Rift in the Sky

Enris stood in the midst of his new Clan, at the center of his old, the focus of all eyes. He was magnificent, Aryl thought, holding in a rush of pride that had no place here and now. Straight-shouldered, serious, with a lift to his head that gathered attention and kept it. Nothing of uncertainty or youth. Everything of strength.

“This truenight, we will give our names to Sona. So doing, in the way of our people, we become Sona and leave our past Clans behind.” His deep voice carried through the room. Through their bones. “Yet we need not.”

Naryn stepped forward. Though freed, her glorious red hair cloaked her shoulders in calm, obedient waves. In her hands was a stack of the metal plates Adepts used for their records. Enris gestured. “Here are the names of those who died in the reshaping of Tuana. We who remember them as the living ask that they be given to Sona with ours. We ask that they not be forgotten with our deaths, but remain here to touch the future. Forever real.”

To keep the past. A concept he’d learned from the Human.

The others hadn’t expected this. Aryl lowered her shields and tasted their puzzlement. They weren’t unwilling; they simply didn’t understand. How could the past stay real?

Something was rising in the M’hir. Could the others feel it? Aryl wondered. Surely they must.

Then . . . like a flood . . . memories burst into her mind. Vivid, crisp.

... A roadway. Buildings of wood and colored metal and a kind of block that wasn’t stone. Strong, sturdy, elegant shapes. A Meeting Hall with stairlike benches that rose to the ceiling.

Faces. Voices. Om’ray she’d never met or known. Hands busy at work. Metal melting and flowing into shapes. Fields that stretched to the horizon. Immense machines, blades slicing through stalks.

Voices. Faces.

The smell of baking. Something sweet and fragrant. Her mouth watered.

Laughter, ease. A life so different from that of Yena she felt unmade. Stars overhead. Glows in a tunnel. Ramps and twists and beams of heavy wood.

Everywhere, life. People. Connected and whole. They had names . . .

Names she could hear because all around her they were being spoken aloud, as if in greeting. Her mouth was moving, too.

The memories faded . . . the echoes died.

The Om’ray of Sona stared at one another, then at Enris.

There was a sheen of sweat on his face. The sharing had come with effort. Beko Serona wept silently beside him. Stryn Licor’s daughters supported their mother. The Tuana were shaken, if triumphant.

Naryn started, then smiled as the metal plates lifted from her hands, rose into the air over their heads, then came to the outstretched hands of Fon Kessa’at. The unChosen hugged them to his chest, as if relieved by his own control. His friend, Cader Sarc, squeezed his shoulder, looking askance at Veca and Tilip, Fon’s parents. They merely smiled at him. So, Aryl thought with approval, the younger generation understood.

“We’ll enter them into the record,” Oran said quietly. Aryl.

Ah, yes. The original reason for the clothes and clean hair, for the rokly cakes cooling on the tables of rough wood they’d had to bring with them, for the tables themselves. She took her place on the dais, the Tuana quietly stepping aside. When Enris would have gone with them, she captured his hand in hers but didn’t look at him.

“This truenight,” Aryl told her people, consciously following the pattern he’d set, “we give our names to Sona.” Smiles. A sense of relaxation. This, they’d expected. “Each and every one of you will be shown how to open the Cloisters’ doors.”

Not expected. She hadn’t prepared the rest for this.

A few exchanged looks. Husni’s mouth hung open. Haxel spoke. “Only Adepts open a Cloisters. We’re not Adepts.”

“You don’t need to be.” Hoyon’s face was impassive, but Oswa flinched. Aryl paused to frown at him. “Secrets,” she said pointedly, “have no value here. We are too few, too far from any other safety. Sona’s Cloisters must open for anyone. The outer doors are a simple trick of Power, easily done by anyone whose name is recorded here.”

Or by an unknown bearing a child conceived in Sona, if she had Power enough to impress the Cloisters; a less-than-tactful speculation of Oran’s Aryl preferred not to mention.

“The inner doors and levels open in the same way, but only to those bearing the ‘di.’ ” She paused. “So all of us will.”