Weight of Stone

by Laura Anne Gilman

  Jerzy’d had the right of it, originally; if they were to find the source of this rot, the origin of the attacks, the Washers would have a new target to throw themselves at. All other transgressions could be forgiven, after that. His House would be secured. Assuming they survived the battle, anyway. The thought was a grim one, but Malech had stood in the middle of a plague house, and come out whole. He would not flinch from this.

  Reaching for a scrap of parchment and his inkpot, Malech dipped a pen, and began writing. The note was a quick one, and while he waited for the ink to dry, he withdrew a small vial from a small, hidden drawer in the desk. The identifying seal on the side was worn down to an unrecognizable scarring, but the color of the flask was unmistakable: that particular reddish clay was used only to make a particular flagon, and those flagons were used only to carry a particular spellwine—ones that required quiet-magic to properly decant.

  Magewine. He had used it most recently to identify a legacy, the type of grape used, but it took its name from a more specific use: the ability to identify a particular Vineart’s work—or to find the Vineart himself.

  Working the stopper out carefully, he sniffed at the contents once, to make sure that the spellwine within had not turned. He had last used this vial months before, when they tested the flesh of the sea beast, and spellwines did not always age evenly. There was no off-note in the nose, however, so he hoped that it was still intact. There was, as always, only one way to know for certain.

  Lightly blotting the ink to make sure it would not smear, Malech let a drop of the liquid fall onto his tongue, feeling the slightly acidic liquid burn the flesh. Unlike most spelllwines, it was not a pleasant sensation: the fruits this wine came from were harsh and bitter, less crafted than beaten into submission, and the taste showed the process. Anyone without quiet-magic would taste only a bitter, spoiled vina that would beg to be spat from the mouth.

  When the wine had blended with the spittle on his tongue, leaving a cooling sensation behind, Malech picked up the scrap of paper and visualized the person he needed to read it.

  “From page the words, words onto page,” he instructed the magic, and then with a gentle breath, issued the command: “Go.”

  If the spell worked, they would be re-forming elsewhere, on something his target was looking at. If not, well, he had no way of knowing. He needed a second plan, in case that one failed.

  “Guardian, call Detta in. I need to speak with her about Household matters.” If the Washers did come again, the House needed to be prepared. He did not think they would harm the servants … but one of the forfeits of apostasy was the burning of the yards.

  The thought gave him pause. Would they do so, if the convicted one was student, not master? Would his own reputation protect him and his lands?

  He thought that the Washers would not dare risk destroying him as well, but the fact that he did not know was proof, if he needed it, of how far into chaos the world had already fallen.

  If they did—would he allow it?

  Was that—Washer against Vineart—what their enemy was hoping for? The thought darkened his brow. Land-lords in disarray was bad enough; bringing magic against religion would be the death knell for the Lands Vin, indeed.

  “When Jerzy is done with his cleanup, perhaps I will send him out to the North Yard.” In addition to keeping the boy busy and out of trouble, it seemed unlikely that their unknown enemy would be able to strike at him there, in one of Malech’s oldest, best-established yards. More, if the Washers were on their way even now, they would come here first. That would buy him more time to consider his options.

  Malech stared at the now-blank parchment in his hand. It had been scraped and reused so many times that the surface had taken on an almost translucent appearance. It was still useful, but not for much longer.

  Ser veh.

  He did not believe in fate, and he would not believe in omens. But you could not be a Vineart and fail to understand that all things had their seasons, and even order occasionally fails in the face of disaster.

  “Not in my lifetime, Sin Washer,” he asked, not even aware that he was speaking the words out loud. “I beg you, not in my lifetime.”

  “IT STINKS DOWN here.”

  Jerzy paused, the cup of aetherwine half empty in his hand and a headache throbbing across his forehead.

  “I had noticed that,” he said, irritated. The smell was less than it had been, and nowhere near the deadly levels his spell-attempt had first created, but Lil’s face was scrunched up in an expression of distaste, and she had taken her red kerchief off her hair and was holding it over her mouth and nose, so he thought he might merely have gotten used to the worst of it, in the time he had been down here.

  A full day, and everything still stank. It would take at least another day to make the rooms usable again, if that. And neither Master Malech nor the Guardian would speak to him until it was done.

  “What did you do?” Lil asked, not coming any farther into the rooms. It wasn’t merely the smell; the House-servants were not allowed down here, unless specifically summoned—or sent. “Master Malech is still furious. He yelled at Detta, just now. I heard it even in the courtyard.”

  “You did not.” The walls of the House were thick stone, the same sort that the Guardian was carved from. Sound did not travel easily through them, and the door to Malech’s study was always closed.

  “I did. That’s why I came downstairs. I figured it would be safer here. Although maybe not. What did you do, Jerzy?”

  For a moment, indignation held Jerzy speechless. For all that she was cook now, Lil was only a House-servant, not a Vineart. She had no right to be here, no right to be asking questions.

  The indignation passed, driven by a weary sort of resignation. Lil had been senior to most of the kitchen children when Jerzy was first taken from the sleep house, had seen him stumble and fall, and succeed. She was asking not to mock him, or to take advantage of him, but because she was curious. Because whatever happened in the House, to the Vinearts, happened to her as well.

  Survival alone did not give her the right to question him. But it wasn’t merely survival behind her worried expression. She was concerned … for him.

  Jerzy didn’t understand it. But he had seen it before, on Malech’s face when Jerzy had undergone his testing with the mustus; in the way Ao had half carried him out of the meeting hall, when they escaped from Aleppan; the time Mahl had asked him if he would be all right, without spellwines.

  Lil cared.

  Like the feeling of loneliness he got when he thought of Ao or Mahl, this made him uneasy, so he shrugged and turned back to the work at hand.

  She waited. Lil was patient; she could set a roast to cook and not touch it before it was completely done, or prepare bread dough and then leave it to rise perfectly. Waiting out a reluctant boy was nothing.

  “I shouldn’t be here,” he burst out suddenly. Talking to Lil wasn’t the same as Mahl, or Ao—or even the Guardian. But she was all he had, right then, and he found that the stoic silence he had perfected in the sleep house no longer satisfied.

  “What? Where else would you be? Oh, you’d rather be in the field? I suppose I can understand that. It would certainly smell better.”

  “No. Not …” Jerzy shook his head and lifted the cup to his mouth, taking a small draught of the spellwine into his mouth to keep from having to respond further. It wasn’t the same. This wasn’t Ao, or Mahl. Lil didn’t understand. She didn’t know what was happening. She didn’t know he was a danger to the House. Not the Washers—Master Malech could handle them. But their enemy … nothing had happened since that attack on the road; he had no reason to believe that he would be a target here, through the Guardian’s protections, but …

  Once he had decanted half a dozen times, the words were no longer needed; like the candle-lighting quiet-magic his master used with merely a twitch of his fingers, Jerzy could raise a breeze merely by exhaling with vin magica–scented breath.

  A
faint, fresh wind started around Jerzy, swirling around to gather the lingering spell-fumes and carry them out the door. Lil gagged as they passed her, moving aside to avoid the smell, the kerchief clutched to her face. “It’s safer upstairs, even with the yelling,” she managed, and fled.

  Safer. What was safe? Jerzy had thought he knew, once: safe was not being noticed by the overseer. Safe was doing everything perfectly, so that Master Malech would keep him. Safe was running, so that the Washers could not take him. Safe was returning home …

  None of those things were safe, anymore.

  Lil didn’t understand. Detta couldn’t understand, no matter how she fussed over his needing new clothing, or how dark a red his hair was becoming. Master Malech understood, but he didn’t know.

  The thought stopped him, the spell-wind swirling and fading as the decantation wore out and the air became still again. Master Malech did not know. He had been the one sent out, sent into the world, not his master. He was the one who had worked the vina of another Vineart, had crossed the lines Sin Washer had laid down, had felt the taint of an unnatural magic against his thoughts. He was the one who could not fit himself back into the comfortable Jerzy-shaped space of House Malech.

  The frustration he had been feeling surged again, until even the familiar, comforting sense of spellwines and vina casked and waiting around him failed to soothe it. Like a toothache or a cramp, only the feeling spread from his chest out toward his knees and elbows, his fingers tingling, the headache from the noxious fumes twisting his thoughts into puzzling, tantalizing shapes he could neither understand, nor forget.

  He felt prickly and uncomfortable, twisting inside his own skin.

  “Guardian?”

  The cool, hard awareness of the stone dragon was in his head, immediately.

  “What’s happening to me?”

  The Guardian did not respond, but the weight of its presence grew stronger, as though trying to enfold Jerzy within itself, giving him something familiar, something reassuring to lean against.

  For the moment, it was enough, and he could feel his nerves settle back down, regaining the cool, measured temperament required of a Vineart.

  Finish the cleaning, the Guardian told him. Help will come.

  WHEN THE WORKROOM was usable again, Master Malech sent Jerzy off to check on progress at one of the older, more established yards. The trip was blessedly boring, and he returned four days later, falling into bed too exhausted to eat, waking too exhausted to wash.

  The next morning, rather than setting him to a new task, or picking up their lessons, Master Malech sent him out to work alongside the slaves, weeding. At another time it might have seemed like punishment, and Jerzy knew that a few months ago he would have resented the mindless, muscle-aching work, wanting only to learn more of magic.

  Master Malech was wiser than he, though. The feel of the soil under his fingers, the touch of the leaves against his skin and hair as he moved among the vines, calmed him even more than the Guardian’s cool presence in his mind. The rote activities, the silent synchronized movements of the slaves, even the occasional roughhousing of the younger ones and the irritated shouts of the overseer as he cracked his whip to bring them back to order, all these were better than a healspell to his exhaustion and worries.

  He was a Vineart. Whatever tension, whatever restlessness he felt now, it was only due to the uncertainty … this was where he belonged. He wanted nothing else.

  He believed that, until he heard Ao’s voice drifting through the vines.

  “Ho the House!”

  Help will come. The echo of the Guardian’s promise, days before. Jerzy had thought the dragon meant …

  Jerzy didn’t care what he had thought. The surge of pleasure at hearing Ao’s voice caught him by surprise, as did the urge to abandon the weeding and run to greet the trader.

  You never abandoned the job before it was finished, not unless the overseer told you to do so. Jerzy was not a slave any longer; as Vineart he had the right to tell the overseer what to do, and only Malech could reprimand him. And yet his training had fallen over him like a comfortable blanket, and it was only with difficulty that he walked away, handing his wooden hoe to a slave and brushing the dirt off his hands, painfully aware that his shirt was soaked in sweat and his feet were bare and dirty. Hardly the way he should appear, to welcome guests to the House of Malech, but the thought of avoiding Ao long enough to make himself presentable was not one he wanted to consider, either.

  All this went through his mind as he walked up to the cobble-paved road, where two horses were being led off by a slave barely tall enough to reach their reins. Ao and Kaïnam were standing by the side of the road, two horses waiting beside them, heads low and sides dark with sweat. They had come in a hurry, then. But how? And why?

  Master Malech had already responded to their hail, dressed casually, with the laces of his shirt untied, his hair tangled as though he had been pulling at the brown-gray strands again while he worked. Seeing that, Jerzy felt a little better about the state of his own clothing, and the dirt ground under his nails.

  “Ah, Jerzy. We have guests.”

  Master Malech did not look annoyed at the interruption. Jerzy wasn’t certain—his master was difficult to read, even now—but he thought the Vineart looked satisfied, in fact.

  “Ho, Jerzy!” Ao looked much the same as he had when they last parted, although his clothing was of a flashier sort: a pale blue smock over green pantaloons that reminded Jerzy of Mil’ar Cai and his oddly flamboyant attire. Kaïnam was dressed more soberly, but the cut of his jacket, and the blue and green beading on it, indicated a similar source. Clearly, they had been to Caul. And now were here?

  “Thank you for responding to a stranger’s summons,” Malech was saying as Jerzy joined them.

  “Jerzy’s master could not be a stranger,” Kaï said.

  “We were already on our way back,” Ao added. “The messenger caught us just before we set sail, so we”—and here Ao paused, grinning a little in memory—“we put on a little extra speed.”

  Messenger? Master Malech had summoned them? Jerzy was puzzled, and then hurt that his master had not said anything to him. Clearly, the Guardian had known …

  Jerzy cut that thought off before it could grow into self-pity. The Guardian knew everything; that was why it was the Guardian. And Malech was still Master Vineart Malech, his master, and Jerzy had best never forget that.

  Instead, he turned to Ao, masking his hurt with a welcoming smile, and grasping his friend’s arm in greeting. “Extra speed?” That could mean only one thing, when sailing. “If your people hear how much magic you have been using,” he scolded, “they’ll never take you back.”

  “So we won’t tell them.” But Ao looked briefly uncomfortable at the reminder of yet another barrier between himself and his clan. The Eastern Wind trading clan was perfectly willing to carry and sell spellwines, but they scorned the use of any magic for themselves, claiming it might injure their reputation for honest, unbiased negotiation.

  “I shall take full responsibility, Trader Ao,” Kaïnam said, oddly formal. “As your patron, you could do nothing but heed my desires.”

  Patron? Jerzy couldn’t wait to hear the story behind that, as the last he knew, Kaïnam had cast himself off from his family and title, choosing to go against his father the prince’s orders. Had Kaï suddenly come into some new wealth since they parted? Jerzy supposed it was possible….

  “Hah,” Ao said. “The Vine’s Heart is as much mine as yours, lordling!”

  “The … what?”

  Even Malech looked taken aback.

  “Our ship,” Kaïnam explained, his normally solemn expression breaking enough to show a hint of humor, although Jerzy thought you needed to know the man to see it through his normal solemn mien. “After discovering what we discovered—more of which, later—Trader Ao and I were able to … combine our skills and use our various connections to acquire a Caulish ship for our travels. The name seemed
appropriate, all things considered”

  “She’s a sweet thing, Jer,” Ao said enthusiastically. “You’ll love her.”

  Jerzy’s head hurt. He didn’t love any ship. Why was the name appropriate? Why were they here?

  “All of you, come,” Master Malech said. His stern face looked out over the vineyard, toward the south and then back up the slope to the east, as though expecting something to sweep down from the skies, or crash down from the forested fringe of the low hills bordering his lands. “Come inside, where we may speak freely.”

  The four of them walked up the path, under the leafed archway. As usual, Jerzy felt the cool touch that he could now identify as the Guardian as he walked back onto the House grounds proper, but neither Ao nor Kaï seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary.

  The great doors stood open, as they had when Jerzy first saw them, and he was pleased to note that Ao, at least, was as impressed by the House itself as he had been. Not to the standards of Aleppan, perhaps, or Kaï’s home, but the golden stone façade, and the narrow, colored-glass windows at either side of the door, had a beauty of their own, and Jerzy felt a twitch of pride.

  Inside the hallway, Detta waited for them. “Master Malech. Two more joining us for the eve meal?”

  “In my study, I believe,” Master Malech said, and the House-keeper nodded, as though this were the normal turn of events.

  Jerzy was still trying to comprehend what had obviously happened. Master Malech had sent a message. To Kaï and Ao. Who had come, who had already been on their way, with a ship named the Vine’s Heart.

  The confusion and worry chewed at him, even more than curiosity, but years of obedience kept any of it from showing on his face as he made a gesture with his right hand to indicate that the newcomers should follow Master Malech to his study.