Stonewiser (41 page)

“Bring me Leandro's game.”

Delis darted over the bridge and out the gate. Sariah returned her attention to the statues. A name was carved on the low platform beneath the stone figure of each of the sages.

Eneis would have been hard on his pupils’ eyes. Bold, short, squat and portly, his girth almost exceeded his height. Sariah gasped. She recognized the man. She had seen him before. He was the plump toad-faced man who had originally wised Leandro's snakes and scorpions!

Sariah rushed to examine the rest of the statues. She didn't recognize the other faces. Poe had been a tall, reed-thin man with small, slanted eyes lost on a face wrinkled with age. Tirsis had been a stately woman whose full lips somehow echoed the elegance of her tall figure and the sinuous curves of her breasts and hips. Vargas, the biggest surprise, had been a small woman loaded with a good measure of excess flesh around the middle and an impish smile.

The statues were carved in the red coppery stone of the Bastions’ cliffs. They were not painted, except for the eyes. Eneis, Poe and Tirsis's eyes had not matched. Vargas's had. These had been the Hounds’ first sages, the Wisdom's eminent makers.

Sariah was struck by their ordinary poses. Eneis held between his hands what Sariah realized was probably a book, sculpted faithfully in its original tattered state. Tirsis held a small chisel. Poe, whose expression seemed a little deranged on second thought, clutched a small indistinguishable object. Vargas, the bloody law lady, wielded a pitchfork, a
broken
pitchfork. Sariah repressed a chuckle. The crowd's ominous silence reminded her of the solemnity of the occasion.

Abruptly, the beam receded from the statues. The crowd stirred, murmuring uneasily. Delis had succeeded at her task. The conclusion of Leandro's game was nearing and Sariah was about to find out the whereabouts of the pure. She had to wait for Delis's return. She was curious. The Bastions were protected by a powerful wising. The beam was fueled by similar powers. Had the original sages been able to wise stone?

She laid her palm against Tirsis's stone body, looking up at the ancient sage's striking face. Her pupils had been black and green, like Kael's. The trance overtaking her mind was gradual and kind. A mellow voice spoke without words. “The goddess's greeting, for Meliahs is just and fair to all her children.”

Despite their people's singular devotion to the Wisdom's oral traditions, the original sages had taken precautions to protect the Wisdom. It endured in these statues, not unlike a sense of their spirits, committed to eternity in the care of wised stone. One after the other, Sariah tested the sculptures and found each buzzing with the precepts of its respective sage. She marveled at the clarity of purpose which supported the original sages’ existence. She wished she had years to translate the Wisdom into fitting engrossments. She couldn't help but wish that the sages were alive in this time of terrible trouble.

“My donnis.” Delis offered her the bag with Leandro's game.

Sariah sifted through the bag, looking for a particular game piece. She needed a scorpion, the botched one, the one missing one of its front claws. Her hand was trembling as she clasped the critter. She hesitated.

She couldn't know the nature of the wising she faced, but by her estimation, it couldn't be an easy one. She had to consider the dangers. She didn't think she had the option of refusing or delaying it. The tale had to be found and the Hounds weren't about to let her walk away from this wising without licking her spilled blood from the floor. On the other hand, she owed the little soul she sheltered in her body a chance at life, an oath of protection as binding as her stone oaths.

The keeper nudged her. “Wiser?”

“A moment.” She closed her eyes and grabbed the amplifying stone she carried in her pocket. She entered the trance and weaved a protective sack around her womb, a strong encasement of luminous links. It was a skill she had learned from Malord. If it had worked to trap a powerful intrusion once, then it should serve to protect the baby.

“Be brave,” she whispered.

She was ready. She stepped up between the sculptures and inserted the botched scorpion in the stone chest's keyhole. It fit. She turned it. It clicked. The light spilled through the keyhole first and then from the sides of the lid. Sariah opened the chest.

A stone glimmered in the chest's center, a fiery dawn, a rounded geode with a hollow middle, crammed with globules and spikes of yellow quartz druses. It was a large stone, one she wouldn't be able to lift on her own. It was gorgeous. A wiser could lose herself in the wondrous world of its shimmering charm.

“Sacred is the sight of the guide,”
the keeper murmured,
“for it shall lead us home.”

Sariah's emotions surged with the light. The call of the stone taunted her senses. She was almost afraid to touch it. She looked at Tirsis's sculpted face, at the crowded dome, at the expectant sages. She closed her eyes and dreamed for a moment, as Poe may have done. She dreamed of peace, of Kael, of a search, done. Then she opened her eyes and studied the stone, knowing in her heart that it was likely to offer anything but the peace she sought.

Thirty

 

T
HE STONE THAT
lay in the coffer between the sages’ four statues was not a common wised stone. The strength of its call revealed it was of the highest potency. Ignoring the crowd's anxious oversight, and despite the light's brilliancy, Sariah took her time examining it.

It was a fiery stone by birth, twined with large quantities of slowly cooled crystal, blossoms of yellow and orange streaks that overshadowed the stone's other components. She didn't recognize them. Were they traces of wulfenite? Mimetite? Perhaps orpiment? A wiser from the Hall of Masons might know. She was sure of one thing, though—Leandro's little snakes and scorpions were made of the same dazzling combination.

Sariah dared a gentle tap on the stone. She was prepared to fight a violent trance. Instead, a pleasant murmur coursed through her mind, a joyful invitation to play. Sariah obliged.

The stone whispered a melody exclusive to her mind.
“Wise me, wiser, tenderly, bring me to my tale. Don't you know me, child of hers, don't you know my name?”

The stone's voice was a lullaby to her senses. The song was an exquisite caress to her mind. She could have stayed in that trance for a long time. She could have leaned on the gentle melody and rested for years on end.

The dome. She had to get back to the dome. Sariah released the trance's peace reluctantly, regretfully. It had been an extraordinary experience. There had been no stern command, no mandate like that which permeated the Domainers’ protective stones, no violent tale like the ones contained in the seven twin stones and no lurking intrusion waiting to wrestle her powers.

Don't you know me, child of hers, don't you know my name?
There had been something familiar, something soothing and intimate about her link to this stone, a sense of belonging, like the safety of Kael's embrace.

She returned her attention to the stone. It had a smooth, egg-shaped underside, but it was broken on top. It seemed to have been split open like an overripe pumpkin, revealing the crystal druses inside the geode's hollow, a ghoulish yellowish grin.

She noticed the small gaps that stood at regular intervals between the hollow's crystals. Regularity wasn't common to the natural world. She counted them. Just as she thought. Forty-eight. There was a pattern to those gaps. They started at the edge and spiraled towards the hollow's middle. She knew what she had to do. She strengthened the baby's protective weave and eyed the crowded chamber.

“I'm not sure what will happen,” she said to the keeper. “It could be dangerous. It could be deadly.”

“We couldn't make them go if we wanted to,” the keeper said. “It's their right to live or die by the domes. Do as you must. So will we.”

Damn the Hounds’ rights. They shouldn't be there. But Sariah knew of no way to persuade them to leave, and a cursory glance at her bracelet reminded her she didn't have time to waste. Courage's link was at the top, as if the goddess's sister was urging her on. She picked up a game piece from the bag. Carefully, she set a little snake, bottom first, into the outermost gap. It fit perfectly.

The coiled snake sparkled to life. It fused to the geode seamlessly, as if it had always belonged there. One by one, with deliberate care, she fit all the pieces in place. Something nipped at her mind each time. She could feel the energy gathering in the stone, the void reaching out to draw from her strength. She had a sense of loss, knowing that with each snake and scorpion she yielded, she was forsaking the stones that had led her to the Bastions.

At last all the gaming pieces but one were in place. She had to chuckle at the stone's eerie grin. A mouthful of snakes and scorpions. Who by the rot pits thought of that?

The botched scorpion was the last one. Only one slot remained at the hollow center. Sariah noticed something strange then, something that had been concealed by the light's refraction on the surrounding crystal. There was a portion missing. She didn't think it was nature's work. It was a clean, straight-edged extraction. Precision was a human trait. Would the wising work with a piece of the stone missing? Was it a provision or an omission?

Nothing to do but try. The light gained brilliancy as she pressed the botched scorpion into place.

The geode's core ignited, hot as simmering fire. A fist of hot air blasted Sariah and pinned her against Tirsis's statue. A short beam uncoiled from the stone and broke apart into four columns of humming light. The columns pierced the statues’ colored eyes. The stone sages glowed. Their arms lifted. They clasped each other's hands, trapping Sariah in an indomitable circle of energy.

Poe's lips moved. “Behold. We have returned as it was foretold to redeem our theft and ourselves. Our dreams turn to tale. Our tale turns to blood.”

Sariah's mind refused to accept what she was seeing. A thousand wild thoughts interfered with her reason. Stone. She needed to commit this moment to stone. She fumbled for the little memory stone she wore around her neck and pushed her memories out of the way. She would be incapable of remembering every detail. If she lived through this. If she survived.

She looked up to see that Tirsis's face was liquid on her stone façade. Her laughter filled the dome, brisk, joyful and sweet.

“Fear not, my beloved,” Tirsis said. “You're ready. The goddess blesses your path. The stone leads you to its lair.”

“Why must we perish to thrive when we thrive without perishing?” Eneis said.

“Because we're pledged to Meliahs,” Vargas said. “Because we were born and bred to die. Of the stone we were created. With the stone we'll be avenged.”

Sariah could only hope that her simultaneous inscription was working and that she would live long enough to understand the sages’ words, because every word they said triggered a hundred questions and every one of her questions had a thousand possible answers.

Tirsis's eyes settled on her, and even though she knew that the woman had been dead for hundreds of years, she couldn't help but gape at the sage's vitality, at the beauty of her broad face, at the wisdom burning in her stare.

“Our ways are most likely primitive to you,” Tirsis said. “But it was all we had.”

Primitive? If only Tirsis knew. The Guild's prohibitions had weakened stonewising, forcing the craft to revert to its simplest and earliest stages. Only Zeminaya's wisings matched the complexity of these sages’ wising and even then, her work had been buried and suppressed.

Questions. Sariah had questions. Was the sages’ extraordinary wising capable of interaction? There was so much she wanted to know, about the Hounds’ origins, about the Guild and the sages, about the Wisdom, about the amazing stone powering their revival. Where to start? The tale. She had to focus on her search.

Sariah's voice was raw to her own ears. “Where can I find the bane of the pure, the tale that can unite the Bloods?”