The Unbalancing by R. B. Lemberg

Author:R. B. Lemberg [Lemberg, R. B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Tachyon Publications
Published: 2022-09-20T07:00:00+00:00

Ranra

I woke up in bed next to the sleeping Lilún. The bed, thank Bird, was new—lower and firmer than the old one, and most importantly, mine. Lilún and I had had no chance for anything last night—they were exhausted by work and overwhelmed by the strangeness of staying at Keeper’s House. I had hugged them to sleep. Now, with the light climbing through the shuttered window, they looked peaceful and so heartbreakingly beautiful in their trust that for a moment I had to remind myself that this was real. Like me, Veruma had been early to rise, and always in a foul mood; but Lilún only nestled deeper into the cushions. They had wanted to introduce me to someone—insisted, even—but it wasn’t happening right now.

I tiptoed out of the bedroom, got dressed, and conferred with my people in one of the nearby chambers where Terein used to have breakfast. It was hexagonal and airy, with an inlaid mosaic floor depicting sea serpents and fanciful fish, and not much furniture except for a few couches covered in summer white.

A single large window overlooked the city, and I got my first good look at it after the earthquake. The magical defenses at Keeper’s House had held. We suffered no damage, not even a fallen bookshelf in the library. The rest of the city was not so lucky. Gelle-Geu, a city of some twenty thousand, lay wounded before my eyes. I saw caved-in roofs and scattered rubble. Farther west, Lilún’s neighborhood was the best preserved of them all, so different from the others that I could easily detect it. Above the stricken city the Mother Mountain towered, her peak drowned in gray clouds.

More people were coming into the room, but not every councilor was present. Somay and Bodavar were already out, helping our people. Dorod, I assumed, was with the ships. Penár made sure that I had breakfast rollups and tea, but she, too, was eager to leave. Veruma was nowhere to be seen, and just as I was about to ask after her, Ulár edged into the room, carrying an armful of scrolls. I doubted he’d slept at all. His red-rimmed eyes shone with a feverish light.

He said, “You were right. We don’t have a year. Look.”

He had redrawn the charts completely, sometime before dawn. The scrolls were criss-crossed with thin, agitated lines, connecting with what felt like thousands of singular strands of four and five-syllable deepname tendrils jutting out of the star like a terrified person’s hair standing on end.

“What am I looking at?” I asked.

“I have no idea, Ranra, to tell you the truth. Nothing good.”

“Well, you tell me, Ulár, you charted this . . .”

He slapped another chart on top of the first. The deepname chains—the hairs of long deepnames I saw in the first chart—looked detached on this chart, disconnected from the star. Hair torn out?

“This was charted with a five-hour interval,” Ulár explained. “I worked without pause, on my own—after I was done working with Erígra, and only because they collapsed.

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