A Gathering Of Stones dost-3

by Jo Clayton

  Felsrawg slid the knife back in its bootsheath. “Yeh. You’d expect them to have tightasses here where they let foreigners in, knowing how these Lewks see us all, but t’ain’t so, Laz old Sorce. You pick a wall, any wall, I’ll go up it like it was flat and clean out everything behind it without a peep from the ‘larms. The wards are in pitiful shape. Creamcheese here, everywhere.”

  “Perhaps not creamcheese.” Trithil slid a fingertip over and over the dome of the star sapphire in her thumbring. “But not far from it. The Maskab Kutskab spent the afternoon complaining about her S’sulan, she says they’re spending more time in taverns than on the street. Half the time they’re drunk out of their skulls on sounnash wukik or sucking the ton off some male whore. The other half, they’re slicing pieces off each other in knife duels. When she wasn’t carping, she was drooling over the hell she’s going to put them through come Closeout. She didn’t say much about the other islands, except some mutters about Maskabi too lazy to do their own breathing, Wokolinka’s kin who got their places through toelicking or worse. I believe that confirms what our tame thieves are telling us.” She gave Felsrawg a mocking smile, looked coldly at Simms, then lowered her eyes to the thumbring and contemplated the pulsing of the star.

  “So,” Danny lifted his legs. “We go round the traps and climb the walls. I thought it might come out like that. My first thought was a boat. Any ideas?”

  Simms shrugged. “Ne’er been on a boat ‘n m’ life till Pisgaloy.”

  Felsrawg clicked her tongue, the sound expressing her disgust. “Nor me.”

  Trithil lifted her eyes briefly, shook her head went back to watching the star.

  Danny shook his head. “And you’re all island born. Well, we fall back on something I did a while ago. It’ll make things easier, but it’s noisy as… well, never mind that, we’ll just hope there’s no sorceror around to hear me working. Trithil, I need the room, find some other place to wait. You’ve all had supper? Good. Get some sleep. We go two hours after midnight.”

  4

  Midnight.

  Danny Blue waggled a finger at the wick. The spark caught and the oil-soaked braid began to burn and smoke. He cranked it down until the flame seemed to spout from the brass tube. As soon as the smoke cleared away, he fitted on the glass chimney and clipped the lamp into its brackets. He frowned at the leather sack, shook his head. No point in it since he was planning to use local materials to build his boat. Airboat. He grinned as he peeled the blankets off the bed, dragged the lumpy mattress onto the floor, doubling it over so it was thicker and half the width. What I did before, I can do again. He pushed at the pallet with the toe of his boot, walked around it, inspecting it. After a moment he dug through the bedclothes, found one of the thin pillows and tossed it down at the end of the pallet. Unless the damn god wakes and sticks her long nose in my business, or one of the S’wai gets a twinge. The way his luck was running, either one could happen or worse. Tungjii my friend, I could use a smile from you right now. He stepped into the middle of the pallet, knelt as comfortably as he could in front of the pillow and pulled a shield tight about him except for a tiny hole he hoped no one would notice.

  He thought a moment, then began gathering his forces, putting bridles on his half-sires, whipping them into a momentary subservience and opening himself to both sets of memory; when he was ready, he adapted his half-sire Daniel’s energy cables to his half-sire Ahzurdan’s fire-handling and wove a lead; he drove the lead through the pinhole into the violent reality of the salamandri. He couldn’t project himself into that reality, he couldn’t draw demons from it, but he could tap into it and use its raving energies to power his Shaping and Transforms. When he had a steady flow coming through the lead into the accumulator cells he’d formed inside his body, he brushed his fingers across the pillow, back across the coarse canvas of the pallet cover. Murmuring a minor Transform, he turned a roll of cloth into a marker that drew coarse black lines. He narrowed his eyes, focused will and attention, and began blocking in the areas where he needed to make the major Transforms that could convert the pallet and pillow into a liftsled like the one he’d made once from a kitchen table, like the sled Daniel knew so well from his home reality.

  Sketching with the marker he shuffled backward on his knees, sweeping lines across the flat in broad X’s; he hobbled to the front again and began drawing honeycomb braces around the edge of the pallet. He finished, straightened his aching back, and inspected his work. “Good,” he muttered. “Now the hard stuff.”

  He knelt before the pillow, touched it. As it happened before, it happened now. Chant poured out of him with a rightness that seemed to come from bone rather than brain, as if the rightness and the elegance of the design once more commanded him, mind and body and spirit, as if the liftsled was using him to be born. He Reshaped the flocking and canvas into glass and ceramic, metal and plastic. Sucking great gulps of fire from the salamandrin reality, he poured it into the Patterns his will created, pressing and shaping that fire into the esoteric crystals that were the heart and brain of the liftfield. He laid down layer on layer of them, embedding them in intricate polymers, wove more polymers into honeycomb braces that stiffened the floppy mattress into something like solidity. He Reshaped the pillow into sensors and readouts, a canted control plate that would let him regulate start-up, velocity, direction and altitude; he drew a pair of powerlines from it to the rear of the palletsled. Dropping the lines for a moment, he sculpted twin energy sinks in the tail; he reclaimed the lines and joined them to the sinks. Then he rested a short while, until the shaking went out of his hands.

  Holding the tap quiescent, he inspected his work inch by inch, making small changes here and there to improve the conformation. When he was done with that, he knelt by the sinks, put a hand flat on each and began feeding power into them until they were topped off, humming to the touch like a hive of angry bees.

  He let the tap fade, let the shield dissolve about him. He got up and stepped away from the liftsled, triumphant but too drained to crow or preen-for the moment, anyway. He tossed the blankets back on the bed, spread them over the interwoven ropes that had served to support the mattress. It wasn’t particularly comfortable, but he was too tired to care. It was a transient thing he’d made, fairygold, apt to vanish if you kept it around too long, but it’d last the night and it was so alien to this reality it wouldn’t trigger alarms for the witches; even the god Coquoquin might not notice what was happening under her nose. Too bad it wouldn’t last. He lay staring at the ceiling, imagining the look on Pawbool’s face if the four of them came swooping in, waving Klukesharna and demanding the antidote. He lifted a heavy hand, checked his ringchron. Nearly two hours gone. No wonder I’m tired.

  His muscles were sore, even his bones ached; too tired to sleep, he lay brooding over his limitations. Fused through all Ahzurdan’s memories was the sense of ease, the exhilarating ease with which the sorceror handled the power that leaped to his hands, the getting drunk with that power, riding a high like no other… And Ahzurdan was second rank at his best. Settsimaksimin was something else. His mind drifted to that last battle. Maks alone against all of them, him and the changers and Brann. Funny that… in a way… Maksim depending on a talisman like BinYAHtii to capture and store power for him when he had a thousand thousand realities laid out for plundering. I don’t know, Danny thought, wrong mindset, I suppose. There’s nothing like forcefields and directed energy flows in this universe, they don’t even have something simple.like electricity. That’s it, probably. They don’t have the physical analogs to show them how to handle the hot stuff. If you don’t know something exists, kind of hard to use it. Hmm. Wonder why Old Garbagegut didn’t think of that? Wit’s been sucked in, I suppose. Thinks like everyone else here. Computer, mmf. An’t it the way, they have all the data but can’t jump the ruts. Just as well, I hate to think what life would be like for ordinary folks here if h/it knew how to get h/its tentacles on that much power. Maksim now, he could handle anything the r
ealities put out, if he happened to think of it. Look what he can do without the tap, transfer himself anywhere in the world he wants, wards’re cobwebs he brushes aside, hardly noticing them. At least, that’s how Ahzurdan remembers him, larger than life and more powerful than a god.

  Danny drifted awhile through Ahzurdan’s memory, melancholy at the loss between then and now. When Ahzurdan was on his own and at his peak, he could jump the horizon to any place he’d been before, he could snatch unwarded items half a world away. Me, I’m lucky if I can do a simple line-of-sight snap. To save my life, I couldn’t round a corner ten feet off. Too bad. Too t0000 bad. If I could look into the heart, If I could make the exchange without going in… Klukesharna’s copy in the warded sack under the sheet… for Klukesharna in the Heart… no use regretting what I can’t do… so much simpler, though… He drifted into a light sleep.

  ##

  He started awake, heart pounding, as some idiot pounded on the door. He sat up. “Come,” he said. “Door’s not locked.”

  Trithil Esmoon slipped in; she stood at the foot of the bed and inspected him critically. “You look like you’ve spent the whole time sniffing dust.”

  He yawned, dragged a hand across his eyes. “I’ve been working.”

  “On that? What is it?”

  “Skyboat.” He swung his legs over the edge of the bed, groaned himself onto his feet. “The others awake?”

  “I heard Felsrawg slamming about in her room. Simms, who knows? It’s raining out.”

  “Heavy?” He crossed to the door that led onto the bal-

  cony, unbarred it and swung it open. Enjoying the cool bite of the mist blowing in under the overhang, he stood in the doorway, listening to the rain, watching the gray lines slant through the patch of light from the lamp behind him. Across the garden court on the third floor of the other wing, he could see strips of yellow light tracing out shutters and balcony doors. A few patrons must be still up or sleeping with nightlights. “It doesn’t look that bad.”

  “Does rain make a difference?”

  “Short of a cloudburst, no problem, except we’ll end up wet as the Godalau. If the S’sulan are as wiped out as you all think, the rain and the chill will keep them inside, make it easier for us. The S’wai?” A shrug. “The little I know about witches doesn’t help much. Can’t expect everybody to be sleeping sound, but rain does tend to wash away alertness. Something we’d better keep in mind too.” He pulled the door shut, looked at his chron. “Go see if the others are ready, it’s time to move.”

  5

  Since she’d be a drain, not an asset, in this part of their plan, Trithil Esmoon stayed behind; she’d keep busy packing the gear and shifting it into Danny’s room and covering for them if the S’sulan, the Inn’s Host, or anyone else developed an unhandy curiosity. Felsrawg and Simms stepped onto Danny’s pertiliar version of a flying carpet and crouched uneasily behind him as it rose and hovered in the thick damp darkness inside the room; it swung round, hovered some more, then it glided forward, sliding through the balcony door with a hair’s clearance on both sides. Trithil pulled the door closed and barred it again as the mattress curved up and around, then darted for the island called the Henanolee Heart.

  The rain battered at them, the sled danced and shivered, dropped with sickening jerks and surged up again as the wind bucked under it, snatched at it, sucked air from around it, under it. The darkness was smothering, no stars, no moon, no lights anywhere around them. Danny crouched over the console, flying by the numbers; he was uneasy about the uncertainties involved, but there was nothing else he could do. When the counters showed the readings he’d been watching for, he slowed the sled until it inched along, hardly moving. Still he saw nothing, only the lines of rain a handspan in front of him, faintly visible in the flickering lights of the console. Wary of snags he crept closer and closer to the Henanolee, peering into the darkness ahead of him, straining to see the walls and the towers. Finally he made out the thickening in the darkness he was expecting; he took the sled up a meter and slid across the top of the curtain wall.

  He brushed against the side of one of the towers, a few of its bricks shimmering ghostlike at the edges of the glimmer from the console, eased around that tower, slid past another and took the sled down until it hovered an annlength above the grass in the Meditation Garden at the center of the Henanolee. After another handful of minutes inching along past trees and shrubs and less identifiable obstacles, he found what he’d been looking for, a small open hermitage in a group of willows. He nudged the sled inside and relaxed when he saw that the rain didn’t penetrate the thick vines growing up the lath walls; he wasn’t too sure how well the liftsled would operate if it were sodden, his Reshaped circuits and crystals swimming in rainwater. He lowered the sled to the flags, shut down all drain from the powersinks except for the trickle required to keep the console lit. He wanted to see their faces, to make sure they knew what his limitations were; reminders never hurt, no matter how well your co-workers knew the drill. “We’re shielded,” he said, “Don’t move more than five paces from me unless I tell you to.”

  Felsrawg snorted.

  On the other hand, worrying at things could be counterproductive. “All right, forget it. Let’s go.” He touched off the console lights, got to his feet and followed the two thieves as they moved quickly and surely through the darkness; he was impressed, more than impressed as he tried to imitate them but kept getting switched across the face by wet branches and stumbling over unseen rocks and roots.

  Felsrawg and Simms waited for him by the door they’d chosen as the best way into the Heart itself. When he joined them under the stubby overhang that kept the rain off the top steps, Felsrawg thrust her left hand at him; the skry rings were glowing faintly. “Wards. The knots are here, here and here.” She pointed to places on the wall, one on each side of the door, one below it; as she moved her hands, the rings pulsed rhythmically. “Sloppy, Laz. Old stuff. Want me to shut them down?” She patted her belt pouch. “I’ve got some smothers I’ve used ten years now without a smell of trouble.”

  Danny Blue read the knots; Felsrawg was right, the wards were old and ragged, fading even as they stood there. He could untie and reset them between one breath and the next; the trouble was, he couldn’t know how they were linked into the witchtraps inside, if they were. “Simms? Any complications?”

  “No.”

  Terse, Danny thought. Hmm. Smothers are neutral things. Why not. “All right, Felsa, go ahead.”

  She ran her hand carefully over the bricks and the stone threshold, pinning down the exact location of the knots. When she knew what she had to know, she formed three nubs of clay, slapped them in place, shoved a tiny crackle-sphere like a cooked glass marble into the soft clay; she worked so swiftly the three smothers were in with no discernible gap between the sets, zap, zap, zap. She ran her rings around the door, nodded with satisfaction when the stones didn’t even flicker.

  Simms flattened his hand against the bricks. “Good job,” he murmured, “you want to take the lock or shall I?”

  Felsrawg grinned at him. “Make yourself useful, little man.”

  6

  The empty corridor had no traps in it until they reached the first turn. No traps but ghosts like ragged bedsheets drifting around, oozing up through the floor and vanishing through the ceiling, or dropping down to sink like spilled milk into the elaborate parquet, or sweeping back and forth across the hall before and behind the intruders, passing through the darkwood wall panels like fog slipping through unglazed windows. Watchghosts supposed to warn the watchwitches if they saw a wrongness in the halls.

  Simms sang:

  Swingle, tingle ghostee bayyy beee, dance y’ shroudee, mama mine oh, timber time-bar, aren’t y’ prettee, round around the troudee tree oh, swingle mingle pattartateee, diddle doo dih dee dee dee…

  His droning endless song was an insect buzz in the gray light, a crooning tenor buzz that was irresistible, it seemed, to all those ghosts.
r />   He sang:

  Pittaree pattaree prettee ghostee, prithee dance a shingaree round and round in silkee laces dance the laughee lovee thee…

  Words, Talent, song, a mix of all three, whatever it was, it worked. Simms charmed the ghosts into a complex dance and kept them so occupied with his nonsense they forgot to issue the warnings they were meant to give.

  At the corner, Felsrawg lifted her hand to stop them, rings flickering.

  Simms leaned against the wall, closed his eyes, his face blank, cheeks drawn in, mouth pursed. His hands drifted through small circular movements, unfocused, apparently uncoordinated. The ghosts drifted around him; now and then they nuzzled against him like cats bumping their heads against him, begging for a scratch behind the ears, but he’d tamed them so thoroughly he could take his attention away and still keep them focused on them, fascinated by him. He sighed, opened his eyes and moved away from the wall. Holding his voice to a. murmur that fell dead two paces off, he said, “Triple trap. Firs’ part, five steps on, the floor melt under you, jus”nough to let y’ sink up to y’ nuts, then she get solid and you stuck. Second part. Rack of scythe blades taller’n a man they swing down fro the ceilin’, set s’ close together it take a snake standin’ on his tail to pass ‘em, sharp ‘nough to mince a bull. They come at you the min y’ start sinkin’, no time t’ jump back and if y’ did, you jump into the points of those blades. An’ y’ canna jump for’ard. f r one thing, you couldna get a hold and you wouldna go anywhere ‘cause you’d hit the third part. There some kind of pipe there shoots out fire from down where the islands was born; the firemountains come up underwater. Down where Coquoquin sleeps, y’ know. If y’ wan’ a v. Jrse-case event, the roarin’ of the fire wake the god. The fire it crisp what left after the scythes finish. Fifteen feet, you past it all, Laz. Count four lamp down, halfway to the next. Anythin’ else?”