Godspeaker Read online

  Godspeaker

  Tessa Crowley

  Copyright © 2016 Tessa Crowley

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 0692710809

  ISBN-13: 978-0692710807

  To my parents, Mark & Terri,

  who are almost entirely to blame for this anyway.

  You and I, little one, we’re not meant for a world like this. After all, it’s in the nature of a shadow to hide from the light.

  But you know that, don’t you? You’ve been hiding from it, too, not so unlike me. And in a world full of light, you and I huddle together in the shadows, and even if you’ve never noticed it, I’ve noticed you. We’re connected, you and I. I look forward to showing you.

  You are so close to coming into your inheritance, and I to mine. I have waited all the years of your world for you, little one. Now that I have you, I know our destiny is nigh.

  You and I, little one, we’ll change everything.

  By my estimation, I have about five days left to live, so I must write this quickly.

  I never pictured myself ever writing an autobiography, though that may be due in large part to the fact that I never really considered I’d have a life worthy of one. But here at the end of all things, alone in my prison cell, while the very world crumbles around the city, I understand the urgency of giving this dreadful sundering a narrative and a context.

  And I know – gods, I know – that I am the villain, the public enemy, and I know there’s a good chance that these parchments will be burnt as heretical lies the moment they’re discovered, but I must take that risk. I must pray that some value is found in this story. There are people yet living who I love very much, and who deserve the truth. Gods willing, this will find its way back to them – although in my experience, the gods want very little any of us should want.

  My name is Silas of House Olen, and contrary to popular opinion, I was not spawned in the dark pits of Umbrion’s Shadow with murder in my eyes and darkness in my heart. I was born in the usual way, two generations out from the First Andels, and my life was, for the most part, really quite ordinary.

  “What is that useless contraption?”

  (And of course, no fair account of my life could begin with anything but criticism from my grandmother.)

  “It’s a l-l-lens.”

  “Is that why you’ve locked yourself up here for the past two days? Glass?”

  “Y-yes, Grandmother.”

  (Nor indeed would it be complete without my embarrassing inability to defend myself. I am striving for accuracy, after all.)

  “Come downstairs,” she said impatiently, and at last I tore my eyes away from my work and looked back at her, to where she was standing in my bedroom doorway. My grandmother was a beautiful woman, all long limbs and dark hair and cutting wit. I’d inherited everything but her articulacy, which was a shame. My life would have been much easier if I’d been uglier but without the stutter. “We need to discuss the festivities.”

  I could not imagine anything I wanted to talk about less, but as I’ve already demonstrated, I never had the necessary wherewithal to stand up to her.

  “I’ll be right d-d-d—”

  But she was gone before the word came out. She never did have the patience for my impediment. I sighed and turned forward to my desk again.

  I try to picture my desk in my mind and it seems like a distant dream, coming to me only in broad strokes and impressions, even though at the time I knew every detail of the chaos. As I recall, it was a mess of delicate instruments and large chunks of glass in various states of transition to a lens. I had just put the finishing touches on my new high-powered spyglass, and I snapped the final lens into place before I gathered it up and set off downstairs.

  My home is something I remember with more clarity. Like most of the capitol, it was a building of sandstone, its rooms and halls carved from the living rock, lit with oil lamps. As House Olen was a family of some standing within the city, we were afforded certain luxuries. Incense that filled the house with the smell of jasmine, steam vents from the spring beneath the city to keep us warm, and of course there was the art: beautiful mosaics along the walls and floor, colorful tapestries, and potted ferns and flowers. It was a lovely home, and by rights it should have been an ideal place to grow up. Perhaps it would have been for a different child.

  When I came up to the top of the stairs leading into the atrium, I straightened the front of my tunic with my free hand. It was a habit done by rote; I’d long since learned that my family would take any opportunity to criticize me, and that it was best to not give them a head start. Once my clothes were pulled right, I started down the steps.

  “… three hundred seasons already. My goodness, how they fly.” I recognized the voice as Father’s. “I remember when you were squalling in my arms, and now my son is set to become a statesman and a sorcerer.”

  I knew they weren’t talking about me – I was most assuredly nothing like a statesman or a sorcerer – and that left only one intensely unpalatable alternative: Perenor was home early from his training. I’d thought he’d be gone for at least another day, training with the other acolytes of Craft in the monastery on the hill outside the city.

  “Careful, Father,” I heard Perenor answer good-naturedly as I reached the bottom floor, “you sound almost maudlin.”

  “Silas, there you are.”

  At this time of night, the glass ceiling of the atrium let in only starlight and the soft ethereal glow of the sky-river. The bulk of the light came from the hearth against the wall, burning brightly and illuminating the faces of my mother, father, brother, and grandmother as they watched me arrive.

  “G-good evening.”

  “What in Sol’s Light is that ridiculous thing?” Perenor asked at once.

  Self-consciously, I hugged the spyglass to my chest.

  “It’s f-f-for looking at stars.”

  “What is it with you and stars?” Perenor stanched it from my grasp and peered into the wrong end. I grabbed it back at once, before he could do any damage to it.

  “Wh-wh-what are y-you even d-d-doing home? I th-th-thought you’d b-be g-gone for another d-d-day.”

  “Came back early to help plan our party, of course,” he answered. “Are you excited, brother-mine?”

  He smirked in a way I would charitably describe as shit-eating. I glared back at him.

  “Behave,” our mother said severely. “One would never guess that you two shared my womb.”

  Brothers were a rare enough thing and twins even rarer, and though I had some vague concept of a special bond shared only by siblings, I had never felt it with Perenor.

  “We were discussing the arrangements for the party,” my mother continued. She was lounging on the divan with a glass of what I guessed was mulled wine. If I was an echo of Grandmother, Perenor was an echo of Mother – she gave him his sandy hair, bronze skin, strong build. “Queen Nerisa has agreed to allow the party to be hosted in the palace.”

  A tremor of dread ran through me. “You w-w-w-won’t make me g-go, will you?”

  “Oh, honestly, Silas,” my father sighed.

  “You don’t want to attend your own coming-of-age celebration?” my grandmother asked. She sounded cross, though not entirely surprised.

  “I d-d-d— I d-d—”

  “Don’t like people?” Perenor interjected. “We’ve noticed.”

  I glared at him a second time for good measure. Not because he was wrong, but because I’d never forgiven him, or anyone in my family, for not seeing why and to what degree I didn’t like people.

  “You have to at least show up,” Father said. “It’s being hosted in the palace.”

  One of the benefits of having a mother and grandmother on the Queenscourt, no doubt. It was unclear to me, ho
wever, in what way this great honor was supposed to make me more likely to attend.

  “I d-d-d-d—”

  “You’re coming,” Grandmother said severely. “I won’t have anyone noting your absence from your own party. Surely you can find less conspicuous ways to embarrass your family.”

  It was difficult for me to say which was the more unpleasant feeling – the fear or the shame. After three hundred seasons, I knew I was a perpetual thorn in the side of my house, gregarious politicians and policymakers all, but it never stopped hurting to hear them remind me. I shut my eyes a moment and took a few breaths to calm my nerves and stutter.

  “I’m g-g-going to the b-bluff.”

  “I take it you don’t have any opinion on the guest list or entertainment?” Perenor asked glibly, and I glared at him one last time for good measure, heaved my spyglass under my arm, and set out through the front door onto the street.

  At night, Ellorian was a labyrinth of sandstone buildings and pools of orange lamplight, of cool night air and salty wind off the sea. Ours was a sleepy borough of the city, higher than the rest, commanding an excellent view of the capitol and the stretch of shoreline onto which it was built.

  For me, the city was always best at night: quiet, dark, still, blessedly empty. In the day, it was too much – too bright, too loud – but at night, it felt almost sacred, alive with fireflies and gentle rumbling, as though snoring, from the veins of the hot spring just under the streets.

  In any case, it was a preferable alternative to my family.

  I stopped on my way out of the city beneath a familiar window, snatched a pebble from the ground, and threw it so it rattled the glass. I had to throw three more before I saw a silhouette move into frame and the window opened.

  “You could just use the door,” Soya said, leaning out the window, her long hair caught in the wind.

  “Your s-s-servant hates me.”

  “You’re not special. She hates everyone.”

  I grinned at her, holding up the spyglass. “I f-f-f-finished the new lens. Come down; let’s g-go to the bluff.”

  “Maybe I have more important things to do tonight than get drunk and stargaze with the likes of you, Silas of House Olen.”

  “Name one.”

  There was a moment of silence. Even shadowed by the light behind her, I could see the grin that split her face a moment later. She ducked back inside and shut the window.

  I was only waiting a few minutes before I heard the door on the other side of the building close, followed by footsteps on stone. Soya came around the moment later, a bag over one shoulder.

  “A little nightbird told me that someone’s having their coming-of-age party in the palace,” she said by way of greeting. I groaned.

  “L-l-let’s not talk about that.”

  “Oh, no, let’s,” she insisted, and I started off down the road out of the city. “I’m sure you’re absolutely beside yourself with anticipation. All the pomp and pageantry and people; that’s all your favorite things in one event.”

  “They’re m-m-making me go,” I sighed.

  “It’s bound to be the biggest social event of the season,” Soya continued as though she hadn’t heard me. “And that’s counting the upcoming Queensday Tournaments.”

  “Do you th-think you could come up with a clever l-l-lie to get me out early?”

  Soya laughed. “Just tell them you want to get a good spot to watch the Godspeaker’s arrival,” she suggested, just as we pushed open one of the side gates leading out of the city. All at once, we were at the edge of the wilds stretching south out of the city, all softly waving palm fronds and whispering tallgrass. The path leading up to the bluff was dark, but one that we both knew well and had no trouble navigating.

  “Is that on the s-s-same day?”

  “I think so. I mean, only one of the Godspeakers has arrived so far. I heard that Greatmother Amira is due to come next.”

  Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t really picture what it is a Godspeaker might look like, especially the Worldmother’s. They were holy people, so far removed from the experience of a secondborn in the capitol that they were not so much actual people as ideas.

  “I d-do want to see her arrival,” I decided, making a sharp left at a palm to follow the steeply sloping path up the bluff. When Aemor’s Godspeaker had arrived, it had been nothing short of a parade, so the arrival of the mouth and the hands and the will of the Worldmother was sure to be even bigger.

  I walked in silence for the rest of the way, though Soya was chattering enough for the both of us. I never minded how much she talked; it made up for the fact that I, after ten years of training myself never to say more than was absolutely necessary, hardly spoke at all.

  Ours was a path long memorized, and we made it to the bluff in good time, rewarded for our huffing and puffing with a breathtaking view. From so high, we could see miles and miles of shoreline – the endless, rolling, night-blackened waters glittering with pinpricks of starlight – and the whole of the capitol laid out at our feet, the veins of the city lit up with yellow-gold lamplight.

  Most spectacular of all was the sky-river, stretching from horizon to horizon in an incredible arc of impossible colors.

  I was never what you would call sentimental – in fact, I’d go so far as to say that mine was a mind more analytical than most – but ever since I was small, I had always been awed by the beauty and majesty of the nighttime sky. When I was a child, I would stay up late and stare out my window at all the little specks of light, dreaming of what they were.

  The obsession had grown from there, despite (or perhaps because of) everyone around me telling me how ridiculous it was to be so fascinated with something as irrelevant as the stars.

  I set up my spyglass, and Soya collapsed on the soft moss bed along the side of the creek that trickled over the edge of the bluff. During the monsoon, the creek was closer to a river and the moss was inaccessible, so Soya always made use of it during the dry season.

  “You shouldn’t go, you know,” she told me as she got comfortable, rummaging through her leather satchel and eventually producing a skin of what was most likely mead.

  It took me a moment to remember what she was referring to. “I d-d-don’t have a choice.”

  “Sure you do. Just tell them to go fuck themselves and don’t show up.”

  “That does sound like s-s-something I would do,” I answered with a smirk, bending slightly to search the sky with the spyglass. The new lenses were perfect – crystal clear and much stronger than the last model.

  Her voice was tender, suddenly; concerned: “You’ll have to learn to stand up for yourself eventually, Si.”

  I spared her a half-glance and a quarter-frown. “You s-sound like my grandmother.”

  “Not that she isn’t awful or anything,” Soya said, “but she does make the occasional point.”

  I had more than a little to say to that, but quickly decided that I had neither the patience nor the inclination to get through them. Anything I couldn’t say in twenty words or less wasn’t worth saying. So instead I let her drink and searched the horizon for one of my favorite stars.

  “Would it be easier if I went with you?” she asked suddenly.

  I looked back at her again, smiling. “As my d-d-date?”

  Soya snorted and took a long swig of her mead.

  “K-keep showing up in p-p-public with me and people will t-talk,” I said. “We’re b-both of age n-n-now.”

  “No offense, Si,” she answered, “but I’m way out of your league.”

  I laughed, but she wasn’t wrong. As the firstborn of the noble house of Rhodan, Soya was out of a lot of peoples’ leagues.

  “No, just as a friend,” she continued a moment later, settling down on her elbows. “I think I’ve gotten rather good at scaring people away from you.”

  “M-m-my favorite thing about you. Sure, you sh-should come.”

  “I would never turn down free food and alcohol.”

  I was
about to set to the task of putting my favorite star back into focus when something caught my eye, skirting across the horizon.

  “Wh-wh-wh-what’s that?”

  “What’s what?”

  “That.”

  Soya reluctantly lifted her head, and I pointed at it. It was just to the left of the sky-river, brilliant silver-white with a long tail, larger than any star.

  I looked back at her in time to see her frown.

  “It’s n-n-n-not a star,” I said, swiveling the spyglass around and hunting for it. Behind me, I heard Soya pushing herself to her feet. Through the spyglass, I could see the long tail with better detail – a streak of fading silver with hints of blue and violet, flickering as though they were on fire. “It’s b-beautiful.”

  “May I?”

  I moved out of the way to let her look. She ducked down and fell silent a moment.

  “Wow,” she said. “It’s like it’s flying. A flying star.”

  “It’s n-n-not a star,” I said again. “C-can’t be.” I moved toward the underbrush and kicked over a large shale rock, where underneath I left all my star charts, bound and wrapped with waxed leather to protect them from the elements. “S-s-stars don’t just come and g-go like that, they have p-p-p-patterns…”

  I knew as much because I’d written about them extensively, charting them in exhaustive detail for over two hundred seasons. This wasn’t a star, I was sure of it – this was an anomaly.

  I sat down beside my spyglass and flipped open the heavy book of star charts in my lap. The first pages went back to my childhood, with nothing but poorly-formed drawings of constellations, but the further on they went, the more precise they became, more expansive. By the time I got to the stick of charcoal serving as a bookmark, it was all careful notes and detailed equations. I scribbled a few sentences about—

  “I d-d-don’t know what to call it.”

  “A flying star,” Soya insisted.

  “It’s n-not a star!”

  “It looks like one.”

  I sighed. Until I knew for sure what it was, perhaps it was the best name. I kept writing, marking the location on the horizon and the hour.