Circles of Stone

by Ian Johnstone

  Naeo blinked at him calmly. “That’s what we were saying,” she said. “We’re not sure. I mean, we know why we’re here, but we have no idea what they’re doing here. They weren’t just chasing us. They were with Scarpia and she seemed to be—”

  Tasker raised a hand for silence. “Did you say Scarpia?”

  “That’s right. Thoth’s Magruman. You know what a Magruman is?”

  Tasker laughed mirthlessly. He rummaged in his pocket and brought out his small black oblong, then swept a finger over it so that it flared into life. He tapped his thumb over the glow a few times, then raised it to his ear.

  Ash and Naeo watched in fascination.

  “Hi, it’s me,” blurted Tasker suddenly, apparently to someone in the oblong. “No, listen!” He took the oblong away from his ear and stared at it as a tiny voice twittered from one end, then brought it back to his mouth and shouted: “PLAGUE!”

  The twittering fell silent, then spat out one word.

  “Yes, PLAGUE!” repeated Tasker.

  More twittering.

  Tasker gritted his teeth. “Just tell everyone. I’ll explain when I get there.”

  “Science is a measured magic, but a magic nonetheless. It unravels the secrets of space and time and natural law, and weaves them into endless possibility. It is the stuff of magic forged by invention and machine.”

  TASKER SHOVED THE OBLONG back in his pocket and gripped the wheel. Then he began riffling anxiously through his hair. “This is bad. Very, very bad,” he muttered.

  “Where are you taking us?” asked Naeo, leaning forward. “We need to follow the river – to town.”

  Tasker took a deep breath. “To start with, I’m putting as much distance between us and them as possible. Once I know it’s safe, I’ll circle back and take you to town. I daren’t go direct – if those things set off at a pace, they could cut us off.”

  He looked up at a little mirror attached to the ceiling of the car and gazed at his passengers. There was a moment of silence. “So who are you people? I mean, apart from bad luck?”

  Ash raised his eyebrows. “I’m actually known for having quite excellent luck,” he said petulantly. “This is a very bad day for me.”

  “Who ARE you?”

  Ash grinned. “I’m Ash. This is Naeo.”

  “And you’re Suhl, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, that’s something.” Tasker went quiet for a moment, glancing in the mirror. “Do you know anything about a boy who made the passing about a week ago? A boy called Tate – Sylas Tate?”

  Naeo grasped Ash’s arm.

  “What do you know about Sylas Tate?” she asked suspiciously.

  Tasker’s eyes narrowed. “Just that a lot of people are worried about him.”

  “What people?” asked Naeo.

  “Plenty of people. But I think the name you’re fishing for is Mr Zhi.”

  Naeo rocked back in her seat and smiled at Ash.

  “Sorry to be so cautious,” she said, “it’s just—”

  “We live in dangerous times,” finished Tasker. “Yes, so it seems. So … Sylas?”

  “He’s fine,” said Naeo. “But he … well, we all still have questions about who he is. And why he came. We thought Mr Zhi might be able to help us.”

  Tasker arched an eyebrow. “Well, from what I hear, he hoped Sylas would find the answers for himself.” He looked for a reaction in the mirror, but Naeo was giving nothing away. “But you’ll find out soon enough. You’re in luck – Mr Zhi is still in town.”

  “In Gabblety Row?” asked Ash, keenly.

  “That’s the place.”

  Ash sat back and patted his knees. “You see?” he exclaimed. “Good luck! I just can’t help myself!”

  Tasker and Naeo both mumbled something under their breath as the car drove on towards their destination.

  Scarpia squinted towards the horizon, raising a panther’s claw to shield her eyes from the dying sun. Her mongrel gaze missed nothing of the scene: where her feline eye failed, her human eye saw all. She saw ten small groups of black figures, each at a sprint, spanning out across the wilderness, following the contours and ditches, streams and hedgerows, so that they seemed no more than evening shadows. In the distance she saw the great stone circle lit by a gathering swarm of scientific lights, their frantic blinks and darting beams betraying controlled panic. And all around the stones were her very own Ghorhund, unleashed from the chariot to bring forth their mayhem: howling at the lights, tearing the vehicles like tin cans, ripping at fences. One stood high on the stones, silhouetted against the setting sun, baying at the strange machine that thrummed and stuttered as it circled in the sky.

  She purred deep down in her throat. Everything was going precisely to plan. Some of the Ghorhund would be taken or killed – it was to be expected – but by then it would be too late.

  She glanced up at the cobalt-blue sky, now adorned with pink-trimmed trails of cloud. Soon it would be night. And what a night it would be.

  Her night.

  She dropped her eyes to the peaceful river at her side. “Come, Lord Hathor,” she purred. “Let’s see if our friends are at home.”

  She bounded off down the bank, leaping over bushes, ducking beneath branches, weaving between trees until, a moment later, she disappeared completely.

  There was a brief, uneasy stillness, and then something shifted in the undergrowth, whispering like a breeze over dead leaves.

  Suddenly a bush rustled, a branch darted to one side, and then, with all the force of a desert wind, the Ray Reaper moved off, cleaving down the bank, snapping trees in half like twigs and shattering all that lay in its path.

  As Naeo stared out of her crystal window at another world, she felt a new electricity coursing through her veins.

  None of it seemed real: not the rich verdant countryside; nor the neat hedgerows dividing fields that heaved with crops, planted in straight-edged rows by some impossibly careful hand; nor the regimental lines of giant metal frames, rising high into the sky and spanned by thick black ropes – defence perhaps against some unimaginable scientific foe.

  Cars whisked past them at just an arm’s reach away, travelling so fast that if she had not seen them approach and disappear, she would have doubted they had been there at all. It was their speed that made all this truly magical, truly of another world. It was more than just a thrill: it challenged everything they knew. The distance they had already travelled broke every law of Nature. This car was not just a way of getting where they were going: it was a machine that gobbled time.

  As Naeo watched it all fly by, she realised that she had never felt so alive.

  “Not far now,” said Tasker, breaking her daydream. “The good news is we’re coming from a direction they’d never expect. The bad news is we don’t know what to expect either.”

  They dipped briefly into a tunnel and then climbed a long ramp that led back towards the light. At the top they joined an enormous road of terrifying speeds with two vehicles travelling in each direction. Despite their death-defying pace, the cars passed so close that Naeo could see the occupants as they whizzed on their way. It was some kind of orderly madness. Naeo and Ash sank in their seats.

  “This may be pushing my luck too far,” muttered Ash.

  Tasker laughed. “No need for luck,” he said. “I’m driving.”

  The car surged on and, as Tasker had promised, they soon started to see the strange structures of a town: familiar ones at first, with sloping roofs and chimneys – although they were higher than normal and oblong. Naeo wondered what it was with this world and oblongs … they were everywhere. Soon these blockish buildings gave way to larger, more imposing structures, which jutted skywards with silky smooth, angular flanks of grey, or shimmering, gleaming planes of glass. Some rose to such heights that they would have rivalled even Isia’s temple, though these were not so proud – so different from all around them. Instead they jostled in a great muddle of brick, stone and glass,
shouldering aside the smaller dwellings. Like the road, this place spoke of business and impatience, of people short of space and time.

  The town made Naeo nervous but excited too. It was gloriously chaotic, filled with shapes and colours and sounds – sounds that penetrated even the strange cocoon of the car. People milled about on the streets, clothed in the myriad colours of another world. Although they seemed rushed and anxious, they appeared to have no work to do. None of them had any real burden to carry, none seemed to be plying a trade. There were not even markets or stalls to speak of. It was all quite bewildering. But then, Naeo was getting used to that.

  The road became even busier and, with less and less space to manoeuvre, the cars began to slow. Soon they were arranged end to end in growling rows, grumbling and honking and blinking their frustration.

  “Where are they all going?” asked Naeo, shaking her head.

  Tasker laughed. “I sometimes ask myself the same thing,” he said, running his hand through his thick locks. “Right now, I just wish they’d get the heck out of our way.”

  The cars inched forward, rolling past huge, brightly lit frontages of glass displaying all manner of wares that Naeo would never have dreamed of: bizarre clothes, strange machines, more little black oblongs. As they turned a bend they passed a huge display of larger oblongs, each alive with blinking, disjointed snippets of the world, dazzlingly clear and true, but somehow flat and unreal, cutting between faces and landscapes, things of nature and wild, psychedelic explosions of colour. Naeo and Ash grinned at one another excitedly. To them the Other seemed so steeped in magic – a place of such endless possibility – that they wondered how Sylas could have been so amazed by Essenfayle or the Three Ways.

  Naeo’s eyes suddenly narrowed. Some of the oblongs in the window were showing an image of what looked like the stone circle, from the point of view of somewhere high in the sky. Just as she was about to point this out, the images disappeared and cut to a woman speaking and pointing frantically.

  Naeo turned to her companions. “Did anyone just see—”

  “What in the name of Isia is that?”

  Ash was looking in a different direction, jabbing a finger into the window pane next to Tasker’s ear. He was pointing at a man gliding past at the same speed as the car, wearing the strangest and most questionable outfit he had ever seen. He was clothed all over in a garment so tight that, were it not covered in splashes of luminous colours, they might have thought him naked. The strange clothing was stretched wafer-thin across his torso, down his arms, over his hips and thighs, leaving only his lower legs and hands free. But it was the man’s transport that had caught Ash’s attention. He was sailing along on a flimsy-looking contraption of only two comically large wheels, one directly in front of the other, leaving no support on either side. By all the laws of Nature, he should have fallen into the path of the passing cars.

  “That,” said Tasker, looking surprised, “is a bloke on a bike.”

  “A bike…” repeated Ash reverently. “And how does he hold it like that? I thought you people didn’t use Urgolvane?”

  Tasker turned suddenly in his seat. “Whoa, now!” he cried. “We don’t speak of those things here!”

  Ash threw his hands in the air. “Calm down, no one can hear us!”

  “That doesn’t matter!” snapped Tasker. “We just never, EVER talk of those things. They’re forbidden – understand?”

  “So you don’t even mention them? The Three … you know?”

  “No, never.”

  “Well that’ll be tough for Ash,” murmured Naeo, still staring out of the window. “He’s a bit of a fan.”

  Ash glared at her. “So what if I am?”

  She grunted and shrugged. “You know what I think.”

  Ash looked away, pursing his lips as though struggling to hold his tongue. “Well, in any case, all this secrecy is irrelevant if you ask me. Now that Scarpia’s here, the cat is well and truly out of the bag … so to speak.”

  Tasker sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. “You might be right,” he said.

  The traffic slowed to a crawl and for some time they just edged forward in silence, each lost in their thoughts. Naeo found herself playing with the Merisi Band around her wrist. It was only after a while that she realised it felt strange – lighter somehow – and it took her some moments to work out why: the pain had gone. From the beginning it had hurt, and never more so than when she was with Sylas. And now – now that she was as far from him as could be – there was nothing. It was a relief not to feel the pain any more, but in the same moment she felt oddly uncomfortable.

  The traffic noise swelled around them as they approached a large junction controlled by curious towers of red, orange and green lights. As peculiar as these were, her eyes were drawn to a tumbledown building made of stone, which seemed a little reminiscent of some of the grander buildings in their own world, with columns and high stone arches. It was just as decayed and decrepit as many of them too, with no panes in the windows and weeds and ivy growing up the cracked walls. Naeo spotted an old, faded sign in its overgrown gardens. It read: ‘Church of the Holy Trinity’.

  “Well, here we are,” said Tasker, nodding to the building on the other side of the road. “Gabblety Row.”

  Naeo and Ash scrambled to the other window and peered out.

  There it was.

  It was a tumbledown improbability of a building, which had no real right to be standing. Nothing about it made sense: not the crumbling red bricks, which wandered and wavered in confused rows; not the misshapen windows, some of which actually lunged out from the side of the building, held precariously on a forest of brackets; not the crazy framework of dark brown beams, which were arranged at such weird angles that they looked like a giant game of pick-up sticks. But despite its frailties, Gabblety Row also looked timeless and substantial. It was a place that had been as it was for many years gone and would be so for many years to come, shrugging off the noise and rush of the roads, the precisions of modern life, the breathless pace of things.

  “It’s a grand old place, in its own way,” said Tasker respectfully. “One of our own, you know.”

  Ash frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, the Merisi built it.”

  Ash looked surprised. “I didn’t know the Merisi were into building things.”

  “We’re into more than you can imagine,” said Tasker. “But Gabblety Row was less about the building than the ground it sits on.”

  Ash peered at its foundations. “How so?”

  “It’s built over a Slip,” said Tasker as the lights changed and the traffic began to move.

  “A what?”

  “A Slip – a missed stitch,” he said as though it should be clear. “A gap. A hole.”

  “What kind of hole?” interjected Naeo.

  “A hole between the worlds, of course.”

  Naeo and Ash stared at him in silence, then leaned over to get a better look.

  “That’s why it’s such a tumbledown,” continued Tasker. “Poor thing barely knows which world it’s in. They built it to plug the Slip.” He turned and gave them a knowing look. “Dangerous things, Slips.”

  They cornered at the junction and swept past the building, seeing the frontage of shops: a bustling bakery; a dismal undertaker marked ‘Veeglum & Retch’; a locksmith and carpentry shop, and finally: a dark, unlit premises whose faded sign could no longer be read.

  Naeo knew what it was without being told.

  “The Shop of Things,” she murmured.

  Tasker glanced back and smiled. “That’s right,” he said. “And Mr Zhi is waiting for you.”

  “But know this: in the last, it will come to War. War is inevitable.”

  SYLAS OPENED HIS EYES, blinked and thought he must be dreaming.

  It was light. Wonderful, life-giving light. It was more of a feeble glow than a dawn – the usual grey smudge of the Barrens – but it was day, and it meant that their trials were over. He push
ed himself up on his elbows. There was something else different too: a tingling lightness in his wrist, a warmth that made him look down at his arm. It was only then, when he saw the Merisi Band, that he realised that it was not so much a sensation as something missing – the pain that had become second nature, that had told him Naeo was near. He had not been without it since he was last on the Barrens, walking into Thoth’s city. But now it was gone.

  She was gone.

  He was certain. He could feel it – not just in his wrist but somewhere deep inside. It was a lack of something, an absence that left him feeling strangely exposed. Naeo was far away. She was not even part of this world. She had passed into the Other.

  He heard a noise and glanced across the ashes of the campfire. Simia was lying on her side, propped up on one elbow, curling a lock of red hair around a finger. She had been watching him.

  “Something wrong with your arm?” she asked huskily.

  Sylas sat up. “No, it’s better than it’s been for ages,” he said, yawning and stretching. “The band doesn’t hurt any more.”

  Simia raised her eyebrows. “So what does that mean? Is she OK?”

  “Yes, but she’s gone. I don’t know how, but I just know – they made it.”

  “Well at least part of this adventure is going to plan,” came a whisper from the other side of the fire. It was Triste, speaking in a dry, broken voice.

  He pushed back his blankets with closed fists and strained to sit up. Simia rushed to help him, but he waved her away, preferring to do it himself. His burns looked a little less livid in the cool light of morning, but he was still a shade of himself.

  He was silent for a while, gathering his strength. Sylas made a support for his back and Simia brought him some water. They exchanged an anxious look.

  “Did you get any rest?” asked Simia as she sat next to him.