Stonemaster

by C. E. Murphy

  Rasim popped back to the surface bellowing, " Desimi !" as loudly as he could. Even the Skymaster flinched at the strength of Rasim's shout, giving him a startled glance. Within seconds, water surged around them, announcing Desimi's speedy arrival.

  So furious with Nasira that he could hardly see straight, Rasim growled, "Get the captain to shore. Send someone for Usia, if he's not already on the way up here. And sit on her if you have to, to keep her down!" he shouted as Desimi cast uncertain looks between his captain and his age-mate, then followed Rasim's orders over Nasira's protests. A moment later, the infuriated captain was being rushed to shore on a wave of Desimi's making, and Rasim took over Nasira's waterworking, keeping the Skymaster elevated so he could clear the air.

  "If you can spare someone to send me to shore, the immediate danger over the lake is past, I think," Arret called down. "But this gas may have rolled down the passes toward the city. I need to follow it, to make sure no one dies."

  "Will the lake burp up the bad air again?"

  "I don't know, but Cara can stay behind to watch for it. I believe the city is in more danger than the lake, now."

  Rasim nodded and filled his lungs again. "Hassin! Kisia!" Neither of them appeared, but another bleak-faced sailor came out of the dark to bring the Skymaster journeyman, Cara, to shore. More and more witches were going that way now, the search on the water coming to an end.

  Firelight suddenly came to life on the shore, roaring bonfires that assured Rasim at least one of the Sunmasters had survived.

  People began gathering around them as their light cast a yellow glare over the water. By their light, Rasim searched for swimmers with witchery and vision alike. Within minutes the lake was still, and he still hadn't seen Kisia. Cold with fear, he finally returned to shore to search around the bonfires.

  Usia was there already, shadowed by Sesin. Rasim's heart lurched with relief as the pretty healer's apprentice smiled at him, but her smile faded again as she returned to work. Nasira lay close to one of the fires, shivering but awake, which had to be a good sign. But too many faces he knew were missing, and he realized anyone hurt worse than Nasira was probably already dead. At least a third of the crew were gone, and he still hadn't found Hassin or Kisia. By the time he reached the last fire, tears streamed down his face, burning hot against the cold evening air.

  Inga, of all people, knelt by the last fire, murmuring something to one of the sailors lying beside it. She looked up, and even with the heat of the fire and its golden hues, Rasim thought he saw her blush. Then he saw who she knelt by, and gave a shaky laugh. Hassin, despite tightly wrapped ribs, was trying to get up on an elbow so he could flirt more successfully with the Northern princess. Inga, laughing, slipped her fur cloak over his shoulders, its paleness a stark contrast to his brown Ilyaran skin.

  "Rasim." Kisia came around the fire and tripped over her own feet, falling into Rasim's arms. She was much warmer than he was, and his heart felt like it would break with relief. She held on for a long minute, then looked at him with a wavering smile.

  "Rasim, I've had enough adventures. Can we go home yet?"

  He laughed again, weakly. "I don't think so. We have to… oh, Siliaria. Telun? Milu? Did either of them...?"

  "They're all right, but Daka is missing."

  Rasim stared at Kisia's dark eyes, made darker by the shadows and flickering light, without really understanding. Delicate, flighty Daka seemed like she would have been able to just rise up, fly away safely like fire licking at the stars. He couldn't imagine that she'd died at the bottom of a half-frozen Northern lake.

  "Who made the bonfires, then?" he finally asked, feeling stupid.

  "Master Endat. Pynda's here, but she can't even talk. She just sits and looks into the fire. Rasim, what happened down there?"

  "It was a trap. Someone used magic in ways we don't even think about."

  "But who? Why? Look how many people they killed. Who would do that?"

  "I don't know, Kisia. They were already trying to kill, or drive out, a whole city's worth of people. Here, Ilyara—" Rasim swallowed sharply as a thought struck him. "I wonder if there's something about these locations. Something special, to make someone want to have control over them? Because otherwise why not choose Ringenstand, if they want to attack the Northlands?"

  "Roscord wanted control over the Islands, too," Kisia said almost instantly. "Compass points. South, east, north. Think of the maps, Rasim. Where do you end up if you draw a line from each of these places inward?"

  "The continent." Rasim closed his eyes, imagining the bulky continent's protruding shape above Ilyara and west of the Islands. "It would be somewhere in the middle of the continent, away from the seas. I don't know much about the midlands. But if you go west from the middle of the continent the same distance as Ilyara and Hongrunn are, you find—" He caught his breath as his eyes popped open. "Senreyla, where the Dynerian horse clans meet every five years to call a new council. I have studied them a little, with the Sunmasters. The horse clans are due to meet in the spring. Kisia, we have to—to warn them!"

  "Of what?"

  "I don't know, but something bad is going to happen there, I'm sure of it. They need to be prepared."

  "Rasim." Inga rose from beside Hassin and put her hands on Rasim and Kisia's shoulders. "Rasim, let it go for now."

  Rasim gave Inga a wild stare. "I can't! We have to do something, we have to help—!"

  "We have to mourn," Inga said very gently. "And when we are done mourning, we must celebrate. Your people have paid a great cost to help mine, Ilyaran, but in doing so you have saved a city.

  You'll be honored in the Northlands until memory fades to history and history into legend."

  "But—!"

  "No." Inga's gentle voice became firmer. "Rasim, listen to me.

  You are desperate to act, and I understand. I felt the same way when Annaken died in the Ilyaran fire, and I believe you felt this way when you thought all your fleet was drowned at sea. When I first met you, you would not let yourself stop moving or acting, for fear you would think too much about what you had

  lost." She gestured to the lake, to the bonfires, to the depleted number of sea witches. "Tonight, perhaps, is even worse than those hard days, because tonight there is no doubt that too many have died. Stop a while and remember them, Rasim. Stop a while and be grateful we survived. There will be time to ride to Senreyla in the spring."

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  He would not— could not—wait until spring. But neither could Rasim leave Hongrunn the same night of the lake explosions, no matter how much he might want to. That thought helped him in the days following, as the sea witches did what they had come to the Northlands to do.

  It had not, Inga had told them a thousand times, been necessary.

  Certainly not so soon, she had said, and not in such quantities: the city could survive easily on purified barrels and mountain run-off. But it had been necessary, not just for the city, but for the seamasters' hearts. They had come to know every drop of water in the deep lake, dredging it with magic over the course of five long, hard days. Rasim, like all of the uninjured witches, barely slept in those days. They dropped when exhaustion took them, and returned to work the moment strength returned.

  They had taken more than salt from its waters. They had found bodies as well, their crewmates preserved in the icy lake. Not all the dead were rescued—some, Telun said dully, must have simply been destroyed by the explosions—but enough were. Enough to ease Rasim's spirit, and the spirits of those around him.

  Earlier that morning they had taken the Waifia out of Hongrunn's harbor, out to the open ocean, and given Siliaria back her dead.

  There would be a wake tonight, a roaring party full of tall tales and shared memories of their friends, but until then, Rasim wanted to be alone. So he'd climbed the mountain again, glancing back once in a while to see if he was followed. People were easy to see against the glaring white snow and slippery black ice paths, but no one
else seemed to have the same thought he did. No surprise, really: they'd spent five full days and nights on the mountain. Climbing it again was the last thing on most of their minds. Rasim was grateful. The silence of snow and winter air was unlike anything he'd ever encountered in Ilyara, and he wanted its peace.

  The half-frozen air over the lake smelled different: clearer, sharper, without the tang of salt. The water moved differently, too, less sluggish and visibly less brackish. Rasim crouched and sank his palm into it, bringing up a handful to sip. It was perfect, fresh and clean and cold enough to hurt his teeth. The harsh, fresh agony of it suited his mood as he stood up from the lakeside and began to walk along the shore.

  There wasn't much shore, truth be told. A few hundred narrow feet where the Northerners had made their beach approach, but mountains plunged straight into the lake in most places, without so much as a passable strand or climbable hill in sight. For anyone but a water witch, it was a daunting aspect. Rasim called witchery, wrapping himself in a swirl of lake water, and let it carry him around a bend or two, until he found another small patch of beach. He stepped free of the water and knelt, brushing snow away with bare fingers until he'd scraped down to frozen stone.

  It was foolish. He shouldn't do it. He shouldn't even try it, because if it was possible , then the trouble he was in knew no bounds. But he did it anyway, just to see if he could.

  He had spent a week in the darkness of the mine. A week surrounded by an element not his own. A week surrounded by stone, washing it, cleaning it, trying to see inside it, as if, like water, it could be transparent. And for a moment, fighting the stone snake, he'd felt that he understood the stone as well as he understood water. Eyes closed, he searched for the calm depth of stone that he remembered from the mines. It was more unchanging than water, though of course everything changed with time. Still, stone was in no hurry to change, even when he tried whispering and coaxing it into new shapes. It didn't rush, it didn't spill, it didn't seem to do much of anything, even when Rasim thought he felt the weight of witchery alive in the air around him. He had a vision in mind, an idea he wanted to make happen, but the stone's quiet presence had none of water's excitement or life to it, no sense of anything happening. Finally, feeling silly, he opened his eyes again and looked around.

  Stone figures stood all around him.

  Triumph so sharp it was almost terror spiked through Rasim. His hands, already cold from the winter air, became icier while his cheeks burned with excitement. His chest felt so full he thought it would burst, or that he might lift up and fly from the speed of his heartbeat. It was impossible , but he'd done it. Mastered stonewitchery, felt its quiet magic working around him—he had felt it, too, just hadn't realized it was working!—and had built the thing he had dreamed.

  It was rough, nothing like what Telun or Milu, never mind Stonemaster Lusa, might have done. But there, written in stone, were the faces of those who had gone into the lake and not come out again. They were taller than in life, more slender, almost airy, despite the element they were shaped from. They stood in a circle around a more delicate, elongated version of the salt fountain, which had ripples in it. A statue of Stonemaster Lusa touched it. Above all of them, dancing on graceful reeds of stone, were patches of dome, like the water dome they had held beneath the lake. Droplets even formed on the undersides of the domes, reminiscent of water.

  It wouldn't last. The harsh winters, with their snow and cold, would shatter the sculptures as time passed. But it didn't have to last. It was a memorial, and memories faded. His would last at least as long as the sculptures, and that was enough.

  More than enough, since he wasn't supposed to be able to do something like this at all. Rasim flashed a pained grin at the sculptures and at the sky. He wasn't going to tell anyone, not ever, but knowing he could do it was a bright burning delight inside him.

  It was the only warm thing about him, he realized. He was freezing. He shivered all over, then breathed a quiet, steaming laugh into the cold air, and turned his palms up. Fire. Dancing, light, impatient, afraid of its own death. Fire, glowing deep and dark in the heart of an ember, patiently waiting to ignite again.

  Anything, he thought hopefully, anything to warm his frozen fingers.

  Nothing. Rasim shivered again and grinned at his half-numb fingertips. Nothing, and that was good. It was best for Kisia to be wrong sometimes, and besides, if he hadn't set the Waifia 's ropes on fire, maybe it had been Kisia after all. Maybe he wasn't the only Ilyaran witch able to work more than one magic at all.

  Maybe Taishm and Isidri were right, and it was only tradition that kept all of them from being much more than they were.

  Shivering more, Rasim rubbed his chest and hurried back the way he'd come. Water witchery carried him to shore, and then he concentrated on where to put his feet until a splash startled him into looking up.

  Kisia sat on the shore, tossing rocks into the lake. Rasim cast a guilty look back at the stoneworking he'd done, though it was well-hidden behind a curve of mountain. When he looked back, Kisia was watching him with one corner of her mouth turned up.

  Squirming like he'd been caught doing something wrong, Rasim hurried the rest of the way to her. She stayed where she was, idly tossing rocks into the water, until he got close enough to see a smirk of knowledge dancing in her eyes.

  He bit back the impulse to ask what she'd seen, and somehow, like she knew he was silencing himself, her grin got bigger. She stood up, but all she said was, "There you are. Come on. The sun is setting, and they won't want to start the wake without you." She offered her hand.

  Rasim took it, surprised that steam didn't rise from their clasped fingers, hers were so much warmer than his. "Desimi," he said, "will always be glad to start a party without me."

  "True. Let's not give him the satisfaction. Come on." Kisia tugged Rasim's hand, drawing him toward the path they'd climbed to reach the lake. "Captain Nasira has some things to say."

  Rasim winced as they slipped and slid their way down the ice-covered stone. "I bet she does." They spent the rest of the journey in silence, concentrating on where their feet went so they wouldn't end up sliding down the hill like children playing on the sand dunes outside of Ilyara. Not until they'd passed the tree line and found more solid footing on snow-covered earth just outside of the city did Kisia say, "You saved her life, you know."

  "She was mad enough about it, too."

  "The rest of us aren't." Kisia waved up at one of the big yellow-haired guards who stood watch on Hongrunn's enormous fortified walls. He waved back, gesturing them through the portcullis gate that they closed at dusk every day, as if trouble might come rolling down the mountainside in the middle of the night. And maybe it did in the summer months, for all Rasim knew, but he couldn't imagine anybody hearty enough to attack over the mountains in a ferocious Northern winter.

  They scurried through the streets, nodding greetings to Northerners who no longer looked twice at the brown-skinned Ilyarans in their midst. The city still struck Rasim as it had when he'd first visited, grim and grey on the outside but surprisingly warm and welcoming behind heavy oak doors and thick stone walls. The Waifia 's crew had been given space in a block of inns and taverns that faced a central square and were backed up by alleys narrower and more treacherous than anything in Ilyara. Some of the apprentices and younger journeymen had been racing down those sharply angled alleys on foot, on sheets of metal, on wooden blocks—anything they could find. The first broken arm had been considered a sign of pride, until Usia refused to heal it, or any other injuries sustained through what he called youthful idiocy .

  Now the square had been filled with bonfires: small ones at each corner, and a larger one in the middle, all tended by Sunmaster Endat. Pynda sat to the side on a stone bench, watching the largest blaze with no light in her eyes; she had not called her power since Daka's death, and there were whispers that she no longer could. Rasim didn't believe that, although he believed she might choose to never do so again.


  Sea witches had already gathered, swaying to music played on hidden drums and on Ilyaran pipes, as well as on Northern instruments Rasim didn't know. Others danced, and some carried the leather flasks of honey mead favored by Northerners. A few had clearly drunk heavily of the mead already, though no one was quite staggering yet. Even those who looked close to it straightened up, sobering, as Hassin escorted Captain Nasira toward the largest fire. She stopped well short of it, and in its flickering golden light Rasim saw sweat beading on her forehead and upper lip. He wondered if it was the fire, or the injury she was still recovering from, that made her stop. Her chin-length

  hair, shorter than any master sea witch Rasim had ever seen, was tucked behind her ears.

  "We've cleared the lake's waters," Nasira said abruptly.

  Hoarsely; her throat had taken damage in the poison air, and Usia said only time would really heal it. She was easily heard, though. Skymaster Arret had to be nearby, helping her voice carry, but Rasim didn't see him. The music faded to near silence as she spoke, and dancers and drinkers alike came together to listen.

  "We've given our dead into Siliaria's arms. We've sang our songs for them, and we've wept for them. Tonight we sing again for ourselves, and laugh, and weep, and remember. Tomorrow we'll begin to look for answers."

  Her gaze swept the gathered sea witches, and a chill shot down Rasim's spine as she met his eyes momentarily. Then her attention moved on, her voice rising steadily. "We'll look for our stolen guildmates. We'll search for those who poisoned Hongrunn's lake, and perhaps even for those who began the Great Fire in Ilyara. We will find answers," she promised, and closed her eyes, as if the effort of that promise was almost too great for her. But she opened them again, looking to each of her crew with the same piercing regard she'd turned on Rasim. "But that's for tomorrow.