Shattering the Ley

by Joshua Palmatier

  He stilled when he saw the brown robes of the gardener, the weary smile that had started to form freezing, then slipping into a tight frown.

  “He stopped me in the street outside Halliel’s Park,” Kara said, a shiver of worry slicing into her gut. “He said he needed to speak to you.”

  A long moment of silence stretched, and then the gardener shifted behind Kara, one hand falling onto her shoulder. “It’s about your daughter, actually.”

  Her father nodded. “I see.” His gaze dropped from the gardener to her and he attempted a smile of reassurance. “Why don’t you go into the kitchen and get us something to drink, Kara? I think there’s still some tea left in the pitcher on the sill.”

  Kara nodded, more than happy to slip out from under the gardener’s hand. Even here, when he touched her, she could feel energy passing back and forth between them, although it wasn’t as intense as it had been at the park.

  She heard the gardener and her father speaking as she found the pitcher, some cups, and loaded them onto a tray.

  “I’m simply concerned for your daughter,” the gardener was saying as she returned. Neither one of them appeared to notice her. “For her to be manifesting so strongly this early . . . it could be dangerous. Not only for her, but for you and those around her as well.”

  “What do you mean manifesting?” her father said sharply. Kara had never heard her father speak in such a harsh tone, tinged with fear, and dread shot through her back. Her hands tightened on the edges of the tray.

  The gardener snorted. Then his eyes narrowed. “I am a Tender of the stones in Halliel’s Park,” he said purposefully. “That means—”

  “I know what that means! And I know what you are, who you were!”

  The gardener straightened, arms crossed over his chest. “Then you know that I speak the truth and that the concern is real.”

  Her father glared at him. For a long moment, neither relented. Kara set the tray down in a free space on the desk, next to the sandglass, and poured two cups of tea. Her hands shook, but she didn’t spill any.

  Finally, the stiffness in the gardener’s shoulders relaxed. He let a breath out through his nose and shook his head. “You are deluding yourself if you think this can be ignored. You must have seen signs.” He glanced toward the ley globe that hung above the desk. “How did you know it was Kara at the door when we arrived? You didn’t turn.”

  “I assumed—”

  The gardener’s eyes narrowed and her father halted, mouth open, then bowed his head.

  “I knew because the globe brightened.”

  The gardener nodded. “And have you seen other manifestations like that?”

  Grudgingly, as if dredging the admission up from long buried depths, her father said, “Yes.” He glanced toward her and she stepped forward and handed him the cup of tea she held. He pulled her in closer, one arm holding her protectively, and somehow that gave his voice more strength. “We—my wife and I—have seen her repair the globe when it flickers. I don’t even think Kara’s aware she does it. She just . . . reaches up and touches it and it steadies. When customers bring in ley clocks, they seem to burn brighter, even before I repair them.” He hesitated, then added, “And then there’s what happened during the sowing.”

  This caught the gardener’s attention. “Something happened during the sowing?”

  “She fainted. The healer said that the excitement of the sowing overwhelmed her, and my wife and I want to believe him . . . but we think it was something else.”

  The gardener’s gaze dropped to Kara and he studied her for a long moment. Her father’s arm tightened where it draped over her shoulder, making her fidget. Then the gardener knelt, so that his eyes were level with Kara’s.

  “Tell me what happened, Kara. What did you feel during the sowing?”

  Kara shifted uncomfortably beneath his gaze. “I don’t know. My body tingled, and I could feel the ground, as if something was drawing something from inside me out through my feet and into the ground, sort of like what it feels like when you touch me.”

  The gardener’s eyebrows rose. “You can feel the energy when I touch you? Flowing through me to you?”

  “Yes. But more of it’s flowing from me to you.”

  The gardener grunted, thought for a moment, then asked, “What else happened at the sowing? There must have been something else, or your father wouldn’t have felt the need to call a healer.”

  “The tingling got worse. I couldn’t move. And then when it ended, when the tower was finished, the tingling stopped, but I felt weak. I couldn’t stand up anymore.”

  “She fainted,” her father said roughly. “She collapsed in my arms.”

  The gardener nodded, as if he understood. He patted her shoulder, then straightened. “I’m certain it was frightening, for both of you. But I’m not surprised that it happened. Not if what I suspect is true. I’m certain the sowing affected many others in the city.”

  “What do you mean?” her father said.

  “You already know, or suspect.” He glanced toward Kara. “And I’m certain that it’s occurred to Kara as well. But there is a way to be certain, one that won’t involve anyone else, in case our suspicions are unfounded.”

  “How?”

  The gardener hesitated, contemplating Kara, then shook his head. “I don’t want anything I say to influence the outcome. She’s probably heard too much already. But if you want to know for certain, bring her to Halliel’s Park tomorrow, after school. I’ll be waiting.”

  A shiver ran down through Kara’s back, but she couldn’t keep the smile from her face.

  As Kara and her father approached the gates of Halliel’s Park, she felt again the energy through her feet, realized she could feel all of the surrounding people as they moved down the crowded street. But her attention was focused on the gate, on the stone of the archway and the ley globes above it.

  She searched the entrance avidly and was disappointed to see that the gardener wasn’t there waiting for them.

  Her father paused at the entrance to the park, staring up at the globes above. He appeared nervous. Kara knew that he and her mother had talked long into the night, their voices hushed but hard. The initial argument had died down into silence, broken only by the clatter of dishes being washed from the kitchen, Kara trying to fall asleep in her bed. Then she’d heard her father’s chair scrape across the floor, and the clattering had stopped.

  Then, clearly, as if her mother had been facing the door, Kara heard her say fiercely, “It’s too early. She’s too young. We should have another few years with her at least!”

  Her father murmured something in return, and then her mother again, her voice muffled this time, as if her head were pressed against a shoulder, but still too loud and choked with tears. “I don’t want her to leave.”

  The pain in her mother’s voice had dampened Kara’s excitement and she’d rolled away, back to the door, drawing herself up into a ball. She thought about those few students at the school who had been tested and who had sparked light in the two clear globes the Head of the University placed in their hands. They’d gone to the University at the confluence of the two rivers the following day. None of them had returned to the school, and they were rarely seen in the district after that. She’d never thought about them much after they left, never thought about what happened to the students after the testing if either the Head of the University or the Prime Wielder singled them out. Those chosen had to study at the University or under the hands of the Wielders, but for some reason she’d never realized that meant they had to leave their home and their family behind, that they had to leave Eld. Once their studies were finished, they were posted throughout the city—the new Wielders focused on keeping the ley system running, those from the University helping with everything else.

  Curled up in her bed, she’d stared at the darkness of the wall closest
to her and thought about leaving her apartment, her mother and father, Cory, Justin, and all of the rest of her friends, and suddenly the thought of Halliel’s Park wasn’t as thrilling.

  It had taken her a long time to get to sleep.

  But the excitement had returned the following morning, and grown the closer she’d gotten to the stone arch and the pathways that lay beyond. Now, with the energies of the park coursing through her, her father glanced down at her and with a sad smile said, “Shall we find the gardener?”

  They entered the park, something Kara had never dared to do on her own, even though the gates to the park were open to the public. She had rarely seen anyone enter other than the brown-robed gardeners, and had only heard people refer to the park when giving directions or as a reference for something else in the city. She suddenly realized how strange that was, as if the park didn’t exist, even though everyone knew it was there.

  Stepping onto the crushed stone path inside the entrance, Kara’s breath quickened. But then her father’s hand touched her shoulder in reassurance and she relaxed and began looking around.

  Pathways meandered through trees and shrubs and piles of stone with no obvious pattern, curving out of sight ahead, or dipping down as the ground undulated. They moved deeper into the trees, the walls that surrounded the park and the sounds of the people on the street falling away behind them. Around a sharp curve, they found a secluded area beneath a huge willow with a bench made out of flat, stacked stones. Farther along, the path split into three sections, weaving through each other like a maze, surrounded by waist-high lilacs, their scent heavy on the air. Somewhere close they could hear the sounds of a stream, water gurgling over stone. They passed beneath a canopy of intertwined branches, leaves rustling in a breeze, and then the trees opened up and fell away.

  Before them, the path wound down between huge stones, the boulders angular, edges sharp, completely unlike the river stone found throughout most of the Eld District. They paused, Kara running her hand down the striations of the nearest stone, the dusky browns and reds stacked upon each other in layers. Energy flowed through her into the stone and back again and she felt her fingers tingling, her skin prickling beneath the touch.

  Ahead, the gardener appeared around a turn in the path and smiled. “I see you decided to come.”

  “I thought you’d be waiting for us at the entrance,” Kara said.

  He laughed. “I wanted to see where you’d head if you were left unattended. Not everyone finds the stone garden.” He shared a meaningful look with Kara’s father, then turned his attention back to her. She suddenly realized that her father had let her lead them through the park, that he’d simply been following her. “Follow me. I want you to see something.”

  She moved forward, the stones rising up above her head, the spaces between the rock cooler, smelling of earth and dust. Her father trailed behind. The gardener chose paths seemingly at random, although Kara realized she could sense something ahead, a strengthening of the energy, and her pulse began beating faster.

  They stepped into a grotto, the closeness of the stone retreating as it opened up into a wide, roofless chamber. Water poured down from the lip of the recess in a small waterfall, pooling below before disappearing through a crevice in the stone wall. Moss covered the rock near the stream, glistening with moisture. In the center of the grotto, six stone plinths rose in a rough circle, none of them the same height, a few canted to one side. Another ring of mismatched stones encircled these, waist-high. The gardener moved toward the stones at first, then veered off to one side, closer to the waterfall, and sat down on a ridge of stone that rose from the floor to form a natural bench. The ground was littered with rocks of various sizes and colors, scattered haphazardly, some the size of Kara’s fist, most smaller. Unlike the surrounding rock of the grotto and the plinths, these were river stones, smoothed and rounded.

  The gardener motioned them toward seats to one side and Kara sat down beside her father. The moment she touched the stone beneath her, she felt something was wrong. She frowned, but the gardener didn’t seem to notice.

  “This is the heart of the park,” the gardener said, nodding toward the plinths and the surrounding walls. “This grotto was discovered before Erenthrall was even a village, before anything had even been built near the confluence of the two rivers. It is believed that the local population realized the power that resided here, even if they had not yet learned to harness it as we do, and so built such stone monoliths to mark its location. There are such stellae scattered throughout the Baronies, the Demesnes, the Temerite lands, and even as far south as the Gorrani Flats and the Archipelago.”

  Kara found herself only half listening as she stared down at the smoothed stone beneath their feet and the scattering of rocks. The energy she’d felt outside the park flowed beneath her, beneath the stone, as if there were a large lake far beneath the surface, rivers of power sifting back and forth below, barely perceptible to her. Here on the surface, she could feel its pulse, feel the eddies as they shifted. But something had disturbed the flow.

  She curled her toes up inside her shoes, then spread them out, trying to sense what was wrong, even as she heard her father ask, “Are the other stone markers in the other Baronial cities? Where the Nexi are?”

  The gardener snorted in disgust. “No. The Nexi that are in the Baronial cities like Erenthrall have nothing to do with the natural structure of the ley. That network of ley—the network controlled by the Prime Wielders and Baron Arent Pallentor—is political, the Nexi created at the whim of the Primes. The Barons pay for their access to the ley and for the Nexi in their cities. Even then, those Nexi are run and maintained by Wielders who are trained here in Erenthrall and are loyal only to Baron Arent. No, that is an artificial network. This set of stones, and those like it spread throughout the continent, are markers for the natural ley system.”

  “The one the Kormanley wants us to revert to?”

  Kara looked up at the mention of the Kormanley, saw the gardener looking at her father oddly, concern flashing across his face.

  “Yes,” he said as he studied her father. “That is what the Kormanley preach. A return to what is natural.”

  Her father nodded and the gardener relaxed, his gaze shifting toward her.

  “What’s wrong, little one?”

  She started, grimacing as her father turned toward her sharply. “I don’t know. There’s something wrong with the stones. With that stone, I think.” She pointed toward a white stone with a streak of red running through it. “But I can’t tell what.”

  The gardener’s attention was fixed on her completely now, as well as her father’s.

  “Why can’t you tell what’s wrong?”

  She frowned. “I can’t feel it through my feet.”

  The gardener chuckled, then leaned forward, eyebrows raised. “Then take off your shoes,” he said softly, and grinned.

  Kara glanced toward her father, who nodded permission. Without hesitation, she kicked off the soft leather and planted her feet directly onto the stone.

  And gasped. Energy shot through her legs and into her gut, spiking a moment before settling down into a steady stream. What had felt like a single current through the stone now split into separate eddies, flowing in all directions, although still interconnected, still part of the same whole. Goose bumps broke out on her skin and she shuddered, her heart adjusting to the flow, even as the grotto came into sharper focus. Scents amplified, stone and dust and the damp, dark taste of the moss by the stream. Pollen from the trees outside exploded across her senses, along with the heat radiating up from the rock all around, heat it had absorbed during the day from the sun. With the sudden awareness of the heat, she realized the eddies and flows she felt in the stone were in the air as well, that she could sense the air, like cloth, all around her, that everything was connected—stone, stream, air, and the lake of ley far beneath her, with an upwelling t
here, at the center of the stone stellae. Except that a deeper upwelling had been siphoned off, diverted and centered farther away, north of here. She frowned as she tried to pinpoint it exactly, but couldn’t. The energy outside of the grotto was too blurred, too vast for her to try to take in and understand.

  “Can you tell me what’s wrong now?” the gardener asked, and somehow the question sounded more formal, more weighted. He sounded like one of her teachers at school.

  She almost told him about the energy that was being diverted away from the circle of stones—so much more energy than coursed through the stone around her now, so much more than what had once passed through here—but then she realized he meant the red-streaked stone she’d pointed out earlier.

  She pulled her attention away from all of the new sensations and focused on the scattered stones at her feet, focused on the currents that she couldn’t really see pulsing through the stone and air and the rocks before her.

  “It’s out of place,” she said. “It doesn’t belong there.”

  The gardener didn’t move, didn’t react at all. “And where does it belong?” When she turned to look at him, he smiled. “It’s all right. You can move them around. You won’t harm anything. Not here.”

  She slid off of the stone ridge and picked up the red-streaked stone. The flows around her changed instantly, shifting before her. She stood a moment, considering, feeling the weight of the stone in her hands, heavier than she’d expected, her fingers brushing its grit and roughness. Then she stepped to one side and set the stone down in a new location.

  But even as she did so, the flows changed yet again, settling into new streams, ones that were decidedly worse than before. But she knew the red-streaked stone belonged there. She felt it, felt the eddies coursing through it.

  The other stones were wrong as well.

  She began moving them all, picking them up, setting them down in new locations, rearranging them. A few times, with a new arrangement, she’d step back and shake her head, then move in again. Some stones had to be stacked one atop the other, or next to each other, balanced precariously, although as soon as they were set properly she could feel the energy flowing through them and knew that they were right. Others were set to one side, solitary. Color did not matter, nor texture—or if it did, then the meaning was too complex or too subtle for her to see.