Stonewiser

by Dora Machado

  “I'm fine,” Delis whispered, rubbing her bruised shin. “What was that?”

  Sariah crouched on the ground and lifted her wrist wrap to add her bracelet's glow to the tenuous light of a faint crescent moon hiding behind a bank of clouds. She picked up a piece of the remains of an earthenware vessel.

  “It was a clay jar of some sort,” she said. “It was decorated with some kind of dotted design. There's script on it. The old language, I think. It's a shame Kael isn't here. He could tell us what it says.”

  “Here's another.” Delis limped a few feet. “And another.”

  The moonlight broke through the clouds. For an instant, Sariah spotted the sinuous shapes of thousands of vessels standing around an open-mouthed Delis. The vessels were under the trees, in between the rocks, all along the escarpment's slope. Some were small and some were large, some were squat and round, others were fluted or narrow-necked. Some were heavily decorated while others were simple and unadorned. Then the moonlight was gone again, leaving Sariah clutching the cold pottery shards in her hand.

  “Maybe it's an offering,” Delis whispered. “To Meliahs’ hounds. To keep them away.”

  “There are no people around here. We haven't seen houses since we entered the forest.” Sariah picked through the broken pieces on the ground and cupped a fistful of tiny white pebbles in her hand. “Maybe these are food stores of some kind?”

  Under the tenuous light, Delis examined the pebbles in Sariah's hand. “I don't think so, my donnis. Unless you think of humans as food, little children at that.”

  The hair at the back of Sariah's neck stood on end. The little teeth were but speckles of bones and yet they burned her palm. She suppressed an urge to drop them. Instead, she returned them to the broken vessel as carefully as she could manage and wiped her hands.

  “Let's not break any more of these.”

  Delis crouched. “Fresh tracks. Here.”

  “Are they people's footprints?”

  “They might be.” Delis looked closely. “This one isn't.”

  The beasts. They had tracked this way, not too long ago. Sariah could barely swallow. She wouldn't be dissuaded from her duty by a pack of… what? She was having a hard time with the notion and yet when she recalled the beasts, the idea of the goddess's hounds wasn't as hard to accept as she had first thought.

  Sariah and Delis advanced up the escarpment and through the trees, mindful of the prolific vessels. The crescent moon came out again, illuminating the deeply grooved, copper-streaked rhyolite cliffs that rose above them like an impenetrable fortress. Sariah had to stop, despite her trepidation, to admire the earth's extraordinary creation.

  The massive stone mountains had been birthed in the earth's core, fused, compacted, crystallized, heated and cooled in chaotic progressions. Expelled from those turbulent depths, they had escaped en masse through a stubborn crustal rift in a slow but catastrophic transformation of the landscape, only to be further tortured by the elements, sculpted by ice, eroded by wind, transformed into a stunning monument to the earth's power.

  “The Bastions,” Sariah said. “The drop of three thousand spans. Possibly more.”

  Delis eyed the cliffs. “Do you want to climb this?”

  “We can't call the beam from the forest. The Shield would be on us in a snap. Those beasts, too. But if we find a way up the cliffs, we can call the beam from the top. It would take the Shield a long time to follow us.”

  “No offense, my donnis, but it will take us a long time too. It will be a difficult climb. And if the Shield spots us on the rock face, we'll be practice targets to their arrows.”

  “I have to make it up there. I can't keep wasting time. I have to call the beam.”

  “All right. For you, I'll try it. How about over there? There appears to be a long groove on the rock face, a vertical crevice. It's partly sheltered from sight and wind.” Delis reached out to examine the cracks on the cliff face.

  A flash of light flared against her hand. As if hurled by the goddess's own hand, Delis flew backwards, tumbled down the escarpment and crashed back-first against a thorn bush.

  Sariah skidded down the hill. “Are you wounded?”

  Delis wrestled with the bush. “More like pinched and pricked, right about now. Sorry, my donnis. It's just not my night. What happened?”

  “I'm not sure. Let's get you out of here.” Sariah helped Delis untangle her weave from the thorns. After she was back on her feet and Sariah was satisfied that she wasn't hurt, they returned to examine the cliffs.

  “Don't touch it,” Delis whispered.

  Sariah reached out with her palms to sense the wising, a muted buzz that tickled her eardrums. She recognized a command in that vibrant layer. She braced her mind to absorb the shock and pushed her hand through the invisible layer and directly against the striated rhyolite.

  Repel. Reject. Refuse. The commands were unbearable shrieks to her mind. Vivid and extraordinarily shrill, they converted will into sound and sound into force, generating the physical repulsion of flesh. Sariah was stunned. She had experienced the will of the Domainers’ gifted imprinters on the stones they used to contain the rot, as well as the wall's powerful wising, but she had never encountered anything like this. Only her mind's readiness to absorb the wising kept her from harm. She didn't know how long she could stand the assault on her senses, or if she could even manage an ascent on those cliffs while taming the powerful wising. Who had wised these magnificent stones?

  The howl startled her out of her thoughts. The replying chorus left her trembling with dread. The pack was out this night and, judging from the howls, in more numbers than before. Fire burst from the direction of the Shield's camp. A battle was ensuing.

  Now. The Shield was engaged. The beasts were hunting the Shield down by the camp. She wouldn't find a better moment to call the beam without having to climb the forbidding cliffs. She knew she risked attracting both Arron and the beasts. But she also knew this was her only chance.

  She fetched Leandro's game from her bag.

  “My donnis, what are you doing?”

  Sariah set the cloth board on the ground, placed her stone on the black space and lined up the little snakes and scorpions at their starting places.

  “Now? You're going to call the beam now?”

  She moved the pieces as fast as she could manage.

  “Those beasts, they'll come, my donnis. The Shield, too.”

  Sariah was completely focused.

  “My donnis, are you sure?”

  “If you want a running start, go ahead.” What was next? Pair of threes. It was done.

  The rumble started much sooner this time. The whole of the Bastions growled. Loose dirt and gravel rolled downhill. The hum echoed through the escarpment and charged down the cliffs. The beam followed, plummeting toward her. She pulled back from the light at the last moment.

  The beam landed on Leandro's set and ignited the pieces to little flames. It seemed to feed on them, to nudge them into sparkling, pulsing brilliance. Sariah pushed herself from the ground and stepped back to get a better view. All she could see was the beam rising from somewhere behind the Bastions and the light diving along the cliffs to land on the game.

  “The rot take me.” They'd have to find a way up those wised cliffs regardless. The call of the beam had shed little light on her direction. The sounds of battle had quieted in the Shield's camp. She knew she had very little time. She snatched the cloth board, toppling the pieces, sending the beam into retreat. The snakes and scorpions were hot to the touch as she scooped them back in the bag.

  “My donnis?”

  “Almost done.”

  A little scorpion slid a few paces down the hill. Sariah scooted on her hands and feet after it. The tiny piece came to a halt at the drop's edge. It clunked faintly against the curved claw of the enormous paw planted firmly on the ground.

  The beast that looked down on Sariah belonged to another world, where evil gods and goddesses engaged Meliahs in a fier
ce battle to destroy her Blood. Huge black eyes stared from a desquamated skull. A heavily fanged snout dribbled with bloody slobber. Colossal horns coiled about the massive head. Sariah would have groveled in fear if it hadn't been for her body's paralysis. Her heart had stopped beating and her knees were rooted to the gravel. Seized by some suicidal spell that eviscerated all sense for self-preservation, she couldn't take her eyes off the hideous creature. She was thinking when she should be running. Thinking!

  The beast exceeded all expectations of evil ugliness. As the long claws began a slow arch toward her throat, she realized with a start that it was an all too perfect incarnation of mankind's worst nightmares.

  “Are you Stonewiser Sariah of the Hall of Scribes’ sixty-sixth folio, formerly of the Guild?” the creature spoke, in a neatly accented speech, no less. The long claws came to rest beneath her chin, tilting her face up. Her mouth snapped shut at the cold lifeless touch.

  Another beast stepped down from its lumbering heights, leaving a pair of enormous legs standing on their own. “Are these yours?”

  He clutched a rumpled parchment in one clawed hand and a crystalline scorpion in the other. Sariah couldn't help it. She laughed. She cackled, uncontrollably, like a mad woman, like the sickest of the atorium's boarders. She laughed until her belly hurt, despite Delis, who stood pale and wide-eyed, flanked by more of the beasts, despite the icy stare of the horrid creatures gathering around her. The last thing she remembered were the beast's claws, aligning fatefully, and the side of a fisted paw coming at her face.

  Twenty-seven

  SARIAH WOKE UP groggily. She had a faint recollection of a fast ascent, of dark stones rushing by, an endless plain streaked with coppery veins. For a moment, she thought perhaps she lay at the bottom of the Bastions, but then her vision cleared and she saw the tall dome above her, an array of richly carved panels adorned with elaborate dotted designs. The dots came together to form a colorful mural, a collection of stylized images that showed a hoard of ragged people traveling a spiral path across the dome, from a walled city, through streams and mountains, to kneel around the cupola's opening. Remarkable. Where had she seen similar designs before?

  Sunlight streaked in through the dome's hollow middle, warming her skin. Her shoulder bag lay beside her. She pushed herself to her feet. She was in the middle of a round dais that stood at the chamber's center. It wasn't very large, maybe twenty spans across. She took a tentative step. Light came through the empty cracks between the boards. A sudden sense of vertigo struck her. She forced the dizzying sensation out of her mind and inched toward the edge.

  A tall, single pillar supported the dais where she stood. Beneath the boards, several posts and dowels extended at different angles, supporting the platform like sturdy branches. Above her, a ledge rimmed the lower part of the dome like a rail-less balcony. But it was useless. A wide moat surrounded the platform on all sides. She couldn't jump the distance if she tried. She looked down.

  An army of barbed spikes covered the moat's floor. A few decomposing bodies were impaled on the spikes, one or two recently killed, judging by the stench of blood and feces, the rest desiccated or rotting. Rats scurried between the spikes. Bones lay scattered about. Perfect. Whatever she had gotten herself into was no benign or harmless venture.

  A movement on the ledge above caught her eye. A tall figure, dark against the dome's lighter hue, stood flanked by the frozen outline of one of the human beasts she had seen before.

  “Who are you?” Her own voice echoed painfully in her head.

  “Today's keeper,” the man said. “I was waiting for you to wake.” He wore a straight garment, a bright, colorful wrap which covered him from armpit to knee, exposing bony, narrow shoulders and long sculpted calves. A thin crust of short, tight curls topped his narrow face. Even though he stood a ways away, Sariah noticed the impressive curve of his nasal bone and his matching brown eyes. But it was the macabre row of horizontal scars on his forearms that caught her attention.

  “Why am I here?” Sariah asked. “And why are those people dead in the moat?”

  The man spoke stiffly, formally, as if his lips were not used to putting thoughts into words. “Those are your predecessors. That last one, he died the day before yesterday.”

  “Why did you kill him?”

  “He killed himself. From ignorance. We found him quite interesting.”

  “Then I'll strive to be boring.”

  “You'll be anything but boring.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He told us.”

  Sariah glanced at the dead man in the moat. He had landed on his back. The spikes had skewered him through the ribs, the abdomen and a leg. A slow death then. Death's rigor had preserved the pain on his face's expression. The wide nose, the scrabbling beard, she had seen that face before.

  Josfan. The dead man in the moat was the shooter who had tried to kill her at the nets, the ruthless mob leader who had destroyed their deck at Nafa. Had he been the one who had always been a step ahead of her? The one who had warned Alabara's marcher of her coming and contracted out her capture with the forester? Had he been Arron or Grimly's agent? She would never know now.

  “The sages will come,” the keeper said. “They will speak through the Wisdom and only through the Wisdom. Your questions shall be answered. And so will theirs.”

  A set of beastly claws burst from the keeper's fist. Without flinching, he ran a single blade against his skin, slicing another notch above the crook of his arm. Blood trickled from the wound. Sariah's horror turned to revulsion. The man lapped at his own blood like a famished bat.

  Before she could make sense out of the keeper's actions, the human beast beside him came to life and blew a long horn that stood on a gilded stand. A single note issued from the horn, a powerful blast that filled the chamber.

  In the dome, the row of panels above the keeper's ledge opened. People began to emerge from those openings. Sariah counted fourteen men and women, some old, some of average age, some barely children, all dressed in the same colorful garb the keeper wore. They stood on small ledges in front of their respective openings, looking down on her.

  “This is Sariah,” the keeper announced. “Daughter of the Hall of Scribes, quitter of the Guild, wiser of the seven twin stones, breaker of the wall, banished of the Domain, wanted of the Goodlands, procured of the Hounds.”

  Sariah forced herself to breathe. She didn't know who these people were. In turn, they knew exactly who she was.

  “You shall fetch and drag the impostors before you,” the keeper said. “And they shall die in horror for their falsehood until truth prevails to the Wisdom's satisfaction. First decree of the Lawman, Vargas.”

  Why was the keeper speaking as if in quotes? Who by the rot pit was the Lawman Vargas? And why had she been brought here in the first place? Could this odd assortment of people on the ledges, young, old, matching eyes and not, comprise the people she sought? She looked up at the reliefs on the dome. Was the answer there? Had she finally found the pure?

  The sages intoned a communal prayer. “Hollow are the impostors’ claims, dark is the truth's journey. Grant us wisdom, merciful goddess, to redeem the worthy and forsake the frail, to lead your restoration or perish.”

  Raised in the ways of the Guild, Sariah recognized ritual easily. She sensed a certain familiarity in the strangers’ words. No, not in the words—Sariah was sure she had not heard the prayer before— the familiarity stemmed from the tone. She had heard the same fervor in the Domainers’ sacred oaths and in the Guild's mandates. She had seen the same determination that gleamed in these people's eyes, in the Domainers’ mismatched stares and in the Guild members’ steely glares. These strangers shared in the Blood's zealousness, an emotion she respected as much as she feared. However far removed from their kin, they were of the Blood.

  With great ceremony, the keeper lifted a huge lever embedded between a set of evenly notched posts. With a loud thump, the lever dropped to the higher notch. A r
attle of chain and pins clattered beneath the boards. The scaffolding under Sariah's feet quaked. A good span of the dais's fringe uncoiled from the rest and fell away before her very eyes.

  “Your time will be done when the pedestal is no more,” the keeper said. “May the goddess bless you with her wisdom.”

  How much time did she have? A minute? An hour? Sariah didn't have the slightest idea. She stole another look at the moat. Those corpses down there had failed at whatever ordeal these people proposed. Would she end her days impaled in the rat-infested moat?

  Sages. They couldn't be too different from the Guild's masters and mistresses. She cleared her throat and called on her best pledge's manners. “Respected sages, why am I here?”

  A little boy with slanted eyes stepped forward on his ledge. “In falseness, many will come. In truth, one will become it. The Seer, Tirsis.”

  Did these people always speak in riddles? What had the keeper said? They will speak through the Wisdom and only through the Wisdom. Were they following an ancient protocol? Were they speaking words they had been taught, perhaps quoting from a communal source? Aye, Sariah decided, on both counts. A child of the Guild was trained to recognize tradition and authority.

  An old man spoke. “A sunless dawn. A branded beast. The life taste of the waiting dead. They are Meliahs’ sacred tools and Hounds will wield them in her stead. The Dreamer, Poe.”

  How was she supposed to make sense out of that? Delis. First of all, Delis.

  “Where's my companion? Is she hurt?”

  A tall woman stepped forward in her ledge. “Why shall the wise converse with the sinful? Why shall the pious reach out to the ignorant? The Teacher, Eneis.”

  She took that as a your-Delis-is-fine-thank-you, but with a bit of skepticism. They didn't give a lick about Delis. She did. “Were those monsters in the forest your warriors?”

  “The beasts shall rise to defend the truth,” a young woman said. “The hearts of warriors shall beat with the strength of the fiercest Hounds. The Lawman, Vargas.”