by Jen Williams
‘Oh, I didn’t mean to be—’
‘Nonsense,’ said Rainya. ‘It’s the least we can do. We welcome curiosity about Finneral, so we do, especially from such a distinguished guest.’
Something small and round dinged off Bern the Elder’s shoulder and bounced off into the undergrowth. He grunted and looked around, only for another small projectile – they were pine cones, Aldasair saw – to bump off the back of his head. There was a shout of laughter from the trees behind them.
‘Stones and arses,’ muttered Bern’s father. ‘The woman is a menace.’
Rainya turned back, squinting at the trees. Her lips were twisted into a fond smile. ‘Stone Talker? Our son is here.’
A woman emerged from the trees, flanked by a pair of huge boar. To Aldasair’s eyes they looked Wild-touched – they were much too big to be natural, and their eyes were a fiery red – but they accompanied the small figure of the woman peacefully enough, and she even rested a hand on the flank of one of the monstrous creatures, as though it were a dear friend. The woman herself was short, and obviously extremely ancient for a human. Her tanned skin was speckled with darker freckles, and her face was a piece of parchment that had seen much use – the words of her many years were written there plainly enough. She grinned at them quite happily, though, and she hadn’t lost any teeth. Her head was entirely clean-shaven save for a single white braid, which was threaded with polished stones of many colours, and it hung heavy and fat over her shoulder. The rest of her wiry frame was mostly hidden under a deep fur shawl.
‘King Bern! I brought Peren and Nevin to see you. Haven’t they grown into fine beasts?’
Bern the Elder made some harrumphing noises while Aldasair tried to make sense of what he had just heard.
‘King . . . Bern?’
Bern shot a pained look at his father, then turned to Aldasair. ‘It’s not like you think. There are lots of kings in Finneral.’
‘Well thank you very much,’ muttered Bern the Elder.
‘They’re really more like warlords,’ continued Bern. ‘War parties left over from our wars with the Sown. I’ll . . . I’ll explain it later.’
While they had this oddly fraught exchange, Rainya had come forward to pat the boar on their snouts, and they were grunting happily.
‘Never mind all that,’ she said. ‘Lord Aldasair, this is Valous the Stone Talker.’
Remembering all he had learned about diplomacy since the awakening of Ygseril, Aldasair swept a deep bow in the old woman’s direction.
‘It is a great honour to meet you, my lady.’
The Stone Talker smiled. ‘It’s one not many people get, I suppose.’ Her voice was rough, but warm. ‘I’m still their great secret. It is . . . interesting to meet an Eboran. You were too young for the Carrion Wars, I suppose?’
‘I only remember them dimly.’ Aldasair felt a familiar cold fog edging in at the corners of his thoughts, and pushed it away firmly. ‘It was a bad time.’
‘It certainly was,’ said the Stone Talker, her mouth twisting. ‘Murder on a scale we had never seen outside of the Jure’lia. Our great mythical heroes sweeping down from the Bloodless Mountains to turn on the people they had always protected. The Finneral people were too far away to take those losses themselves, but when a dog runs rabid, you know it will come for you eventually, and we learned of the suffering of the plains people with heavy hearts.’
‘But surely,’ Aldasair felt his grip on the situation loosening, ‘surely you were not alive then?’
The Stone Talker rumbled laughter. ‘Oh no. I am not quite that old. But one of my roles as Stone Talker is to know our histories, to keep them and preserve them for whoever comes after me. And the many sorrows of Sarn are written into its very bones.’ She looked up at the treetops, as though looking for a sign, and a stray shaft of sunlight settled on her face. It turned her hazel eyes golden. ‘If you know where to look, you can read those sorrows like lines on a scroll.’ She shook herself, and plucked at her shawl. ‘Peren and Nevin were born in the woods to the north of here. We call those woods the Sorrowing Wood, because they are Wild woods, and because they are full of dangers. King Bern here liked to hunt in them once.’
‘I still would,’ said Bern’s father. ‘But apparently I risk too much.’ He shot a look at Rainya as he said it.
‘He went hunting wild boar, and found the biggest beast the Finneral people had ever seen,’ continued the Stone Talker in her broken voice. ‘It was, by all accounts, an epic hunt.’
Bern the Elder visibly brightened. ‘That it was! You were there, Bern lad, you remember that? We tracked her for days, careful as you like, in woods much less friendly than these.’
‘I remember, Da.’
‘King Bern took the beast down singlehandedly, with spear and sword,’ continued the Stone Talker. ‘There were songs sung, ale passed around. A great celebration. And then as the songs quietened we heard the sounds of snuffling, of whining. The great worm-touched beast had left behind two young, both equally worm-touched and now, very vulnerable. Do you remember, King Bern?’
Instead of answering, Bern’s father made a low grumbling noise in his throat. The Stone Talker smiled. ‘I would not let them kill the young. They might have come from a long line of beasts, but they were in trouble, and alone in the world. Killing such is not the action of a warrior, I told them, but the action of someone who looks only for pointless revenge.’
‘You were at the hunt, Lady Stone Talker?’ asked Aldasair.
‘I was. Do you see, my friend?’ She placed her hand on his arm briefly. ‘Your people are vulnerable, alone in the world now. It would be easy, too easy, to take revenge. And then we would lose a powerful ally.’ She nodded to Peren and Nevin. ‘I raised them both myself – it’s possible to do that, if you listen closely to the patterns nature shows us. Even worm-touched nature is understandable, if you’re willing to listen. Gentle as lambs, the pair of them. They know who helped them, and they are grateful. Something to remember.’
‘Stone Talker, do you wish to accompany us to the Broken Field?’ Bern’s face was very still, and again Aldasair felt like he was missing some vital interaction.
The Stone Talker took a long, slow breath, her shoulders rising and falling under the thick fur shawl. All at once she looked unspeakably old, as though a strong breeze would tatter her to pieces. ‘Listen to me go on. We should go there before it gets dark. I am too old to look at that place in the moonlight.’
25
They went immediately. Nearby there were four horses waiting for them, looked after by a tall woman with bristly brown hair, and to Aldasair’s surprise the Stone Talker rode on one of her boar – he still hadn’t figured out which was Peren and which was Nevin. The beasts kept up with the horses easily, and the Stone Talker led them to the northwest, winding down paths that appeared and then vanished again, following signs that Aldasair could not fathom. Eventually, the forest began to thin – the towering pine trees were replaced with stumps, each carefully topped with some sort of hard brown substance. Seeing Aldasair’s curious glance, Bern nodded towards them.
‘There’s a fair amount of Wild around here, and we do what we can to keep it back. Cut down the trees and seal them over. The Broken Field is enough trouble all by itself without a thriving Wild forest. Not that it does much good, mind.’
Aldasair could see what he meant. Despite the stumps and the dead wood lying around, this clearly wasn’t a dead place. Smaller trees were already growing, racing to take the place of their older brethren, and they were strange themselves, with bark of black and red and green, with twisted branches and strange, tumorous lumps. There were patches of fungi too, things like bloated hands and lacy fringes, like the hems of elaborate skirts. Aldasair saw several things that looked like fat sleeping infants, their pale bodies curled in on themselves, but they were just more strange mushrooms. They made him deeply uneasy. He knew about the Wild, had even seen it on the edges of Eboran territory, but after centurie
s spent in the echoing corridors of the palace, he had neatly parcelled these memories away as old nightmares. The reality of the Wild was a hollow feeling in his chest.
The first they saw of the Broken Field was the stones, although Aldasair hardly thought that was an impressive enough name for them. The land fell away below them, revealing a shattered landscape littered with enormous monoliths. Each was huge, taller than the palace of Ebora, with several appearing to be almost as tall as Ygseril himself, and they were all shapes – roughly square, narrow and sharp, or round, like boulders. Every one of them had been carved all over, with the interlocking geometrical shapes that Aldasair recognised from the Stone Talker’s letter, and all of the grooves had been filled with paint – red and black symbols shining against the rough grey stone.
‘Ah, this place,’ said Rainya. Her cheerful face was creased with distaste. ‘I’m glad to say we don’t have many scars in Finneral, but this is the biggest of what we’ve got.’ She frowned fiercely. ‘I wish we could lay about it with your axes, Bern my lad, and chop the whole bastard thing out of the ground.’
‘All of Sarn must bear its scars,’ said the Stone Talker. ‘Do you see, Eboran, the efforts we have gone to, to keep this monster contained?’
Aldasair nodded slowly. Underneath the stone monoliths there was the broken ground, uneven and strange. There was black soil there, and enormous flat plates of rock, some overlapping each other, some shattered into shards as big as carts. The Stone Talker led them on, and as they edged closer to the site, Aldasair felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. He could not see the Jure’lia here, but he could feel them. He sincerely hoped it was his imagination.
‘You covered it up,’ he said. He spoke softly, but all four of his companions turned to look at him as if startled. ‘The pieces of the old evil. You found them and then you buried it all deep, hoping it would never awaken, and, just to be sure, you weighted everything down with rocks. Giant stones.’ He blinked. ‘Vintage said that stones would never work.’
‘What is Vintage?’ asked Rainya.
‘A friend of ours, Ma,’ said Bern. ‘She’s an expert on the Jure’lia. I think you’d like her.’
‘It was the best we could do,’ said the Stone Talker, shifting atop her boar. ‘Your people, Aldasair, and our own warriors, brought this Behemoth down and, for once, it did not survive the collision with the earth. Our ancestors buried the remains of it, and the stones you see here are the most sacred guardians of Finneral, here to keep us safe.’
‘But they didn’t,’ said Aldasair. ‘They have failed you.’
The Stone Talker snorted, not entirely in good humour. ‘You could say that. With the release of the queen from your dead god’s roots, everything suddenly became much more . . . lively. The stones, which we thought so immovable, began to shift. At night, the place glows, and it moans, like something haunted. It is a horror waiting to happen.’
Aldasair wondered how much the Stone Talker knew about his own role in the awakening of Ygseril – he had, after all, walked across the roots and poured the worm people’s strange golden fluid over the god’s roots. And he had watched as the old nightmare had boiled up into life again. Bern had been there, and it was entirely possible that he had told them all of this in his letters. For reasons he didn’t understand, he felt a soft pain in his chest, as though a hook had embedded itself there. Did Bern blame him for what had happened? Did he see him as another selfish Eboran monster, like his cousin Hestillion, acting without caring for the fate of Sarn?
‘Can we look at it more closely?’ asked Bern. He was standing in his saddle, craning to get a better view. ‘I’d like to know everything we can before we bring Jessen and Sharrik here.’
Together they moved off down the slope. The good sounds of the forest, as faint as they were – the rustling of leaves, the calls of birds and insects – faded away, and were replaced with a tinny silence. Even the air seemed to lie heavy here, and for the first time since arriving in Finneral, Aldasair felt a prickle of sweat break out across his back. There was a smell too, sweet and strange, like something rotting. When they reached the Broken Field, the horses grew skittish, refusing to travel across the black earth and shattered stones, and they all climbed down from their mounts.
‘There is a Behemoth buried under there.’ Aldasair meant to phrase it as a question, but the words fell from his lips like stones. Of course the Jure’lia lurked here. It could hardly be anything else.
The Stone Talker nodded.
‘It’s fixing itself, we think. There have been reports of this happening across Sarn – old Behemoth wrecks rumbling into life and joining all their broken pieces back together. Or at least it’s trying too. The sacred stones are not just physically heavy – they carry the weight of the will of the Finneral people.’
‘We have had those reports too,’ said Bern. He glanced at Aldasair. ‘In Ebora, I mean. This cycle, this Rain, is different. They weren’t chased off to wherever it is they go, to come back good as new centuries later. They fell and rotted into the ground, and now they’ve risen from their graves.’ When the Stone Talker turned to him, he shrugged. ‘Vintage knows a lot about this, and so do the Eborans. The worm people are like wounded animals, weak and injured.’
‘Unfortunately,’ added Aldasair, ‘so are we.’ He turned to the Stone Talker and addressed her directly, looking straight into her hazel eyes. ‘Ygseril was weakened when he brought forth the war-beasts, my lady, and we only have five to fight for us, and one of those an infant. And there are other . . . difficulties. We are not what we once were.’
The old woman tipped her head to one side, squinting at him and considering his words.
‘But they are strong? They wish to fight?’
‘Of course,’ said Bern, a gruff note to his voice. ‘They are legends brought to life.’
As if in answer to this statement, the ground under their feet began to tremble. Startled, Aldasair turned back to the Broken Field. The enormous carved stones were shifting, just slightly, and the flat plates of rock they stood on were moving too – the quiet, heavy air was split with an unhappy squealing. Aldasair’s heart leapt into his throat until he realised that it was simply the sound of the rocks being squeezed together and shifting across one another. Nevin and Peren pawed at the ground and shook their ungainly heads.
‘You see?’ The Stone Talker gestured to the Field. ‘It grows lively, even during the day.’
Unsheathing one of his axes, Bern walked down to the very edge of the field, and after a moment Aldasair followed him. Bern the Elder, Rainya and the Stone Talker stayed where they were.
‘What do you think?’
Bern did not answer immediately. He looked out across the Field, his face unusually sombre.
‘Look. Where the dirt is at its darkest.’ He pointed with the axe. ‘Can you see it?’
Aldasair looked where he pointed, and frowned. The dirt there was black, and it looked wet too, although nothing else here looked like it had recently been touched with rain.
‘The black fluid that came up through Ygseril’s roots.’
Bern nodded. ‘It’s the worm people, definitely. All I can think of doing is to move everything back – clear away the sacred stones in the centre there.’ He gestured again with the axe. ‘Dig down, and kill anything underneath. We don’t know what’s under there, or how put-back-together it is, but we do have the advantage of being directly above them.’ He tugged on his beard with his free hand, and sucked in air through his teeth. ‘Curse my stones, it’s a big job, though, even with our war-beasts. We’ll have to have everyone down here, ropes and platforms, and we’ll need to be on our guard constantly, in case anything gets too wakeful.’
‘What’s that?’ Something had caught Aldasair’s eye, some piece of colour that sat out of place with everything else. Ignoring Bern’s look of concern, he stepped onto the nearest flat plate of rock and moved to where it met the next plate. There was a sticky, bubbling crust of black
fluid there, oozing between the two plates, and, wedged in it, something red and brown. He reached down and pulled it free, grimacing at the sucking noise as the black ooze reluctantly gave it up, and then turned the object over in his hands. It looked a little like a long soft leather sock, embroidered with red and yellow stitching – Aldasair saw flowers and fish there, entwined with each other. ‘What is it? A boot?’ he asked.
Bern appeared at his shoulder and his face fell at the sight of it. ‘It’s a betrothal boot,’ he said, taking it from Aldasair and holding it gently as though it were something newly born. ‘One of the traditions we have in Finneral. When a couple are falling in love and thinking of marrying, there are these little . . . steps, we have. Like steps in a dance. An unasked for task is undertaken and completed. One brings the other’s parents the first catch of the day for a week or two. The couple take a walk together around the base of Stone Father, usually on the night of a full moon, and in the weeks leading up to their moving in, they will work together on a piece of clothing.’ He held the boot up. ‘Traditionally, it is embroidered with their family’s sigil. In this case, a flower of some sort, and a fish. This would have been treasured by someone, and I don’t know why it would have been left out here.’ He sighed heavily. ‘But perhaps I do. The Stone Talker said in her letter that people were being taken by this thing.’
They returned to the others, and when Bern passed the boot to his mother, she turned it around in her hands, shaking her head.
‘Terralah. She vanished early last week. She and Rold were due to be married at the end of the summer, and he has been going out of his mind.’ She looked up from the boot, her eye blazing. ‘What does this mean? What are they doing to our people?’
‘We’ll stop them, Ma.’ Bern squeezed Rainya’s shoulder. ‘No one else will be lost to this evil place.’
A high-pitched shriek filled the air as the stones began to move again, and Aldasair wondered if Bern was right.