PodCastle

* Author : Sara Saab
* Narrator : C. L. Clark
* Host : C. L. Clark
* Audio Producer : Peter Adrian Behravesh
*
Discuss on Forums



Originally published by Beneath Ceaseless Skies.


Rated PG-13.
Suddenwall
By Sara Saab
In the amnesty-city of Vannat, Aln Panette has let guilt go.
The city of Vannat is a strict and inscrutable rulemaster, so Panette doesn’t question the rules. She lives a plain, clean life. Keeps her recollections as free of the war as she can.
Panette figures she has earned an indulgence or two for her decade as a soldier. Memories of Odarr Harvei are one indulgence. Harvei’s smile of fifteen years ago flashing in the light of the war caravan’s lanterns, her easy company, their mild one-upmanship. The unbroken sky above them.
Other small indulgences Panette allows herself:
Leading the stallions at Vannat’s racecourse stables through their daily exercises.
A now-and-then treat of salted fish in tart molasses that reminds her painfully of Camillon, her home.
And in this city of unremarkable languages passed naturally from parent to child, not a drop of magic in the syllables, not the barest trace of rebellion or fury, Panette indulges in the knowledge that — at least in Vannat — the killing has stopped.

Seven years after Panette’s last encounter with Harvei, accidental, fraught, a neighbor appears at her door. He’s here to tell her that a veteran from Panette’s war caravan (“Harway? Halveigh? Not so easy to hear through stone — ”) has been trapped by a suddenwall. Panette jogs a long time down dusty side streets, her throat hot and tight and dry. The morning is dull as pewter. Commotion in the city’s Southern Quarter winds her nerves tight.
The suddenwall’s appeared inside a house that smells exactly like Harvei, bark and new-woven muslin. A crowd’s concentrated at it: a seamless floor-to-ceiling curve of ochre stone that isolates a corner of the starkly furnished bedroom. There’s a cocksure ruckus, as if every ex-tactician and ex-armorer in Vannat has gathered here. Fists against arcane masonry. Voices pitched to carry through stone. Battering poles hoisted, crowbars hefted.
“We’ll get you out.”
“How many behind there?”
Panette hears an answer hop from tongue to tongue: three. There are three of them walled off by the vigilante immune response of the city.
Three that Vannat has judged? Or two, or one, plus collateral? (Three people — in what must be Harvei’s bedroom. That, Panette does not unpack.)
Panette pushes to the front, shouldering other veterans aside. Rests fingertips against the suddenwall.
“Harvei!” she shouts.
The rescue party is so loud. Panette hears nothing from the other side. Questions she would ask, given time and privacy: What did you do, Harvei? How did you make Vannat so mad? Where have you been, these years?
Question she does ask, again and again: “Harvei, it’s Panette, can you hear me?”
And finally, from the other side, a voice she’d never forget in a thousand years: “Panette? I’m — ”, and something obscured, and “Help.”
Panette would have helped her anyway. She can’t turn away. But everyone gathered here knows that whomever Vannat meant to hold here, meant to extrude — there’s no way to stand Vannat down. Not really.
Three the city has judged; or two, or one, and collateral.

A long time ago,