Stonewiser: The Heart of the Stone, page 1
STONEWISER
The Heart of The Stone
The STONEWISER Series
STONEWISER
The Heart of the Stone
STONEWISER
The Call of the Stone
STONEWISER
The Heart of The Stone
Dora Machado
Copyright © 2008 by Dora Machado
Excerpt Stonewiser: The Call of the Stone Copyright © 2008 by Dora Machado
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, transmitted or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission in writing from the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and all other material contained herein are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, activities, and/or locations is purely coincidental.
Map art by Dora Machado
Cover and interior design by Mayapriya Long, Bookwrights
Cover and title spread art by Duncan Long
Stonewiser™ is a trademark of Dora Machado
ISBN: 978-0-9799682-1-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2008920906
Mermaid Press is an imprint of Mermaid Publishing, LLC
www.merpress.com
Mermaid Publishing, LLC
P.O. Box 5480
Spring Hill, FL 34611
Printed in the United States of America
TO BTM, for he believes.
CONTENTS
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Forty-One
Forty-Two
Forty-Three
Forty-Four
Forty-Five
Forty-Six
Forty-Seven
Forty-Eight
Forty-Nine
Fifty
Stonewiser: The Call of the Stone
Acknowledgments
The Author
ONE
STONEWISER SARIAH KNEW she was dying—murdered, she surmised, and not by the stones she clutched in her hands as was often the fate of unwary stonewisers. Kneeling on the Sacred Vaults’ cold ground, the stones were scalding to her palms. Her hands throbbed, her muscles cramped, her shoulders strained as if she balanced the full weight of Meliahs’ colossal boulders on the crumbling structure of her neck. The forbidden twin stones she was trying to wise offered an intriguing tale, but Sariah wouldn't live long enough to understand it unless she acted quickly. Who in the Guild had wanted Ashmid gone and Sariah dead, and for what dark purpose?
Sariah tried to break the trance, the unique bond that her stonewiser's mind was able to forge with the stones. Even by the Guild's stringent standards, her gift to reach into the stone's realm and retrieve the stowed tales had always been extraordinary. But this wising had gone terribly wrong. She couldn't break the trance. Somehow, she was stuck in the stone realm at the worse possible time.
In the stone tale, Sariah found herself lying on harsh rock, craning her neck to look at the rot pit that blazed at the center of a long vault. The ancients moved between the rows of slabs lining the walls. 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.
The pain announced that she was in the witness's skin, sharing the stone realm with the woman who had lived the tale. Through her eyes, Sariah was looking up at a circle of strangers, recoiling from their assailing hands. The light of a torch reflected on her bloated belly. Jagged rocks grinding through her gut would have been painless compared to the agony that convulsed her. She tried to maneuver for a more comfortable witnessing, but the power of the twin stones was arbitrary and the locked trance defied her attempts to shift within the tale. Her lungs struggled for air. Her throat seized. She wasn't just choking from the witness's pain or from the toxic fumes corrupting the vault's air; she was suffocating in the dangerous world of her own reality, dying slowly from lack of breath, immobile and helpless as long as she was trapped in the stone tale.
To escape a twin stones’ locked trance was a deed seldom survived. Rumor was that twin stones were jealous of those they claimed, likely to ruin a stonewiser's mind before allowing a trance to break. Still, Sariah tried to shed the stones. Her bones cracked as she struggled to stretch her fingers. The stones lashed back with a rabid sense of beating. Movement was by far the trance's hardest lock to break. How much time did she have left?
Her thoughts raced along with her frantic heartbeats. Where was her minder? Luar should have batted the stones from her hands by now. Dead. He had to be dead. Nothing else could explain his desertion. Meliahs help her. She'd killed them both.
She'd been a fool to try to wise forbidden twin stones. If only she'd been a more obedient stonewiser. Obedient? Not even the stone wrath could sustain such a delusion. She'd never managed obedience and the Guild had earned many profitable returns for her trespasses.
The Guild. A surge of pain twisted her belly. The Guild would have her hide if they caught her, and well they should. By all reasonable accounts, she should have sided with the Guild. Instead, she was stuck between the Guild and her master. Curse Ashmid. Where was he? Gone, maybe disgraced, maybe condemned, maybe even dead—all fates that he might very well have deserved if Sariah's fortunes had not been unavoidably linked to his. Damn the man. She couldn't stand the thought of belonging anew.
The stones obliterated Sariah's sputtering thoughts, forcing her to return to their realm. In the tale, she was still in the witness's skin. A babe protruded between her legs, a tiny quivering creature drenched with slime and blood. Sariah was in awe. She had never seen, let alone experienced, a birthing. Her wonderment turned into angry disbelief. Despite her pleading cries, the ancients wrenched the newborn from the mother. The woman's anguish left Sariah panting, as if a vital part had been hacked from her body.
An abrupt shift in the wising confused her. A new presence eclipsed the tale and captured her senses. A woman materialized next to Sariah, a striking figure with white hair hanging straight down to the back of her knees. Her fierce expression distorted her face's harmony. The sharp angles of her chin, nose and cheeks were soft compared to the intensity of her blue eyes and the fury of her thin-lipped smile.
“I know what you're thinking, wiser,” the woman said. “You think I don't belong here. You're right. You're wrong. We all belong here in one way or another.”
The woman didn't fit the tale the twin stones told. Her blue dress was of a different time. Her image was diaphanous yet vividly colored. Her shape's outline was charcoaled against the tale's background as if traced by a heavy-handed child. Sariah drew on her training to identify the improbable. An intrusion? No. It couldn't be. Intrusions were an ancient myth, a dark forbidden notion that the Guild punished with death.
“I'm Zeminaya, witness to the breaking of the blood,” the white-haired woman said. “I was sworn to find the way through the stones and I discovered in grief that the blood had been estranged. Into the world came a new child, born not of the flesh but of the stone, outside of the care of a fallen goddess.”
How? Sariah's throat buckled, unable to ask the question.
“Beware,” the intrusion said. “One tells a truth, but six yield the seventh and only seven grants the truth.”
The white-haired woman disappeared. The stone tale reclaimed Sariah's mind with renewed zeal. Sariah's strength waned along with the mother's faltering heartbeat. Her own life was ebbing like the blood gushing from the dying mother's womb. Blurred faces examined the babe's features.
“It is not,” one of the ancients said. Without warning, he cast the babe into a pool of corruption bubbling in the center vault. Like lard tossed on a scalding skillet, the child's flesh dissolved. The hissing flow gnawed at the babe's bones until they too melted into the rot. Sariah would have screamed if she'd had a voice, if the killing hands constricting her neck had allowed her throat the luxury of horror.
Strangulation was a fitting end to one who had defied the trance and ignored the Guild's rules, more violent than the suffocation that usually killed inexperienced stonewisers, but equally lethal. It left a mark, though, a bruise on the deceased's skin and perhaps a broken neck, something left for the Guild to ponder—a warning, maybe?
A lightness in her left hand announced she had managed to drop a stone. A screech rose in Sariah's ears, the remaining stone's protest, punishing her neglect. She couldn't drop the other stone. Instead, she aimed for a simpler task and focused her mind on opening her eyes. Her eyelids stiffened, heavy with the trance's subversion, but Sariah fought until she managed to rip them open in a harsh spasm.
Bright light hacked the murky darkness of the trance's withdrawal, attacking her defenseless pupils. Brilliant white flashed in a burst of pain. For a moment, she thought she must have blinded herself, a common occurrence among the Guild's newest pledges. But then images began to emerge between flashes, shapes and colors as painful as the light itself, quaking triplicate sights she had to transform into coherent images if she was to survive this day.
Three men stood before her framed by the severe curve of the vault's low arch. Or were her aching eyes seeing the same man thrice? She tried to focus. The men's features echoed on each other's faces. They all had fair hair and light skin bronzed and weathered by the sun, but they were different from one another. One had a beard. One was shorter. The tallest stood in the middle. All three carried rare half-moon swords. Where had she learned to fear such weapons?
They stood cautiously flattened against the wall, perhaps stilled by the sight of Sariah, of a wising gone wrong. There was something fierce about them, something alien and alarming. Slowly, as if in a dream, the tall man stepped forward, whirling a triply loaded sling. It hummed a low-fluted warning as he aimed and fired.
Darkness blinded Sariah. She waited for the pain of impact, but no, the man had not shot at her, he had shot at something behind her. The darkness stemmed from her struggle with the trance, a fight she wasn't ready to concede. Real sound slammed her ears when the light returned. Someone gasped and cursed behind her, and suddenly air traveled through her crumpled gullet and filled her shriveled lungs. The Sacred Vaults’ dampness replaced the stone realm's toxic odor. The scent of sweat and soil, of hard travel and salt came from the men crouching before her. The half-moon swords, the formidable weapons belts, the rare faces—these were features Sariah was trained to recognize, she was sure.
The stone remaining in her hand flared with vengeance. The reliefs carved on the stone blistered her palm. The burn blazed through her flesh in an agonizing trail toward her bones, heralding a fate similar to that of the stone tale's murdered babe. Sariah clung to her consciousness but only because she was too stubborn to relent. A wail echoed in the chamber—her wail.
The shorter man eyed her with suspicion. “Is she dead?”
The bearded man considered the stone in her hand warily. “I don't think so. Not yet.”
The taller man dared to touch her cheek. “She's burning up. Curse the stones. Take them.”
Aye, remove the stones, she wanted to say, but she didn't have the strength.
“It's not our tale to tell,” the bearded man said.
The taller man scoured her with his disturbing stare. “We owe no honor here. Should we just let her die?”
“If we're caught here, we won't survive.”
“After what we've witnessed, neither will she.” A scar fractured the line of the tall man's eyebrow, but that wasn't what made his unsettling stare chilling. His irises. One was sparkling green, the other one was jet black. These men's eyes—she'd seen those discordant eyes before in the stones of judgment's earliest tales, the ones every pledge mastered before becoming a stonewiser. Those eyes had been born of heresy, eyes whose colors never matched on a New Blood's face.
The Guild had fallen prey to the land's violence. Her master had disappeared without word. Intrusions lurked in the strangest of stone tales. A stonewiser was dying in the Sacred Vaults, namely her. As if that wasn't enough, the New Blood walked freely in the keep, bringing corruption to the Hall of Stones. Had the stone madness seized her mind and confused her life's wisings into an evil jumble? It was the only fitting explanation.
The stone in Sariah's hand hissed a final torturing shriek. Then it was gone and with the shock of its absence, Sariah lost her pain and her senses. Her last thought was that death was by far preferable to the stone madness.
TWO
SARIAH OPENED HER eyes. A wave of nausea slammed her breathless. Her head pulsed with a throbbing ache. She willed herself to breathe. She recognized the ornately sculpted walls of the Hall of Stones. She lay on a narrow bench in one of the antechamber's curtained alcoves. Light entered through the only window in the room, a tiny opening high on the outside wall, grossly insufficient to alleviate the suffocating heat trapped within the massive walls. The normal after-wising reaction, mild disorientation and the occasional fever, seemed magnified a thousandfold. She felt ill, and she ached everywhere, as if a giant pestle had ground her bones to chalk.
Belatedly, she remembered that hers had been anything but a normal wising. Meliahs help her, she'd wised forbidden twin stones, she'd been trapped in a locked trance, and yet she was somehow alive. She willed herself to rise on her elbows. Her right hand was merely bruised; her left one was bandaged. She wiggled her cobalt-stained fingertips. Meliahs be blessed. She was whole for the moment. She hoped she hadn't damaged her gift.
“The Guild's parrots are smarter than you,” a voice said too close to her ear. “What oxen-minded make-believe wiser dares defy the Council and steal into the Sacred Vaults?”
“Mistress Ilian,” Sariah said hoarsely. She supposed she should count herself lucky to be alive, but it was difficult to feel fortunate when the mistress was staring, no, glaring at her. The mistress's face would have been pretty except for the scowl clawing at her features. The First of the Hall of Scribes wasn't there to keep her company through the post-wising feebleness. Of that, Sariah was sure.
Mistress Ilian crossed her arms and leaned against the wall, glaring at Sariah with a viper's cold stare. “You don't look well.”
As if she cared.
Sariah's bruised throat ached when she spoke. “Someone tried to kill me.”
“Then someone botched the job,” the mistress said. “You ought to be dead, Sariah. Dead.”
Despite the piercing headache, Sariah forced herself to reason. Had Mistress Ilian commanded her murder? Possible. Probable. Perhaps even justifiable by nature's horrid ways. Sariah wondered, not for the first time, if her golden brown complexion, arched brows, and thickly lashed brown eyes were remnants of the mistress's blood in her. Could a link as tenuous and irrelevant as blood-sharing fuel murder?
“Luar.” Sariah remembered suddenly. “I need to speak to my minder. Is he well?”
“Well?” Mistress Ilian sneered. “Luar is alive, if that's what you mean, no thanks to you.”
“Thank Meliahs.” But if Luar was alive, what had happened in the vaults? He wasn't one to shirk his duties; yet he hadn't come to her assistance when the trance locked. And what about the three strange men? Were they real, or were they just her mind's delusions? She sat up on the bench, fighting the dizziness overwhelming her senses.
“The Council has punished Luar for his trespasses,” Mistress Ilian said. “He's done minding you.”
“But it was my deed. He's not liable for punishment.”
“The Guild does as it wills, not as you want. In any case, what were you doing in the Sacred Vaults? Did your little incursion have anything to do with your master's disappearance?”
Of course it did, but the feebleness hadn't completely wilted Sariah's wits, and she wasn't about to tell Mistress Ilian the little that she knew—that Ashmid had stolen into the Sacred Vaults several times before his mysterious disappearance. She knew. She'd followed him. She squeezed her temples, trying to soothe the headache. Why by Meliahs’ earthly babes had Ashmid favored these twin stones? Why had he been so keen on them?
Power. Coin. Those stones must have somehow carried at least a promise of profitable progress. Ashmid was an ambitious lout; that's what drove him. She remembered the twin stones’ vivid tale. She was fully trained and truth-sworn and yet she'd never wised that tale before—why not?
Too many questions. The elaborate stone carvings on the nook's walls swirled about her. Vipers coiled, dragons snarled, fanged faces grimaced grotesque, mirthless smiles. Sariah shut her eyes and waited until the hall's stillness reclaimed her spinning world. What exactly had she witnessed in the twin stones’ wising? An unknown tale? A lie? An ancient intrusion?
Impossible. Rumors of lies in the stones were just that, rumors, and even a casual reference to the implausible concept of an intrusion was considered heresy. She couldn't stand the thought of lies or intrusions corrupting the stones. Then what had she seen?
