Library
Search
Home / Sci-Fi / The Aether Chronicles / The Listener's Burden
The Listener's Burden
Author: Real Brainy
last update2026-10-31 03:15:14

"No," I said.

It was the third time I had said it that evening, and it was beginning to sound less like a decision than a reflex. Lyra sat across the bench from me in the old hall, with a cup of hot fish broth between her palms and her chin lifted in a way I had learned to dread. Beside her, Orin leaned against the wall with his arms folded and his bad hand tucked in his armpit, and said nothing. It was the silence of a man who has decided to let two young people argue until one of them runs ou
Continue to read this book for free
Scan the code to download the app
Previous ChapterNext Chapter

Latest Chapter

  • The Watch

    I did not wake when it happened. I want that clear, because I have been asked about it many times, and people always want it to have been more dramatic than it was.There were no lights. There was no sound that anyone but Dax and the machine heard. I lay on my bench in the dark of the Forge with my eyes shut and my mouth a little open, like a tired child, and somewhere in the third hour of the night, according to the testimony of a thief who had decided to count everything, I sat up.I know this only because he told me. I will set it down as he told it, because it is the only account there is."You sat up," said Dax. "Very slowly. Like a puppet on a string."It was morning, or what the lamps called morning. We were in the old hall, at the foot of the wall of the ledger, and Dax was sitting on the bench with a bowl of porridge growing cold between his knees. He had not touched it. His face was gray, and the skin under his eyes was bruised with sleeplessness, but he spoke with a steady,

  • Forty-Three Minutes

    There is a particular kind of fear that comes from discovering you have been a stranger in your own house.I had known about the minutes for a week. I had carried the number around like a stone in my boot: forty-three. I had said it to myself at the Wells, in the Forge, in the dark of the Hearth, lying awake with my eyes on the ceiling. And in all that time I had not asked the machine a single question about it. I had told myself I was busy. I had a city to feed, an army to arm, a woman in a storeroom with a map in her head. These were all true. They were also, I understood now, a very elaborate way of not looking.So on the fourth night after the debrief, when the lamps had dimmed and the Hearth was quiet, I took a lump of charcoal and went to the long wall in the old hall. I did not look at the ledger. I stood to one side of it, in a clean place, and wrote across the top in small hard letters: THE MINUTES."Show me," I said."Kael—""All of them. Every one. When it happened, how lon

  • What Anhet Knew

    The second vote was closer than the first, and nobody could have predicted who tipped it.I had thought it would go against her. I had stood in the old hall that morning with my arms folded, ready to count the raised hands and keep my face still, and I had watched Garo rise and say, in her flat gravelly voice, that a knife that has been in a man's throat is not a knife you hang in your kitchen. Half the room had nodded. It was a good argument. I had been about to say so.Then a small woman at the back of the hall stood up, with a gray shawl across her thin shoulders, and every head turned."I have been in that woman's care for six years," said Maren.Nobody spoke. It was the first time I had heard her voice in company, and it was exactly as I remembered it: low, warm, a little rough. Lyra, sitting beside her, went very still."She was not kind," said the weaver. "She was not cruel. She was careful. She never let a guard lay a hand on me. She brought me wool when I asked for it, and sh

  • The Mistress of Hands

    Lyra did not touch her mother.I watched it happen, and I have never forgotten it. The little weaver stood on the wet steps of the water gate with her thin arms held out and her gray shawl slipping from her shoulders, saying little bird, little bird, and her daughter stood ten feet away with both fists clenched in her blanket and did not move. She did not weep. She did not speak. Her face had gone as smooth and blank as a stone."Lyra," I said, very low."Don't.""It might be—""I know what it might be." Her voice was a thread, pulled tight. "I've heard that voice. I've heard it come out of my own mouth. I'm not going to touch her, Kael, until I know."The woman's arms sank slowly to her sides. She did not look hurt. She looked, if anything, like someone who had expected it, and had decided in advance to bear it as well as she could. She nodded once, a small, tired, courteous nod, and drew her shawl back up over her hair."That is quite right," she said. "I would not either."It was t

  • The First Vote

    I had never asked anyone's permission for anything in my life, and I discovered that I was very bad at it.I stood at the head of the old hall, in front of the wall of the ledger, with forty-one people sitting on the floor in front of me, and I could not think where to put my hands. I put them behind my back. I put them in front. I folded my arms, which Dax later told me made me look like a man about to be sick. Finally I let them hang, and that was worst of all, because then I could feel how much they were shaking."I've called you here," I said, "because I've been told I'm not allowed to decide this alone."Somebody in the second row coughed, politely. It sounded like a laugh."In three days a woman is coming to the water gate. Her name is Anhet. Some of you have met her. She led the Hands who came at us in the gully. She was the one who took Lyra." I looked at the faces. Hemar, with his cracked oar across his lap. Garo, arms folded, jaw like a rock. Orin leaning against the far wal

  • The Locked Door

    I went up to the seventh terrace on the second night, because I wanted to be afraid of something I could look at.The stair was long and cold and dark, and I took it slowly, one hand against the wall. I had not been up there since the morning Dax first showed me the door. I had told myself it was because I was busy. That was not exactly a lie. I had a city to feed, a Shroud to feed, an army of fishermen to arm and a ledger to keep, and a line of gray cloaks somewhere on the coast road with a child's weapon in a cart. But I had also, I think, been avoiding it the way one avoids a letter one knows to be bad.The great door stood at the top of the stair, exactly as before. Twice my height, set deep in the black stone, with its three silver circles, one inside the other, gleaming faintly in the thin blue light of the crater.I stood in front of it for a long time.CHARGE: 31%. SIGNATURE: 41. ECHO: 24%."All right," I said, to the dark. "I'm ready.""No," said the Interface. "I do not beli

More Chapter

You may also like

Explore and read good novels for free
Free access to a vast number of good novels on MegaNovel app. Download the books you like and read anywhere & anytime.
Read books for free on the app
Scan code to read on App