A Gathering Of Stones dost-3

by Jo Clayton

  “Better wait.”

  “How long?”

  “Two days, three at most.”

  “All right. Will you come with us?”

  “No. I’ll make up some call-me’s for you; if you run into trouble and I can help, break one under your heel and I’ll be there.” He lifted his hands, spread them wide in a flowing expressive gesture. “If it weren’t for young Kori…”

  “It’s my affair, not yours, Maksi; you needn’t fuss yourself.”

  “Hmm.” He got to his feet. “If you need money…”

  “I do. But I’ll talk to you about that later. All right?”

  “Fine. Third hour tomorrow morning?”

  “All right. Here? Good.”

  She stood in the doorway to, her suite and watched him stride off down the corridor. That’s over, she thought. I was right. Neither of us is going back to Jal Virri. Healing time, resting time, it’s done. She sighed and shut the door, went over to the fire and stood leaning against the mantle, letting the heat play across the front of her body. Tungjii, she thought. Say hisser name and step back. Maksi was right. I shouldn’t have invoked the little god, look what happened. She brooded until her robe began to scorch, then she shifted to a chair. Slowly, with painful care and uncomfortable honesty, she confronted needs she hadn’t expected to have and set these against the ethical code her father had taught her by example and aphorism.

  Don’t cheat yourself by scamping your work, whatever the pressures of time and need; you always lose more than you gain if you cut corners.

  In your dealings with others, first do no harm.

  If harm is inevitable, do all you can to minimize its effects.

  Her eyes filled; she scrubbed her hand across them angrily. This cursed nostalgia was useless. All it did was undercut her efforts to deal with the things that she was discovering about herself, things that terrified her. Disgusted her.

  “You didn’t wake me.” Jaril dropped beside her, knelt with his arms resting on the chair arm.

  “Maksi was in a mood.” She touched his hair. “Do you mind?”

  “He going to help?”

  “Yes. He’ll start looking for Yaril tomorrow. He has to soothe the Managers first.”

  “Urn. He coming with us?”

  “No. It’ll be just us.”

  “Good.”

  “Jay!”

  “He’d be a drag and you know it.”

  “He’s powerful. He can do things we wouldn’t have a hope of doing.”

  “Who says we’ll need those things? We haven’t before.”

  “Imp.” She tapped the tip of his nose, laughed. “What are we arguing about, eh? He’s not corning, so there’s no problem. ‘

  “When we leaving?”

  “Maksi says he should have all he can get in two-three days, say three days. Then I’ve got to Hunt, he says wait until he finishes his sweep and I agree. Say two nights more. All right?”

  “Has to be. You look tired.”

  “I am.”

  “Sleep.”

  “Cant turn my head off.”

  “Come to bed. I can fix that.”

  “I don’t want to dream, Jay.”

  “I won’t mess with dreams, Bramble. If you do, you need to. Come on.”

  “I come, o master Jay.”

  7

  Maksim was embarrassed and worried when he came to her suite two days later. “I don’t know who, I don’t know why. I tried every means I know, Bramble, but I found out nothing.” Hands clasped behind him, he went charging about the room, throwing words at her over his shoulder. “Do you hear? Nothing! Even the cave is closed off from me. All of it.” He stopped in front of her, glared at her. “I don’t think you should go there, Bramble. Not alone.”

  “I won’t be alone. Jay will be with me.”

  He brushed that away. “You have a year. Give me two months. Come with me to meet Kori when she leaves the school. As soon as I finish there, I’ll be free. I’ve never seen anything like this, Brann; god or man, no one has shut me out like this since I was a first year apprentice.”

  “No, Maksi. Now. It has to be now.”

  “If I don’t snap you to the cave site, it will take you at least two months’ travel to reach it. Give me those months.”

  “If that sled Danny Blue made hadn’t gone to pieces, I wouldn’t have to beg. I hate this, Maksi, but I’ve got no choice. Please. Do what you said you’d do. I’m not being stubborn or perverse. It isn’t Jay working on me. This is…

  I don’t know, a feeling, something. It says NOW. I don’t know. Please, Maksi. Do you want me on my knees?” She started to drop, but he caught her arm in a hard grip that left bruises behind when he took his hand away.

  “No!” He shouted the word at her. “No,” he said more quietly. “Here.” He stretched out a fist, held it over her cupped hands. “Call-me’s. If you need me, put one under your heel and crush it. I’ll be there before your next breath. If I can find you.” Grim and unhappy, he dropped half a dozen water-smoothed quartz pebbles in her hands. “If I can. If you aren’t blocked off from me like the cave.”

  Drinker of Souls prowled the streets.

  A band of prepubescent thieves came creeping through the fog to find their Whip limp and lifeless on the filthy cobbles.

  A childstealer dropped from a window with a bundle slung over one shoulder. A hand came from the darkness, slapped against his neck. A mastiff howled until a houseguard came out to throw a cobble at the beast. The guard heard the baby crying, saw the bundle and the dead man, woke the house with his yells.

  An assassin prepared to scale the outside of a merchant’s house. When the streetsweepers came along, they found his body rolled up against the wall.

  Inside the BlackHouse a man was beating a boy, slowly, carefully beating him to death. When he finished, he left the place, strolling sated between his bodyguards. His gardener found the three of them stretched out under a bush, dead.

  And so it went.

  In the cold wet dawns the streetsweepers of Kukurul found the husks she left behind and put them on the rag and bone cart for the charnel fires.,

  In the cold wet dawns the Kula priests went sweeping in procession through the tangled streets, setting silence on the newborn ghosts. Ghosts that were highly indignant and prepared to make life difficult for everyone around them. They fought the grip of the priests but lost and went writhing off, pulsing with blocked fury. The wind blew them off to join the fog out over the bay and the debris from older cast-out souls.

  9

  On the evening of the third night, with Jaril trotting beside her, Brann climbed the mountain above the inn and waited for Maksim.

  The Wounded Moon was a vague patch of yellow in the western sky, a chill fog eddied about the flat; the stones were dark with the damp, slippery lightsinks and traps for the unwary ankle. Brann pulled her cloak tighter about her body, muttering under her breath at Maksim’s insistence on this particular spot for his operations. At the same time she was perversely pleased with her surroundings, the gloom around her resonated with the gloom inside her. Jail was even more unhappy with the place. He’d kept his mastiff form but replaced his fur with a thick leathery skin that shed the condensation from the fog like waxed parchment. In spite of that he was uncomfortable. The wet stole, heat and energy from him. He was prowling about, rubbing his sides against any boulders tall enough to allow this, impatient to get away.

  In the fog and the cold and the dark, Jaril whining behind her somewhere, Brann began to wonder if Maksim had changed his mind again. She eased the straps of her rucksack; though the leather was padded, they were cutting into her shoulders. Soft, she thought, but I’ll harden with time and doing. She looked at her hands. They glowed palely in the dense dark, milkglass flesh with bone shadows running through it.

  “You can still change your mind, Bramble.” Maksim’s voice came out of the dark, startling her; she hadn’t heard or sensed his approach. That worried her.

 
; “No,” she said. “Jay, come here. Do it, Maksi.”

  10

  Brann stepped from one storm into another. The slope outside the cave mouth was bare and stony; a knife-edged icewind swept across it, driving pellets of ice against Brann’s face and body. Jaril whimpered, ducked under the snapping ends of her cloak and pressed up against her.

  Brann dropped into a crouch, put her mouth close to his ear. “Where’s the cave? We’ve got to get out of this.”

  Jaril shivered, grew a thick coat of fur. He edged from the shelter of the cloak, waited until she was standing again, then trotted up the slope to a clump of scrub jemras, low crooked conifers with a strong cedary smell that blew around her as she got closer, powerful, suffocating. She plunged through them and into a damp darkness with a howl in it.

  Once he was out of the wind, Jaril changed to the glow globe that was his base form and lit up a dull, dark chamber like a narrowmouth bottle. He hung in midair, quivering with indignation and cursing Maksim in buzzing mindspeak for sending them into this cold hell.

  Brann ignored the voice in her head as she would a mosquito buzzing; she slid out of the shoulder straps and lowered the rucksack to the cave floor. Her cloak was wet through, she was cold to the bone. “Jay, in a minute give me some light out there. I have to get a fire started before

  I perish…” She gasped and went skipping backward as a stack of wood clattered to the stone, followed by a whoosh and a flare of heat as a clutch of hot coals and burning sticks landed near the woodpile. She laughed. “Thanks, Maksi,” she called. She laughed again, her voice echoing and reechoing as Jaril darted to the fire and sank into it, quivering with pleasure as he bathed in the heat.

  She bustled about, spreading mat and blankets, restacking the wood, organizing the coals and several sticks of wood into a larger fire. When she finished, she sighed with weariness and looked around. Jaril was gone. He couldn’t wait, she thought. Well, she’s his sister and night and day don’t matter underground. She rubbed her back, frowned. What do I do if he’s trapped like Yaro? Idiot boy! A few more hours and I could have gone with him. She dropped onto the mat and pulled a blanket around her to block off the drafts. Staring into the fire, she grew angrier with every minute lumbering past.

  The glowsphere came speeding recklessly back. Jaril shifted to his bipedal form, flung himself at Brann, sobbing and trembling, cold for his kind and deep in shock. “She’s gone, Bramble, she’s not there any longer, she’s gone, she’s gone…”

  II. Settsimaksimin

  Kukurul, the World’s navel Settsimaksimin, alone and restless also: Jastouk, male courtesan

  Vechakek, his minder

  Todichi Yahzi, Maksim’s ex-secretary, now a mistreated slave.

  Davindolillah, a boy who reminds Maksim of himself, of no other importance.

  Assorted others.

  1

  Settsimaksimin yawned. He felt drained. It was brushing against the trap in the cave that did it, he thought. The block. Fool woman, lack-brained looby, ahhh, Thornlet, that thing is dangerous. He stomped about the rubble-strewn flat, uncertain what to do next; the fog was thickening to a slow dull rain and the night was colder; it was time to get out of this, but he was reluctant to leave. Fool man, me, he thought. He wrung some of the water from his braid, shaped a will-o and sent it bobbing along ahead of him to light the path so he wouldn’t break his neck as he went downhill to the Inn.

  Jastouk would be at the Ardent Argent unless he’d got tired of waiting and gone trawling for a new companion. Gods, I’m tired. I don’t want to sleep. Sleep, hah! Bramble, you’re damn inconvenient, you and those devilkids of yours,.. fires die if you aren’t there to fan them…

  He changed his clothes and took a chair up the Katt. He found Jastouk sitting sulkily alone, watching some uninspired dancers posturing with the flaccid conjurings produced by an equally uninspired firewitch. He coaxed the hetairo into better humor and carried him off to a semiprivate party at one of the casinos.

  Company in his bed didn’t chase the dreams this time. Maksim woke sweating, his insides churning. He swore, dragging himself out of bed and doused his head with cold water.

  Heavy-eyed and languorous, Jastouk stretched, laced his hands behind his head. “Bad night?” he murmured.

  Maksim snapped the clasp off the end of his braid, tossed one of his brushes on the bed. “Brush my hair for me,” he said. He dropped into a chair, sighed with pleasure as the youth’s slim fingers worked the braid loose and began draw-mg the brush over the coarse gray strands. “You have good hands, Jasti.”

  “Yours are more beautiful,” Jastouk said. His voice was a soft, drowsy burr, caressing the ear. “They hold power with grace.’

  “Don’t do that.” The anger and worry lingering from the night made Maksi’s voice harsher than he’d meant it to be. “I don’t need flattery, Jasti. I don’t like it.”

  Jastouk laughed, a husky musical sound, his only answer to Maksim’s acerbities. He began humming one of the songs currently popular in Kurkurul as he drew the brush through and through the sheaf of hair. He was thin, with the peculiar beauty of the wasted; his bones had an elegance denied most flesh. He was neither learned nor especially clever, but had a sweetness of disposition that made such graces quite superfluous. Pliant and receptive, he responded to the needs and moods of his clients before they were even aware they were in a mood and he had a way of listening with eyes and body as well as ears that seduced them into thinking they meant more to him than they did. They were disturbed, even angry, when they chanced across him in company with a successor and found that he had trouble placing them. He was wildly expensive, though he never bothered about money, leaving that to his Minder, a Henerman named Vechakek, who set his fees and collected them with minimal courtesy. Jastouk had a very few favored lovers that he never forgot; despite Vechakek’s scolding he’d cut short whatever relationship he was in at the time and go with them, whether they could afford his fees or not. Maksim was one of these. Jastouk adored the huge man, he was awed by the thought of being lover to a Sorceror Prime; there were only four of them in all the world. But even Maksim had to court him and give him the attention he craved; there were too many others clamoring for his favors and he had too strong “a need for continual reassuring to linger long where he was ignored. ne-glected and gnored. He was indolent but had almost no patience with his lovers, even the most passionate; when Brann’s demands on Maksim’s time and energies interfered with his courting, Jastouk was exasperated to the point of withdrawing, but when the interference was done, he was content to let Maksim’s ardor warm him into an ardor of his own; this morning he was pleased with himself, settling happily into the old relationship. He brushed Maksim’s long hair, every touch of his hands a caress; he sang his lazy songs and used his own tranquillity to smooth away the aches and itches in Maksim’s souls.

  When they left the Inn, the sun was high, shining with a watery autumnal warmth. Content with each other’s company, they moved along the winding lane, dead leaves dropping about them, blowing about their feet, lending a gently melancholy air to the day. Maksim had the sense of something winding down, a time of transition between what was and what will be. It was a pleasant feeling for the most part, with scratchy places to remind him that nothing is permanent, that contentment has to be cherished, but abandoned before it, got overripe. He plucked a lingering plum from a cluster of browning leaves, tossed it to a jikjik nosing among the roots. There were no real seasons this far south, but fruit trees and flowering trees went into a partial dormancy and shed part of their leaves in the fall, the beginning of the dry season, and stretched bare limbs among the sparse holdouts left on whippy green twigs until the rains came again.

  “When you were busy with your friend,” brown eyes soft as melted chocolate slid lazily toward Maksim, moved away again, the chocolate cream voice was slow and uninflected, making no overt comment on Maksim’s neglect of him, though that did lie quite visible beneath the calm, “I was rat
her moped, missing you, Maksi, so I went to see the Pem Kundae perform. Do you know them?”

  “No.” Maksim yawned. “Sorry, I’m not too bright today. Who are they and what do they do?” He wasn’t much interested in Jastouk’s chatter, but he was willing to listen.

  The hetairo noted his mental absence; it made him unhappy. He stopped talking.

  Maksim pulled himself together; he needed company; he needed sex and more sex to drown out and drive away things clamoring at him. Drugs were impossible; a sorceror of his rank would have to be suicidal to strip away his defenses so thoroughly. He needed Brann. He was furious at the changers for calling her away like that. He missed her already; time and time again when he saw some absurdity, he turned to share it with her, but she wasn’t there. Instead of Braun, he had Jastouk, pliant and loving, but oh so blank above the neck. I’m not going to have him, if I keep letting my mind wander. He set himself to listen with more attention. “Are they some kind of players?”

  Jastouk smiled, slid his fingers along Maksim’s arm, took his hand. “Oh yes. Quite marvelous, Maksi. They do a bit of everything, dance, sing, mime, juggle, but that’s only gilding. What they mainly do is improvise little poems. You shout out some topic or other and two or three of them will make up rhyming couplets until there’s a whole poem finished for you. And the most amazing thing is, they do it in at least half a dozen languages. Delicious wordplay, I swear it, Maksi. Multilingual puns. You’d like them, I’m sure; it’s the kind of thing you enjoy.” He hesitated, not quite certain how his next comment would be taken. “I’ve heard you and your friend play the same kind of game.’

  “Ah. I shall have to see them. Tonight, Jasti?”

  “It would have to be, this is their last performance here. I bespoke tickets, Maksi, do you mind? They’re very popular, you know. I had to pull all sorts of strings to get these seats. They’re a gold apiece, is that too much? They’re really worth it.”