Stonewiser (28 page)

The wait was nerve-racking. She couldn't remember if the snail had made a sound when it came. Very little light made it through the weave. The luminescent glow of her bracelet cast macabre shadows inside the sack. It reminded her of… No. She wouldn't think of the box. Instead, she thought it was a very good thing her legs were folded at either side of Mia. She didn't think she could stand if she tried.

Sariah tugged on the little sack that held Leandro's game. It was fastened securely around her neck. The things she had to do for the stones. She caressed Mia's hair. She too would have preferred to make this journey insensible. Mia wasn't very safe with her, but Delis was taking Malord, and Kael was bringing the bulk of their gear, gear they would need on the other side if they survived the crossing.

“Poor little girl,” she whispered. “You're stuck with me.”

Balled around Mia, Sariah reviewed Kael's instructions once more. He said he had done this twice before. Crazy. She tested the deep-cockled shell over Mia's face. It was fastened to her head by a flexible leather twine. All she had to do was put it over her weaved face at the last possible moment while donning hers at the same time. She was practicing just such a maneuver when the moment came.

The darkness and the stench arrived suddenly and together. Sariah took a last breath of fetid air and pressed the shells over their mouths and noses. She felt herself aspired. Bagged in the protective weave, she and Mia tumbled in a channel along with other things, some of them maybe even her friends.

They bounced on a prickly surface, the snail's radula perhaps, the tongue-like muscle covered with bristled teeth. She had been worried about snails having teeth. Kael had said the snail's soft denticles didn't concern him as much as the parts coming after the teethed tongue. Great.

The weave was getting heavy, no doubt coated with mud and saliva. It was holding, though, and barring a snag, it should hold fine. The air in the shell was warm with her breath. Sariah had a sense of tumbling down the beast's narrowing gullet. The throat tightened over them as the snail swallowed. They fell into a large space, the snail's crop, the pouch formed by the gullet's widening, where things, according to Kael, could get complicated.

Ideally, momentum would drive them through the crop and up the digestive canal towards the snails’ mantle cavity. Instead, they plummeted like stones and landed at the bottom of a sloshing pile. Not good. Time to act. Kick. Wriggle. Rolling down and up was good. The reverse was decidedly bad. It meant a return to the mouth and the risk of becoming snail vomit or overly masticated cud. Lovely thoughts. She dug her heels in the crop's floor. By now, they needed to be rolling up.

The snail gagged, a deep expulsion of air and slosh which sucked Sariah backwards. All her fears of double-mastication proved to be in vain. Instead, she got stuck in the narrow opening leading to the crop, where the muscles of a very active throat churned over her like a gigantic stone grinder.

They were already late in the journey, taking a pounding, and worst of all, they weren't moving. The air in her shell was hot and rancid. Damn if they were going to die as a snail's choking hazard. She wasn't going to let Mia down. She stretched out between compressions. At once, she felt the pressure of the snail's muscles ease. She slid back down to the crop and up into the digestive canal, this time swiftly.

The canal seemed to stretch for hours. She tumbled up an incline, a remarkable feat of gravity. She was traveling up towards the mantle cavity, the hump tucked under the shell in the snail's back. She only knew about the snail's anatomy because Kael had drawn it in the mud while he described in detail his previous journeys. He had also shared the knowledge he had gained during the dissection of a dead giant snail he and his father had found many years before. Knowledge was the key to a successful snail crossing, Kael had explained. Meliahs help them.

Mia started to wheeze in her sleep. Sariah followed promptly. How long had it been since they had begun the perilous journey? Kael had explained that these giant snails had
precipitated
digestions, fast-paced processes to convert great quantities of food into energy adapted to the beast's continuous feeding practices. The journey had already taken much more than the three minutes the average crossing took. She was sure of it. How long was the snail's damn digestive canal?

Longer than the Royal Way? Longer than the wall? Long enough to lose consciousness, she realized. Twice. Long enough that she wanted to rip the shell off her face and breathe whatever foul substances were traveling with her. She fought the impulse. The stomach had to be close now. Wait. What had Kael said? The stomach was the most dangerous place of all.

On cue, they dropped feet-first into in a broiling sack. Tumbling in a viscous pond, Sariah fought for some kind of purchase or footing, difficult since the stomach walls felt more like rubbery nets under her feet. She seemed to be bouncing against those writhing walls, engaged in an aimless back and forth, sloshing in a dizzying, angry churn. Despite the weave and the shell, the vapors set her lungs and stomach on fire. She started to heave from the stink. She forced herself to swallow her own vomit.

The red dye. She groped for the rope she had tied to her wrist and pulled. The rope released the contents of the dye bag attached outside of the sack. She prayed it worked fast. The weave had kept the brunt of the gastric acids out of the protective sack, but a bit of the thinner liquids, saliva, slime, and now some fizzling foam, were filtering through the top. The hot air in the shell was no longer breathable. She was drowning in her own breath.

Abruptly, the snail's stomach went into spasms. A huge gurgle exploded around Sariah, a giant, awful croak that reverberated through her bones. Sariah was ejected with the force of a catapulted stone. She hit her head against something hard. The space around her constricted gradually, until she was being smothered again, torn to pieces by a spastic gut, asphyxiated by the glut compacting around her. She realized what was happening. She was dying an ignominious death, squashed senseless in the snail's turbid excrement.

Twenty-two

 

P
EACE
. F
RESH AIR.
Meliahs’ gardens. It had to be.

“Sariah?” Kael's voice spilled over her body like a swift caress, blessed relief pampering both mind and aching flesh. She wanted to keep the dream going, but she forced her eyes to open for the same reason she always went on—she had to.

The sky was as blue as Mia's sparkling eye, which along with her green eye, looked down on her with glistening humor.

“We were pooped by the snail.” She giggled. “In-as-snail-bait-out-as-snail-dung.”

Sariah started to laugh but hacked instead and had to turn to wretch profusely. Her bile floated away in the river's efficient current. For a moment, she thought she was floating away as well. She fumbled and dug her knees in the gravel, only to find Kael sitting on a rock behind her, holding her fast between his legs.

“Hello there.” She held on to his calves and dove underwater. The current stretched the length of her hair with a playful, steady tug. She kept herself under for as long as her lungs lasted, then came up for breath. “I'm never traveling by snail again.”

Kael was laughing as she went under once more.

The river bottom was a treasure of polished pebbles and stones, black, brown, gray, yellow, all glimmering with the sun's reflection under the sparkling water. She eyed the stones with a wiser's lust. She had to slip a few in her pocket. A pale fish darted by. The water was clear and delicious, flowing nicely over her skin and clothing.

She came up to swallow great gulps of clean air. Water was streaming down her face like a translucent drape. “Did they—?”

Kael pointed to the nearby bank. She wiped the water from her eyes. Malord was rinsing his weave in the river and Delis was sprawled on top of a rock, swinging her big feet in the current.

“You should see the pile, Auntie. We came out of the side of the thing, right next to its huge shell.”

“I think I'd rather not see it.”

“We were covered in—”

“Mia, don't you remember?” Kael said. “We weren't going to tell Auntie about that.”

And she didn't want to know. “Which way are we going?”

North and west was somewhere upriver, between a tall cypress and a coral-tree blazing with blooms.

“We'll have to scout the area,” Kael said, “before we call the beam.”

“We have until nightfall,” Sariah said. “I doubt the beam will be visible during the day.”

The sight of the forest around them, the damp leaves’ lush scent, the river's gurgle, even the woodpeckers’ hammering threatened to overwhelm Sariah's dulled senses. No wonder they called it the Goodlands. No wonder Malord and Delis stared in shocked fascination and Mia splashed in the shallow river. She realized she had missed trees, water and good soil under her feet. Meliahs be blessed. They had made it to the Goodlands.

The quails’ rancorous call announced a covey in the brush. Her belly grumbled a pathetic growl. “Is that dinner? I'm famished.”

“Is that so? I suppose we ought to do something about it.” Kael picked her up halfway out of the water and locked his arms around her waist, keeping her face to his eye level. He was thoroughly wet too. Clear water drops clung to his thick eyelashes and sparkled on his face like a host of tiny stars. “You took a long time.”

“But I came.”

“I can't forgive the anguish.”

“Wandering a snail's innards is not exactly anxiety free.”

His mouth quivered. “I was beginning to think of ways of buggering a damn snail.”

Sariah kept her face perfectly straight. “Sinful vice or virtuous search?”

His laughter echoed in the clearing and startled the quails into a tumult of clucking and wing batting.

“Are you going to kiss Auntie now?” Mia said.

“Do you really think I should?”

“My daddy says it's your job to kiss her lots.”

“I'll do it,” Kael said. “But only 'cause it's my job.”

To Mia's delight, he smacked Sariah loudly on the lips.

Then he kissed her softly below the ear. “Don't be late next time.”

Sariah swallowed the last bite of roasted quail leg with a moan of delight. She licked the bone until no flesh, marrow, or flavor remained, before she tossed it into the fragrant wood fire. She leaned back, laying her head on Kael's lap and rubbing her full belly.

“Satisfied?” he asked.

“Very.” She licked the last of the delicious grease from her fingertips. “I'm clean and full. What else could a woman want?”

Kael's brow rose suggestively.

“I know,” Sariah said. “A spoonful of honey?”

“You've all but turned into a honeybee.” Kael groped through her pack and handed her the jar. “It's about done.”

“I'll find you more, my donnis,” Delis said from her perch by the stream. She pointed to the water in awe. “It keeps coming, and it's not the same as before.”

Malord mumbled through a mouthful of berries. “It's a river, you twerp. I already told you. You can throw in as many branches as you want, but they're not coming back.”

“What do you think, Auntie?” Fingers dripping with paint and etching knife in hand, Mia stuck her latest work in front of Sariah's nose.

The scene was remarkably vivid. A lush forest stood in the river's background, rich with the aspen's golds and the birch's peeling red-brown bark. The silvery water captured the sun's waning light to perfection. She could see all of them there, sitting around the campfire as they had been just moments ago.

“It's beautiful.” Sariah pleased Mia into a satisfied blush. “Your grandmother Aya would be proud of you. Do you feel a little better now?”

“Much better. Like a warm kettle without the steam, as my mommy likes to say.”

They all laughed. Sariah was relieved. Mia's art was as much expression as it was compulsion, and holding back her dark flows was hard enough for the little girl. Until she met Mia and learned about Aya, Sariah had believed what the Guild taught—that sight copyists were extinct and that their translation had been an aberrant remnant of the Old World, of the times before the rot when parchment and paper had kept the tales well enough and art mixed easily with wising.