Deep Water

by Pamela Freeman

  “Hello? Is anyone there?”

  It was a man’s voice, unsure of itself. He was standing in the light from the doorway. Ash peered through the gap between door and hinge and examined him carefully. A Traveler. Ash relaxed and slipped the knife back into his boot.

  “We’re here.”

  The man pushed the door fully open and peered into the dark. “I can’t see you.”

  Ash stepped forward, making sure that he was balanced and ready to fight in case this was a trick.

  “Oh, there you are,” the man said, sounding relieved. “I have something for you.” He held out a pouch. A stonecaster’s pouch.

  “They’ve been calling for a week now,” he said.

  Ash swallowed. He could hear the same descant that he had heard while Flax was singing the lullaby, and it was coming from the pouch. He could hear the stones. Just as Martine had said.

  “For me?” he said.

  The man nodded. “I thought it mighta been for the singer, but no, it were you, drummer.” He gestured with the pouch. “Go on. Take them.”

  There was something in his voice, a deep desire to be rid of the pouch, that made Flax reach out and put a hand on Ash’s arm.

  “Don’t take them. It’s a trick,” he said.

  “No trick!” the man said. “I’m not out to cause anyone harm. My name’s Auroch — I’m a chimney-maker, well known in these parts. And I’m a stonemaker, which aren’t so well known, if you take my meaning.”

  They did. Stonemakers were few and far between and only stone-casters really knew who they were. Flax relaxed a little, but he still held Ash back. Ash wanted to throw him off and grab the stones, but he knew Flax was being sensible, so he stayed still. But his eyes never left the pouch of stones.

  “Why are you so keen to give my friend the pouch?” Flax asked suspiciously.

  “To get rid of it,” Auroch said honestly. “It’s an unchancy set, this one.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “It’s got a new stone in it.”

  They stood in silence. Ash breathed heavily, remembering a song his mother had only sung once, about the stones.

  Cast a new stone, cast a new stone

  And change the woven power of the world

  So. This was why the other stones were wrong for him, yet Martine’s casting insisted he was a stonecaster. These had been waiting for him. A new set. A new stone.

  He reached out his hand for the pouch, and Auroch dropped it into his palm, and then turned and hurried off into the darkness.

  A crescendo of song enveloped Ash, the stones singing high and low, sweet and harsh, loud and soft, each with its own note, all of them blending into something extraordinary. There was a central note, he could hear it, could hear how all the others twined around it.

  Something no stonecaster had ever heard before.

  Auroch’s Story

  I NEVER WANTED IT. When I were a nipper and my mam told me the stories about stonemakers who were chosen to find a new stone, I thought, I hope that don’t happen to me. A new stone coming into the pouch means the world’s going to change, because the stones and the world reflect each other, although which is the reflection I’ve never figured. I wondered, sometimes, how stonecasters could walk around so easy with the world hanging at their waist.

  Changing the world seemed too big a thing for me. Too scary. So. I were right there. Maybe it picked me because I didn’t want it. That’s likely. That’s how the gods work. Or maybe I was just the only one nearby. There’s only three of us stonemakers living, after all. It runs in families, like with my mam and me, and somehow it only goes to one or two in a generation.

  Stonemaking’s not all I do. Stones can’t be bought or sold, only given. Just as well. A good stonemaker might make twenty sets, their whole life, and Travelers aren’t the richest customers, so you’d never make a living.

  I’m a chimney-maker by trade. You might think that any builder can make a chimney, but once you get more than one fireplace on the flue it’s an expert job, and the best builders know it, and bring me in for that part of the job.

  Turvite’s got so big we are half Settled now, me and Cricket and Grass, our daughter. Winters here, summers on the Road. It’s in the summer that I find the stones. Up north, mostly, because the northerners like chimneys made of river stones, and I go collecting. River stones are good for about half the casting stones. They carry the changing elements: Birth, Death, Chaos, Travel, Growth. They whistle and sing and hum to me as I handle the larger chimney stones, and I slip them into my pocket as gently as a bird lays moss in her nest.

  The rest I find as I go. The harsh stones call strongly: Murder, Betrayal, Anger. A good Jealousy stone is the loudest of all. The last one I found fairly shouted at me from the side of a track way up near Mitchen, a flint in a field of chalk.

  I don’t like finding the harsh stones. The cry they make in my mind is as nasty as their meaning, and I get a headache for days afterward.

  Now the puzzling thing about stones is that they don’t all like each other. Each new stone has to pick its set, and some of them are very choosy. I had three sets building at the time this happened. Two almost done, waiting for a couple of stones. One of those needed only the blank stone. Another one just started, with only three in it; the ones that always come first when a set starts: Birth, Death, Rebirth. The blank stone is always last, and that tells you the set is complete, even if it doesn’t have every single stone you know exists. That’s because some stonecasters can also hear their own stones before they are in the pouch. They pick them up as children and use them for luck, although they don’t understand why at that age. If you make a set with a stone missing, sure enough you’ll find the person the pouch goes to has the missing stone in their pocket. Then all you have to do is mark one side of it for them and tell them which stone it is, though once it gets with the others in the pouch it usually starts to talk to the caster.

  It might take ten years to make a set, normally. As it happened, one set that were nearly complete had taken me almost all my life. I’d found the first stone when I were only a babe, my mam said, playing by the side of a stream where she was searching for lily roots. I grubbed in the river sand with my fat baby hands, she said, laughing, and then tried to eat what I found. I would have choked on Birth, she said, if she hadn’t heard the stone call out and grabbed it out of my hands.

  So that were my first stone ever, and it is beautiful: flat and oval, smooth white quartz without a seam in it. Rare, and singing of beginnings whenever I went near it. I loved that stone, and thought I’d have it always.

  Then, when I were eight or so, and my first set was starting to weigh heavy in the pouch, I were with my mam when she went to see a stonecaster who’d taken on a new apprentice. Mam was checking to see if the set she’d completed the winter before would suit this young one.

  Someone from the outside wouldn’t have seen much. We sat down, the old stonecaster served us some tea, he chatted with Mam about nothing much: the weather, the warlord’s latest execution, the price of barley. The apprentice, a plain young woman who seemed grown up to me then but who was surely only sixteen or so, sat and looked hard at Mam’s pouch on the table. I could hear the stones talking in their darkness, as they always did, out of tune and jangling, each of them trying their best to be heard, although some, like Justice, speak in a whisper, and some shout.

  The apprentice heard them too, I were sure from the look on her face. Her hand crept closer and closer to the bag. Then the strange thing happened, which changed my life. As her hand approached, the stones began to change their noise. The closer she came, the more they seemed to sing together, the harsh stones providing the rhythm of the song, the gentle ones the melody. When she actually touched the pouch, they came into full harmony, all singing the same song, although the harsh was still harsh and the soft was still soft. Mam nodded at her kindly.

  “I reckon they’re yours, right enough,” she said with satisfaction. The apprentice beamed at her, looking
suddenly beautiful. That moment, I realized that all my work’d be for other people. That my lovely Birth stone would go to someone else; that no matter how many sets I made, none of them would sing for me the way that pouch had sung for her. That I could not bring the stones into tune.

  On the way home, Mam were cock-a-hoop.

  “No doubt about that,” she said. “It’s nice when it’s so clear cut. Sometimes the stones stay a little out of tune, and it’s hard to know whether that means they need another caster, or just that the young one hasn’t grown into themselves yet.”

  I said nothing, and she looked at me.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing,” I said, but she knew me too well to take that. She cuffed me lightly on the back of the head.

  “What?” she demanded.

  “We never get to keep them,” I said. “They never sing like that for us.”

  “They change their song when we make a set complete,” she said.

  “Not like that. Not singing together.”

  She were quiet for a bit, then sighed. “No. That’s so,” she admitted. “But think of it like this: a builder builds a house for a new couple. Does he expect to live in it? A brewer makes a cask of ale for the warlord. Does she expect to drink it? Or even closer, a flute-maker makes a flute: does he expect to perform with it?” She shook her head. “We’re makers, Auroch, and that’s the fate of makers: to give what we make to others.”

  I hung my head. “Flutes aren’t alive. They don’t sing differently for maker and flautist.”

  “No?” Mam laughed. “That’s not what my friend Rowan says. He reckons his flute don’t sound the same for anyone else.”

  I hunched my shoulders at her and she tousled my hair. “It’s the way of things, lad,” she said sympathetically. “No stonemaker has ever been a stonecaster. They are different talents. Remember, without us, there’d be no stonecasting. Think of that.”

  I did think about it, on and off, about a world where the future were blank and dark, where fears could not be examined and lessened, where hopes could grow unchecked by reality. I imagined a world with no sense of what were to come, and I shivered and thought my mother were right. We was important. But I didn’t realize then that the future can change; I didn’t know that I would change it.

  So that day, that fine spring day, I were working on a chimney in a village called Cold Hill. I were building with bricks, not stone, but that was the owner’s problem; bricks are easier to lay, but not so good at holding heat. It were going to be a big, two-story house with four fireplaces and two chimneys, and the owner were trying to talk me into putting another little fireplace up in the attic, which woulda ruined the draw of the flue and made the lower hearths smoky in bad weather. But would she listen? No. She were arguing without taking breath so I stopped attending to her, and then I heard it calling.

  A song, a call, a cry I’d never heard before from any stone, out of the pouch or in it. I’m not a word-maker, I can’t describe it. It was like the hum of a distant beehive, or the constant sound of the surf from a long way off. Not loud, but soothing, somehow. I must have looked strange, because the owner said, “Well, if that’s your attitude, I can always get another builder!”

  “Go ahead,” I said. I walked away from the chimney and the house, down to the stream at the end of the garden, where the call were coming from. As I got closer it became more like a song: all on a single note, like a singer trying to impress the audience with the size of his lungs. But that note had tones in it that I couldn’t quite hear. They buzzed at the back of my head, they made lights dance in front of my eyes. The stone were easy to find, although it were buried a foot deep. I just reached down and pushed through the soft, cool mud and took it up in my hand. It weren’t big, half the size of most stones, but it felt good in my hand, and as I touched it the note changed, deepened, quickened somehow, as though the stone itself were excited.

  I washed it off. Jet black, it were, black as pitch. Blacker. That’s rarer than you think, a completely black stone. It were perfectly round, and perfectly flat on both sides, like a coin. But the strange thing was that it weren’t any of the stones I knew. That song, that feel, didn’t belong to any of the stones in any pouch anywhere in the Domains. As I realized that, I felt cold all over, and began to shake. But it might be a stone that were common in other countries. The Wind Cities had stones we did not, and I knew the names of them all.

  “What are you?” I whispered, and the stone sang back. Evenness, it said. Balance on the scales.

  I’d never heard of that stone, and I felt sick. To bring a new stone into the world was to change the world itself… it were still too big for me. I didn’t know what to do. I wished that my mam were still alive.

  I left the stream and the complaining house owner and walked back to the cottage where we was staying, renting a room from a Settled Traveler. As I went through the cottage gate I heard a song from a little further down the road. A song I knew. The blank stone. It were just lying there in the middle of the track, plain and simple, as though it had been waiting for me to notice it. Gray, with silver streaks. Nothing special. I’d seen blank stones like this one a dozen times. It meant the set was complete.

  I sat at my work table and looked at the stone, then took out the flint I used to make a mark on one side of each stone in the pouch, except the blank stone. Some stones tell you which side to make the mark on. Others don’t care. But as I brought the flint closer to the black stone, it shrilled a warning. No mark, it sang. We are the same, both sides. That is the point.

  My stomach churned. I went to my chest and got out the pouch, the set that just needed a blank stone — the set that I had been making my whole life. I put the blank stone in the pouch but kept the other tight in my fist. When a set is made complete, the cries of the stones change. Just a little. But not this time. The blank stone made no difference. I loosed my hold on the other stone and put it in the pouch.

  The stones began to sing. Just like they had for the apprentice, just like they had for other stonecasters I had given pouches to.

  They sang for me.

  I shoulda been happy. At last, they was singing. But I were afraid, and a moment later I knew that though the set were singing, it weren’t singing for me. They was calling their stonecaster. Calling like the goatherds in the Western Mountains yodel the flock home. The calls became notes, deep and high. Under them all I could hear the new note, the call of the black stone. The sound of the world changing.

  Leof

  THE MEN CAME marching through the next afternoon, after what had clearly been a short night’s rest. They looked ragged with exhaustion, even the officers on their mounts. Thegan kept them marching, allowing family and friends to walk alongside and hand over extra food or comforts, snatch a kiss or two, as long as they didn’t slow the pace.

  “Who knows what difference an hour may make?” he said to Leof, who came to ride alongside him through the town.

  “We have thirty-seven axes of various kinds ready, my lord,” Leof reported. “I have loaded them into a cart so that the men will not tire from carrying them. Also, a quantity of boar spear.” That thought had come to him late the night before and he had rousted out every huntsman in Sendat to find the spears. Boar spears had a crosspiece about halfway up, intended to stop a boar simply running up the length of the spear to gore the spearsman, which they were prone to do. Too stubborn to know when they were dead, boars. Like the ghosts.

  Thegan nodded approval. “You have done a great deal in a very short time.”

  “Otter came through here trying to find you, my lord. The Lady Sorn ordered the axes made ready.”

  Thegan raised an eyebrow, amused. “She is very martial of a sudden!”

  “She acts to protect you and your men,” Leof said.

  Thegan nodded. “She’s a warlord’s daughter, after all. I suppose she’s learned something of warfare, living in a fort all her life.” He dismissed the thought and turned to o
ther matters. “The fort —”

  “Aye.” Leof nodded. “The fortifications won’t stop the ghosts. They’ll need to be rebuilt, and more axes, more boar spears made. The call has gone out to the oath men this morning.”

  “Good. I’ll leave you Alston for their training; he’s reliable. Tell him the truth. And the men will need reprovisioning. We don’t know what we will find in Carlion.”

  “At least ghosts don’t eat much,” Leof said dryly. “They won’t strip the land bare as a living enemy might.”

  “Who knows what these ghosts will do. If they have flesh, perhaps they eat.” Thegan paused, choosing his words carefully. “I know you would rather be with me in battle, but I need someone I can trust here. Supply lines, provisioning, they are the heart of warfare, no matter what the songs say. Men will not fight for glory on an empty stomach, with empty hands.” They had reached the end of town, and Thegan gestured to the townsfolk to fall back and let the men proceed.

  “I will do the best I can, my lord,” Leof said formally, and saluted. Thegan returned the salute gravely, hand over heart, and then smiled.

  “Keep my fort safe, boy,” he said, spurring the chestnut gelding he rode to a canter, taking the lead, his banner rider following close behind so that the gold and brown banner floated out behind him — sword and spear crossed, glittering in the sunlight. The Lady Sorn had sewn that banner, Leof remembered, all of last winter.

  He returned to the fort and only on the way up the hill realized that Thegan had left no word for his lady, hadn’t even thought about visiting her, however briefly. When he came into the hall, hesitantly, she was waiting for him again in the shaft of sunlight. She saw his face, and smiled reassuringly.