by C. E. Murphy
No one stood on the other side. Rubble lay everywhere, like someone had come through smashing inner walls with a vast hammer.
Doors were torn off their hinges, shutters dangled uselessly from windows. It looked like it had been abandoned for decades and left to fall to pieces, but as Rasim's wide gaze took in more, he realized there were huddled, still forms on the ground. Bodies, wearing soldiers' insignia on the heavy fur cloaks that kept winter cold off them. Had kept the cold off: they would never need the cloaks again.
"Something's wrong." Rasim's voice, barely a whisper, still cracked when he spoke. "Something terrible has—!"
An enormous stone snake burst from an inner door and lunged at them with gaping jaws.
Chapter Twenty-Two
They screamed and scattered, flinging themselves in every direction to avoid the snake. Its scales hissed across the icy-slicked ground and tore into the stone, dust rising from its passage. It turned with far more speed than something its size should be able to, huge jaws slamming together, enormous fangs driving holes into the garrison's stone floor. Rasim felt its breath chase him as it narrowly missed his legs. He hit the ground, rolled, and leaped to his feet again, running without knowing where he was going. He tore up a set of stairs carved from the stone, expecting the snake's breath to blow over him again.
Worse: it didn't. That meant the vast beast had turned on one of the others as its quarry. Rasim flung himself back down the stairs, not thinking.
Lars lay on top of Sondra, protecting her as they cowered in a corner. Kisia was nowhere to be seen. The snake struck at Lars, but its blunt nose bashed into the outer stone walls they were tucked between. It reared back, hissing with outrage, and struck again, to the same effect. Then it turned at great speed and went the other way, mouth open, tongue darting out as it searched for easier targets.
It was every bit as large as the sea serpent Rasim had once faced, and serpentine as well, but the resemblance ended there.
The serpent's face had been eel-like, elongated, narrow, whiskered: the stone snake's was blunter, wider, and its jaws opened much, much farther than the serpent's had. Its scales crackled when it moved, the sound of stone breaking and reforming faster than the eye could see, but its debris hung in the air and littered the earth. It was as dark and striated as the mountains themselves, with streaks of reddish-orange, like rusted iron, along its body. Dirt clotted under some scales, and in places scraggly plants still hung on. It had been the mountain, and now the mountain had come alive.
Rasim's hands went cold as he thought of the scale-like appearance of the lower walls outside the garrison. He twisted, staring upward at the mountains towering above them. The sea serpent had been a single creature, but if the snake was the mountain, if the scales outside the fort were a part of the beast that hadn't yet awakened, then it might unwind from deeper and deeper within the stone, never ending. It might drag the mountains along on its back, and tear the world apart, if they couldn't stop it.
Rasim clenched his fists, willing warmth back into them. There was not a snake in Ilyara that could survive having its head
struck off. Even a snake born of stone couldn't be that different from the hooded, poisonous creatures that slithered down Ilyaran streets.
The only problem was cutting the head off a snake whose spine stood twice Rasim's height from the ground.
It reared up again, hissing mouth spread wide. Then it doubled, diving. Stone ripped and tore as the earth itself swallowed the snake. It did have an end, thank Siliaria: it had a tail that whipped the air and drove the beast deeper into the ground.
Rubble clattered and spilled across the suddenly empty earth, the hole sealing itself over as the snake disappeared into it. Rasim swayed, staring at the undisturbed rock in befuddlement.
As fast as it had disappeared, the snake returned, this time surging upward beneath Lars and Sondra. Sondra's scream shattered the air, but only the snake's lower jaw protruded from the ground beneath them. The garrison walls shuddered and shook with its impact, and for an instant it was as though Rasim could see through the rock.
"It's witched!" Rasim's voice broke with comprehension. "The garrison, it's witched somehow! The snake can't get out of it! It
—it hit its face when it—!" A giggle dissolved his ability to explain. He could see it as clearly as if it the walls were water. The snake clearly knew it couldn't pass the garrison walls, and had tried to judge its spacing, but its vast head was too large. It couldn't come up beneath Lars and Sondra in their protected corner without bashing its nose into the impenetrable walls. As Rasim giggled, the snake sank away again into the earth's depths. "Stay there," Rasim shouted to the Northerners.
"Just stay there. It can't get to you!"
Though they obviously didn't think it was funny, both Northerners nodded. Rasim knew they were right, but laughing and being able to think was far better than fear and frozen indecision. And they'd agreed to stay put, even if they didn't know why he was laughing. That was enough. That was one thing Rasim didn't have to worry about.
The snake burst out of the stone in front of him, hungry jaws wide again. Rasim jumped sideways, so close to the closing jaws his arm brushed the strangely soft stony skin at the side of its mouth. Behind him, the entire stairwell he'd been standing in collapsed under the snake's bite: it wasn't magicked the way the garrison walls were. He had to reach them for safety, and from there, find Kisia. He was on his feet, running, before the plan had fully formed.
There were crags and buttresses all along the garrison walls, places for sentries to hide from the wind as they watched for trespassers beyond the walls. Rasim flung himself into one as the snake turned again, dust billowing from its mouth. Its eyes were
depthless brown, not black like every other snake Rasim had ever seen. The color of good earth, that's what they were. The color of earth that would grow food and give life. It seemed strange that a creature bent on eating them would have eyes like that.
The beast struck at him repeatedly, though it never came close enough to smash its nose against the witched walls. It didn't have to, though, to keep Rasim pinned there. He started forward once or twice, only to be driven back again immediately.
Kisia appeared from behind the snake's coiled body, running at top speed. She bent and scooped up a dead soldier's sword without missing a step, moving so smoothly she might have been dancing in the sea. She sprang from a low stone to a higher one, her lithe form darting higher and higher in great bounds. Then she was in the air, sword held in both hands, raised above her head as she fell an impossible distance toward the snake's head.
Panicked laughter burst in Rasim's chest. He had taken that very leap from the Waifia 's mast when he fought the sea serpent. He wondered if anyone had seen him as clearly as he now saw Kisia, clearly enough to appreciate the beauty and grace of her pose as she fell. She was perfect, brave, heroic, and completely crazy.
The cold metal sword blade shattered into a thousand pieces as it slammed against the snake's stone skull.
It bellowed and flung its head back. Kisia went flying again, thrown across the yard. She tumbled end over end, so quickly Rasim couldn't possibly follow her with his eyes, but somehow he saw her white-faced terror, and the way she sealed her lips so she wouldn't scream. Rasim shouted, flinging his hands out as if he could catch her. Witchery surged within him, but the sea was too far away to answer in time.
A huge stone hand formed out of the rock wall and caught her gently in its grasp.
For an instant, silence hung over the garrison. Then Kisia leaped onto the stone hand's fingers and punched the air with her fist.
" Yeah !"
The snake whipped around and struck at the stone hand. Kisia howled and slide inside its protection. The snake's jaws closed around it and it thrashed, trying to crush or absorb the hand, but like the witchery-infused outer walls, it couldn't pass through the witch-shaped stone. Rasim heard Kisia's shouts and wondered if she still had the sword stub, whet
her she was jabbing the roof of the snake's mouth, or was just disgusted at being half swallowed. He had to trust the stone hand would hold, and that the snake would be distracted long enough for him to find a way to defeat it.
A familiar, unexpected voice called, "Rasim! Up here!"
Rasim spun, searching the parapets. Telun, pale with concentration, waved at him from atop the tall stone walls.
Relief took the strength from Rasim's legs. His knees buckled and he hit the earth, fingers digging into broken shards of stone.
The weight of stonemastery suddenly seemed evident, permeating the garrison walls. No wonder the snake couldn't dive through them. No wonder the stone had shaped itself to save Kisia. He looked up, asking, "Milu?" so raspily he doubted Telun would hear him.
The other journeyman nodded anyway. Relief as strong as the first wave hammered Rasim down even farther, until his forehead touched the ground and his lungs were full of rock dust. He hadn't known how badly he was worried about the Stonemaster journeymen until he learned they were safe.
Not that the garrison was really safe . Still, some-how, knowing that Milu and Telun were alive gave Rasim strength. And Kisia was alive, and she would tease him mercilessly if he didn't get up.
He had slain a sea serpent. He and three other Ilyaran witches could handle a stone snake in the far, frozen North.
Frozen. Ice. Isidri could freeze the very water, a vanishingly rare skill among Seamasters. But stone shattered under ice's pressures, and they had no other weapon that might work. Not unless the Stonemasters could shape a sword of stone that would penetrate the snake's hard skull.
That sounded like a much better idea than risking them all on the chance Rasim could now make ice from salt water. He filled his lungs and bellowed, " Shape a sword !" at Telun, whose round face went blank, then bright with understanding.
"It'll take me a few minutes! Milu is—" Telun waved his hands and disappeared, leaving Rasim staring upward in bewilderment. Either Milu was hurt and unable to work the stonewitchery, or—more likely, Rasim thought—the gangly journeyman was the one holding the snake within the garrison walls.
A snap echoed through the garrison. Rasim whirled. The rock behind the stone hand was beginning to crack. The snake's great strength would break it down sooner rather than later.
There wasn't time to wait for Telun's stone sword. Rasim swore, then lifted his voice. "Lars! Sondra! Get to high ground!"
He caught a glimpse of them darting out of the protective cubby, their eyes wide with expectation. Later he might think their expressions funny: they knew what had happened last time he told them to get to high ground. Right now he only hoped he could live up to the witchery he'd performed in the mines, and then outshine it.
The power came easily, thanks to Siliaria's blessing. It felt far more natural than it ever had, through all the years that he'd struggled to command magic in the guild. It flowed now like his breath, like his blood, pulsing and pulling with the ocean's tides. He didn't need nearly as much power now as he'd needed in the mines. He just needed enough to seep into the snake's head, to pour it into its throat and to seek membranes around the eyes, vulnerable spots where encroaching water, turned to ice, could shatter the stone skull.
And yet it was harder than pulling the inlet into the mines had been. There, he had gathered water but not separated it from itself. Here he was trying to make a bubble of water, a river in the air like the Seamasters had done to stop the recent fire in Ilyara. Water was heavy , when not carried on an earth bed.
A kind of embarrassment close to anger suddenly swept through Rasim. He didn't have to lift the water. He'd seen, outside the garrison walls, how the tide had carried huge stones right up to the door, shifting bits of sand beneath them until they moved. If the tide came that far on its own, it could creep high enough to come through the door, with his encouragement. It could swim up the snake's body, coating it, getting beneath scales as they shifted and broke, and in time it would rise to the creature's massive head.
A very short amount of time. It had taken most of an hour to work the witchery that drowned the mine. Kisia had nothing like that much time: the stone was shattering now, breaking away in great chunks, and any snake could swallow something larger than its own head. The stone hand might not be digestible, but Kisia, trapped inside it, was. Rasim extended his hands, one toward the inlet tongue outside the garrison, and the other toward the snake's twisty body.
The water was already so cold, so cold. Ice floated in it, great heavy chunks that melted on bottom and froze anew on top as the water and air worked their conflicting powers on it. Rasim grasped the idea of freezing, holding on to the so-cold crystals as they formed. They were only water, he told himself, water in a different form, but only water, and a Seamaster worked with water. He had seen Isidri do it. He knew it could be done. He would do it, with Siliaria's grace, just this once. Just enough to save his friends. It was all he asked. All he needed. The sea spilled into the garrison, slicking the rock floor, freezing Rasim's unprotected feet.
It reached the snake's tail, washing over it, and began to turn to frost.
A squeak of excitement tightened Rasim's throat. He kept the inlet flowing toward him, beckoning it with one hand, pointing it, guiding it, with the other. It ran up the snake's body more quickly, turning its many colors to a blurry white. It crept
beneath scales, stiffening and slowing them, and finally reached the beast's vast skull.
Much too late, he saw that the high ground Lars had chosen was, for some inexplicable reason, the snake's head. It coated with ice beneath the Northman's feet, but he flung himself on his belly, fingers dug into growing frost. He slid over the side of its mouth, toes buried in the thickening ice as well, to help him to keep from sliding the terrible distance to the ground. He let go with one hand. Bile rose in Rasim's throat, barely kept in check by his teeth. Above him, Lars flipped sideways, suddenly holding on with only one hand, and swung into the snake's maw.
Rasim let go a cry of dismay and choked it off a breath later as Lars swung free again.
Kisia clung to the Northman's free hand. A wild, panicked grin split her face.
But the slick surface was too much. Lars's hand slipped along the snake's face, fingers clawing the ice, but he couldn't get a grip. They fell, both screaming. Above them, the triumphant serpent ripped the stone hand free of the wall and swallowed it before slamming to the ground repeatedly, like it was breaking the hand to pieces inside itself. Like it was trying to shake the ice that slowed it away.
A stone slide rippled from the wall and caught Kisia and Lars both. Their screams turned to surprise, and then Kisia's laughter shouted across the garrison again as they whipped toward the earth. A hollow opened up at the slide's foot and they fell inside, protected by magic-worked stone.
Rasim turned an incredulous gaze upward, to where he'd last seen Telun. Milu stood there with Telun now, one hand extended and utter weariness on his face. Telun said something that made Milu smile wanly, and another slide appeared in front of Rasim. A stone sword, as striated and colorful as the snake, rattled down the slide and landed at his feet.
Ocean water, still rising around his feet, became ice that lifted him and sent him sailing across the garrison floor to the flailing, freezing snake. Rasim lifted the sword to strike, then hesitated. Only its eyes were unfrosted now, and they were dull with cold, just as any desert snake's might be. The frost thickened and the snake's motions slowed, growing ever-weaker.
"Telun. Milu." Rasim hardly knew his own voice, nor the sorrowful strength that carried it across the garrison. "Can you sink it back into the stone? Put it back to sleep beneath the garrison, now that it's calm?"
Surprise filled their answer: "Yes, but why?"
Rasim stepped away, letting the weight of witch-ery go, and leaned heavily on the unused sword. "Because it can't hurt us now, and it shouldn't have to die if it's already been defeated.
It's not evil, just big and hungry. And its eye
s are the earth."
He closed his own eyes. "We shouldn't kill the earth."
Trembling, he dropped the sword and left the snake to slumber.
Chapter Twenty-Three
"Telun and Milu need to rest." Kisia came to the door of the chamber Rasim had taken for his own. He had been there for hours, too cold and tired to watch as the Stonemasters sank the snake back into the stone. He had gotten up once for the necessary, and had stopped on the way to look into the garrison's shattered courtyard. The snake's sinuous body made a wide, twisting path across the ground, its differently colored stone easy to see from above. The sight made Rasim's chest hurt, and he'd returned to his room to shiver and wonder why he felt such sadness over the beast's near death. It, after all, had attacked them.
When he didn't answer, Kisia came into the chamber and hunkered down beside him, right in front of the fire. "They were given mindkiller, too, but either not as much or their magic makes it not work as well on them. They tried to free themselves. Milu thinks they probably woke the stone snake with their witchery. It went after everyone else, but not them."
A raw breath exploded from Rasim's chest. "Then I was right not to kill it. We disturbed it. A lot of people died because of that."
"Slavers and soldiers who were happy to keep slaves," Kisia said with a curled lip.
Rasim looked at her, feeling as dull as the snake's eyes had been. "Maybe nobody ever offered them a better way. Maybe they were just bad, but maybe they could have learned better. I don't like killing people, Kisia. It's not right."
She pursed her mouth, but didn't argue. "Any-way, Milu and Telun are exhausted. Almost as tired as you are. You look like Isidri now, Rasim. You look that sick. We're going to stay here tonight," she said like she was challenging him to disagree.