The Stone Key

by Isobelle Carmody

  “You are going to stay to find Domick?” Merret guessed.

  “I know where he is,” I sent. “The man whose mind I showed you is helping me. He has a friend who has located Domick in a Faction house not far from the piers. I do not know whether he is a prisoner or a guest, but they promised to help me reach him. They say it will be best to act in the very early morning, for half the population will be abed, sleeping off tonight’s indulgences.”

  “The city is a cesspit, because Councilman Kana is greedy and unscrupulous and will stoop to anything to line his pockets,” said Merret in distaste.

  “It does not matter,” I said. “It is my intention that by midday tomorrow, with their help, I will be well away from Halfmoon Bay with Domick.”

  “This Erit is a child,” Merret protested, for she had seen him in my mind.

  “And what were we when we took over Obernewtyn?” I snapped. “Erit has already proven himself by finding out where Domick is staying.”

  “He and this metalworker know everything?”

  “So far they know almost nothing. They think I am a rebel trying to rescue another rebel who has some sort of weapon. But tonight I will tell them that I am a Misfit, and I will tell them about the plague that Domick carries.”

  “You trust them.” A statement rather than a question.

  “Without their help, I would still be seeking Domick, for his mind is closed to me.”

  “Even so, I will ride to Halfmoon Bay. I can be there by tomorrow morning,” Merret sent decisively.

  “No,” I said. “I need you to warn the others and the rebels.”

  “I can do both,” Merret replied. “I am riding to Aborium to meet Gwynedd and some of the newer rebel leaders. All the original rebel leaders were killed in the Night of Blood, save Serba, Tardis, and Yavok. Then Yavok was murdered, Tardis died not a month after, and Gwynedd became the leader of what remains of the rebel network.”

  I did not bother to explain that I knew about Gwynedd saying only, “It is extremely fortunate that you are about to meet Gwynedd.”

  “Not truly,” Merret responded. “We have been meeting once every sevenday this last twomonth.”

  “Then we are fortunate that this is the day. Tell Gwynedd that Dardelan would have come to their aid sooner, but all the ships were burned during the rebellion, and when the rebels built more, they, too, were destroyed, probably by Malik’s men.”

  “I do not think Gwynedd will be much surprised by Malik’s new treachery. No more am I. But though he will be interested to hear of what has been happening on Herder Isle, I think he and the other rebels will be more concerned about what you intend to do with Domick once you have him.”

  “I will ride with him out onto the plain on the other side of the main road where there is no danger of anyone running into me by chance. Then I will make camp and care for him.”

  “But, Elspeth, if you are with him when the plague becomes contagious…” Merret began.

  “Someone must be. Why should it not be me?” I said tersely. I knew that I could not avoid the heroic light that would be cast on my actions, but I was probably the only one who would survive the plague because of what the Agyllions had taught my body. I went on, “Tell Jak everything and see what he advises as treatment for Domick. If there are medicines that will ease his pain or heal him, you can leave them some distance from the camp, and I will walk out to get them.”

  “Elspeth, this is absurd. You cannot do this alone. As soon as I speak to Gwynedd and the others, I will come to Halfmoon Bay to help you. Blyss is already in Aborium, and she can ride back and speak with Jak.”

  I wanted to refuse, but in truth, I might need help. “Come, then, but remain outside the city. I will farseek you if necessary,” I said, growing mentally exhausted now. It was always a battering business to sustain a farsought conversation with a coercer. And sharing memories was tiring with anyone.

  “Where are you now?” Merret asked as I was about to withdraw from her mind. I told her, and she said, “How strange that you should find your way to Stonehill, given that it was not where I told you it was.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said, unable to remember her ever mentioning Stonehill to me.

  “I thought it was on the other side of Aborium,” Merret said.

  “We can speak of this later,” I said, for I was becoming fuddled. I bade her ride safe and withdrew from her mind.

  I rested for a time and, drowsing, found myself remembering a vision I had once had of Domick lying slumped in what I had thought was a Council cell, his hair long and matted, his body covered in sores and filth. I had no doubt now that the vision had been of Domick on Herder Isle or Norseland, and I wondered what Ariel had been doing to him all this time, given that he could not have been infecting him with plague.

  At last thirst forced me to climb again, and it was not long before I reached the top of Stonehill. A gentle slope rose before me, covered in long grass that swished pleasantly in a slight wind. It was very dark, for the moon had risen behind a tattered veil of cloud and was only fitfully revealed, but I walked steadily, eager to reach a place where I could see the ocean. The wind grew stronger, and I was so intent on leaning into it that I was almost on them before I noticed the outline of buildings near the top of the slope. Drawing closer, I saw that they were ruins. I entered the nearest dwelling. There was no roof at all, and whatever had once been laid down as a floor had gone, too. But the grass growing there was soft, and I was delighted to see a pile of the brown rock that was used for fires on Herder Isle. All I needed were some twigs and dried grasses to start a fire, and I could cook the potatoes Erit had given me.

  Once outside, I remembered that I wanted to see the ocean and continued up the slope until I reached the top. The hill flattened out and ran to a cliff edge where the stone looked as if a knife had sheared it off. The moon was shining through the clouds onto the sea, and I stood for a long time looking at it and thinking of Ari-roth and Ari-noor and of Dragon and her mother and of Harwood and the others upon Herder Isle. But the wind that flowed from the sea was chilly, and soon I turned to head back to the ruins. I had one clear glimpse of them and the land about them before the moon vanished again, but I had seen enough to discern that the ruins were not merely a few buildings but a proper small settlement. I wondered why Erit had not mentioned it when he suggested I ride to the top of Stonehill. If there had once been a settlement here, there must be some easier way up the hill than the perilous path I had taken with Rawen.

  In looking for some twigs to start a fire, I noticed a hollow to one side of the ruins that had once been walled. Within it grew the remains of a substantial orchard. Queerly shaped stumps were all that remained of the trees, all thickly distorted trunks with little branches. Dead, I guessed, the branches long ago broken off for firewood.

  I headed toward the nearest gap in the wall, wondering why Halfmoon Bay had not been built about this hill. It would have provided a magnificent lookout and given the city true distinction.

  Then the clouds shifted, and moonlight bathed the thick stumps in a light that transformed them into stone.

  4

  I GASPED, FOR even at that distance and in the moonlight, I recognized in the stone forms the work of Kasanda, who had once been D’rekta of the Twentyfamilies gypsies. That meant that the ruined buildings must be the first and only home of those gypsies before they had struck their safe passage agreement with the councilmen and become nomadic. If I was right, this was also the site of the school for stone workers that Swallow once told me about. Now I understood why Merret had made her cryptic comment about Stonehill. Hearing of my interest in statues, she had once told me that she had heard of a stone garden where sculptors were trained, built upon a sea cliff on the other side of Aborium. She had got the location wrong, but I recalled her saying that she wanted to visit the stone garden. I wondered why I could not remember her telling me about it. Then I realized that had been the last farsought conversation I had had wit
h Merret before the Suggredoon closed.

  I stopped dead, my heart beginning to race, for I was remembering the fourth line of clues that Kasanda had carved into the panels that had become the doors to Obernewtyn.

  “Who [would/must] enter the [sentinel/guard/ watcher] will seek the words in the house where my son was born.”

  Sentinel was the name of the Beforetime project that had been set up to develop a worldwide retaliatory system of weaponmachines that would deal in dis-criminately with any aggression between countries. But something had gone wrong, and these weapon machines had brought about the Great White holocaust that had destroyed the Beforetime and poisoned most of the world. These were the weaponmachines I was to find and render helpless. And if the clue meant what it seemed clearly to say, words in these ruins would help me gain access to the Beforetime complex without harm.

  As if in a dream, I turned back toward the ruined buildings. Whatever message I found here must have been carved during Cassy’s time in the Land, yet the clues on Obernewtyn’s door panels had to have been carved after Cassy had journeyed to Sador, for how else could she have learned the gadi in which they had been scibed? But if she had made the panels after she went to Sador, how had they fallen into the hands of the gypsies Louis Larkin had seen bringing them to Obernewtyn? Was it possible that Cassy, now Kasanda of Sador, had sent them back to the gypsies who had remained in the Land, and if that were so, why hadn’t Swallow mentioned that the revered Sadorian seer had once been D’rekta of the Twentyfamilies gypsies? Or had he known but not mentioned it to me?

  Setting aside the puzzle, I looked about and tried to envisage how the ruins had looked when they were whole and occupied. A number of smaller dwellings had been built in a semicircle, facing a larger building of which little remained. The larger building had most likely been communal: an eating place or maybe a sculpture hall. I methodically went through all the smaller buildings, checking what remained of the walls and patches of flagged floor, seeking the words Cassy had left for me.

  I found none, though I did discover a well with a stone cauldron beside it between two of the huts. I drew up a bucket of icy water and drank thirstily, wondering again why a settlement with water and fertile ground in a desert land had been left abandoned after the Twentyfamilies gypsies had left. Pouring some water for Rawen into the stone cauldron, I continued searching the remaining smaller buildings and then inside and outside the walls of the larger building, but I found no carved words.

  I went back to where I had left my bag, took out the potatoes and the battered tinderbox Erit had given me, and set to making a fire. When the brown rock glowed hotly, I pressed the potatoes into the embers, took a stick of lighted wood, and revisited the walls of the ruins to see if I had missed any small carved words, but still I found nothing.

  The moon was shining brightly now, and the sight of the thirty or so statues glowing in the pallid light made the hair on my neck stir, for it came to me that the Cassy of my past dreams, whom I had seen commune with flamebirds and mourn her lover and fight with her parents, had once stood in this very place as a grown woman. She would not just have been a woman, but a mother. An even stranger thought occurred to me. She had known my face as she stood here, for had she not carved it from glass in the Beforetime? And perhaps she had thought of me as she stood here with her little son in her arms. Or maybe she had thought of her friend the Red Queen, and the queen’s brother, who had fathered the child. It struck me forcibly then, for the first time, that Cassy’s bond with the queen’s brother meant that her son was a distant cousin to Dragon! Was that why Cassy had dreamed of my meeting with Dragon even before she left the Red Queen’s land? She must have, for why else would she have left something there for me that Dragon alone could reveal?

  I thought of what I had seen in Dragon’s Comatose mind. Her dying mother had bidden her remember the grave markers of the first Red Queen and her brother. The dream had been a vision dream, full of symbolic images, but I had no doubt that this part had been true. Dragon’s mother had spoken of the grave markers of her ancestors, who had known Cassy.

  I summoned from memory the sixth line from the Obernewtyn doors.

  That which will [open/access/reach] the darkest door lies where the [?] [waits/sleeps]. Strange is the keeping place of this dreadful [step/sign/thing], and all who knew it are dead save one who does not know what she knows. Seek her past. Only through her may you go where you have never been and must someday go. Danger. Beware. Dragon.

  Despite being sure that the “one who did not know what she knows” was Dragon, there was still much in the clue that mystified me. But all at once it occurred to me that what Kasanda had left for me in the Red Queen’s land might not be a thing but words, and if that was true, then the obvious place for the words would be on the grave marker of the Red Queen’s brother. Indeed, what would be more natural than for Cassy to have sculpted a stone for the grave of her dead lover? But would she truly have been capable of using his grave to leave me a message? Perhaps it had been his sister who had suggested the stones, for Cassy must have spoken to her of the Seeker and the need for her ancestor to know that I would someday come to the Red Land to find the sign left for me.

  I shivered and realized I had been standing as still as the statues before me. Thrusting my numb fingers under my arms, I went to look more closely at them. The nearest was a cloaked man and was less refined than the wall friezes Cassy had created in her latter days as Kasanda in the Sadorian Earthtemple but was more subtle than the glass form she had made for the Reichler Clinic foyer in the Beforetime. I bent to look at the base for any words carved there, but there was nothing but a faint C.

  I went to another statue and then to others, stopping to study the faces as much as the stonework that shaped them, wondering if they had been people whom Cassy had known. From what Swallow had said, the workshop and school she had established here had been very successful in the early days, and in addition to the many ordinary young Landfolk who had come to learn Cassy’s technique, many more had come to have their forms sculpted. Some of the stone figures were clearly Twentyfamilies gypsies, judging from their attire and facial characteristics. One, the statue of an older gypsy woman, had an expression of great pride but also a hint of stern sorrow.

  Some of the pieces were not Cassy’s, though it was clear she had taught the maker. And although these were fine, none surpassed the mastery of their teacher. Several of the better pieces were inscribed with an E, and I wondered who “E” had been.

  In one corner, I came upon several groupings of children that seemed sentimental. These were not Cassy’s work, and I guessed they had been done by her novices or acolytes, but in their midst was a statue that Cassy had obviously done, of a boy about Erit’s age, posed in sitting position, hands clasped loosely about his knees. This boy lacked the tough, good-natured brashness that animated Erit’s engaging face. He looked more vulnerable and reminded me somewhat of the Norse boy, Lark, whom I had met on the way to Herder Isle. I stood for a long time, marveling that Cassy had been able to capture the nature of a boy’s yearning so well and so tenderly. It came to me that this might be Cassy’s son, who had taken over the Twentyfamilies when she had left the land.

  How had he felt, I wondered, when his mother had vanished? Swallow had told me once that, although many of the tribe had believed their D’rekta had been stolen away from the Land against her will, her son had always insisted that she had known she would be taken and had allowed it. If she had known what would come, she must have told her son, who went on to make the pact with the Council that had brought the Twentyfamilies to their nomadic existence. This enabled the gypsies to watch over and protect the messages and signs for me that she had strewn about the Land. Maybe Cassy’s son had even distributed some of them.

  Had he lost that gentle yearning once he became responsible for the Twentyfamilies, I wondered, and what had he yearned for as a youth anyway?

  I left the statue and went farther down the fi
eld than I had gone before. There was more novice work here, but there was still the occasional form that could only have been wrought by Cassy. I came to the statue of a girl about my own age, standing and gazing into the middle distance, frowning slightly. She had lifted one hand as if to shade her eyes from the sun’s glare, and like the statue of the boy, the face had been modeled with great care. Some moments passed before I realized that it seemed familiar. The person it resembled most was Hannah, whom I had just seen for the first time in a vision when I come to the west coast. It was curious that Cassy had chiseled Hannah as a girl, given they had not met until Hannah was middle-aged. Had she dreamed of her mentor as a younger woman? It might be so, for the likeness was not exact. The brows were wrong, and the mouth was more full then those of the older Hannah, the chin softer. Whatever it might lack in accuracy, the statue was an exquisitely rendered work that showed its maker’s affection for the subject. Both the young woman and the boy had been posed gazing outward, but where the boy’s expression had been poetic and full of yearning, the statue of the girl was characterized by determination and strength. It was as if she, unlike the boy, was looking for something very important and very specific. Certainly this was not the face of a dreamer.

  I heard a sound and turned my head, expecting to see Rawen, but instead I saw a woman coming toward me, her face hidden in shadow. Stumbling backward in fright, I caught myself from falling by grasping the hand of the stone girl whose face I had been studying. The woman did not speak, and for one wild moment, I thought she was a ghost. Then I saw her face and my shock subsided, for I recognized the strong, willful face of Swallow’s half sister, Iriny, whom I had once saved from burning, though she had cursed me for it.