Stonewiser (26 page)

Twenty

 

W
ITH A RENEWED
sense of urgency, they pulled for a fortnight straight and without pause. Sariah didn't dare set up the game again, afraid the beam would reveal their location to their pursuers. To keep the risk to a minimum, they had decided to call the beam only after they arrived at a safe location in the Goodlands. At least they had a clear sense of direction. They had hitched their two decks together and took turns to pull the augmented load day and night, trekking steadily towards the nearest breach in the wall. Two of them were always pulling while the third rested. Malord and Mia served as lookouts. The prime pulling team was Kael and Delis, but Sariah strained herself to match their punishing pace.

It was during one of those interminable pulling sessions, and only after Sariah had asked a hundred times, that Kael reluctantly explained some of what had happened the night the beam struck the deck.

“We were quiet,” he said. “You know how we do that.”

She knew. She had never met creatures as lethally quiet as Ars's runners.

“Given the lights and the sounds, the decks were easy to find. We settled to watch.”

“What did you find out?”

“As we suspected, it was Josfan and the mob. Alfred and some of Orgos's men travel with them. Still, it's a smaller mob than before. Either they broke up into smaller groups to cover the ways out of the flats, or part of it gave up. The executioners were there too, two decks of them. Delis thought she recognized a couple of her fellow assassins.”

“What happened then?”

“Delis walked onto the executioners’ deck as if she was taking a leisurely stroll through the Crags. She asked them to leave.”

“Crazy.”

“One of the executioners asked Delis why she hadn't killed you yet.”

“What did she say?”

“Delis said you were her donnis and she would protect you with her life.”

Unbelievable. Sariah craned her neck to find Delis. She was on the deck, talking to Mia, hunched over a steaming pot. Delis, who wanted her as a pet, had declared herself against her people for her sake? She didn't understand the woman or the notion. Perhaps she never would.

“Delis was swift with the executioners, impressive really.”

Was Kael praising Delis? This was a rare day indeed.

“The others heard the commotion and joined the fray. I thought the odds were poor for Delis, so I lent a hand. Then that damn comet or light beam, or whatever you want to call it, shot overhead and stunned us all. The rest you know.”

“I don't understand. If I'm supposed to be her donnis, why does she mind me instead?”

Kael gave her an odd look. “Do wisers have pets?”

“Some do. Cats. Dogs. Mice. Lizards. The occasional goat. Ashmid had a pet fish once.”

“In my experience, people who have pets are of two minds: those who love to master their pets and those who love to pamper them instead.”

“And you think that Delis is of the latter inclination? I guess it's the better choice.
If
I was someone's donnis, which I'm not.”

Kael's pressed lips quivered slightly.

“Does that mean you like Delis better now?”

“Like her?” He looked perplexed. “No. Do you?”

“It almost sounds like you would.”

“She pulls well, and she minds your safety, I like that. But look at her. How could I like her?”

Sariah stole another glance at the woman. Delis waved from her place by the cauldron.

“She looks harmless to me.”

“Do you know what's in that pot of hers?”

“Boiled turnips?” she hoped fervently.

“Friends turned foes,” Kael said. “Her executioner friends’ ears and noses, her little war trophies.”

Sariah and Kael climbed atop a tall boulder, one of many gigantic slabs which had been ejected during the wall's destruction. The grueling ascent, notably stingy of hand and foot holds, took the better part of two hours. Once on top, they settled on their bellies against the rock, further hidden by the dark weaves they flung over their backs to blend with the granite. They waited through most of the afternoon.

The heat of the stone was Meliahs’ gift on Sariah's sore thighs. She pressed her cheek against the hard surface, inhaling its bland metallic scent, the distant whiff of ardent volcanoes, the pure promise of the earth's raw core. She could have stayed there forever, hugging the coarse-grained beauty, riding the compacted links, listening for creation's primeval wising with her eager palms. But she had already wised these stones the day of the wall's breaking, and she had climbed this boulder today for a different purpose.

The climb had been worth it. The boulder offered the best view of the area and it allowed them to see both sides of the ruined wall while remaining concealed. She saw the ruins of a guard tower scattered at the base of the crack, and noticed how quickly the green and brown vines had overtaken it on the other side. The shock of seeing the broken wall again squeezed both her throat and her heart.

“You didn't want to do it,” Kael said. “Remember? It was Zeminaya who overtook your power and tried to destroy the wall for her own purposes. If anything, you saved what remains intact. She almost killed you that day.”

It was little consolation when faced with such destruction. Zeminaya, who had built the wall at the time of the execration, believed that the wall's destruction was the only way to bring the Bloods together. For this purpose, she had wised Zemi, a powerful intrusion of herself into the twin stones tales. Through Sariah, she had achieved her goal and broken the wall, but her dreams of unity had not been realized. The irony wasn't lost to Sariah. Zemi had bequeathed the legacy, but it was the executioners who had forced Sariah to carry it out by imposing a deadline on her life.

Was there a person in the Domain or the Goodlands who had not heard of the day Sariah broke the wall? Many different versions circulated about that day, many ill-disposed toward Sariah. The Guild's version in particular was one to mind. But there was no time to dwell on the past now. The future. That's what they had come to fetch.

“Do you see them?” she asked.

Kael scanned the woods with one of his most prized possessions, a looking glass he had purchased during his last roaming. “Huddled by the wall.”

The large group of men, women and children were massing by one of the wall's huge cracks. The Domainers had been hiding all day, waiting for the darkness's protection. Now they were stirring like bats wakening at dusk.

“Is the Shield gone?”

“They're in the woods. Waiting.”

With her eyes accustomed to the twilight's blue darkness, Sariah saw the Domainers crawling through the wall's crack, following each other like docile sheep.

“They're too many and too slow,” Kael whispered. “I told them it wasn't safe.”

“You risked your own life and went to talk to them. You warned them not to cross here. Nothing you can do if they chose to disregard your warning.”

“Crossing here is madness,” Kael said. “The place is crawling with Shield. The Shield has this break well covered, just like the other two spots we scouted yesterday.”

Sariah glanced at her bracelet. Already three of the nine red crystals had grown opaque with the silver haze. Worse, a trace of it was beginning to trickle into a fourth crystal with the inevitability of sand pouring into an hourglass. “Can we go a different way?”

“Aye, but we have Malord and Mia to consider, and you're not going to like it.”

“You don't think they'll be able to handle it?”

“I'm not sure. I don't particularly want to go that way, let alone bring all of you along, but I gather from my conversations with other Domainer travelers that the mob and Alfred are no more than a day or two behind us. And the Shield, as you can see, is still very much minding the wall. I don't think we ought to get ourselves stuck between enemies—”

The first arrow struck the woman in the lead between the shoulder blades. It was fired from such a close distance that it burst through her chest like a morbid medallion. What ensued was a massacre. What the arrows didn't kill, the pikes and swords did. The Shield emerged from the woods like rampaging locust. All Sariah and Kael could do was watch in angry but helpless frustration as the hopes of these Domainers died along with them and their children.

Sariah and the others followed Kael over the rocky promontory, dodging the fumaroles’ sudden eruptions and the boiling orange puddles, taking care not to slip in the warm mud, picking their footing carefully over a span of jagged limestone.

“Watch it, rot spawn,” Malord said, when Delis slipped and sent him joggling inside the basket where she carried him on her back.

“Hold on and shut up, half-man,” Delis said. “I'm not your mule.”

“Quiet.” Kael crouched behind a low ridge. “Hide yourselves and be still.”

Sariah and Mia knelt beside him. He watched a sliver of trampled mud at the edge of the rocks. He took in every detail, seemingly oblivious to the slow passing of time. Sariah wasn't so patient. She had hoped to be in the Goodlands by now, following Leandro's beam and much closer to her final destination.

Mia started to play with the tiny crabs crawling on the rocks. The armored eight-legged fellows had quick claws that nipped at Mia's harassing fingers. Crying gulls flew overhead, landing occasionally to dig out the krill marooned in the mud or to steal the eggs of a flock of long-legged cranes nesting on the muddy beach. Life in the Domain never ceased to amaze Sariah. The rot and its bitter brew had taken over and yet, like the Domainers, life still endured, resisting all attempts at extinction. Sariah watched the riotous gulls and the black-beaked cranes for a while. Then, bored and a little curious, she pressed her palm against the rocks. A vision of coral polyps, algae and kelp entered her mind, a sense of deep blue depths, undulating with the sun's sparkling refraction. A whiff of salt and seaweed slammed her like a wave to the face.

“What was that?” Mia, always mimicking Sariah's action, had just experienced the same.

“It's a sense of the sea.”

“What's a sea?”

“A very vast pool of water, not dead water like the Domain's, but salt water, full of life. They say it used to be everywhere before the rot came. Now it's only on the other side of the Goodlands.”

“I'd like to see the sea someday,” Mia said. “Can you wise these rocks?”

“Most of the time all you can wise from it is what you just saw. These types of rocks are not very good at holding tales. There was too much life in the sea, little animals darting everywhere and flower-like plants. I saw a tale of it once in a Guild stone.”

“It's all that life,” Mia said. “It doesn't like giving up its tale. It wants to go on and on.”

Mia's observation struck a chord with Sariah. The best stones for wising were rich with the earth's core matter. Comparatively, these stones had very little of it and lots of animal and plant remains. Mia was right—life never relinquished its tale easily.

Kael motioned for everyone to be silent.

The water by the muddy beach stirred. Two straight steles aimed towards the rocks. Something popped from the dead water, two jiggling globes wrapped in some kind of wrinkled tissue, mounted on long stalks just now emerging to the surface.

The glimmering base supporting the stalks surfaced like a budding island. It approached the beach as if looking for berth. A slow bovine movement brought a squirming cluster of tentacles out of the water. One of the globes on the stalk swiveled her way. Sariah realized with a start that she was staring at a dark, gleaming eye.

“What by the rot is that?”

“A rot monster?” Mia whimpered.

“No, not a monster.” Kael said. “An animal. She's an empress snail.”

“Snails are little,” Mia said. “And they have shells. I play with them all the time at Ars.”

“This one's big. Her shell is far from here. She and her kind are the biggest of all the snails.”

“You mean there are more of these?”

“Several more that I know of.”

“I heard rumors,” Delis whispered.

“I never thought them true,” Malord said.