Vault Of Heaven 01 - The Unremembered (7 page)

The tip of the sword smoked in the frigid air and glowed red and orange from Geddy’s fires. The smithy held it aloft. “Have you ever seen such a fine piece of steel?”

Tahn marveled at the blade, not because he recognized the quality of the metal, but because he’d never seen Geddy forge one before. To his knowledge, Geddy never had. Yet the man looked comfortable with the weapon in his hand. He dropped his hammer and hefted the sword from one hand to the other, an odd smile on his face. The steel’s reddish glow gave his gnarled visage a garish look. The lines in his face seemed longer, the large black-filled pores of his face deeper. But his eyes did not look old as he studied the blade in his hands. Abruptly, the smithy seemed to remember Tahn and Sutter and held the blade out for their inspection, never offering to let them hold it.

“Don’t know the owner. Must be here for Northsun.” Geddy turned the blade to the flat edge and looked down its length, checking the straightness of the edge. “Came by a few days back and handed me a … by all my Skies I can still hardly believe it … a folded square of steel.”

Geddy looked at them with crazed excitement, which turned to disappointment as he saw the blankness on Tahn and Sutter’s faces. “Youth,” he harrumphed. “This bit of metal, lads, has been turned over on itself several thousand times. No impurities. It is worth as much as … as the Fieldstone itself.” He laughed from deep in his chest, the sound like rocks shifting upon themselves. “I’ve been at it. But it’s a hard metal. Not, you might say, a Hollows metal.”

Tahn shared a knowing look with Sutter. “You ever make a sword before, Geddy?”

“Just once,” he answered. “Even told the gentleman that. He didn’t care. Just handed me a small satchel containing the square of steel and a princely sum besides, in
silver
.”

“Well it looks like a fine job to me,” Sutter said.

“Thanks, lad.”

Sutter reached to touch the sword. Geddy quickly pulled the weapon back. “Not yours to be putting your hands on. I just thought you might like to
see
it.”

“Actually, its owner is a man named Vendanj,” Tahn said. “He asked us to pick it up for him.”

Geddy cast a wary eye on him.

Sutter gave an exasperated sigh. “Tall guy. Great sense of humor. The kind you want to upset so that he has to come get the sword himself.”

Still Geddy didn’t seem convinced.

“With a woman companion. Grey cloak,” Tahn added. “She moves fast.”

The smithy nodded. “Very well. I know I can trust you.” Sutter faked a hurt look. Geddy put the tip of the blade into his water bucket, where it hissed and steamed. He then pulled the weapon out, tested its temperature with his thumb, and retrieved a rather ordinary sheath to stow the blade. “Tell him I had no time to polish or sharpen.”

With some reluctance, Geddy handed the weapon to Tahn, who had to tug a bit to pry it from the smithy’s fingers. “Thank you.” As he and Sutter turned, Tahn thought he heard old Geddy mutter something about the sword and a strange light in the back of his barn.

CHAPTER THREE

A Late Reader

Braethen Posian sat in the warm light of his lamps and read. His father was Author Posian—A’Posian, as the tradition held—and the problem of it had been Braethen’s access to books. He had little self-control when it came to them. Stories, histories, maps; didn’t matter. And it led to the other hazard of his twenty-six years of life: He’d found the Sodality.

He’d discovered it at the tender age of eight, and loved everything about it: the purpose, the creed, the stories of sacrifice to meet and uphold higher truths. The Sodality covenanted themselves to the Sheason. Braethen had never actually met a renderer. But the Sheason’s utter commitment to service—even at the cost of his own soul—left him holding that order in the highest regard, even though his father had spoken cautiously of the Sheason, warning that they walked between worlds, a path at the edge of what is and what may be, of what can be touched and what can be changed.

And so Braethen had spent the better part of his twenty-six years reading about and yearning to belong to the Sodality. So much so that he’d become a target for mockery—some of it good-natured enough, but a target nonetheless.

The real problem, though, was simply that the Hollows had no Sheason, and so no need of a sodalist.

Not yet,
he thought.
But things could change
.

A knock came at the door.

He jumped up. He hoped to hear that the reader had arrived. He’d made a friend of Ogea. The old man always gave him an evening of discussion when he came to the Hollows, probably because Ogea and Braethen’s father were such good friends. But the old man made time just for Braethen. He shared things with him that he didn’t say from the rooftops. And Ogea was the only person who didn’t tease Braethen about his obsession with the Sodality; in fact, the old man taught him more than he could ever glean on his own. He loved him for that.

With a book still in one hand and a quill clamped in his teeth, he pulled the door open to see Tahn and Sutter. “To what do I owe this pleasure? I know you two don’t read.”

They laughed and pushed past him into the room. “Can we come in?”

As Sutter passed by, he fingered the pin at Braethen’s throat. It was the tarnished copper emblem of the Sodality: a sword on its side, a quill balanced on the blade at its center, the entire crest wreathed in a circlet of copper leaves. He had had it mongered by Geddy in exchange for a sign listing the prices of his various smith services.

Braethen shut the door on the wind and turned to his guests, waiting. He bore the two friends no animosity, even though they were among those who mocked him—though usually in fun. Because he was taller, and both fuller in chest and broader in shoulders than both Tahn and Sutter, he liked to believe if he really wanted to stop their mockery, he could.

“Who’s there?” A’Posian called from a room at the back of the house.

“It’s Tahn and Sutter,” Braethen replied.

The author came into the room and removed his specs to shake the boys’ hands. “What brings you here? I know you don’t read.”

They all laughed at the repeated joke, and the author clapped them on the back before going back to his writing desk. No one ever came to A’Posian’s home without receiving his hand and some small witticism.

After he’d gone, Sutter and Tahn stood staring, a strange look in their eyes. So Braethen did the only sensible thing—he sat back down to his books. He proffered a plate of cheese and berries to the two, who waved it away.

Braethen marked his place in three of the books opened on the table before looking up at the two of them and asking again, “All right, out with it. What’s going on?”

Sutter cocked his head to look at the books strewn across the table. “Why did you not follow in your father’s path and take up the Authors’ way?”

Braethen’s smile faded, and his expression became thoughtful. “I thought I would. Father needed my help even when I was young, so I started copying books for him before you two could even walk.” He was eight Northsuns older than Tahn and Sutter. “But I don’t have Father’s gift for words. I learned that about myself a long time ago. And somewhere in all those books, I found other interests.”

“The Sodality,” Tahn supplied.

“I was drawn to the purpose,” Braethen said, and put his fingers to the brooch at his throat.

“Not a lot of call for it here,” Sutter remarked, rolling his eyes.

“True enough,” Braethen answered, unruffled. “I’ve no real acquaintance with the brotherhood, but I’m still learning, aren’t I?” He smiled broadly.

“What are you reading?” Tahn asked.

Braethen’s eyes glimmered at the question. “Histories mostly, with the occasional journal or map.” He shifted on his chair. “I bought some of them from a merchant down out of Myrr.” He began to gesture, his excitement growing with each passing word. “I suspect they were not gotten legally. I’ve read them all, several times, but there are inconsistencies and vast gaps. Entire ages summarized in a few pages.” He ran a hand through his short, light brown hair. “Each time the reader comes, I have my questions ready.” He paused. “This year I study even more because he has
not
come.” Braethen looked toward the window, beyond which pine boughs swayed softly in the wind.

Sutter closed one of the books. “No offense, Braethen, but … why? Listening to the reader is enough, I say. What good can come of knowing the details of dead things? And after that, isn’t the whole point of being a sodalist to protect a Sheason?”

Braethen replied, unabashed, “The Sodality defends in two ways: the arm and the word. I’m focusing on the word right now.” Again he tapped the emblem at his throat.

This whole “focusing on the word” thing was a small evasion, and he hoped they’d be inclined to let him have it—though they didn’t likely know any better. Besides, after all the joking done at his expense, Tahn had told him once that except for maybe Braethen’s father he thought Braethen was the most ethical, dependable person in all the Hollows, precisely because he lived by the sodalist oath. That had been a good day.

Tahn broke the silence. “I think Sutter’s trying to say that he’s jealous, since digging roots is so awfully important.”

“Yeah, that’s it,” Sutter agreed in a sarcastic tone.

“The past, all the ages of man, show us what will be,” Braethen said, hefting one of the tomes before him. “They help us act today so that tomorrow doesn’t come with all the mistakes that have gone before. This knowledge helps a sodalist serve a Sheason, the two working together in the common interest of others.”

“You sound like a book,” Sutter said.

Braethen ignored him, and turned with familiarity to a passage. “This is our purpose.”

“Here he goes,” Sutter muttered, “with the credo.”

“‘Change is inevitable and necessary, but the traditions of our fathers need to be preserved. Someone must watch. Someone must remember. And someone must defend…’” He trailed off, feeling again as he had the first time he’d read those words: humbled, yet eager to take the oath himself.

“You sound like the reader when you speak of such things,” Tahn said.

Sutter waved a hand in front of Braethen’s eyes. “Yeah, kind of spooky.”

Braethen shook himself physically from his reverie. “The storms have never held so long. It bears another meaning, I think … rain, water … renewal … change. Maybe war.”

A chill ran down Braethen’s own back, and Sutter closed his mouth with an audible sound. Then the would-be sodalist looked up. The little room grew suddenly quite serious. “I’ll tell you the truth. I’m more fond of Ogea than anyone, and I hope he is dead and that we simply haven’t received word of it. Because … I don’t like what I believe is the alternative.”

“What, did you read something like that in your books?” Sutter wanted to know.

But before Braethen could answer, beyond the door the sound of slow hooves fell upon the street. At the lonely echo of a rider on the muddy roads of the Hollows, another chill rushed over him. They all went to the window to look out. The window began to cloud before his face and he unwittingly held his breath. Outside, the wind moaned over the eaves of the house and sighed through the trees.

The rider passed, so slowly that there could be no mistaking his identity: the reader. Ogea sat slumped in his saddle, his forehead resting upon the neck of his mule. In a moment, he vanished again down the road, lost beyond the trees surrounding Braethen’s home.

“Let’s go,” Braethen said. He ran to the back of the house and told his father the reader had arrived. Then he donned his cloak and flew out the door, Tahn and Sutter close behind him.

It took but a short walk to catch up to the reader. Ogea’s mount plodded along steady and slow.

As was tradition, the reader wound through the Hollows, saying nothing, his procession his only announcement. Townsfolk and Northsun travelers flocked to the street, as they always did, today drawing their coats and cloaks tightly around them as they followed behind. There was always a quiet reverence at Ogea’s passage, but this time Braethen felt a sullen edge to the silence.

Dirt-stained and torn, the reader’s cloak bore black-fringed holes as though left too close to a fire. Underfoot, the mud on the road, now being trod by a hundred boots or more, made soft sucking noises in the early dusk.

The wind continued to howl, and somewhere on the Huber River a water hawk protested the wretched skies that hindered its hunting, its call a faint but ominous shrill.

Finally, the procession drew toward the Fieldstone. A crowd stood in the street before the inn, ready to welcome the reader. The mass parted as Ogea’s mule kept on straight, paying them no mind. Behind him, the crowd came together again. At the far corner of the inn, the reader stopped. He slid from his saddle, and steadied himself with his pommel. His satchels hung as they always had upon the flanks of his mule. Ogea reached inside, drawing out a scroll that bore a wax seal.

“My Skies. He’s never read from the old parchment before,” Braethen said reverently. “He usually carries a book with him to the roof.”