The Burning Stone

by Kate Elliott

  For a moment.

  Anne stood by one of the stones, staff raised; daimones crowded her, their light forms throwing her stern figure into relief. He couldn’t see Liath, only a cloak of utter darkness where she had stood, as if the galla had consumed her entire being. Off to his right, Resuelto had halted at the trees, whose branches whipped and slashed in the gale. The galla had only retreated out of range of the griffin feathers. That stench of forge iron was the scent of blood taken from a thousand thousand victims; they were hunters, and they had not given up on their prey.

  Distantly, he heard the thunder of an avalanche. Then the storm howled in, out of nowhere. The tempest drove him to his knees as the galla shuddered under those impossibly strong winds. The gale raged in his face until he could hear nothing and feel nothing but its scream. He could not even lift his head. The winds blew dirt into his gritted teeth, choked him with clots of dirt from the ground itself as though under Anne’s command the daimones meant to strip the Earth down to its bones. Not even the galla could advance into the maelstrom.

  “Liath!” he cried, but he couldn’t hear his own voice above the screaming wind.

  And she called fire.

  Fire blossomed like wings over Liath’s head. The host of galla who had enveloped her were obliterated in the blaze, and he saw her in that instant: caught in the blaze, bow raised and drawn down on Anne, her expression so focused that she seemed unaware of anything else in the world. She seemed unaware that her fire had caught in the stones, leaped the gap as a great forest fire leaps from tree to tree like the hand of God. The blue haze that outlined those shrouded and half-seen marble walls, that traced the contours of the ebony gate through which the intruders had reached them, ignited into a scorching white blast of heat that singed his hair although he knelt many paces away.

  “Sharatanga protect us!” The voice sounded unexpectedly loud, at his ear. A strong hand grabbed his arm and tugged him up. He looked into eyes as sharply green as emeralds: like his daughter’s eyes. Like his own eyes. “What manner of creature is she? Run, Son! Run! She is calling them through! No one can survive where they walk!”

  High above, the stars themselves seemed to uncoil whips of light, like fiery arms reaching out. The bowl of the sky itself seemed to bulge downward, as if something were trying to get through. And then it found the gateway that had already been opened.

  It flowered out of the ebony gate, a spirit with wings of flame and eyes as brilliant as knives. It had a form, of a kind, vast and terrible. Where its feet touched the earth, streams of fire raced away, igniting the grass. Where its gaze touched the great crowns of trees, the lush summer foliage simply whoofed into sheets of fire, like a sequence of torches set alight, and birds burst from the woods in a flurry of wings and flocked in panic toward the cliffs.

  Impossibly, others crowded behind it, pressing out through the gateway into the tiny valley that seemed far too small to hold them all. The air became torrid, blushed with a golden haze rising off their coruscating bodies. The swarming galla simply flicked out of existence as if sucked away into a neighboring room. In their terror, the mules kicked over the corral gate and bolted.

  Below, the timber hall burst into flame. He had a moment to grieve for Heribert’s fine creation before he heard screams, livestock panicking, the wails of the airy servants still caught by Anne’s bonds. The sheds kindled. Cattle and goats and pigs scattered into the darkness. Two human figures stumbled after them.

  Incredibly, the tower went up in flames. Even the stone burned, and as he watched, two figures flung themselves from its confines, clutching their precious books to their chests. The luster of this incandescent fire shone even onto the towering cliffs around them, until he realized with horror that this was no reflection of the conflagration but only a continuation of it.

  Even the mountains burned.

  “Run, Son!” She yanked him on, but he dragged her to a halt. Standing, he was a good head taller. Her pony shoved against him, and reflexively he caught hold of its halter to hold it in place. Of her human servant there was no sign.

  “Liath!” he cried, because he couldn’t see her in the face of their brilliance. He drew in air to call out again, but the heat of it scalded his lungs and he could not utter one word.

  As they pressed forward, they cast from side to side, searching, and he realized that, here on Earth, they were blind. But they were not mute.

  Their voice struck like a thunderclap.

  “Where is the child?”

  Then they found her.

  Their wings unfurled in pitiless splendor as they launched themselves toward the heavens. The sound of their wings reverberated off the high mountain walls, a great, booming flood’s roar, and the night brightened until it shone with the heat of the noontide sun. He had to shut his eyes, had to shield them with a hand because even through his eyelids the light burned.

  Then faded.

  He opened his eyes to devastation. Fires smoldered and embers gleamed. Blackened trees cracked and shattered, branches dissolving into ash. He groped at his back, found Blessing’s beloved mat of curly hair. She stirred at his touch. A little hand closed on his finger, and she babbled something.

  Ai, God. Still alive.

  Jerna’s sweet breath tickled his hand, soothing his skin.

  As he stood there, catching his breath, he saw dawn’s light rime the eastern slopes. Somehow, the night had passed them by.

  “Sanglant.” The hand that closed on his hand was still cool, slightly moist, as though she was coated with a sheen of water. Her voice was a stranger’s voice and yet entirely familiar. Was this truly his mother, who stood before him dressed in nothing but a ragged skin skirt and bold painted patterns marking her otherwise naked skin? “I did not know they had made such an ancient and dangerous enemy. Let us go.”

  He let go of the pony’s halter and staggered forward, slipping on ash. Even the ground had been parched and blackened. Alone of all things in this valley, the stone circle stood untouched. Of the marble walls and ebony gate he saw no sign. A single figure lay crumpled at the base of one of the stones: Anne.

  Liath was gone.

  Maybe he had known from the first instant he had seen them breach the gate and emerge into this world, which could not contain them. He had sensed it before, but now he finally, truly, understood what essence lived inside Liath, like a second being trapped within her skin.

  Fire.

  “Sanglant, we must go.”

  He looked at her bleakly. “Where do you intend to take me?” he demanded. “Why should I trust you? How do I know you didn’t bring those creatures through to attack us and steal my wife?”

  She sized him up rather like a lady examines a stallion she will buy as long as its temperament proves suitable. “I beg your pardon, Son. There should be affection between us, but there is none.”

  “You abandoned me.” He hadn’t known he was so bitter. He hadn’t known until this moment how much he resented her for what she had done.

  But she took no offense at his anger. “I abandoned you because I had to. Because you had to build the bridge between our kind and humankind.”

  “A bridge, or a sword?”

  “What can you mean?”

  “Isn’t it your intention to conquer humankind once you return to Earth from your refuge?”

  She cocked her head to one side, regarding him quizzically. “This I do not understand. Not by our own will did we leave Earth.”

  With a great sighing gasp, the timber hall collapsed in on itself. Ash and smoke poured up from its rubble into the sky, teased and torn by daimones as they fluttered round the ruined valley. Were they free, making sport of their old prison, or were these the ones not yet unbound from Anne’s spell? Anne herself, lying by the stone, groaned and stirred. Below, a hound barked, and he saw its black shape come loping up the hill.

  “Her I do not wish to battle again,” said his mother. She flicked soot from her mouth, spat, and scented the air, almost
like a dog might. “My servant is of no more use to me.”

  “Is he dead? Should we bury him?” But he, too, watched Anne suspiciously, and in truth, a good captain knows that at times one must retreat in good order even when it means leaving the dead behind.

  “Let us go,” she repeated, as if in echo of his own thought. “Time grows short. Can you take me to Henri?” Although she spoke understandable Wendish, she still said his father’s name in the Salian way, with an unvoiced “h” and a short, garbled “ri”.

  He whistled, and good Resuelto, miraculously unharmed although a trifle singed, trotted nervously over to him, the poor goat hobbling in his wake. He untangled her back legs from the leadline, although she bleated most accusingly and tried to chew on his arm. Her kid was gone, consumed by the galla. “I know a path out of the valley that should be open now, unless you want to leave the way you entered. Through the stones.”

  “Where they did walk, the old paths will be twisted by their fire into a new maze.” Hoisting her spear, she shook it, and the bells tied to its base tinkled merrily. “That gate is closed to us.”

  “Ai, Lady,” he murmured as he took Resuelto’s reins and soothed the agitated horse, then offered the reins to her.

  “Nay, I walk. I lead this small horse.” Cautiously, she touched Blessing on the head. Jerna slid away, twining onto Resuelto’s neck. “So fecund is the human blood,” she murmured, as if to herself. Then she turned and gestured toward the woodland. The air still had a smoky color, almost purplish with dawn. Small animals skittered through the ashy remains, and as they started up the path, leading the two horses, he saw tiny animals digging out from the debris, frantic squirrels and bewildered mice, cluttering or silent as was their nature.

  “Who is she, the woman they took?” his mother asked.

  But he could only shake his head, too choked with rage and sorrow to speak.

  4

  SHE could not see. She could not hear. Yet she was neither deaf nor blind, only drowning in a wash of such brilliance and overwhelming sound that it had all become a flood, one note, one tone, one absence of color that was pure light. She wasn’t sure she was actually breathing, or that there was any air, and yet she wasn’t dead either. Oddly enough, she also wasn’t afraid. For the first time in years, she understood that there was nothing to fear. The grain of her bow lay comfortably against her palm, gripped tight. The tip of her sheathed short sword, Lucian’s friend, grazed her thigh. Her quiver of arrows weighed on her back even as a shift in her position caused the leather straps to press against her collarbone, shifting the gold torque that lay heavily at her throat. A stray curl of hair tickled an ear.

  Blue winked.

  An instant or a thousand years later she saw it again: the blue flash of the lapis lazuli ring that Alain had given her. Somewhere, where her hand flailed at the tip of her nose or a hundred leagues away from the rest of her body, the ring found purchase and sparked color, a thread her vision could follow.

  They were rising. She had a direction now. Her wings beat steadily in time with the others, the sound of their wings as variegated as the voice of a great river. But she didn’t have wings. They were carrying her. They had lifted her with them as they sprang to the heavens.

  They had named her “child.”

  In the seven-gated city of memory, in the tower of her heart, at the center of her being, rested a chamber set with five doors. Four faced the cardinal directions, north, east, south, and west. Da had taught her all this, the secrets of memory. With his tutoring, she had constructed the room in her mind. But the fifth door, set impossibly in the center of the room, he had built; through the keyhole she could see only fire, which he had locked away even from her.

  Now she knew why.

  Whose child was she?

  Above her, blue flickered again, and as she reached with one hand to touch the other, she saw not the lapis lazuli ring but a tenuous curtain roiling the air, rimmed by blue-white flame whose outline had the same contours as the burning stone she had seen on Earth. Was this another gateway? Was the burning stone only one of many passages from one sphere to the next, from one plane of existence to another?

  How was she to pass through, if she could not walk or ride?

  They said, “Fly, child.” And let her go.

  But she didn’t have any wings.

  She plunged. The air was suddenly too thin to breathe. Flailing, she managed only not to drop her precious bow. And for that moment, as she fell, she saw the world laid out below her, a dense black carpet of earth with only the barest pale limning of receding sunlight far to the west where ocean surged restlessly at the edge of her vision. Yet against the vast carpet of land, far below, seven crowns gleamed, seven crowns with seven blazing points each, a central crown and six surrounding it, flung far from that center as though the central crown marked the axle and the other six glittering points along a wheel’s rim. She recognized it at once: it was Emperor Taillefer’s crown of stars writ large across the breadth of the land, encompassing many kingdoms and uncounted leagues. It was the great wheel, the true crown of stars. The ancient map she had seen at Verna made sense now: seven crowns in seven locations. Was this wheel the loom by which the Aoi had woven their immense and cataclysmic working two thousand seven hundred years ago?

  At that moment, sucking in air that didn’t give her enough substance to breathe, she also realized that she was going to die.

  Then the glorious creatures blazed around her again.

  “She is too heavy to cross into the higher spheres.”

  “She is not all of the same substance as are we.”

  “She has no wings.”

  They gathered her into them, and at their touch she knew an intense joy unlike anything she had ever experienced. They blazed with pure fire, fierce and bright, and the door that Da had locked against her was consumed in that flame. As it opened, she saw for the first time into her innermost heart, the core of her being:

  Fire.

  Not as fierce as theirs, truly, but of the same substance, impossibly intermingled with her human flesh.

  Whose child was she?

  They reached the shimmering curtain of light, and she passed through it as through a waterfall, waves of light pouring down over her. Yet she was no longer rising. She seemed caught in the eddy, and they had begun to fade as if they flew on and she remained behind.

  “Wait!” she cried. But they had already moved beyond her reach, wings thrumming as one voice caught on the smooth shell where a higher sphere overlapped a lower:

  “Follow us.”

  There are spirits burning in the air with wings of flame and eyes as brilliant as knives. They move on the winds that blow far above the sphere of the Moon, and now and again their gaze falls like the strike of lightning to the Earth below, where it sears anything it touches. Their bodies are the breath of the Sun coalesced into mind and will.

  She cannot follow them, and her heart breaks.

  Yet as the light of their passing faded, she began to search around herself, found herself walking through endless twisting halls that, scoured and scalded by their passage, glowed with a faint blue luminescence. She was inside the vision made by fire, which is the crossroads between the worlds. She had to find her way home.

  But she didn’t even know where home was.

  There! A boy slept with six companions, heads pillowed on stone, bodies resting on a rich hoard of treasure.

  There! Misshapen creatures crawled through tunnels, trapped there by the element of earth that coursed through their blood.

  There! A dying man slumped against the burning stone, two great hounds nudging him and licking him as though these attentions would bring him back to life. He stirred, and she recognized him with horror and grief: It was Alain.

  She leaped for him, but she misjudged the currents in this place. They swept her into the stone, through the gateway, and she could only grab for him as she passed by. Her hand caught on a mailed shoulder—

&
nbsp; He sees a woman clothed in cold fire, and her fiery touch hauls him ruthlessly sideways until he falls free and slams into the ground. He lies there for an interminable time, in a stupor, so washed in pain that he is blind. Then the tongues lick him again, driving him, always driving him to live.

  Weeping, he staggers up, not truly able to stand because the wound has pierced so deep, but their great shoulders give him support. He still stands in the hill fort, but even numbed by pain he sees that he is no longer where he once was. It is absolutely silent. No bodies litter the ground, dashed and broken. No horns ring, nor do men cry out in pain, nor does the flooding river’s roar overpower the rumbling of distant thunder. The sun rises in the east to reveal a clear and pleasant day.

  Impressive ramparts twine down the hill, some of them freshly dug. Where a low mist kisses the low-lying ground still half in shadow below, he sees a river winding through a sparse woodland of pine and beech, only the river does not follow the same course as the river he crossed this morning. It is a different river in the same place. Yet why, then, does the hill fort look so new? Why, at the crown of the hill fort, do all seven stones stand upright where moments ago they all lay fallen in a lichen-swamped heap?

  No blue-fire stone burns in the middle of the circle. Instead, within the ring of stones he sees a sward, hacked down so that grass bobs raggedly at various heights. Cowslip and yellow dew-cup give scattered color to the grass. Pale purple-white flax flowers ring the squat upright stones. Mist veils the farthest reaches of the hilltop and twines around the more distant of the standing stones.

  On a low, flat stone situated in the center of the circle stands a huge bronze cauldron incised with birds: herons and ducks, ravens and cranes. From its rim hang rings, each one linked to a second ring, from which dangles a bronze leaf. He can smell that the cauldron is filled with water. The pure scent of it teases his lips and nostrils. Truly he no longer has any reason to live. He doesn’t even know where he is anymore. It would be better just to lie down and die peacefully here, to lay aside his anger at the injustice of his fortune, lay aside his grief at what he’s lost and what he failed to do. Yet his legs move anyway. With a hand on either hound to support his weight, he staggers forward toward the cauldron because he has an idea that one sip of that water will heal him, even though he wants to die because the pain is so bad, both the physical pain and the pain of anger and grief. Yet those same feet keep taking their stumbling, weak steps because he can’t even despair enough to fall down and die. He wonders if it is possible to love life too well.