Stonewiser (52 page)

“Meow.”
The freckled face of an oversized kitten peeked from under Belana's neck. The black-footed cub climbed on Sariah's lap, a clumsy bundle of fur, huge ears, needle-like claws and enormous yellow eyes. Petting the purring creature settled her nerves. Her hammering heartbeat eased. What kind of cat was it? She couldn't tell.

“Hurry up.” Julean's bark sent the kitten scrambling into hiding.

Sariah shook the sisters gently, until Belana's sightless eyes fluttered open. “Is that you, little sister? Sweet awakening, how kind of you.”

Telana uncoiled like a mighty python and looked out of the box. “It's back. I can feel it. Julean is here too.”

“Sorry, little sister,” Belana said. “We have to work.”

Sariah was seriously worried. Belana was leaking black tears and Telana was securing Sariah to the birthing chair as if the belch was coming. Without a voice, Sariah couldn't persuade the sisters from their course. She shook her head. She tried to motion with her bound hands.

“You don't understand,” Belana said. “She wants the pain.”

“Silly,” Telana said. “She wants the progress.”

What progress?

“The progress of the Blood, of course.” Grimly strode into the chamber carrying a small package that she set to balance on Sariah's belly. “I don't want to hurt your baby. On the contrary, I want to help him.”

Help him?
Was it vengeance the Prime Hand wanted? If it was, the horror of hurting her baby was the worst possible revenge. But revenge was more Arron's style. The Prime Hand had always been deliberate in her purposes, set on the Guild's grandiose goals. How could killing her baby contribute to the mistress's goals?

“I'm a faithful admirer of creation's beauty,” the mistress said. “Yours will be the pinnacle of this generation. Done naturally, no less. I expect great things from you. Do you know what this is, Sariah? Can you guess?”

A trickle of sticky warmth leaked from the packet and dripped down Sariah's side. The mistress cut the twine and unwrapped the bundle. A putrid stench stunk the room.

No. She willed Meliahs.
Please, no.

It was too late. On her belly, the keeper's blood-crusted hand still clutched the yellow stone prism.

With the sharp point jabbed in the depths of her navel and the power firing from it, the prism was like a pick to the entrails. The stone was lit from within, shimmering with shifting geometrical patterns as the sisters rotated it against her navel. And the pain. Sariah couldn't stand the pain. It wracked her body with increasing intensity, leaving her rattled and bruised.

Belana held on to the prism with the intensity of a rider trying to tame a bolting charger. “Not too much longer.”

Telana's hands were tightly wrapped over her sister's. “Are we making a change?”

“Hard to tell,” Belana rasped. “Very opaque in there.”

Opaque?
Was blind Belana somehow gifted to look into her womb?

“Give it some more,” Telana said. “We should've finished by now.”

Sariah couldn't understand. The keeper. He must be dead. Why were they doing this to her? The sisters didn't want information from her. They asked no questions; they issued no commands. She thought perhaps the excruciating torture was meant as Grimly's punishment. But why the prism?

She forced herself to pay attention, to function despite the pain. She tracked the stone's power as it rammed through her defenses. She made an extraordinary effort to test the powerful jolt, to taste it with her mind, just like Kael tasted the water for traces of the rot with his tongue. The pain seared her as if she had indeed drunk from the rot, but what she saw in that terrible flash frightened her beyond pain. How could it be?

The stone's power had both intent and direction. It was directed at her unborn child. It targeted the baby in a very specific, brutal way, to grow him, to accelerate him, to change him in ways Sariah didn't quite understand. She wouldn't allow it. She had failed to protect the child before. She wouldn't fail now. She strengthened the protection she had weaved around her womb.

How long had the Mating Hall served as a screen for torture? How many of the keep's wisers had been born of pain like this? How many had been murdered here? She wished she could get a message out to Kael. She needed him to know that she was alive, but with her wiser's skills muzzled and without access to a stone— Wait. She had access to one stone and one stone only. The very stone she needed to wise. Was it possible?

She had to try and quickly, before she lost the unlikely opportunity. A wiser was more than palms, more than fingers and hands, more than a freestanding core separate from the rest of the mind. But there had to be some carnal anchor between the stone and the flesh. No way around that.

She concentrated on her tortured navel, where the prism's sharp point made agonizing contact. She visualized the spot until it held preeminence over the rest of her aching flesh. She trapped the prism's own power on that spot and merged it with the flesh. Pulse by pulse, she grew it into an elongated cord, a combination of her own matter and one of her freed links. An amalgamation of flesh and light crept up her spine, a cold serpent slithering up her backbone. It was an unnatural creation, a deviance, a feat of desperate necessity she would have never dared under any other circumstances. It split at the base of her neck. One string crept further up to her wiser's core. The other slinked down along the bones of her shoulders and arms towards her hands like some malignant ivy.

Between painful spasms, she managed to bring the tips of her fingers together. There. A sense of contact. A buzz. The prism's rage seethed in her fingertips, stone power routed to serve as a bond between the link and the flesh. She knew she had it when she felt the curious inquiry of a trance knocking on her mind. She had done it.

She drew a deep breath and gathered her wiser's voice at the tip of the tale. She thought of Mia, of the unique link they shared. She visualized the aberrant connection she had created within herself, hovering over the seal stamped on her wiser's core. She flexed it, aimed it, and flexed it again. Then she rammed it into the seal.

Sariah's body arched like a quaking bridge. Her mind felt shattered. Her brain was bruised. And in that instant the protective weave she kept around her womb flickered, allowing the prism's jolts to get by. But she pulled herself together just in time to restore the weave and enable the heresy. The silent words shot out of her mind like an arrow to her seal.
Keep. Mating Hall. Alive. Beware. Arron's Shield. All around. Amplifying stones. More. When I can.

“Stop,” Belana cried. “Stop.”

The prism's point eased away from Sariah's navel. The power quit. The elaborate cord flamed and crumbled to sudden oblivion. Sariah's strung body collapsed on the birthing chair, filthy with her discharges. Her throat ached from her soundless screams. She gasped for breath. Would Mia be able to hear her message?

“Did you feel that?” Belana said.

“Did I feel what?” Telana asked.

“Something, like a bump in the link. Didn't you feel it?”

“No, sister, I didn't. Your sensitive nature must be acting up. Try again.”

“But—”

“One last rush. If the mistress senses no quickening today—”

The surge lanced through an exhausted Sariah. She flopped on the chair like a speared fish. The baby jerked, and a cry that wasn't hers echoed in her mind.

Sorry
, she whispered wordlessly to her baby.

Sorry.
She mourned her dead keeper.

Sariah was on fire. She turned and tossed in an uneasy sleep, aching, throbbing and buzzing with the remnants of the prism's torturous power, dreaming a nightmare she had once wised out of a tale. In the nightmare, she wasn't a witness in the tale, but rather herself.

The air was thick with steaming vapors. The stench of blood, mixed with the scent of acrid corruption, dilated her nostrils and singed her lungs. She lay on a bed of black rock. Dark blood flowed between her legs. A circle of strangers accosted her. Blurred faces examined her baby's features.

“It is not,” Grimly said. Without warning, she cast Sariah's son into a pool of corruption bubbling in the center vault. Like lard tossed on a scalding skillet, the child dissolved. The hissing flow gnawed at the babe's bones until they too melted into the rot.

Sariah woke up drenched in sweat, trembling and gasping for air. She would have been screaming if she'd had a voice; she would have woken the entire keep if her throat had been allowed the luxury of horror.

Against Meliahs’ prohibitions, wisers of old had created flesh. They had divided the Blood to make slaves, betraying Meliahs’ ways, labor and sweat. It wasn't so different here. Was it?

The baby was the real reason Sariah was still alive. Sariah's purported good blood, mixed with Kael's, son of the powerful stonewiser Aya, was attractive to Grimly. And suddenly she understood what Grimly was trying to do at the Mating Hall, although not necessarily the why or the how.

The Mating Hall routine ground down even the hardiest of souls. After another long day at the looms, Sariah more or less dragged herself to the tidiness line and stripped her worthless garment before taking her place behind Celia. Celia wiggled her fingers behind her back. News. Sariah shook off the day's weariness. She followed Celia down the stairs and stepped into the cold water of the long cleansing pool. It got crowded at that end of the pool, a perfect opportunity for a brief attempt at underwater finger tapping.

A flash of Celia's lewd deeds filtered through the woman's untrained mind, but after that, Sariah caught a sense of her conversation with the guard the night before. Across the bars, the man was boasting about his cushy assignment at the Mating Hall, gloating because he didn't have to stand guard on the walls day and night like his fellow guards had to do.

The contact broke when Celia's turn arrived. Then it was her turn. Sariah withstood the sponging. She resented the stern hand that forced the washing on her as if she was nothing more than a well-used work beast hosed down after a grueling day in the fields.