “Nothing, Sheason.” Braethen’s voice came equally low, failure evident in his tone.

“Nonsense,” Vendanj replied, though the lack of inflection left the words unconvincing. “Put your book aside a moment, sodalist, and tell me this: Have you a sigil of your own?”

“I wear the crest of the Sodality. It is—”

“A worthy emblem,” Vendanj finished. “But it is yours only as the sky is yours, or the earth. We are all of us adopted into larger families, grafted onto longer vines. This is necessary and important. But it is not individual. Do you understand?”

Braethen nodded. “I have no family mark. It never seemed necessary in the Hollows. Everyone knew me by name—”

“That is not the purpose of a personal insignia, sodalist.” Vendanj paused to consider, his eyes never leaving Braethen. “Perhaps you have discovered precisely what you say.” Nothing. While the Sheason spoke with little inflection, his words conveyed clear disappointment.

After all he had done and hoped and given, the disappointment burned.

Still, the Sheason did not move, seeming to scrutinize Braethen, perhaps to compel him to some realization by the imposition of his presence.

Then Braethen softly touched the blank scroll and muttered again, “Everyone knew me by
name.
…”

With unhurried hands he withdrew from his pack a green-colored vial and a quill. Removing the stopper from the vial, he dipped the quill and set the ink aside. Then, placing Ogea’s empty parchment on the book in his lap, he drew a single blade of grass at the topmost center. He rendered it expertly, as though he saw in his head precisely what he meant to draw.

Braethen did not look up at the Sheason, but stared down at the image as the ink dried. After several moments he whispered, “Ja’Nene.”

Vendanj looked satisfied. He nodded and said, “Your own story, sodalist. An important one,” and walked away.

Braethen rolled the scroll and carefully replaced it in his pack. When he withdrew his hands, he held a needle and several strands of thread. Taking up his cloak, he set to the wool, fashioning over the left breast the symbol he’d drawn on the parchment.

“You’re planning on telling me why you’ve chosen this as your sigil, right?” Tahn smiled, nudging Braethen.

“We’ll share a sack full of secrets sometime soon,” Braethen answered, and went on with his stitching. He allowed a thin, dubious smile as he met Tahn’s questioning gaze.

“I look forward to it,” Tahn said, nudging his friend again.

Moments later, Mira called, “Gather your things.”

Braethen closed his book and put his belongings away. He shouldered Ogea’s satchel and sheathed his sword. “Well, let’s go see Tillinghast.”

*   *   *

Once through the pass, the air suddenly warmed, as though the seasons of men held no sway beyond it. A shallow valley stretched before them, the mountains rising again at its far side.

Across the valley floor, trees had fallen heavily to the earth, their trunks half buried in the soil. Once-elaborate root systems stood exposed in twisted knots. It struck Tahn like a garden of stone statuary tumbled by a quake. Simply seeing the length of these trees suggested to Tahn the majesty that had belonged to them when they had stood and reached heavenward.

The inscrutable visage of the Sheason fell to a kind of despair Tahn couldn’t remember seeing.

In a careful whisper, the sodalist explained. “The mountains at the end of the Saeculorum are described as being filled with the beauty and grandeur of the Cloudwood, trees reaching up more than a hundred strides, their branches and trunks denser than steel folded a dozen times. It is known as the Eternal Grove or Undying Forest, because its wood was said to be impervious to the axes of men, its bark resistant to disease. It is written that during each century, the cloudwood grows by but one growth ring, and each ring comes so near its neighbor they can scarcely be distinguished.”

As the Sheason followed Mira onward, Braethen spoke, his voice hushed in reverence to a woodland now vanished, the land somehow denuded, and left dotted with scrub oak, low cedars, and grasses brown as from an early autumn.

“History records that the First Ones created the grove at the end of the world to be a source of renewal and growth. In its strong roots, the weave of the earth could continue should men prove to be poor stewards. Though the Fathers abandoned this world once the Artificer tainted its potential with his ruthless ambition, it is believed that they hoped the land and its people might survive through the strength of the iron roots weaving a new loam in which men might plant, and through the reemergence one day of the covenant language.” Braethen paused a moment, considering his own words.

“Much of the balance of Forda I’Forza is the special rendering of the Cloudwood as it claims form from the abyss into which its roots crawl.”

Tahn turned back to him. “That is where we’ll find Tillinghast, isn’t it?”

Braethen looked from one eye to the other. “Yes.” The sodalist paused briefly before resuming. “But the Cloudwood is…” he trailed off.

The party had descended into the midst of the fallen sentinels, the girth of the half-sunken trees twice and three times the height of Vendanj. Mira led them between two parallel trees, the trunks forming a roofless conduit along the basin. Braethen walked near one tree, placing a hand on the gnarled bark. “This is why the Scar expands. The balance is undone.”

From several strides ahead, Vendanj’s voice boomed, “That is not the whole of it!” The Sheason whirled about, halting them all in mid-stride. “The loss of these stewards and emblems”—he gestured around him at the dead wood without looking—“is an indictment of us all. A blemish we wear as a race, every man and woman on the comfortable side of the Bourne. But it is also the vile product of Quietgiven, prideful, lustful, scornful creatures who would take for themselves and leave the penalties of their avarice for us all to pay in the body of a wounded land.

“We have but one thing that is truly our own, truly ours to give. Everything else belongs not to us, but is ours to watch over, or ours to squander.” Vendanj looked around, seeking each pair of eyes in reproachful instruction.

“There is no great mystery in it, and yet it is priceless beyond all you might own.” Then his voice softened. “Still, some give it away as cheap and sullied as a harlot’s bed linen.” His eyes came to rest on Tahn. “It is our will. Nothing else is forever ours, nothing else so keenly sought by those who hope to Quiet our world, and nothing else much less regarded by the noble, reasoning beasts we have become.” Again his eyes sought each companion, silently naming them.

“Beyond this valley lies the last earth and stone risen from the roots of these fallen sentinels.” He pointed to the peaks of another range just visible over the top of the dead cloudwoods. “And where that earth comes to an end is Tillinghast, the Heights of Restoration, beyond which there is only emptiness, the mists of Restoration that bristle with the permutations of countless lives and choices. It is a cauldron of breath, of Forda, a mirror to help us see behind our own mask.” Vendanj lifted his arms skyward, clenching his fists as though he might take something in hand.

Tahn felt for the lines of the scar on the back of his hand, so like a mallet.

“We come with our petty differences, our disinclinations. And when we taste the mists on our tongues, they will be a scourge that threatens to unmake us. Or when Tillinghast shows us our true selves, we will
wish
to be unmade.”

Vendanj stood motionless for long moments. Then he softly stepped close to Tahn and whispered in his ear, “Prove me wrong. Stand fast at Tillinghast.”

Deep inside, Tahn felt a seed of hope. He wanted badly to do just that.

He turned to Sutter. His friend was white, as though he’d seen a ghost, the very penaebra of lost life.

What has he seen?

They continued on, and as they neared a narrow canyon at the far end of the valley, the sun slid behind the mountains behind them, casting everything in blue shadow. With it came a preternatural stillness, absent the whir of crickets or the call of larks taking to their nests, making every footfall large in the quiet. Sutter started a fire to ward off the chill.

But before Tahn could make his way there, Grant cornered him near a fallen cloudwood. “I know you don’t want to listen to me, but this once, if never again, please.”

It was the only time Tahn had heard the exile use that word. The plea inside it softened Tahn enough to nod.

“I didn’t come to Recityv or with the Sheason to entreat a reunion with you, Tahn. I’ll be honest with you; I don’t know if anything we can do will turn back the tide of what has begun in our world. I sit in the midst of it every day, and sometimes I believe the Quiet has already come, and we are just hearing the echo of our own death throes. It is said by dark poets that we are nothing more than walking earth, upright dust, consuming breath in ignorance.”

Tahn instantly remembered hearing these last words from the creature in the wilds of Stonemount. He’d thought then that they were familiar. He knew now, with his restored memory, where he’d first heard them.

“There are days,” Grant continued, “when I half believe that. But…”

He paused, searching for the right words.

“But whatever you end up thinking or feeling about me, I want you to understand, especially as you go to the Heights, that your mother and I are proud of you. She loves you, Tahn. Her ache when we conceived the plan to hide you away from scrutinizing eyes almost killed her. And for my part, I might have accepted a death sentence rather than go into exile in the Scarred Lands. But we wanted you to have a chance at a good life. And if it came to it, I wanted you to have the strength of body and character to stand at Restoration.”

He put a hand on Tahn’s shoulder.

“I know now that you have become all that we ever could have hoped. What comes after may be black and may destroy you or even yet the land of men, I don’t know. But up to this moment, here, now, nothing more could have been asked of you.

“And come Quiet or chorus, Tahn, I stand behind you with anything that is mine to give … anything.”