Trial of Intentions by Peter Orullian Page A

didn’t wait long.
    Moments later, two forms at the far edge of his senses moved subtly, looking west and judging. He could feel them assessing the escaping rider, considering their response. The movements and assessments touched Vendanj the way a ripple at one end of a pond will reach the far shore.
    Then stillness again. Vendanj had his answer.
    He ran back far enough that his companions could hear him. “With me!”
    Then he spun, and bolted toward the city wall. He glimpsed Mira and Grant and Tahn as they began to follow. Over the scree and shale he raced, dread filling him with each running stride. How could I have been so blind!
    He waved a hand twenty strides from the ramparts, signaling the guard to open a way for them. They passed through on a dead run. The clap of their boots on cobbled stone echoed through the vacant streets. Far children had been hidden. Far warriors were embroiled in battle. But a Far contingent would be standing guard at the vault library. Grant a fool a prayer.
    Vendanj mounted the steps to the Naltus Forum, and crashed through the main doors into the forum proper. Oil lamps burned about the room, but there was no sign of Quietgiven. The chairs still stood upright, undisturbed, and the air remained settled, unmoved by the eddies of recent motion. But his skin prickled with anticipation. Something was close.
    He dashed through the center of the room toward the stone stairway, which descended into blackness. Lying on the top few steps, their blood pooling beneath them, were two Far and two Bar’dyn. They’re here. He grabbed a nearby lamp and started down, Braethen and the others close behind. At the base of the first set of stairs they came to a massive stone portal where a door should have stood. The short landing lay strewn with the rubble of what had been the door. And more bodies—four Far, two more Bar’dyn.
    These doors were ward-locked. No battering ram would have crumbled them.… Velle.
    He stepped over the dead, through the piles of broken stone, and down a second set of stairs. Through two more ruined doorways they went, the dead count rising—a handful of Bar’dyn, a Velle … over twenty Far. But he heard no moan or clatter from the dark corridors ahead. There was only the labored breathing of the sodalist behind him, and their own hurried movements. They descended deeper beneath Naltus, navigating the labyrinth that protected the Language of the Covenant.
    The Covenant Tongue was the language of the Framers—those gods who’d formed the world of Aeshau Vaal before abandoning it. The smallest parts of its speech could be perfectly understood and used and combined. One could speak something into existence. Or unmake it. With this language, the Quiet could end the Veil that held them, walk into the Eastlands. What had been harbored as an instrument against the possibility of such an invasion would become the tool of its success.
    Vendanj shivered. This was why the Quiet hadn’t tried to flank the First Legion, or press on the city as a whole. The war on the shale was a diversion, while a small band stole its way into the heart of Naltus to seize the Covenant Tongue.
    If that happened, everything he’d done and sacrificed would be for nothing. He thought of his wife and unborn child; both had died years ago in the aftermath of a Quiet attack. Though blame for that belonged to the League of Civility, too. On the authority of a law known as the Civilization Order, the League had prevented Vendanj from helping his injured wife.
    The Quiet and the League. Two godsdamned sides of the same coin.
    Down several sets of stairs they passed, weaving inward and earthward. He could only hope that the protections of darkness, silence, and the labyrinth itself would safeguard what lay below until they could get there.
    They passed another doorway. More dead Far.
    Soon, he glimpsed a flicker of light ahead. A few moments later they stepped out