Caitlin Brennan - Song Of Unmaking

Valeria’s stomach clenched. “Embracing nothingness? Are you sure?”

“No, I’m not!” he snapped. “I don’t know why I’m even telling you this. I should be telling the Master. Except when I try, it all seems too foolish to bother him with.”

“Believe me,” said Valeria, “there’s nothing foolish about this. What else did you see?”

“What else should I have seen?”

She took a deep breath, praying for patience. “That’s what I’m asking. You haven’t said anything we haven’t all seen, one way or another. What’s the rest of it?”

“I don’t know,” said Paulus. If he had not been so consciously dignified, he would have been squirming in his chair. “I can only tell you what I think it was. There was more about the war. Kings dying and kings being made. And the Mountain. That was the leap at the end. It said, ‘The Mountain is not what you think it is.’”

“That is cryptic,” Valeria said.

“I told you,” he said.

“What do you think it means?”

He flung up his hands. “The gods must know, because I don’t. It’s bad news for us, whatever it is. It says we think we’re safe, but we dance over the abyss. We trust ourselves and our powers, but they’re a delusion. We bury ourselves in tradition, and tradition buries us. This war isn’t on the frontier at all, though there will be battles enough there. It’s here, in our citadel. It will be our undoing, unless we wake up and give it its name.”

Valeria had gone cold inside. Augur or not, Paulus had seen the truth. He had seen the Unmaking.

“You have to tell the Master,” she said, though her throat tried to close and stop her.

“What can he do that he’s not already doing?”

“He needs to know,” Valeria said. “The threat’s not just to the emperor or his army. It’s to us. To the Mountain.”

“We don’t know that,” Paulus said. “I could be all wrong.”

“You’re afraid,” she said.

For once he did not give way to her baiting. She devoutly wished he would. She was afraid, too—deathly afraid. All he had to protect him was the fear that he was wrong. She knew he was right.

“Look,” she said, “Midsummer Dance is in three days. There will be Augurs there. If the Lady Danced the truth, the stallions will, too. The Augurs will see it and everyone will be sure.”

“And if they don’t?”

“If it’s there, they’ll see it.”

Paulus nodded. This gave him a graceful way out of his dilemma. It gave Valeria one, too—though she had far more to be afraid of than he did.

He pulled himself to his feet and smoothed his expression back into place. When it was as haughty as it usually was, he said, “We’d better go. We’re keeping the Master waiting.”

Valeria nodded. Neither of them would talk about this again—until they had to. That was understood.

She expected Paulus to bring her to the Master’s study, but he went on past it. By that time she was almost fit for human company. The worst of her fears were buried and the rest were tightly reined in. She could face the Master with, she hoped, a suitable degree of calm.

Master Nikos was waiting for her in the riding court nearest the Master’s rooms. He had been training one of the young stallions in his care and was just finishing, with a lump of sugar and a pat on the neck, when Valeria came through the arch onto the sand.

Another stallion was waiting, equipped for instruction with the heavy training headstall. His groom stood by him, holding the loops of the long soft line.

The groom took the young stallion’s bridle and led him out. Master Nikos took charge of the older stallion. He was very old, this one, so old he looked like a glass full of light.

Valeria bowed low. This one she did not know, and she had thought she knew every stallion in the citadel.

“This is Oda,” the Master said. “Mount.”

Valeria knew better than to argue. She was too curious in any case—and wary enough to pause before she mounted, to stroke the long arched nose and meet the wise dark eye. There was no threat of humiliation there. This was a test, but it was honest.

She mounted and settled lightly in the saddle. The back under her was broad and, for all its age, still strong.

Oda’s stride when he moved out on the circle at the Master’s request had a swoop and swing that made her laugh. Sabata moved like that, but he was young and still a bit uncertain. This stallion had been instructing riders for longer than Valeria or even Kerrec had been alive.

The Master stood silent in the middle of the circle. This was not his lesson, then. The stallion was teaching it.

Valeria breathed in time with those sweeping strides. She let her body flow into them, riding without rein or stirrup, legs draped softly, hands on thighs. Anger, frustration, even fear and dread of what Paulus had told her, drained away. There was only the thrust and sway of the movement, the sensation of power surging up through those broad quarters. Follow, was the lesson. Simply follow.

She had been taught this way when she first arrived in the citadel, at night and in secret, because she was not allowed the other riders’ instruction. It was familiar, so much so that she forgot the man who was standing in the circle, watching. She was alone with the stallion, who was unquestionably a Great One. He felt almost as vast in the spirit as one of the Ladies.

As if the thought had brought her, Valeria opened her eyes to find the bay Lady there with Briana on her back. They were watching as the Master was, without moving or saying a word.

The Great One’s back coiled. Every instinct screamed at Valeria to snap into a ball or at the very least to clamp on with her legs and cling frantically to the mane on the heavy arched neck. She breathed deep once and then again, for focus and calm. When Oda went up, she rode with him.

He was transcribing patterns in the air as the Lady, the day before, had transcribed them in the sand of the testing ground. These were a part of the whole, but what the whole was or what it meant, Valeria was too close to see.

She did her best to remember the nature and placement of each leap—not easy when she was caught up in them. It was easier if she let her memory of the Lady’s Dance run in the back of her mind. They fit together.

The last leap ended in the center of the circle, directly in front of the Master. He kept rider’s discipline, with his back straight and his face still, but he looked tired and old.

She had never thought of him as old before, even with his grey hair and his lined face. “Is it going to be as bad as that?” she asked him.

He shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “The emperor’s Dance isn’t over. You salvaged a future, but there’s no telling whether that future will be worse than the one you turned us away from. And now…”

“And now it gets stranger,” Briana said when he did not finish. She ran her hand down the Lady’s neck. “I wasn’t expecting this.”

“None of us was,” the Master said. “Even the Augurs are at a loss. We’ve always had at least some glimmer of what is to come—but now we’re stepping blindly into the dark.”

Valeria bit her tongue before she said, “Not the dark. The Unmaking.” That was what the Unmaking did. It swept away all that was or had been or ever would be.

“It’s the end of something,” Briana said to the Master through the fog of Valeria’s maundering. “So many changes. Do you feel them bubbling up under your feet?”

“I feel them,” Master Nikos said. “I wish to the gods I did not.”

Valeria swung down from Oda’s back. She wanted, suddenly, to be done with this. “What is it, then? What did you call me here to do?”