by Jack
* * * *
A shaking of the bed woke Ros from a nightmare in which his face and hands were being scarred anew. Adi crouched motionlessly beside him, barely visible in the darkness. Her eyes caught every faint trace of light in the room and sent them, refracted and concentrated, right at him.
‘I want to stop her,’ she said. ‘No one deserves to feel like this.’
‘I agree. We’ll do it tomorrow. Together.’
‘There’s no together any more, Ros. We can’t think like that.’
‘Then we’ll ask for help. Everyone’ll know we’re here by breakfast anyway, so let’s get the whole city looking for her. Use the stories to our advantage for a change.’
Adi didn’t confess that she’d already been doing that, when it suited her.
‘I want revenge, too,’ she said, lying down next to him.
Ros put his arm around her. They stayed that way as sleep claimed them again, and they didn’t wake until dawn.
* * * *
KEEPSAKE
Word spread like fire through tall grass. Where the rumour started wasn’t clear. The light-chimneys had barely delivered the distant sun’s first rays when its source was obscured behind a wall of friends-of-friends and cousins-in-the-know. Once the news hit the markets, it took on a life of its own. Roslin of Geheb and Aditi Sabatino — he who vanquished the Golem of Omus and she who walked the Weird — were in Ulum, and in trouble.
Once released, the story accrued strange new details: that a monster walked the city streets, devouring children; that an explosion the previous night heralded an invasion from the depths of the earth; that the pair were impostors whose real selves had been disposed of days earlier. Among the elaborations and fabrications, however, lurked enough of the truth for the message to sink in. That which the famous lovers held most precious in the world had been stolen by a seer.
Every one of the city’s innocent seers — if such existed — closed shop for fear of reprisals against them personally or the profession as a whole. Some declared themselves to the authorities in advance of wrongful accusations. A description of the culprit in question circulated, passing from hand to hand and via the more exotic means available to those talented in the Change. Officially, the Stone Mages played no role in the seer-hunt; they could not until the ruling Synod had issued an order to that effect. Unofficially, a growing cadre assembled in the city’s Grand Minster in order to lend their weight to the search.
Hastily constructed charms scoured the underworld for clues, while ethereal images and messages wafted along the streets. Regular commerce ground to a halt. Of those with a choice, only the most churlish abstained from the city-wide effort. Some grumbled about the jammed thoroughfares or the delays in some services, but all pitched in somehow. Reports flooded in of suspicious-looking characters, most bearing no resemblance whatsoever to the missing woman. Boarded up spaces were exposed to daylight, some for the first time in decades. Panic spread through the city’s rodent and insect populations as previously safe haunts were overturned. Birds and lizards headed for roosts out of reach of human hands.
The day wore on. Crowds gathered in wait of news, hopeful too for a glimpse of the famous couple. Whispers spread of sightings as leads were followed and dismissed, one after the other. Opportunistic merchants set up stalls and manipulated rumours to direct crowds their way. As night approached, a carnival atmosphere set in, complete with music and impromptu dances. Families and neighbours set up camp on corners, sharing wine, beer and food, and any news that happened to pass through. Not all was merriment and joy, of course, for the reason for the holiday had not been forgotten by anyone. Fights broke out in places, among the poor-tempered and those who found the tension too much. The people of the city were waiting for an outcome, each in their own way. Ulum, as a whole, held its breath.
* * * *
From behind the curtained windows of their hostel room, Ros listened to the crowds moving through the city. They had barely left the building all day, relying on runners and other means to convey messages back and forth. Only twice, when particularly strong evidence had pointed to a near-certain location, had they gone out in pursuit of a resolution, and even then only by a back entrance, secure from the public eye. The hostel had hunkered down around them, the manager enjoying his role as their protector and confidant. Adi dreaded to think what the bill might tally to.
‘What if she’s gone?’
She looked up from double-checking the stack of information that had already been gathered. ‘Do you think it’s possible?’
He doubted it. The city had been physically sealed all day, as well as blocked against the Change. If she had made a dash for the outside the very moment her latest lovers had been kidnapped, maybe then she could have made it out in time. The still-smoking cheroot haunted that theory like a ghost; it wouldn’t be laid to rest, and made a mockery of the attempt.
‘She has to be here somewhere.’
A team of volunteer Stone Mages had gone over every inch of her abandoned stall. The Way Ros and Adi had followed was now firmly shut, and the room clear of any other exit. Van Haasteren must, therefore, have had another escape route secreted nearby. Neighbouring buildings had been searched from top to bottom, without success.
Adi pushed the stack aside. ‘What about why rather than where? That’s what I’m stuck on. What’s in it for her? She fed the Thrall, but she must’ve gained something in return.’
‘Not wealth, that’s for sure,’ he said.
‘Or fame.’
‘Look where they’ve got us.’
‘My point’s the same, though. She’s a criminal. Her motive has to be more than just cruelty.’
Adi remembered the passion with which the seer had spoken of the spark.
‘Maybe her own spark died,’ she said, posing an answer to her own question, ‘and she doesn’t want anyone else to be happy.’
Ros felt the thought coming long before it arrived. Something Adi had said had collided with a detail considered irrelevant, and together they prompted another question.
‘What about how?’
‘The Change,’ she said. ‘All that.’
‘But where did she learn it? Even rogue Change-workers have teachers, and I’ve never heard of anything like this.’
‘Maybe she invented it herself.’
‘Not from scratch. That’s impossible. She would’ve burned herself out, most likely, or at least attracted serious attention before now.’ He tapped his chin. ‘No, there had to be someone else. Someone who helped her at least part of the way.’
The thought was still coming. He gave it time while she watched him, wondering what was going on inside his head.
Suddenly he was heading for the door and scooping her up along the way. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I know exactly how to find her.’
* * * *
‘But we’ve already searched here,’ said Adi when the convoy they were leading pulled up at the seer’s hovel. ‘Over and over.’
‘Not well enough,’ he said, fairly bounding from the cab and approaching the entrance. Armoured Mages recognised him barely in time and waved him through a split-instant after he had passed.
Adi dragged herself after him, reluctant to return to that awful hole no matter how excited Ros appeared to be about it. He had kept the secret to himself the whole way, saying that he wanted to be sure. She told him not to worry about getting her hopes up, since they were as low as they could possibly go, but he had stayed silent, fairly vibrating with energy.
Before she could reach the door he emerged again, holding something heavy and shapeless in his arms.
‘Take one end,’ he said. ‘Turn it over.’
Together they unfurled the curtain through which they had walked to their spark’s doom. The threadbare Stone Mage stared up at the unnatural stars. By their light his indifference looked entirely calculated.
‘Lay it down, right here.’
Adi did so and took a wary step backwards.
/>
‘Watch,’ Ros said.
This was the first time she had witnessed his new skills with the Change. His movements were economical and assured. There was no urgent fumbling, as there had been in his youth or when in the grip of the Thrall passion had ruled his head. Here he was cool and confident, utterly in command.
The world flexed around them.
Adi and the small crowd that had gathered watched to see what would happen next.
Ros stepped lightly onto the carpet and dropped out of sight into Magda Van Haasteren’s hidden Way.
* * * *
Immediately he stumbled, made clumsy by an awkward tangle of geometries. He had wanted his revelation to be dramatic. He had wanted Adi to be surprised. Too late he realised that they should have fixed the curtain vertically, as it had been originally placed, so he could simply walk through instead dropping out the wall on the other end of it.
He was the one caught off-balance. His right foot came down awkwardly, twisting his ankle. Pain shot up his calf and the leg gave way beneath him. He tumbled forward and landed heavily on his side.
‘Get ready to catch your girlfriend,’ growled a familiar voice.
Ros rolled onto his back with his hands upraised as Adi hurtled through the Way after him. Lighter and more sure on her feet, she merely staggered two steps and came to a halt, standing still before him with both soles firmly planted.
Behind her, the Way snapped shut with a whip-crack, silencing a growing clamour from the far side.
Ros gathered his strength to punch a hole back through.
‘Do it,’ said the seer, ‘and I’ll kill all three of us.’
Magda Van Haasteren was a shapeless mass sitting in the centre of the rough-hewn chamber, hunched over a candlestick holder as though for warmth. The candle was lit, casting a flickering yellow light across her walnut features. Adi helped Ros to his feet, watching the seer closely and taking the measure of the place in which she had sought refuge. It was far below the city’s deepest extent, that much Adi was sure of, with no physical entrances or exits, windows or exhausts. The air was clammy, hot and foul, and apart from the candle the only light came from tiny glowstones embedded in the ceiling like jewels. Water dripped in a far corner, and trickled elsewhere, leaving gleaming paths and stalactites in its wake.
The seer’s hidey-hole wasn’t a comfortable space by any human standards. The more Adi saw, the less certain she became that it was intended for human habitation at all. A series of makeshift shelves lined the chamber’s walls, and on those shelves were things that hurt the eye to look at.
‘Do that too,’ said the seer at some plot of Ros’s that Adi couldn’t sense, ‘and I’ll lock you down here forever. With me.’
Ros sagged backwards, favouring his right leg.
‘Are we trapped?’ Adi asked him, sotto voce.
‘No. I’m sure I can get us out.’
‘How sure?’
‘As sure as he can be, girl,’ the seer said with a cackle at their expense. ‘You’re asking the impossible and he’s failing to deliver it. Or he’s showing off and you’re not being a very good audience. I forget which.’
Adi’s fury rose. ‘We should leave you to rot.’
‘I’m rotten enough as is.’ The seer put the candlestick to one side and stood up with a grunt. Her shape didn’t appreciatively change. ‘As are we all, on the inside. See that one there?’ One twisted finger stabbed at the nearest shelf. ‘That’s all that remains of your spark.’
Ros stared at the thing she indicated, aware of Adi’s hand painfully gripping his arm. It, like the others filling the shelves, was black and twisted, seeming both thorned and half-melted at the same time. Some grass seeds had the same look, seen up close, but this held no vitality or beneficence. It was entirely malefic.
‘What did you do to it?’
‘I did nothing — and what was done would have been done anyway. You would’ve killed your spark without the Thrall’s intervention.’
‘Never,’ said Adi, sure that the aching void in her heart had once held something of great permanence
The seer hobbled to the shelf and picked up the hideous object. ‘The surety of youth is a brilliant thing. It takes a brighter fire still to burn it out. You’ll see soon enough that I did you a favour. I’ve seared your soul against the wound of disappointment; the deeper scars of loss and regret you’ll never know. You should thank me rather than rail against me.’
‘You would’ve killed us,’ said Ros, ‘like the others.’
‘Yes, but don’t you see that would have been a blessing too?’ The seer clutched the thing in her hands, not heeding how its wicked points cut her, or at least not minding. ‘Where there is life, there is hope — and hope makes us do terrible, terrible things.’
‘You’re done now,’ said Adi, repulsed by the mixture of self-pity and triumph displayed before her. ‘Ulum has had enough of your “blessings”.’
The seer uttered a sound that might have been a laugh. Blood dripped in heavy splashes to her feet. ‘So you plan to kill me. I thought you came to take back what you have lost. What if I told you that I could return it to you? Would you let me go, if I did?’
Ros knew she was lying. She had to be, for such a claim was preposterous. The spark had been eaten. All that remained was the waste, the excreta, of a being that thrived on the dreams of others.
Yet he was tempted. To recover what had been taken — to reclaim the future he had spent five years planning ...
‘And then what?’ said Adi. ‘We don’t have much in common, Ros and I. That’s why our story was so popular. We were the odd couple, the mismatch made good. Look at how we tested each other when you gave us the chance to. Look at the wedge we drove between ourselves. You didn’t create that wedge; it was already there. You just wielded what we would’ve wielded against each other, in time.’
The seer’s lips curled. ‘You’re not so dense after all. Congratulations.’
‘That’s what you’d have us believe, anyway.’ Adi had let go of Ros and was moving slowly to her left, widening the gap between them. ‘You spared us the lie of the spark and an agonised life when it’s gone. You tell yourself it’s a good thing because you wish someone had done it to you. You don’t have the courage to end your own pain, so you end the pain of others instead. You create it, and then you end it. You’re your own little industry, aren’t you?’
‘Stay back.’
The seer’s eyes danced between the two of them. She was beginning to feel hemmed in: Ros could see that much. He wanted to warn Adi to be careful, to be wary of pushing her too hard, but he was unwilling to interrupt the tide of words. True or not, Adi’s insights were having a profound effect on the seer.
‘Stay back, I said!’
‘Who did this to you?’ Adi pressed, feeling her fortunes turning at last. ‘Who did you lose?’
The seer’s face broke out into a snarl. With surprising strength, she hurled the wicked thing at Adi’s head. Adi raised her hands to ward it off, but the barbs dug deep. She fell backwards with a cry.
Ros was already reaching for the Change when the seer turned to him. They were surrounded by stone — stone wedded hard to the bedrock by virtue of its depth. He was surrounded by power. All he had to do was channel it.
So too the seer, and she had blood and territory on her side. Their wills locked in strange and deadly shapes in her secret hideaway. Light flared through all colours of the rainbow. Flashes of heat seared their skins. The floor beneath them buckled, and showers of dust and rock rained on them. The black shapes lining the walls exploded like ghastly black rockets, filling the air with soot.
Ros knew within seconds that he had the measure of her. It wasn’t in his mind to end it quickly, though. He needed to know the source of her knowledge. He had to be sure his guess was right.
And thus it turned out to be, for behind her wild improvisations and baroque peccadilloes he did recognise a philosophy, a method of teaching that was diff
erent from his own but at the same time familiar to him, as it would have been to any Change-worker raised in the Interior. A Stone Mage had taken her part of the road towards mastery — a Stone Mage much like the one depicted on the curtain.
The battle of wills had achieved its purpose. Ros bore down as Master Pukje had taught him, forcing his will upon her so that she could hurt no one else. His intention was not to kill her, but to bind her long enough for the authorities to take her captive. His desire for revenge only went that far.
Movement to one side caught both their attentions. Adi was up and moving, groggily but purposefully. Somehow, despite all the commotion, the candle was still burning. With one bleeding hand she reached for it.