With slow deliberateness he stepped forward, watching as realization dawned in Belamae’s face. He saw shame pass to surprise, to wonder, then to delight. That last came as little more than a faint smile, not unlike the surface of the stone steps they’d just climbed.
Relief held in his prodigy’s eyes more than anything else, though. And he liked the look of that. It made every moment of remembrance and backaching work bent over his table worth the pain. But there was still an emptiness in the boy. He could feel it, like the reverberating resonance felt in the head of a tightly covered drum.
As he stared at Belamae, the right thing to do occurred to him. He extended the viola to him again, as he’d done what seemed like many cycles ago. Belamae tentatively reached for the instrument. But before his student could take it, Divad whipped it around and brought it crashing down on the hard oak surface of his worktable. The viola strings twanged, the spruce split and splintered, the body smashed into countless pieces, and the neck ripped in three parts. The soundboard he’d labored over lay in ruins. He felt a pinch of regret over it.
But his own loss was nothing compared to the shock and horror that rose on Belamae’s face. It looked like the boy had been physically wounded. His mouth hung agape, his hands held out, palms up, as if beseeching an answer to the violent, incomprehensible vandalism.
“My boy,” Divad said, his voice softly intoning some reason to all this. “Won’t you help me collect the pieces. We’ll see what’s salvageable.”
“Maesteri?”
Divad smiled warmly. “Instruments can be mended, Belamae.” He tapped the lad’s nose. “Come. We’ll see about this together. I’ve decided I rather like this part of instrument care.”
He began to hum a carefree tune, as they gathered in the shattered viola.
Read on for a preview of the
AUTHOR’S DEFINITIVE EDITION OF
THE UNREMEMBERED
BOOK ONE OF
THE VAULT OF HEAVEN
by
PETER ORULLIAN
THE
UNREMEMBERED
PRELUDE TO
THE VAULT OF HEAVEN
“One is forced to conclude that while the gods had the genius to create music, they didn’t understand its power. There’s a special providence in that, lads. It also ought to scare the last hell out of you.”
—Taken from the rebuttal made by the philosopher
Lour Nail in the College of Philosophy
during the Succession of Arguments on Continuity
WHAT HADN’T BEEN BURNED, had been broken. Wood, stone . . . flesh. Palamon stood atop a small rise, surveying the wound that was a city. Beside him, Dossolum kept a god’s silence. Black smoke rose in straight pillars, its slow ascent unhindered by wind. None had been left alive. None. This wasn’t blind, angry retaliation. This was annihilation. This was breakage of a deeper kind than wood or stone or flesh. This was breakage of the spirit.
Ours . . . and theirs, Palamon thought. He shook his head with regret. “The Veil isn’t holding those you sent into the Bourne.”
Dossolum looked away to the north. “This place is too far gone. Is it any wonder we’re leaving it behind?”
“You’re the Voice of the Council,” Palamon argued. “If you stay, the others will stay. Then together—”
“The decision has been made,” Dossolum reminded him. “Some things cannot be redeemed. Some things shouldn’t.”
Palamon clenched his teeth against further argument. He still had entreaties to make. Better not to anger the only one who could grant his requests. But it was hard. He’d served those who lay dead in the streets below him, just as he’d served the Creation Council. Someone should speak for the dead.
“You don’t have to stay,” Dossolum offered again. “None of the Sheason need stay. There’s little you can do here. What we began will run its course. You might slow it”—he looked back at the ruined city—“but eventually, it will all come to this.”
Palamon shook his head again, this time in defiance. “You don’t know that.”
Dossolum showed him a patient look. “We don’t go idly. The energy required to right this . . . Better to start fresh, with new matter. In another place.” He looked up at evening stars showing in the east.
“Most of the Sheason are coming with you,” Palamon admitted.
“All but you, I think.” Dossolum dropped his gaze back to the city. “It’s not going to be easy here. Even with the ability to render the Will . . .”
Palamon stared at burned stone and tracts of land blackened to nothing. “Because some of those who cross the Veil have the same authority,” he observed.
“Not only that.” Dossolum left it there.
“Then strengthen the Veil,” Palamon pled. “Make it the protection you meant it to be.” He put a hand on Dossolum’s arm. “Please.”
In the silence that followed, a soft sound touched the air. A song. A lament. Palamon shared a look with Dossolum, then followed the sound. They descended the low hill. And step by step the song grew louder, until they rounded a field home. Beside a shed near a blackened pasture sat a woman with her husband’s head in her lap. She stroked his hair as she sang. Not loud. Not frantic. But anguished, like a deep, slow saddening moved through her.
Tears had cleaned tracks down her field-dirty cheeks. Or maybe it was char. Like the smell of burning all around them.
But she was alive. Palamon had thought everyone here dead.
She looked up at them, unsurprised. Her vacant stare might not have seen them at all. She kept singing.
Palamon noticed toys now beside the home.
“The city wasn’t enough,” Palamon said, anger welling inside him. “They came into the fields to get them all.”
The woman sang on. Her somber melody floated like cottonwood seed, brushing past them soft and earthward.
Dossolum stood and listened a long while. He made no move to comfort the woman, or to revive the man. His
