Water in shadow ... he murmured to himself, the ball of his right foot firm on the ground.
Cherry blossoms in silver ... That was his left foot, as his right hand brushed along the cold slippery smoothness of the ice, and the stone grit ran through his blood like sorrow.
Fish kisses Moon ... He thought of his wife, smiling under a summer oak-tree at him, wearing the blue Traveller-style gown he loved best, dark hair released from its braids, rosy skin freckled from hours in the sunlight. She’s given him the book on their wedding-day, and he’d taken it with him to every campaign, on every visit home. Fish kisses Moon. The magic summer with his nine-year-old son before the Seventh Army had been sent to this Border, teaching young Jemis all the things Jack had wanted to learn from his own father, who had lived only for his horses. Fish kisses Moon. He would be owed a good long leave if he rescued the command staff. Perhaps he would even sell out and run his brother’s estate.
He opened his eyes, shuddering from his head to his feet, to see before him the amused face of a stone shaman.
“Good attempt,” the man said in execrable Shaian, and the guards bound him.
Two
THEY STRIPPED JACK naked and left him tied and shivering in the corner of a cell next to the corpses of three of the people he had come to rescue. He shivered in reaction from the passage through the stone, from being caught, from exhaustion and hunger and cold and fear and grief for all his comrades and officers. Also he shivered in rage.
There had been sixteen Loëssie and five prisoners: General Halioren of the Fourth Division, the General’s Second Norcell, Halioren’s Aide-de-Camp Laranghi, and the two Sub-division Commanders, Colonels-Major Kitani and Ruz. Jack shivered next to the bodies of Kitani, Ruz, and Laranghi. Laranghi and Ruz appeared to have been tortured to death; he couldn’t tell from their respective positions what had happened to Colonel-Major Kitani, except that she had not died happily.
He shivered and wrapped his arms as best as he could around his knees, squatting awkwardly to keep from the cold stone. They had not been more than two hours behind the prisoner train when they left Loe. Perhaps that had extended to three when they were stymied by the cliff face.
In three hours the Loëssie had killed three of their possible hostages, leaving only the two highest-ranking. Why?
Jack rocked slowly back and forth on the balls of his feet. Ankles bound, wrists bound, in a bare stone cell with ice down one wall. He would not last long naked, especially since he was a nobody. There was little money in his family and no name except what he had won for himself. No one would pay a ransom for him, even if the Loëssie were in the mood for ransoms. They’d killed Laranghi, who came of a high family of Ysthar and bore the tattoos to prove it.
Surely the Loëssie would prefer a negotiated peace to the destruction of their people. No one courted elimination.
Then he thought of the endless booms as the Valley folk destroyed their sculptures and castles rather than let them fall into Imperial hands. Stone speaks to stone, and water to water. They built up their mountains, their dams and their valley walls—and when the time came they let them fall in avalanches and floods.
General Halioren and his Second, Lady Norcell, would not have an easy incarceration and a ransom to the Commander-General of the Seventh Army at Arne. They would be tortured for what they knew of the invasion plans, and then, no doubt, killed and displayed somewhere prominent as a warning to the Empire, after the Valley folk destroyed everything they thought made their valleys attractive to Astandalas.
As Jack well knew, the Empire wanted the Valleys for their strategic position more than their magic or their resources, because of the fertile plains on the other side of the mountains and the buffer they provided against the restless hosts of Faërie to the east. But as he also knew, the Seventh Army was fighting on three fronts, for Faërie had attacked the Third and Fifth Divisions to the south as they tried to come round through the Middle Passes to the rear of the Valleys, and in the north the recently-conquered Surlevi had decided to take advantage of the unrest to their south to rise up in rebellion. The First Division had been considered enough for that purpose, but even as the campaign for the Seven Valleys had started to turn in favour of the Valleyites, the Surlevi had found a brilliant war leader and produced enough of a fight that Commander-General Itoh had called off the Fourth Division as well, leaving only the Second and the Sixth to deal with the Loëssie and what was supposed to be an easy finale to the campaign.
The Second had been prevented from reinforcing the Fourth by the Loëssie’s destruction of the bridges in the fifth valley and the collapse of the pass to the sixth, leaving General Halioren’s division completely cut off from the rest of the Imperial Army. And now, Jack was grimly aware, due to some traitor in their midst, the Sixth Division consisted of General Halioren, Lady Norcell, Ngolo, Vozi, and Jack himself.
Five out of a force of five hundred, and he didn’t know anyone’s fate but his own.
Jack looked bleakly at the corpses beside him. He’d reported to Kitani as his superior, learned from and liked her a great deal. She came from a lesser noble house in eastern Voonra, was a distant relative of the poet whose haikus Jack so loved. She had been trained initially as one of the dedicated priestess-warriors of the East Voonran goddess of merciful death. He wondered if she felt she had had a merciful death, or if her spirit would be unquiet and seeking revenge.
He would revenge her, he swore silently, her and Ruz and Laranghi, and all the rest of the Fourth Division. He would die in the attempt: there was no way he could return home from this side of the Border, with all that lay between him and Northwestern Oriole and his wife and his son and the summer willows.
He was naked and alone and bound at the wrists and ankles, in a stone cave with ice down one wall, at the mercy of folk willing to destroy themselves rather than submit to the Empire.
“Goddess of Merciful Death,” he said in Shaian, no longer afraid of being overheard, “your priestess died far from her family. Will you not assist me to set her spirit to rest? Give her vengeance if you could not grant her your own arrows of relief.” And then, because he was not a religious man, but he was a loyal son of the Empire, and once he had lain prostrate before his Emperor and discovered he could love him, he added: “Emperor of five worlds, we fight and die for you. Remember us, Sun of Astandalas, in our darkness.”
There was no answer from the goddess or the Emperor, but after a few more minutes of shivering Jack did notice that although Colonel-Major Kitani’s lacquered helmet was nowhere to be seen, her hair had not been torn from the elaborate braids she used to cushion her head.
Back when Jack was a captain hoping for promotion, and Colonel Kitani about to receive hers, he’d been assigned to stand-in as her aide for three weeks. That was when he’d learned about her relation to the poet, and that she was dedicated to the Goddess of Merciful Death.
He’d been helping her into her armour when she told him this. He’d asked what it meant, and she’d told him of her vocation, which was to see that there was always a way out of the cycle of suffering for those who asked.
“What if you’re not armed?” he’d asked.
She’d laughed. “I am always armed.”
His hands were bound to his feet, so he could squat with his arms around his knees, but not straighten nor crawl. He rolled over to where his superior officer’s corpse lay. Then, weeping at the indignity, he scrabbled at the elaborate braids for the hidden pins anchoring them.
The hairpins, then the half-circle curve of a sicar, the sacred knife. The Goddess of Merciful Death was one name for the Moon, Kitani had told him. The knife was a crescent, the blade on the inner curve, the clasp demure silver beneath the sleek braids.
Jack mouthed the knife free, spitting out cold hair and white breath. The air was cold, and when he brushed up against the Colonel-Major’s skin, as he unavoidably had to, he shuddered at how cold and clammy it was. Her eyes were staring out at whatever vision
came with death, empty of her spirit and lacking any indication she’d seen her goddess.
He wedged the sicar between his feet, clumsy with the cold, nicking himself with its razor edge. The blood flowed very sluggishly out of what seemed very white skin, and he feared frostbite but was grateful not to bleed freely. He was very slow at slicing between the ropes in his hands, and waited, massaging them, until the painful tickle of returning blood subsided, before he tried to free his feet.
When at last he stood upright he felt as stiff as the corpses.
His first act was to close their eyes and mutter a prayer over them, swearing vengeance that he felt they would care more to hear than any pious mumblings he could remember from childhood services to the Lady of the Green and White. And then, begging silently for their forgiveness, he pulled off what remained of their clothes, and every weapon he could find.
He was left with five hairpins, two of them with the gold bead that Colonel-Major Kitani had said meant poison, two with the silver that meant something else that he didn’t know, one with a jade bead of equally uncertain effect. The sicar, and a length of silk belt, and the sharp edge of a broken shell from Laranghi’s headdress. He couldn’t find the hollow tube that was meant to act as a blow-pipe for the hairpins, and instead stuck them carefully in a length of cloth which he rolled up into a tube he could stick safely into the silk belt, which she’d worn tripled and was therefore just barely long enough to reach around his own waist.
He shuffled to the door in his makeshift slippers, shivering still in the draped rags and tatters of three uniforms, sicar in one hand, shell in the other, the hairpins in their roll at his waist. He feared their coldness; but he was aware that if it came to it, they would provide a more merciful death for the remaining soldiers than the torture that awaited them otherwise.
He could hear nothing, but that meant nothing. The door was locked, and he had no great skills at lock-picking. He hesitated, and realized that there was light in the cell.
He was used to Astandalan magic, which even for non-practitioners lit up rooms with a whistle or a word. It hadn’t surprised him to be in a windowless cell and be able to see: being in total darkness would have been more bewildering. Yet now that he thought of it, as he examined the door for any weakness, all his senses straining to hear footsteps or breathing, he realized his mistake.
There was no source of light in the cell, no lantern or enchanted stone. There were the three bodies and himself, and tatters of rope and cloth that he’d left on the floor, the unpleasant pile in one corner he’d also been forced to leave, and the stone walls, the stone door, and the ice sheet.
The ice was the source of the light, he realized. It was such a soft light it cast no shadows and suggested no origin, but as he stood against the opposite wall he could see that it was either glowing itself or providing a translucent medium for another source.
Jack used the broken shell to chip off a piece of ice. The shell shattered; he felt foolish to have so wasted a weapon. In the shade of his hand the ice showed no glimmer, was an innocuous piece of ice, quickly beginning to melt into clear water. He was wary of ice, here in the mountain fastness, but he was also tremendously thirsty, and sucked down that piece and several more before a sudden headache suggested to him that ice was not the best remedy for a chilled body.
The thought made him glance at his former officers and shudder. He turned back to the sheet of ice. It did not seem to be glowing itself: that meant there was a light source on the other side: and hopefully that meant it was not very thick.
He had nothing but himself or the other bodies to use as a battering ram. He immediately rejected the desecration involved in the latter, and instead girded himself up and thrust his shoulder into the ice.
It made a curious thrum. He bit his lip, remembering again that stone speaks to stone, and water to water. Still, there seemed nothing for it: go forward to a near-certain death, or await a certain one.
He wound his balled fist in a shred of cloth and struck sharply at the ice. This time it cracked into a spider web, each crack glowing brightly.
Possibly there were guards on the other side, watching this effort with the same amusement the stone shaman had shown watching him enter the tunnel. Jack arranged the sicar in his left hand, determined to take at least one more Valleyite with him, if that was all that he could manage, before he struck at the ice again with his right fist.
There were two guards around the corner, playing dice and ignoring the noises coming from their left. When he hurled himself through the opening he saw them as he went forward into another corridor. He landed hard, but was up and hidden behind the corner before they fully turned.
“What was that?” one asked.
The second sniffed. “Sounded like something breaking.”
An interminable pause. Jack held the sicar tightly, reaching with his bruised right hand for the first of the darts. Then the first one said, “They must’ve let the irketz on the dingos.”
Another pause. “Well, better leave them to it, then. Stone speaks to stone.”
“And water to water,” agreed the first. “Roll again?”
Jack waited, but they said nothing else. They couldn’t have been guarding him, he realized slowly, thoughts moving far too slowly in this cold thin air. The door to his cell had been in another hallway. So ... the general? Someone else? Something else?
Toss of dice, scent of burning. “Vorghin,” said the second guard. “Thought they’d never get done.”
“Wait,” said the first. “The ordoon haven’t started yet.”
Jack breathed on his hands. He was freezing. He looked around, shivering, trying not to panic. He was a trained soldier, for the Emperor’s sake. Experienced. An officer. No reason to panic.
There was a slow skittering noise behind him. He turned, heart thumping, to see a waist-thick serpent sliding towards him.
It was all frosted-green and dead-white, scales, eyes, tongue. Jack pressed himself back against the wall, sicar gripped tightly, weight resting as easily as he could contrive on his half-frozen feet. He swallowed down a deep revulsion. The serpent moved sinuously, slowly, body undulating side to side as it approached.
There was no way, Jack thought, that he could rely on the darts to work on the reptile. The sicar was wickedly sharp, but the serpent’s scales looked hard as stone. It was turning its head side to side as it came, livid tongue flicking out to taste the air. He would smell of death and dust and distant places, he thought. Was it venomous? Or was it a slow coiler, like the water snakes of the jungles of East Orkaty? He was far too weak to wrestle with a constrictor this size. One of his men had woken in the night to find himself encumbered with a boa constrictor. It had taken three of them to unwind the snake from around the man, and he’d borne the bruises for weeks.
The serpent paused when it came up to him, head turning so he could see its flat white eyes. He held his breath. The tongue flickered, tasting, judging.
Something touched his thigh, and he looked down to see that while he had been watching its head, the snake had stealthily brought up its body to coil around him.
Three
THE STRUGGLE WAS EERILY silent.
Jack had fought in more battles than he cared to count. They had all of them been noisy, even deafening. Weapons clashing, horses crashing, people screaming, all melding into a huge roar that echoed sometimes in his sleep.
The serpent did not even hiss. Its scales made soft rustling sounds that his brain tried to make into words in Loëssie, in Shaian.
His breath was short and shallow, grunts held back by willpower alone, trying desperately not to attract the notice of the inattentive guards.
His hand slipped down the icy scales.
“Two fives,” came the voice down the corridor.
Jack lifted his arms up just in time to avoid being pinned by yet another loop of the monstrous creature.
Clatter. “Three and four split.”
Almost by accident
he got his left hand in place as the serpent struck, catching it under the jaw, wishing for once he was left-handed. His muscles almost immediately started to quiver with strain.
Constrictor snakes were usually not also venomous—but then again snakes, especially large snakes, did not usually inhabit ice caves most of the way up mountains.
“Six and two.”
He was starting to feel weak, and despite the chill he was beginning to sweat. In his right hand he held the sicar, its silvered blade delicate, thin, sharp.
“Two fours.”
Goddess of Merciful Death, he half-thought, half-prayed, let it be as sharp as Kitani claimed.
The serpent struck, coils tightening against his legs, making him tilt, throwing off his balance. He kept most of his attention on his thrusting elbow, on his left hand holding the neck, and as it struck against him he brought his right hand around, knife slicing up, no point to it to gouge eyes, just the half-moon curve to slide between sweaty hand and icy scales.
It slid between scales stretched apart by the creature’s own killing strike, between ball and hinge joint of jaw, and finally, his own arm’s failing strength assisted by his left hand relaxing, letting the serpent’s own momentum carry it onto his blade, the sicar slid between vertebra and skull.
Head and he fell together in a wild recoil of flailing loops. The sicar in his hand struck the stone floor and shattered like cheap glass.
“Two sixes,” said a guard. “Another go?”
HIS WEAPONS THUS REDUCED to two deathly hairpins and three of unknown effect, Jack wondered whether to be more cautious or more bold. He sat on the floor, the ground, gasping as quietly as he could manage, massaging the blood back into his legs. He would be all over bruises tomorrow.
He refused to think he would not see tomorrow.
Stone Speaks to Stone: A Tale of the Nine Worlds Page 2