by Sarah Zettel
“Now that you’ve lived to be marked, Aria, I can start telling you about your name. Stone in the Wall. Aria Born of the Black Wall. What I say is true, daughter of my blood, but you must never, ever tell anyone. If someone comes who has need of you, they will already know. If anyone else hears, you’ll be killed for a Heretic. What I say is from the Nameless Powers to our family, do you understand?”
Aria didn’t, but she’d nodded anyway. Mother’s anxious tones sent chills through her that were worse than the ones the wind brought.
Mother sat back and folded her hands like she was making a vow or a curse. She stared at the moss-chinked wickerwork that made up their house walls. She spoke in measured cadences like she did when she was reciting the Words. “When the Nameless Powers left the Realm for the place beyond the Black Wall, they knew that the people would have need of aid and protection. So they gave their Words to the Teachers and their authority to the Royals. They set the seasons and the days in motion so that the people would have time and life.
“But they knew the Aunorante Sangh were waiting with their tricks and their traps. They knew, for they were the Nameless Powers and nothing is hidden from them, that the Aunorante Sangh might send servants to disrupt the workings of the Realm, which would kill the People.
“To prepare against this, the Nameless Powers spoke new words and these words became jewels. They took each jewel and they spoke its name over it. As they spoke, the jewels split into four parts. Three parts remained stone, but the fourth became a person.
“The names that the Powers spoke for the jewels gave the stones the power to hear and understand the workings of the world, but only in the hands of the people who had been made from the jewel’s substance. The Nameless scattered the people across the world. One became a Royal, one a Noble, one a Bondless, one a Bonded, and one a Notouch.
“The years passed and the stones and their names were handed from parents to children. But the names became corrupted and garbled by the speaking of men and, gradually, the truth was lost by all, except the Notouch. For we who cannot touch power or coinage cannot be distracted by the ways of the world.
“The Nameless Powers, where they watched through the Black Wall, saw the Aunorante Sangh breeding their servants the way a farmer breeds pigs. They saw, too, that they were building their own Realm that their servants might have a fortress from which to launch attacks upon the People. The Nameless knew those servants would one day be sent into the Realm. So the Nameless Powers spoke new words. Metthew Garismit, they said, and they created their own servant and opened the Black Wall so he might walk down to the Realm.
“Garismit knew his name from the beginning and he knew that to save the Realm from the Aunorante Sangh, he would need to move it to where the Aunorante Sangh could not reach it.
“The Teachers say that Garismit went into the belly of the Realm and spoke to it with its own name. That is not all he did, Aria.
“To make the world hear him, and to hear it, he needed the stones and their keepers. He went first to the Royal and the Noble. But they had hidden their stones in their money houses and would not dig them out. He went to the Bondless, but they had gambled the stones away years ago and did not know where they were. He went to the Bonded, but the slave had given the stones for a master’s favor and did not know where they were.
“So Garismit went to the Notouch. He called her by her name—Clear Sight—and Clear Sight took her stones into her hands. Garismit opened the ground for Clear Sight and he led her down the paths to the center of the earth. The stones became eyes and ears and the Realm saw Garismit and heard him as he spoke its name and it moved at his command.”
Mother had rumbled with the thong of a leather pouch then. Aria could still remember the musty smell that rose from the leather.
“Hold out your hands, daughter.”
Feeling like she was dreaming, Aria had held out her bandaged hands. Her mother laid the stones in them and Aria gasped, partly from the pain of their smooth weight against her fresh hand marks, but mostly from their beauty.
“These are Clear Sight’s stones,” Mother said. “We are her daughters, named by the Nameless and born of their substance. We serve the Nameless by keeping them safe and close. The Aunorante Sangh still seek us. The Nameless Powers may send another servant to save us from them again. The Nameless themselves may return. When they do, they will need the stones and we must be ready with them.” Mother tucked her hand under Aria’s chin and raised her daughter’s eyes away from the beautiful spheres. “This is the beginning of the truth, daughter of my blood, Aria of the Black Wall. There is more, and I will teach it to you. We can only speak of these things when the world is protected by the Black Wall. When the sun comes again, you cannot let anyone know anything has changed for you.”
Mother’d taken the stones back, then led her daughter back to her mat. Aria spent that night shivering in the dark, but now from wonder rather than cold.
Aria kept her silence as she traveled with the other women and children to the cities and she did not show anything had changed. But something had. She knew it when she listened to the Teachers. Thoughts crept unbidden into her head when she was supposed to be filling it with the words of the Nameless Powers and Metthew Garismit.
... the Notouch are the dirt and stone of the world, but I’m not Notouch. I’m born of the stones and born of the Black Wall. If the Teachers could lose the story of the stones, what else could they lose?
If names given by the Nameless can become corrupted by the speaking of men, what else can become corrupted?
And always, always, through the other thoughts, through the anger that blossomed and the rebellion that grew into willful and deliberate heresy she remembered that the Nameless Powers had condemned their best to be Notouch. The knowledge of who she was and how she had been wronged by the Nameless Powers and all their servants shaped her life from her Marking Day to the day she’d walked unafraid up to the Skymen and asked to know how she could be of use.
She caressed the pouch that held her namestones. All her life she had longed to be recognized for what she really was, and now it was happening. These Skymen with their naked hands and their ignorance of the Words of the Nameless treated her like a trophy. She should have been reveling in it, using it for all it was worth. But all she wanted to do was get home, get the stones back to her home and her daughter, where they belonged. There wasn’t a minute that went by that she didn’t wonder what would happen if she lost her life, lost the stones out here. Then she would not only have lied to Little Eye, she would have taken away her children’s only hope of getting out of the mud.
Aria realized her knees were trembling. She turned away from the window and strode across the room.
Counters. Floors. The terminal. I’m not sure how much longer I can deal with these Skymen. I don’t know how much longer I’ve got before whatever plans they have for the Realm come true. I’ve got to find out what they want and get back home. She saw all her children lined up before her mind’s eye and swallowed hard against the pang of homesickness.
She slid the door for the sanitation cupboard and dug out the sponges and canisters of solvent. Can’t go yet. Too much I don’t understand. Her own words came back to her. A wave of exhaustion washed over her. Just too much. How has Teacher…Eric Born…managed to live out here for ten years without losing his mind?
Thinking of him was a mistake. His name brought the image of him to her mind, along with an absurd longing she’d managed to avoid finding words for.
Scowling at her hands, she bent to her work.
“G’wan! Get outta here! Move it!” Iyal swatted the backsides of the sandy brown cows indiscriminately with her prod. The beasts bellowed and jostled each other but they moved steadily toward the narrow gate where Jexid, the new intern from the Nuot Division, gave any of the balky ones an extra prod to funnel them up the ramp of the transport. Old Keyenar ki Oruat tapped each of the fat, stupid, carefully engineered beasts between the e
ars with the signature wand and checked its number to make sure only the cattle that had already passed inspection made it into the shipment.
Loading and herding the big animals was one of the things people still did better than the automatics. Nobody’d yet been able to program a cheap automatic with enough self-preservation instinct to get out of the way if there was a stampede.
A sharp whistle jerked Iyal’s head around. One of the cows bawled and stamped its foot down. Iyal felt the shock up to her ankle, despite her steel-toed boots. She whacked the cow and cursed and at the same time she tried to see who the idiot was who didn’t know they still hadn’t managed to breed all the nerves out of the mountain-specific cattle.
Outside the fence Zur-Allenden waved at her frantically and beckoned, while pointing at her sedan chair unit with his other hand.
Ground beneath my feet, what does he want now and why can’t he call me over the crashing terminal? She gave the cows in front of her an extra shove and hit the TRANSMIT key on her torque.
“Get an appointment, Allenden,” she muttered through clenched teeth as she leaned sideways to try to keep a nervous yearling from squashing her side. It stamped edgily, missing her toes, thankfully, and moved forward.
Got to calm these critters down. Well, with the new configuration in the next batch…
“Iyal, I need to talk to you about your new…acquisition,” came Allenden’s voice through her translator disk.
“What acquisition?” Keyenar was cutting one of the cows out of the herd and prodding it toward the side holding pen. Iyal hooked her prod onto her belt and waved both fists in the inquiry sign and he held up three fingers. Wrong number. Nothing major.
Iyal brought her hands down. Understood. She snatched up the prod again to urge the cows forward. The press was easing as most of the cattle lumbered onto the truck. There was always a mild relief in being able to breathe freely again. Allenden was not allowing her to enjoy it, however.
“You know,” said Allenden. “The woman.”
“It shouldn’t be that tough for someone named Zur-Allen-den ki Uvarimayartus to pronounce Aria Stone.” The torque picked up her subvocalized words and relayed them to Allenden’s translation disk. She hoped it also managed to accurately transmit her tone.
“Zur-Iyal, I can’t talk about this over the air. Give me ten minutes. Please.”
For a moment, Iyal considered telling him to go bury himself in manure, but Allenden was capable of making himself extremely unpleasant if he felt ignored, and she didn’t feel up to being called into Director ki Sholmat’s office and read the employee relations section out of her supervisor’s contract.
She waved to Jexid to come take her place at the back. The intern, to her credit, unhooked her own prod from her belt and waded into the thick of the herd, slapping and cursing like an old pro.
Iyal squelched through mud and debris to the side gate and palmed the latch. It registered her sweaty, muck-stained hand and let the gate swing open for her. Iyal stomped up the path, showering the concrete with dirt at each step until she reached her sedan chair. She plunked herself down in the seat and immediately switched on the monitor boards to check the input from Keyenar’s wand against the manifest. This was a big order and an important one. Since the Vitae had taken over Kethran’s gene-tailoring industry, there had been far too few of those. The last thing she needed was Allenden bothering her about his pet trivialities.
But then, he probably knew that. He never picked his fights randomly.
The summer heat and pent-up annoyance broke a fresh sweat on her forehead and cheeks, despite her broad-brimmed hat and screening lotion.
“I’m serious, Iyal.” Allenden squatted down beside the front legs of the sedan. “I think we’ve got a problem.”
“You mean a new problem.” Iyal watched three new registration numbers appear on the list. “So let’s have it.”
Allenden glanced this way and that. Iyal sighed. Allenden’s penchant for dramatics never failed to get under her skin and stick. “Get it out, Allenden, I don’t have all year. We’ve got 260 head to get inspected, loaded, and delivered.” She squinted at Allenden out of the corner of her eye. The sun was behind him and it took a minute for her new lenses to adjust so she saw something other than a black blob where his face should be.
“Iyal. Your…Aria, she’s a Vitae spy.”
Iyal felt her eyes swivel all the way toward Allenden. Her gaze followed a second later. “What?” Almost no one on Kethran, from First Family members on down to Fourth Wavers, liked having the Vitae around. Most recognized them as an unpleasant necessity. Some were waiting for a chance to kick them offworld. A few, like Allenden, were actively looking for ways to force them off.
“Somebody’s been using my access codes to get into the datastores after hours.”
Iyal finally took her attention off the herd and the boards and turned all the way toward Allenden. The man was built like a sun-bleached beanpole on stilts. Even on his knees in the grass, the top of his head was level with hers.
Iyal snorted. “Aria can barely type her name or understand…”
“She’s got a Vitae gene sequence, Iyal. For all we know they created her as a way to get in here.”
“Don’t be stupid, Allenden. Should that sequence turn out to be exclusive to the Vitae, which I doubt, even the Vitae aren’t that good at genetic engineering.”
“We don’t know exactly how good the Vitae are,” he said levelly.
Who’s paying Perivar’s bills these days? The thought slid into her mind. No. Not Perivar. Bones and breath, he works with a Shessel. He…
Who is paying his bills these days?
“You want to talk about this inside?” Allenden glanced across toward Keyenar, Jexid, and the herd.
“No, I do not want to talk about this inside.” Iyal heaved her shoulders back. “If you want to insult my judgment, Assistant Researcher, you can do it in writing to Director ki Sholmat.”
Allenden leaned close enough for her to smell his fruity breath over the scent of the cows and the summer grass. “I saw her, Iyal. Security’s got her recorded. Reading the lab notes. Senior research level lab notes.”
No. I won’t believe it.
And if security really has got her recorded?
No. Some of those rented eyes haven’t got the brains we gave the cows. There’s been a screwup. There must have been a screwup.
Allenden waved his hands toward the sky in a gesture of helplessness. “Iyal, you brought her in here just before the Vitae made their announcement about taking over MG49 sub 1. Everything’s changing with them, don’t you see? We’ve got to look at everything in a new light. Now that they’ve picked a single base, they’re going to be moving to centralize their influence. They’ll be tightening the screws and closing the locks. The only reason they haven’t done it before is that they’ve been too scattered, too busy maintaining control over themselves to spare resources for consolidating an empire out of the rest of us.”
Iyal blinked at him. She tried to take her time to formulate a decent reply. That was a mistake, because it gave Allenden’s little speech time to sink in. He’d obviously rehearsed it several times. Maybe he’d even talked to some people who had better sense than he did. If you believed in conspiracies, the formula made too much sense, and if you’d ever seen the Vitae organize a project, you believed in conspiracies.
It would still mean that Perivar had lied to her, and that Aria had lied to her, and that Zur-Iyal ki Maliad had seen the chance for profit and advancement and had lost track of the overall situation.
That was not acceptable.
“I said, if you want to question my judgment, you take it to Our Cousin Director. Until he fires me, I’m your supervisor, and I say that Aria Stone is my responsibility, not yours.” She folded her arms and directed her attention to the cattle pens. Keyenar slammed the truck’s gate shut and waved to the driver. The transport rolled across the grass. Its balloon tires molded to the damp gr
ound so the turf would be disturbed as little as possible. The labs only had an allotment of ninety-five acres of chopped ground and they needed all of that for gardens and pens. They couldn’t afford to go hacking up the fields.
Allenden reached across the chair’s boards and with one, bone-thin finger tapped six keys, one after the other. The manifest cleared from the main screen and in its place appeared a view of Lab #20. Aria Stone hunched in front of the comm screen on Allenden’s research table. Iyal squinted over the dark woman’s shoulder and saw nothing but a blur of gold light on a black screen. Allenden keyed for the security camera to zoom in closer on the text. Aria had the screen set for the fastest scan level and the words flashed by too fast for Iyal to do more than pick out one or two at a time, but she did catch the gold logo of the First Families and the green-and-blue globe of the Kethran Diet.
Seven screens of information flashed past before Iyal realized Aria was reading transcriptions from the Diet sessions. Reading high-formal tense, legally extensive and twisted documents restricted to First Family access. Iyal touched two keys and brought up a profile from the second security camera. Aria’s black eyes flickered back and forth. She was really reading them, and reading them faster than Iyal could.
Iyal sat back in the chair, not caring what Allenden made out of the bewildered look on her face.
Impossible. Ridiculous. She had only started learning the language four weeks ago. She didn’t even have full command of one level of grammar yet. She barely knew where an ON switch on a view table was. How in all the worlds that lived had she gotten into secured files?
Allenden planted both hands on the edge of the board. “We’ve got a spy in the ranks, Cousin Manager.”
“No.”
“What do you mean no!” Allenden reared up like a startled cow. “Look at her!”
“Yes.” Iyal gestured at the screen. “Look at her. Right in front of the security camera. Clear as all outdoors and solid as dirt. You’re telling me a spy, a VITAE spy, is going to tap the secured network from the lab in front of a camera?”