Weight of Stone

by Laura Anne Gilman

  “The westing wind brings the taint. West, and south. I don’t know more than that.”

  Ao looked at Mahault, as though hoping for support, but she was merely watching Jerzy, waiting. A soldier’s patience, Jerzy thought suddenly.

  “It’s almost dark. We should stay here for the night,” Ao said, giving in without much grace. “Get a good night’s sleep, all three of us, instead of one person keeping watch.”

  “Someone would have to keep watch anyway,” Mahl said. “In case someone came on us, or came up from shore, or—”

  “We need to go,” Jerzy interrupted. The taint lingered under his skin and made him itch. “We need to be under sail.” He didn’t know why, but something told him that it was not safe to remain here any longer—they had lingered in one place too long already. The wind pushed at him, willing them to be gone, promising to fill their sails and take them where they needed to go.

  Magic, even quiet-magic, did not work like that, but he felt the truth of it nonetheless.

  “All right, then.” Mahault heard the urgency in him, and gave way, shooting a look at Ao that made him back down as well. “Is everything secured down below?”

  “Tied and stashed,” Jerzy replied.

  “Then let’s be off. I’ll take first stand at the wheel. Ao, you’re best at maps, can you plot a possible course?”

  “Aye, Captain,” the trader said, bowing with only slight mockery before going to unlash the sails, while Jerzy leaned over the rail to pull up the weigh-anchor. The weight had gone over easily enough, but his arms ached by the time the heavy clay forms cleared the railing. He managed to get them onto the deck without dropping them on his toes, and coiled the rope carefully on top so that it didn’t catch or snag, before going to help Ao with the sails.

  “Haul out there,” the trader told him, “the way I showed you—careful!”

  Despite his help, they managed to get the triangular sails raised without mishap. There were long oars stashed belowdeck, to be used if the ship was becalmed, but they required more arms than they had onboard. Thankfully, the winds cooperated just as Jerzy had felt they would, filling the sails and moving the ship forward at a slow but steady pace.

  By the time the sun dipped below the watery horizon, leaving the sky around it streaked with reds and blues, they were in open water. The sky behind them was already blue-black, the sweep of stars spreading as the daylight faded. Jerzy stood at the prow of the ship and breathed in the air, trying to recapture a feel of the taint—but it was gone.

  “You’ve finally got your sea legs,” Ao noted, his sharp gaze taking Jerzy in from head to toe, as though assessing a horse or crate of goods.

  “Perhaps.” He thought about telling Ao of his experience in the water, but the words wouldn’t come. He couldn’t speak about any of it: the freedom, the sudden fear, the quiet-magic itself. He was still not accustomed to sharing things with another person; a slave kept to himself, and a Vineart … he listened and learned, he did not tell others or share his thoughts. Vinearts were meant to stand alone; that was the cost of their magic. Jerzy was only now beginning to understand that the rest of the world did not live that way.

  Maybe that was why he felt so comfortable with Mahl. She, too, understood the importance of keeping your own thoughts. Ao, on the other hand, used words to disarm and provoke. Like the drinking trick he had used on Jerzy when they first met, pretending to match him sip for sip of ale, while actually dumping his mugs onto the floor. Not out of malice, but because he was curious to see what Jerzy might say when drunk. The fact that Jerzy said very little had made Ao respect him more, not less. Jerzy still found that odd—that Ao wanted information and yet was pleased when he didn’t get it.

  The world was a confusing place, and Jerzy wanted only to be back in his vineyards, on familiar ground, doing familiar things, where the lessons he needed to learn were already known, the risks and rewards established. Tradition was safe. The cycle of the vines was security, knowing your place in the world at all times.

  He did not know his place at all now, only where he wished to be, and where he was.

  “Where do you think we’re going?” Ao asked, leaning his elbows on the railing and staring out across the horizon. The wind was just enough to tangle Jerzy’s hair, and he wished briefly that he had replaced his kerchief, to keep the strands out of his face. Perhaps he could cut it short.

  “I don’t know,” Jerzy said, amused at how the trader’s question matched his own thoughts. “I don’t have a map, clearly marked out. I don’t even have a picture or a name. Just a sense of …” He couldn’t describe it, not to Ao. To Malech, or Giordan, or another Vineart, maybe. They had the language to understand him. Ao, untouched by the Sense, unmarked by the mustus, could not understand how Jerzy thought or saw.

  “If we keep heading in this direction, we’ll be past Iaja and into the open ocean in … oh, a week or so. I don’t suppose you could whip up a wind that would move us along faster, the way you summon fire?”

  Vineart Giordan could have. Sailors paid solid coin for his spellwines, to raise winds and calm seas. Farmers used them to bring rain in drought, and dry the skies during floods.

  They were delicate, stubborn grapes, requiring that Giordan literally give his own blood to tame them into accepting incantation. Only aethervines were more difficult to work. Jerzy had tasted the mustus, had sunk his fingers into the soil around their roots and heard their whispers in his head. He could taste the wind … but he could not control it. Without a spellwine, with its specific incantation, he could not decant anything useful.

  “No,” he said in response. “No, I can’t.”

  He could, a voice like a soft breeze whispered to him. He had lifted himself out of the water, hovered in the air, and done it without spellwines. He could fill the sails with wind and speed them on their way….

  No. Jerzy refused the temptation. His master lit flame with a touch of his fingers, closed wounds by merely pressing on them. But that was after a lifetime of working with his legacies of firevines and healvines, of letting their essence blend with the magic within him. Someday, Jerzy, too, would be able to do that, and he would welcome it.

  The magic he had worked that afternoon with a legacy he had not been granted? It scared him down to his bones, and he would not willingly do it again. There were Commands and traditions for a reason. Breaking them … no. He was not apostate.

  “I don’t think I’ll need magic,” he said suddenly, distracted. “Look ahead.”

  The sky, clear only moments ago, was filling with dark clouds, blotting out the bright stars.

  “Storm,” Ao said, destroying Jerzy’s hope for fair winds. “Bad one. Damn it, I knew we should have stayed in the cove.”

  “Storm ahead!” Mahl called out from her post at the wheel, and Ao raised his hand to let her know they had already seen it.

  “You’re the Vineart, Jer, you know the weather better than us. What do you think?”

  Jerzy stared at the clouds, trying to sense their mood. Was this just rain coming toward them? Or a hard blow? He couldn’t tell.

  “Let’s try to ride it out,” he said finally.

  THAT, JERZY DECIDED a little while later, had been a very bad decision. The ship crested over another wave and plunged back down, bow first, even as she tipped back and forth. He would throw up, save there was nothing left in his stomach. His right hand was wrapped in a lead rope, while his left braced him against the wheel-cabin, and the wind and rain hammered at him from all sides. Mahl was at the wheel just ahead of him, a rope tied around her waist to keep her there, both hands clenched around the wheel, while Ao braced her from behind. Every time the ship jolted, they staggered together, two soaking-wet figures occasionally outlined by the crack of lightning that came down from the sky.

  He could feel the timbers shake under his feet, the wood shivering as it was pressured from every side. He had no affinity for its dead wood, no sense of its nature the way he did living vines, but e
ven he could tell that the ship would not last much more of this storm.

  His mouth was dry with fear and the residual bitterness of his vomit, but he sucked his cheeks in anyway, ignoring the bitterness, searching for some moisture to draw on. If he could bring enough saliva onto his tongue, he could summon quiet-magic, and …

  And do what?

  Even Giordan could not calm this storm; not even Master Vineart Conna, renowned for his weatherspells, could still the fury that had been unleashed. It was a wild creature of wind and rain, raging down from the skies with the full force of Nature and magic behind it.

  That much Jerzy knew: this was no purely natural storm. Under the salt of the wind and sea, and the sweet taste of the rain, there was a scent of magic that he recognized. Here, the nose of it was thin and stretched, enough that he thought the storm was merely a side effect of something else, spun out by actions elsewhere and crashing into a natural storm. Somewhere, someone was using a windspell; sheer bad luck that they were caught in it.

  That was the danger and the delicacy of a weatherspell, and why Master Malech preferred not to use them himself; such a decantation did not stay in one place but raced with the wind from one field to the next, across entire lands … and across the sea as well.

  There was a sharp crack and another bolt of lightning cut through the dark, this one heading straight for the mainsail. Jerzy flinched, warned by some instinct even as the smell of burning wood touched his nose.

  “Fire!” he yelled, hastily untangling his hand from the rope. “Fire!”

  Another wave came over the side of the boat, swamping the deck and hitting against Jerzy’s knees hard enough to make him stagger. The rain might have put out the fire under ordinary circumstances, but the wind whipped the white-hot flames into greater fierceness, and it leaped, like a living thing, the sail catching in an instant, sparks dropping down to the deck, cinders that sizzled and caught, tiny fires springing to life.

  A firespell could counter those flames, control them. If he had just one mouthful of a firewine, if he had a few more years’ experience in his blood, he might be able to save the ship.

  He had neither.

  The ship rose and fell again, and Jerzy raced forward, grabbing at Ao’s shoulder and shaking him. “Fire!” he screamed in the trader’s ear, and Ao looked back over his shoulder, the firelight great enough now that Jerzy could see his face, rain slicked and set in grim lines. His lips moved, and although Jerzy couldn’t hear him through the wind, he suspected it was a particularly pungent swearword. Then Ao turned back and got Mahault’s attention, even as Jerzy was moving around, crouching low and reaching for the knife at his belt to cut the rope away from the wheel.

  Master Malech had given him a proper knife before he left for Aleppan, a handle of polished horn, the blade the length of his longest finger and sharp enough to make short work of wax or twine—a proper Vineart’s tool. “No Vineart should use another’s knife to open his spellwines,” his master had said, making him swell with unexpected pride. That knife should have hung from his belt, with a tasting spoon and small waterskin, identifying him to any with the wit to look. But his belt had been taken from him in Aleppan, when they brought him up on charges before the maiar, and all his tools as well. He had acquired another knife before they set sail, but the blade was too large, the handle wrong in his hand, and he felt keenly the loss of his master’s gift every time he touched this replacement. Still, this blade did what was required.

  Another rise over a swell, and Jerzy felt his stomach heave, but he kept sawing at the rope, even as he could hear and smell the fire spread, swirling with the wind, the thick wet smoke beginning to choke him.

  The ship jumped, and a crack sounded underneath, deeper and more ominous than even the crackle of flames.

  “She’s breaking up,” Ao said, and this time Jerzy heard him. “We have to get off the ship.”

  Off … and go where? The sea below them was wild as the storm, and there were things under the waves, things with teeth and hungry maws. Jerzy’s imagination brought up images of the sea serpent he had seen killed, only three times as large and without armed soldiers or spellwines to help destroy it this time. Or a kraken, less fantastic but no less dangerous, its long arms and sharp beak reaching up to snap off his limbs and tear at his flesh …

  “Jump!” Mahault, freed from her post, grabbed at Jerzy’s arm and forced him to the railing. “Jump!”

  He didn’t think now was the time to tell them that he couldn’t swim. Odds were they would be eaten or drowned in the waves before he could have made more than a few strokes, anyway.

  The fear left him at that, and he stood up against the wind, his hands clenched on the railing. He should not try to call on weatherspells; they were not his to hold, and the challenge to keep one steady within the storm already brewing was beyond his skills, would tear him apart for his arrogance. Yet … If he was going to die, what did it matter? What did any of it matter?

  His tongue licked the roof of his mouth and then opened as though to pull in the aroma of grapes. Sea air surrounded him, but the rain brought not salt but the sweet fruit of spellwine.

  It was his imagination, fueled by panic, but it was enough.

  “Above water, above wave. To safety, bring us, please.”

  It wasn’t a proper decantation, but he had no idea what he was calling on, to focus it better. He was flailing, desperate and reaching beyond his grasp, beyond his rightful domain. Yes, he had worked with weathervines, knew the taste and scent of its fruit, the gritty feel of its soil, but it was not enough to fight a storm of this nature, even without another Vineart’s spell behind it, building it to this fury.

  He was not strong enough to control what he had raised.

  So he merely let the magic within him rise as it would, whatever came to his summons, and asked it to save them.

  THE STORM HAD come out of nowhere, giving Kaïnam barely enough time to strike the sails before it hit. He could have retreated to the cabin and stayed dry and warm, but the Green Wave was his ship, and he would not leave her alone to face this. So he wrapped himself in a cloak that had been treated for storm use, and went upside to stand by the wheel. The small shelter overhead was enough to keep the worst of the rain from his eyes, but the visibility was terrible anyway; he could barely see an arm’s length past his nose. The ship swayed and rocked with every wave and gust of wind, but her timber was well seasoned and her construction the best that could be bought, and she slipped through the storm like a dancer following a steady drumbeat. He leaned back into the shelter, worrying briefly about where he actually was, but trusting that the spells built into the Wave would keep her from crashing into an unexpected spar of land. One of Master Edon’s students had crafted that spell, and made his fortune off it, and every year gifted a new cask of it to the royal family, in gratitude for his training.

  But nothing would keep even the best-protected ship from being overwhelmed by a storm, if it were bad enough. After his experience with the sea creature, Kaïnam could not help but worry.

  Because he was worrying, and watching, he spotted the glimmer of light off to his port side and did not dismiss it entirely as a storm-born hallucination. Fire, raging even through the rain and wind.

  “Firespout,” he said immediately, his skin pricking with fear. Firespouts occurred naturally, dangerous eruptions from the ocean floor, but magic caused them as well—and he had last seen them appear without warning outside his own home during just such a storm, destroying the Caulic fleet that was searching for Atakus’s hidden harbor.

  Such out-of-place apparitions were the bastard creations of firespells and weatherspells, turning water and wind into deadly upward explosions of briny flame. If they had any use save destruction, he had never heard of it.

  “No,” he decided, scouring the rain-thick night for another blast. “No.” It was a steady flicker, too high to be rising from the water. “Something is burning.”

  The only thing that
could be burning out here, this far from land, was a ship.

  “Blast and brine,” he swore, hauling on the wheel to try to turn the Wave toward the flame. She hauled about sluggishly, fighting the order to go into the wind. No sane man would go near a fire at sea, not under these conditions, but if there was a ship, then odds were there was crew as well. He would not leave men out there to die.

  The flames were flickering out as he came closer, the Wave not moving quickly enough to suit him, when there was another burst of light—not lightning, but colder, and appearing in midair just off his bow. There was a shriek, like a woman’s scream, and then a heavy thud and splash.

  There, his sister’s voice said to him. There.

  With a despairing glance at the still-burning ship, Kaïnam fought to turn the Wave around again, circling back to where he had seen the splash. Grabbing a spell-lamp in one hand, he went to the side and looked down into the water.

  Three bodies, limp and water slick, clung to a piece of wrack, appearing and disappearing as the waves knocked them about. Instinct and training took over; Kaïnam set the lamp down on the deck and grabbed a towrope, coiled neatly in its proper niche by the railing for just such a purpose. Tossing the weighted end over the side, he called out to the bodies, hoping that one of them, at least, was still alive, and alert enough to hear him.

  “Grab the tow!”

  There was no response, and the line started to drift away from them, almost out of reach. Kaïnam hauled it up again, desperation making him clumsy, and yelled again. “Towline! Grab it!”

  Something reached them, thank Deep Proeden, because one of the figures stirred, lifting his head as though to look for something.

  “To your right!”

  The figure turned and spotted the brightly colored rope shifting with the waves. As Kaïnam waited, his heart beating too fast with concern, the wrack victim reached out, fingers grasping for the lead. Kaïnam could do nothing more than hold the line steady, and wait, and hope. Hope that the figure could reach it, hope that no wave came up and swamped them, hope that nothing lurked below the surface, summoned by the turmoil and looking for an easy meal …