Stone Speaks to Stone

by Victoria Goddard

  Stone Speaks to Stone

  Greenwing & Dart, Volume 1.5

  Victoria Goddard

  Published by Underhill Books, 2018.

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  STONE SPEAKS TO STONE

  First edition. April 8, 2018.

  Copyright © 2018 Victoria Goddard.

  Written by Victoria Goddard.

  Also by Victoria Goddard

  Greenwing & Dart

  Stargazy Pie

  Stone Speaks to Stone

  Bee Sting Cake

  Whiskeyjack

  The Sisters Avramapul

  The Bride of the Blue Wind

  The Warrior of the Third Veil

  Watch for more at Victoria Goddard’s site.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Also By Victoria Goddard

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Author’s Note

  Sign up for Victoria Goddard's Mailing List

  Further Reading: Stargazy Pie

  Also By Victoria Goddard

  About the Author

  One

  KA-BOOM

  Major Jakory Greenwing—Jack to almost everyone—tucked the book of haikus into his waist pouch and readied himself for the next and seemingly most dangerous stage of his scouting mission: the return to base.

  Ka-boom

  The eighth battle of the Seven Valleys campaign was not going well. They were still on the sixth valley, and although they’d captured the fortress of Loe, the Imperial army had been unable to make further headway. The siege had been closing in when Jack and his men had been sent to scout forward, and after a fortnight in the field, it was evident that the besiegers were still holding strong.

  Ka-boom

  Fortunately it appeared that the besieged were also holding strong, or so Jack interpreted the constant booming. That was the enemy, breaking down their mountains instead of surrendering to the Empire at their gates.

  Ka-boom

  Jack admired the Valley folk for their resolve, though he was a loyal son of the Empire and well believed in its civilizing mission. These mountain bandit-lords had a special magic they used in better times for sculpting their icy and stony region into fortresses of great strength and stunning beauty.

  Ka-boom

  Now they were breaking down the fluted walls and the high ice arches, as they had been for weeks, determined to stop the Imperial army from pushing the Border out another mountain range.

  Ka-boom

  The Emperor wanted the rich farmlands on the other side of the mountains, and the magic the Valley folk brought too, to bolster the forces guarding the Empire from the unfriendly hosts of Faërie to the East and the rebels to the South.

  Ka-boom

  Jack snapped his leather vambraces onto his forearms, grabbed a dagger and a few packets of pemmican to stick in his pouch next to the book, and belted his sword over his dull brown cloak. He glanced at Vozi and Ngolo, the remains of his scouting party, and nodded at them to get ready while he examined the situation once more. Dropping to his stomach once he was past the screening trees, he wriggled his way to the edge of the bluff.

  Ka-boom

  From here he could see the plumes of ice and rock dust that rose above the avalanches on the other side of the valley. The Valley folk were blocking the valley behind the Astandalans, and he cursed silently as he read the siege, laid out like a campaign table in the valley below him.

  Ka-boom

  The deliberate avalanches had blocked the valleys behind them, leaving the vanguard—Jack’s company, the Sixth Division of the Seventh Army, under the command of General Benneret Halioren—trapped in the fortress of Loe with no escape and no means of communication, since the Valley folk hunted with falcons and had used theirs to take out all the messenger pigeons in the first week of the siege. Jack had heard two of the Valley commanders celebrating the fact, and that their ice and stone magic blocked Astandalan Schooled magic, here at the edge of the Empire.

  Ka-boom

  The company consisted of five hundred men, but more than half had died in taking the fortress, and the rest wouldn’t last much longer. The Valley folk were not numerous, but their magic was powerful and they knew their land. Jack was unhappily certain that the fortress did not hold enough food for a protracted siege.

  Ka-boom

  And then, incredibly, silence.

  They had been listening to the booms for weeks now, and the silence rang eerily in their place. Ngolo crawled up beside Jack; Vozi, as he saw when he looked back at her, was kneeling to make sure the ashes were cold.

  “Too quiet.”

  Jack nodded shortly. The siege was well entrenched, the reason he’d decided to take a high cross-country route on his return, hoping successfully to evade capture by the Valley folk. Loe was a stout fortress of superb beauty, the lower walls blank for security but the upper portions and the interior a glorious work of art, all inlaid and carved stone in serpentine designs of sinuous dragons and endless waves, clouds, and mountains. Jack had studied nature poetry, but he wished for some skill at drawing beyond rough sketches to capture the beauty of the stone and the ice sculptures and the fierce falcon-hunters of the valleys.

  The hunters filled the valley. They too were quiet. Too quiet, indeed. Jack fumbled for his spyglass. There was movement by the castle—no—surely not—

  The massed Valley folk began a raucous chant accompanied by clashing swords on shields. He and Ngolo exchanged tense glances, and he fitted the spyglass to his eye again with nervous hands.

  No.

  The main castle door opened, and the general and his chief staff were led out in chains, while above them the sun-in-glory banner of Astandalas was winched down.

  “DO THEY KNOW WE’RE behind them?”

  Jack raised his head from the stream, beard dripping water down his front. “They will if you carry on like that.”

  Vozi bit back her next comment and handed Jack a piece of dried goat instead. Jack nodded thanks and chewed on the tough meat while trying to assess the situation. They’d been tailing the prisoners for three hours now. The Valley folk had led their captives ever higher into the mountains, following a trail Jack was kicking himself for not having discovered on his scouting mission. It was clearly the way supplies and reinforcements had been getting down to the siege of Loe. The entrance had been exceptionally well hidden in the carved valley sides, but still, it had been his task to find it, and he had not.

  Better not fail the rescue, then.

  His was the only party of Astandalan soldiers this side of the siege. He could redeem himself by rescuing General Halioren and the remainder of the command staff. He was grimly sure they were the sole remainder, for his last sight of Loe had shown heads being placed above the ramparts of the fortress.

  The air up here was getting thin. He was worried that Vozi, especially, would faint if they went much higher, since she was from lowland Zunidh and this was her first time in the mountains. Ngolo was a Ystharian Highlander, so he was grinning at her discomfiture. Jack was even more worried about the stone speakers discovering them.

  They had discovered—at the cost of the other two soldiers in their patrol, two weeks ago—that the Valley stone speakers could trace their movements when they stood on stone. The only thing that seemed to block their magic was to be upon plant life, not easy to come by this high in the mountains. On that disastrous patrol, two had been standing on stone, and Ngolo, Vozi, and himself in the reeds beside a tarn. They’d all ducked down, and indeed Hans and Russhi had seemed bett
er hidden behind their boulders than the three of them in the reeds, but when the Valley folk came they plucked out Hans and Russhi as easily as if they’d known exactly their hiding place, and ignored the reed bed entirely.

  Jack had spent a long and wet night thinking through that sequence of events, before realizing that all the near misses had come when they had been in the rocks and moved off again just before the Valley folk arrived. He didn’t like the exposure of being above the tree line, and ducked down as soon as possible into the forests, and had at first attributed the close calls to being exposed to the falcon-hunters’ sharp sight. After the loss of Hans and Russhi he’d reassessed, and realized it was the stone speakers tracking them.

  The three of them had spent the next morning making rough boots and capes of the reeds, barbaric cloaks against barbarian magic. Jack had no magic of his own, nor did Vozi; Ngolo had a small gift at Schooled magic, good for things like setting up camp or forming mage-lights in the Empire, fairly useless at the edge of the Border if you weren’t one of the wizards weaving newly acquired land into the net of magic that would keep them in the Empire.

  Completely useless on this the other side of the Border, which was two valleys and six months back.

  THE LOËSSIE SEEMED more intent on haste than caution—or perhaps it was just that after two weeks Jack had learned the important thing about Valley magic, which was that stone spoke to stone, and water to water.

  The phrase had about it the air of a proverb or a passcode, and it wasn’t until Ngolo was nearly caught, despite all their care, that Jack had figured it out. Ngolo had sat on a boulder for a rest and exclaimed in Shaian how tired he was. They’d been speaking Loëssie up until that point, just for practice, for Jack was barely swarthy enough to pass as a Lower Valleyite, and both Ngolo and Vozi were ethnic Shaians and far too dark-skinned to be anything but Imperial subjects, this side of Alinor. Still, wrapped in scarves against the cold they’d passed—or they had until that incautious word. It was only Jack’s too-cautious nature that made him hustle Ngolo and Vozi away from the site of the indiscretion immediately, and to hell with the needed rest. He’d been more surprised than they that they had gotten a dozen feet into cover when a stone shaman and his posse descended on the boulder.

  “Stone speaks to stone,” the shaman had said, then another had added, “And water to water. Downstream!” And off they’d gone, missing the three Astandalans half-buried in pine needles not ten feet away.

  It was a curious blind spot, relying on magic over sight, but Jack was grateful for the tiniest help. As Jack followed the prisoner train higher and higher into the mountains, there was precious little way to avoid stepping on either the stone or the water so attuned to the Valley folk. That was when he remembered the earlier usefulness of reed overshoes, used for silence when creeping around the second valley’s habitations, but effective too to mask the shamans’ magic.

  Or perhaps the Valley folk knew they were creeping along behind their prisoner train, and didn’t care in the slightest.

  THE SUN WAS BEHIND the mountains when the trail of footsteps abruptly stopped.

  Jack was considering the fact that the last saddle had taken them fully out of the lands claimed by the Empire and into the wild territory beyond when Vozi said, “Where did they go?”

  She spoke in Loëssie, and it took Jack a moment to tease the meaning from the words. He withdrew his glance from the unfamiliar peaks around them to look at first Vozi’s worried face, then Ngolo’s stoic attempt not to show how uncomfortable the small mage felt outside the Borders of the Empire, and finally at the ground before them.

  They’d stopped at the edge of a thicket to reconnoitre before venturing into the next clear space. The trail was clear up to the edge of the thickets, then disappeared onto a stone pavement. Jack would have assumed this the work of the stone shamans—and perhaps it was—if he hadn’t seen such a pavement of hexagonal blocks of basalt in a famous landmark near his homeland in Northwest Oriole. Still, stone speaks to stone, and he was wary indeed of stepping out into the expanse. Especially since the pavement made a little amphitheatre at the edge of a cliff.

  “Come, lads, it’s an adventure,” Jack whispered, and at Ngolo’s sigh and Vozi’s shrug he grinned. They wormed their way off the visible path into a hollow of the junipers, and considered the situation.

  Three Astandalan soldiers behind enemy lines, high up in the mountains with night coming on, and an entire Border of the Empire under threat.

  Jack pulled out some more dried goat from his pocket and chewed on it thoughtfully.

  The last hour had taken them along a series of scree slopes leading up a side canyon from the main valley. The canyon was still of considerable depth, but their last bit of path had brought them to the rocky cliff edging on an old avalanche fall. Up here there was no sign of the Valley’s magical architecture, unless the basalt pavement was indeed human work. A glacier filled the valley above them and sent cold air gusting down upon them, nearly a brisk wind as the light drained out of the valley. The broken stone of the avalanche was some sort of white stone, brilliant against the black basalt and holding the twilight, for which Jack was grateful. The Moon was gibbous and would rise an hour or so after sunset. They were on the right side of the mountains for her light to assist, if for nothing else.

  The path wound between several large boulders and the juniper thicket growing up and around them. The pavement had a hundred-foot drop as one edge, and the curving face of a sheer cliff rising up to the mountain summit on the other. The debris from the avalanche formed a kind of bridge down into the canyon, much encrusted with ice in great icicle formations.

  Twenty people had, it appeared, vanished into the air.

  There was no way down the scree—they would have heard any attempt—and no way up a thousand-foot perpendicular cliff face, either, even for a stone shaman. Jack gazed up and saw a black-horned face gazing down at them from what appeared to be the merest shadow of a ledge, some four hundred feet up. Well, perhaps a stone shaman could do it—or a shapeshifter who could become a mountain goat—but without ropes and substantial magic the command staff of the Fourth Division of the Seventh Army of Astandalas was hardly going to get up there, too.

  They could have left the trail, Jack acknowledged reluctantly to himself, for they hadn’t actually seen their quarry for two hours, having had to drop back crossing the open scree slopes, but he didn’t think it very likely.

  That left a major transportation spell of a type wholly unknown to the Empire or anything Jack had seen from the Valley folk so far, or some magic to do with either of the cliff faces or the avalanche fall and its ice.

  Signalling Vozi to watch their rear and Ngolo their surroundings, and satisfying himself that the mountain goat had leaped to some equally improbable spot out of their direct sight, Jack eeled out of the junipers and crept around the base of the cliff to examine it as thoroughly as he could before the light failed entirely. He had standard-issue magical lights, but they were made from the Schooled magic of the Empire. He didn’t know how obvious Imperial magic was to uncanny vision, this side of the Border, but he was sure that manufactured lights were a bad idea to show on the exposed edge of a valley.

  It was nightfall that aided him. Just as he came as close as he dared to the precipice itself, he saw a glimmering coming from where the icicles met the cliff face. He stopped, but lost the glimmer as soon as he moved his head. Edged slowly back and forth until at last he had it in sight again.

  He marked the spot with his hat, and crawled back to meet his two subordinates.

  “Take turns standing watch,” he murmured to them, “and be prepared to flee if I don’t return by sunrise.”

  “Flee?” Ngolo objected.

  Jack grinned. “Report back, I mean.”

  “That’s better,” his second replied, with insincere mollification.

  “Get to Arne and tell the Brigadier,” Jack added. He paused, then took out his book of haikus and han
ded it to Vozi to keep safe.

  Ngolo and Vozi looked at him, smiles fading. Arne was fifty leagues away, all six valleys—plus the ones they had just followed—back across the edge of the Empire to the last of the supply depots coming from West Alinor.

  Vozi lifted her fist to her temple in the old salute. Ngolo followed suit more slowly, with a crisp parade-ground quality to the gesture despite the cramped position and rush-cloaks. “See you at sunrise, Major.”

  When he reclaimed his hat, Jack positioned his feet carefully. He looked back at the junipers, and was relieved to see nothing. He turned his head back to the cliff face as slowly as he could manage, and saw nothing of the glimmer.

  He took a deep breath, let it out halfway, and then slid his hands across the stone and under the lip of the ice.

  “Stone speaks to stone, and water to water,” he whispered in Loëssie, and under his hand a latch clicked open.

  TO HIS EYES NOTHING changed. Or nothing except that his hands penetrated into the stone.

  It was not some illusion of substance hiding a proper opening, nor a trick of architecture making a shadow of a fissure. He could feel his hand passing through the stone.

  If he had thought about it, he would probably have thought passing through stone would be like swimming through water. It wasn’t like that; it was like he was the water and the stone was the solid body swimming through him. It was quite the most unpleasant thing he’d ever felt. He pressed himself forward into the darkness, terrified that he would dissolve into some nothingness and be lost as a ghost in the mountains of the Valley folk, outside the Empire and never going home again.

  Water in shadow

  Cherry blossoms in silver

  Fish kisses Moon

  And on the opposite page, the shadow-cut illustration of a golden fish arcing through black water, and pressed between the covers, the pale scented flowers from the cherry trees of Iolë when Jack took a too-brief leave to follow the poet along the narrow road to the north.