Stonewiser

by Dora Machado

  The first arrow struck the woman in the lead between the shoulder blades. It was fired from such a close distance that it burst through her chest like a morbid medallion. What ensued was a massacre. What the arrows didn't kill, the pikes and swords did. The Shield emerged from the woods like rampaging locust. All Sariah and Kael could do was watch in angry but helpless frustration as the hopes of these Domainers died along with them and their children.

  Sariah and the others followed Kael over the rocky promontory, dodging the fumaroles’ sudden eruptions and the boiling orange puddles, taking care not to slip in the warm mud, picking their footing carefully over a span of jagged limestone.

  “Watch it, rot spawn,” Malord said, when Delis slipped and sent him joggling inside the basket where she carried him on her back.

  “Hold on and shut up, half-man,” Delis said. “I'm not your mule.”

  “Quiet.” Kael crouched behind a low ridge. “Hide yourselves and be still.”

  Sariah and Mia knelt beside him. He watched a sliver of trampled mud at the edge of the rocks. He took in every detail, seemingly oblivious to the slow passing of time. Sariah wasn't so patient. She had hoped to be in the Goodlands by now, following Leandro's beam and much closer to her final destination.

  Mia started to play with the tiny crabs crawling on the rocks. The armored eight-legged fellows had quick claws that nipped at Mia's harassing fingers. Crying gulls flew overhead, landing occasionally to dig out the krill marooned in the mud or to steal the eggs of a flock of long-legged cranes nesting on the muddy beach. Life in the Domain never ceased to amaze Sariah. The rot and its bitter brew had taken over and yet, like the Domainers, life still endured, resisting all attempts at extinction. Sariah watched the riotous gulls and the black-beaked cranes for a while. Then, bored and a little curious, she pressed her palm against the rocks. A vision of coral polyps, algae and kelp entered her mind, a sense of deep blue depths, undulating with the sun's sparkling refraction. A whiff of salt and seaweed slammed her like a wave to the face.

  “What was that?” Mia, always mimicking Sariah's action, had just experienced the same.

  “It's a sense of the sea.”

  “What's a sea?”

  “A very vast pool of water, not dead water like the Domain's, but salt water, full of life. They say it used to be everywhere before the rot came. Now it's only on the other side of the Goodlands.”

  “I'd like to see the sea someday,” Mia said. “Can you wise these rocks?”

  “Most of the time all you can wise from it is what you just saw. These types of rocks are not very good at holding tales. There was too much life in the sea, little animals darting everywhere and flower-like plants. I saw a tale of it once in a Guild stone.”

  “It's all that life,” Mia said. “It doesn't like giving up its tale. It wants to go on and on.”

  Mia's observation struck a chord with Sariah. The best stones for wising were rich with the earth's core matter. Comparatively, these stones had very little of it and lots of animal and plant remains. Mia was right—life never relinquished its tale easily.

  Kael motioned for everyone to be silent.

  The water by the muddy beach stirred. Two straight steles aimed towards the rocks. Something popped from the dead water, two jiggling globes wrapped in some kind of wrinkled tissue, mounted on long stalks just now emerging to the surface.

  The glimmering base supporting the stalks surfaced like a budding island. It approached the beach as if looking for berth. A slow bovine movement brought a squirming cluster of tentacles out of the water. One of the globes on the stalk swiveled her way. Sariah realized with a start that she was staring at a dark, gleaming eye.

  “What by the rot is that?”

  “A rot monster?” Mia whimpered.

  “No, not a monster.” Kael said. “An animal. She's an empress snail.”

  “Snails are little,” Mia said. “And they have shells. I play with them all the time at Ars.”

  “This one's big. Her shell is far from here. She and her kind are the biggest of all the snails.”

  “You mean there are more of these?”

  “Several more that I know of.”

  “I heard rumors,” Delis whispered.

  “I never thought them true,” Malord said.

  “I've seen her before,” Kael said. “She's got a crooked left eyestalk, the poor old thing, and a missing tentacle in front. She probably lost it fighting some contentious pretender. She's an old gal. She likely dates to the execration itself. She's a horrible beauty.”

  It was a very accurate description for the gigantic beast. It crawled through the water slowly. A black muscular body skirted by a single massive flat foot rose from the water. Painfully, almost languorously, it launched itself forward. A huge, loose-lipped mouth landed on the beach's mud to suck birds, eggs, krill, and whatever else laid there, in one enormous slurp. There was little to say as the giant contracted back into the dead water and disappeared gradually—eyestalks last—leaving the mud streaked with feathers and cracked eggshells.

  Malord broke the silence. “She's huge.”

  “She spans almost a league,” Kael said.

  “Where has she gone?” Mia asked.

  “She's around. She dines in the Domain but she excretes in the Goodlands.”

  “You mean she's so large that her head is on this side of the wall and her tail is on the other side?” Delis asked.

  “Precisely.”

  The pit of Sariah's stomach flooded with dread. “Kael, Kaelin. Please tell me. How are we going to cross the wall into the Goodlands?”

  He didn't smile. “We're going through her.”

  Twenty-one

  “I WON'T GO.” Mia stomped a stubborn foot in the mud. “You can't make me go.” She turned from Kael and collapsed in Sariah's arms, sobbing. “Auntie, please, don't make me go.”

  Sariah couldn't blame the child. She felt like weeping too. If it wasn't because she really had to get to the Goodlands right now, she would do what any coherent person in their right mind would do—run away.

  As it was, they had no choice. A quick glance at her bracelet showed that the fourth crystal was filling up. Word among the Domainers they had encountered in the last two weeks was that the Shield had mounted a new offensive on the wall's cracks and refugees were dying by the hundreds. Word also was that Alfred and the mob were but a half-day behind them. Malord and Delis's ashen faces told of the same dread she felt.

  “Perhaps you don't have to go, Mianina.” Sariah patted the girl's soft curls. “Perhaps you can stay on this side with Malord and Delis.”

  Relief made a subtle appearance on her companions’ faces, but Malord shattered the reprieve. “You know she has to be with you. She can stand a little time and distance without you, but Meliahs knows, you may have to travel long and far into the Goodlands to reach the beam's source. Until we figure out a way to unhinge Mia's mind from yours, we can't risk the separation. And I pledged my work to you. I'm going.”

  “So will I, my donnis. I'll come. By whatever deranged way.”

  Sariah's gaze shifted from Delis, to Malord, to Kael, and back to Mia. She didn't want the heavy burden of their lives on her soul. “If something were to happen to any of you—”

  “We make our own decisions,” Kael said. “We have three choices: We try our luck with the Shield, go this way, or we turn around and return to Ars.”

  “Ruin Ars?” Malord scoffed. “That would be a great gift.”

  “Only to have my donnis killed?”

  “So we go.” Kael pulled out three oversized weaved sacks from his pack. “We don't have a lot of time to prepare. I've told you what to expect.”

  “But I don't want to go.” Mia's hands trickled drops of black flow. “I won't go.”

  The flicker on Kael's clenched jaw signaled his impatience. They had no time for Mia's tantrum.

  “Go get ready,” Sariah said to him. “Let me talk to her.”

  The others m
ight have a real choice, but Kael was forgetting that Mia didn't. She was stuck in a decidedly adult and unpredictable world. To make matters worse, the child was somehow linked to her, a rogue stonewiser whose lousy odds for survival trended from bad to worse. No wonder the child hesitated.

  Slim and small for her age, at twelve Mia was barely emerging from a protected childhood in her family's happy home. Despite her courage, her trials as a new wiser and her unwonted presence at Sariah's breaking of the wall, Mia was frightened. It made perfect sense. Sariah was afraid too, terrified, horrified. What they were about to do called for no lesser emotions. She hated herself for endangering the child. She made a silent vow to find the connection between Mia and her, and shatter it to oblivion. Mia would be better off for it.

  She spoke very softly, looking into the girl's tearful green and blue eyes. “I know you're scared, Mianina. So am I. But sometimes we have to be brave and do things we wouldn't do otherwise.”

  Mia stuck out a defying chin. “My mommy's gonna poke your eyes out if I get hurt. She said so.”

  It was no idle threat. If something happened to Mia, Torana would do more than poke Sariah's eyes out. She would rip out her beating heart, chop it to pieces and feed it to the goats. Sariah had learned the hard way that motherly rage fueled the fires burning in Meliahs’ rot pit.

  “I'd do anything to avoid harm coming to you,” Sariah said. “But I can't lie to you. This is dangerous. We do it only because it has to be done.”

  The pout on Mia's face didn't waver.

  “How about if I infuse you with a little sleep? That way, you won't be afraid. You'll dream nice dreams through the worst part, and when you wake up, you'll be fine on the other side of the wall.” Or so she hoped.

  “Can you do that?” Mia asked. “Will it be all right?”

  “You won't be afraid.”

  “What if we die?”

  If they granted children coins for good questions, Mia would be rich. Sariah wracked her brain for a remotely good answer. “Do you remember when old Matty died back in Ars a few months ago?”

  Mia nodded.

  “She died having dinner on her deck, remember? She was slurping her gruel one moment and next she was gone.”

  “To Meliahs’ gardens,” Mia said.

  “My point is we can all die suddenly and without cause. It's the nature of our lives. Some of us get to die snug in our pallets. Some of us get to die in the rot's fire.”

  “Or in a worm.”

  “Technically, it's a snail.” Sariah smiled. “I happen to think if we die trying to do something good, something that will help our kin and make life easier for those who come after us, we die better than if we passed from choking on pits while stuffing our faces with cherries.”

  She was beginning to sound like Kael. How by the fiery rot had she gotten stuck with explaining something she didn't understand?

  “I like cherries,” Mia said.

  “What?”

  “I said I like cherries. But you want me to be brave.”

  “I wish you didn't have to be.” Sariah took Mia's hands in hers. “I need you to be brave.”

  “I'm sorry. I'm not very brave, Auntie.” Mia wiped her nose with her sleeve. “Put me to sleep. I'll see you on the other side.”

  “Let me tie that knot,” Kael said, after kissing her hard on the mouth.

  “Who's going to tie yours?” Sariah asked.

  “I'll do it from the inside. Remember everything I told you. Every word. Understand?”

  Sariah hugged the sleeping girl against her body. The weaved sack's opening narrowed, until she could see only Kael's black and green eyes, fast on hers.

  “Be there,” he said as he closed the gap.

  The wait was nerve-racking. She couldn't remember if the snail had made a sound when it came. Very little light made it through the weave. The luminescent glow of her bracelet cast macabre shadows inside the sack. It reminded her of… No. She wouldn't think of the box. Instead, she thought it was a very good thing her legs were folded at either side of Mia. She didn't think she could stand if she tried.

  Sariah tugged on the little sack that held Leandro's game. It was fastened securely around her neck. The things she had to do for the stones. She caressed Mia's hair. She too would have preferred to make this journey insensible. Mia wasn't very safe with her, but Delis was taking Malord, and Kael was bringing the bulk of their gear, gear they would need on the other side if they survived the crossing.

  “Poor little girl,” she whispered. “You're stuck with me.”

  Balled around Mia, Sariah reviewed Kael's instructions once more. He said he had done this twice before. Crazy. She tested the deep-cockled shell over Mia's face. It was fastened to her head by a flexible leather twine. All she had to do was put it over her weaved face at the last possible moment while donning hers at the same time. She was practicing just such a maneuver when the moment came.

  The darkness and the stench arrived suddenly and together. Sariah took a last breath of fetid air and pressed the shells over their mouths and noses. She felt herself aspired. Bagged in the protective weave, she and Mia tumbled in a channel along with other things, some of them maybe even her friends.

  They bounced on a prickly surface, the snail's radula perhaps, the tongue-like muscle covered with bristled teeth. She had been worried about snails having teeth. Kael had said the snail's soft denticles didn't concern him as much as the parts coming after the teethed tongue. Great.

  The weave was getting heavy, no doubt coated with mud and saliva. It was holding, though, and barring a snag, it should hold fine. The air in the shell was warm with her breath. Sariah had a sense of tumbling down the beast's narrowing gullet. The throat tightened over them as the snail swallowed. They fell into a large space, the snail's crop, the pouch formed by the gullet's widening, where things, according to Kael, could get complicated.

  Ideally, momentum would drive them through the crop and up the digestive canal towards the snails’ mantle cavity. Instead, they plummeted like stones and landed at the bottom of a sloshing pile. Not good. Time to act. Kick. Wriggle. Rolling down and up was good. The reverse was decidedly bad. It meant a return to the mouth and the risk of becoming snail vomit or overly masticated cud. Lovely thoughts. She dug her heels in the crop's floor. By now, they needed to be rolling up.

  The snail gagged, a deep expulsion of air and slosh which sucked Sariah backwards. All her fears of double-mastication proved to be in vain. Instead, she got stuck in the narrow opening leading to the crop, where the muscles of a very active throat churned over her like a gigantic stone grinder.

  They were already late in the journey, taking a pounding, and worst of all, they weren't moving. The air in her shell was hot and rancid. Damn if they were going to die as a snail's choking hazard. She wasn't going to let Mia down. She stretched out between compressions. At once, she felt the pressure of the snail's muscles ease. She slid back down to the crop and up into the digestive canal, this time swiftly.

  The canal seemed to stretch for hours. She tumbled up an incline, a remarkable feat of gravity. She was traveling up towards the mantle cavity, the hump tucked under the shell in the snail's back. She only knew about the snail's anatomy because Kael had drawn it in the mud while he described in detail his previous journeys. He had also shared the knowledge he had gained during the dissection of a dead giant snail he and his father had found many years before. Knowledge was the key to a successful snail crossing, Kael had explained. Meliahs help them.

  Mia started to wheeze in her sleep. Sariah followed promptly. How long had it been since they had begun the perilous journey? Kael had explained that these giant snails had precipitated digestions, fast-paced processes to convert great quantities of food into energy adapted to the beast's continuous feeding practices. The journey had already taken much more than the three minutes the average crossing took. She was sure of it. How long was the snail's damn digestive canal?

  Longer than the Royal Way?
Longer than the wall? Long enough to lose consciousness, she realized. Twice. Long enough that she wanted to rip the shell off her face and breathe whatever foul substances were traveling with her. She fought the impulse. The stomach had to be close now. Wait. What had Kael said? The stomach was the most dangerous place of all.

  On cue, they dropped feet-first into in a broiling sack. Tumbling in a viscous pond, Sariah fought for some kind of purchase or footing, difficult since the stomach walls felt more like rubbery nets under her feet. She seemed to be bouncing against those writhing walls, engaged in an aimless back and forth, sloshing in a dizzying, angry churn. Despite the weave and the shell, the vapors set her lungs and stomach on fire. She started to heave from the stink. She forced herself to swallow her own vomit.

  The red dye. She groped for the rope she had tied to her wrist and pulled. The rope released the contents of the dye bag attached outside of the sack. She prayed it worked fast. The weave had kept the brunt of the gastric acids out of the protective sack, but a bit of the thinner liquids, saliva, slime, and now some fizzling foam, were filtering through the top. The hot air in the shell was no longer breathable. She was drowning in her own breath.

  Abruptly, the snail's stomach went into spasms. A huge gurgle exploded around Sariah, a giant, awful croak that reverberated through her bones. Sariah was ejected with the force of a catapulted stone. She hit her head against something hard. The space around her constricted gradually, until she was being smothered again, torn to pieces by a spastic gut, asphyxiated by the glut compacting around her. She realized what was happening. She was dying an ignominious death, squashed senseless in the snail's turbid excrement.

  Twenty-two

  PEACE. FRESH AIR. Meliahs’ gardens. It had to be.

  “Sariah?” Kael's voice spilled over her body like a swift caress, blessed relief pampering both mind and aching flesh. She wanted to keep the dream going, but she forced her eyes to open for the same reason she always went on—she had to.