Stonewiser (28 page)

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.

Now she knew better. The sight copyist blood endured in the old line of Ars. Aya, Kael's mother and Mia's grandmother, had been a stonewiser of that translation. Sariah struggled to lead Mia through her sight-copyist apprenticeship blindly, but she was sure of one thing—the child was happiest when she unleashed her power to engrave her work on parchment. Mia's latest masterpiece still smelled of fire and smoke. Sariah was about to comment on the beauty of the engraving's foreground when the screams began.

Kael's head snapped up. He was on his feet and running instantly, followed by a hatchet-wielding Delis. Sariah ran after them, but not before directing Mia and Malord to put out the fire and hide. She had her sling loaded by the time she caught up with the other two. They stretched on their bellies at the top of a shallow ravine overlooking a muddy lane. She crawled quietly to join them and stole a look at the scene on the road.

The gray shields were unmistakable. About fifteen or twenty well-armed guards outfitted with the wood, copper and hide shields surrounded an upturned cart. The screams were coming from two young girls twisting in the soldiers’ grips. An older woman knelt on the ground amidst her cart's spills, clutching a bunch of corn ears to her breast.

“It's the Shield's right to requisition your cart and its contents,” the man in charge was saying. “It's the law.”

“It must be another one of your new laws,” the woman said. “My grandchildren are hungry and I didn't take my savings and travel all the way to Ellensburg to feed you stinking pests.”

The swipe of the man's pike struck the woman in the back with a dreadful thump. She flung forward and fell on the corn, hacking from the blow. She was stout and small but she braced herself on arms strong as oaks and faced the brute over her.

“Is this how your master intends to rule?” she said. “Through brawn and pike?”

“We'll teach you to respect the Shield.” He turned to his men. “Take the cart. And take them. All three of them.”

The guards wavered. One of them said, “They're but an old woman and two little girls—”

“Shut up, Kenzy. That one must be at least thirteen. They're three wombs. You know the drill.”

By then Kael had motioned Delis up the road and had an arrow notched in his bow. To see him wielding the traditional Goodlander bow was rare. Kael usually preferred his Domainer sling. But Sariah had seen Kael fight enough times to know he always chose purposively from the impressive array of weapons he carried on his belt. The arrows would throw the Shield off for a moment or two and Kael would profit from the confusion.

He stood up and shot. The same deadly arrow punched through his target's neck, killing the man instantly, and then went on to efficiently skewer another man's calf, disabling the second soldier. Sariah aimed her sling and shot. She winced when she heard the stone clang against one of the men's helmets.
Pop.
The stone burst on command, and the man fell to the ground, clutching his head through the half-melted helmet.

Her next stone was aimed at the guard who held the smaller of the girls. It bounced on his neck and dribbled down into his shield. The man smiled, thinking she had missed. How she hated using the stones for harm.

She gave him a last chance. “Give me the child.”

The warrior charged her, clutching the crying child in one hand and his pike in the other.
Pop
. He stumbled midway and looked down in surprise. Dark blood poured down his legs and pooled at his feet. Only his shield kept his guts’ gore from spilling on the ground. His eyes rolled to the back of his head. He keeled over. Sariah picked up the screeching girl and set her on her hip, all the while searching for her next target.