Stonewiser: The Heart of the Stone, page 15
“Give me that, you're making no progress.” Ashmid snatched the staff from Desiree. He groped Sariah's body looking for a place untouched by his own savagery to launch a new round of torture that could break Sariah's block. “Here. Beasts always minded their joints.”
Sariah cringed, waiting for a hit to the knee. She jerked reflexively when the staff came down. That Ashmid missed was either a miracle or a testament to his anger. Perhaps the fight with the hunter had weakened his staff. Perhaps the hours of use had worn down the shaft. Perhaps Sariah's body, hardened with raw pain, had broken the accursed weapon. Whatever the reason, the staff shattered.
Ashmid stared in disbelief at the pieces of his broken staff. “It has killed lions and bears.”
Sariah thought he might shed tears over the accursed thing.
“I know how to break her,” Desiree said.
The look in Ashmid's eyes was more frightening than his staff. “All right.”
It wasn't the pain of Desiree's depraved explorations that undid Sariah, but rather the persisting sum of her caresses, the cold slobber of the woman's devouring lips, the raking of teeth sharp as fangs, the memories of past abuse renewed and enhanced by Desiree's present cruelty.
The darkness collapsed. The trance swooped on her senses and captured her mind. Sariah fought the pull, but the tale began to unravel despite her defiance.
In the stone realm, the image of an astounding city formed in Sariah's mind. She was looking at a sprawling expanse of white marble, tiled roofs and stone paved lanes. Fountains flowed at the center of every court and gardens graced the surroundings of enormous temples and buildings that rose from the street to reach five and six levels high. Sariah had not seen a city this beautiful. It was a market day. People crowded the stalls and music filled the air. She found herself walking along with a group of richly dressed Council members to the city's main gate. The stones under her feet rippled.
“The land shakes too often now,” a councilwoman said warily.
“You must see it for yourselves,” the guide said. “It's nothing I have seen before.”
They stepped through the gates and walked to a clear field bordering the city's wall.
“When we first cleared this land, it blessed us with triple yields,” the guide said. “Then last year, the land died. Nothing took. Even the weeds and the wild flowers refused to grow here. The tremors began. They are stronger here. Look at the wall; it's cracking from the strain. Don't go closer. The land is undermined beneath.”
The earth next to the wall had cracked too, a deep fissure running in opposite directions around a gaping hole. The hole was a sore on the land, a hissing pond of black corruption steaming pungent vapors. The rot's tentacles flowed in different directions, bubbling between the fissures, consuming the soil, creating new sinkholes of molten corruption.
“What are we going to do?” someone asked.
“We must take great care not to frighten our people,” a woman with long white hair said. Sariah recognized Zeminaya. She had been in the stone birth tale, or rather, she had appeared in that tale as an intrusion. She had been at the execration tale as well, twice, as a part of the story and then as an intrusion. She seemed to belong in this tale. The rot must have appeared during her lifetime.
“People are already terrified,” another councilwoman said. “The persecutions have taken a toll.”
“There might be a way,” Zeminaya said. “New Blood wisers may possess a wising to contain the rot. They are closer to the earth for they work it. Let's heed the New Blood's advice.”
“What's the price?” a councilman asked. “What will it cost the Old Blood?”
“Togetherness,” Zeminaya said.
“But the rot is the work of the New Blood,” someone said.
“This is no time for accusations,” Zeminaya said. “We may all perish from the rot.”
The tale suddenly blurred and froze. The shift left Sariah dizzy but she recognized the second Zeminaya, materializing next to her.
“You're an intrusion,” Sariah murmured.
“An intrusion?” Ashmid was screaming in her ear. “Did you say an intrusion?”
He'd get nothing from her. Nothing. She'd be dead before she told him what she knew.
The intrusion grew large in her mind. “I'm Zeminaya, greeter of the rot and witness to the persecutions. We allowed the breaking of the pact to break us and we would have destroyed the world, but the rot came to destroy it in our stead. Beware, wiser. Three tell a truth, but four yield the seventh and only seven grants the truth.” The intrusion was instantly gone.
“Wise it again,” Ashmid shouted. “Speak to me!”
“My hands,” Sariah whispered. “They're burning.”
“Try harder, look deeper.”
The pressure built in her ears, unbearable until it popped against her eardrums, deafening the river's flow into a quiet hush. A spurt of hot blood gushed from her nose. In the stone realm, Sariah witnessed the babe's birth again, the mother's anguish, the child's horrid death in the rot pit. Zeminaya was there too, a stowaway who had jumped tales in the jumble of Sariah's mind.
“No more,” she tried to say. Her mind was slowing down and then speeding up, spitting fragmented thoughts. The stink. Charred flesh. A mouth. The pain.
“You must understand.” Zeminaya's hand swept over the cave where the women birthed on the stone slabs, but Sariah didn't understand. Her senses waned to darkness.
She couldn't tell how much time passed, but when she was able to focus again, her hearing was keen. She heard the trickle of the sluice stream turn to a rush, the idle paddle wheel picking up speed, and the wheel's creak turning into a steady screech.
“What's happening?” Ashmid's mouth moved slowly.
“I don't know,” Desiree said equally slowly. “The flow is stronger. Either the river is swelling or the broken sluice gate gave way. Go check the gate, Eve.”
As she opened the door, Eve was a blurred shade against a painful brightness to Sariah's ailing eyes. Sariah's hands were burning beyond pain, but now her thoughts were flowing calm, free and clear in the ways of the dying mind.
“How long must we wait?” Zeminaya cried.
Sariah thought that, sadly, the intrusion would have to wait for another wiser. Sariah's strength was gone. She had no doubts that the pain inside her head announced a wiser's worse fear: Her mind was decaying, dissolving like the stone tale babe in the rot pit. If Ashmid didn't kill her first, she would die soon.
Death and hope arrived unexpectedly and together. Death roared on Kael's face as he broke through the door and entered the wretched mill room. Hope, the hope she thought she had renounced a night not long ago, was he.
Kael crashed into the milling floor together with the broken door. Metelaus followed, clutching Eve by the scruff of her neck. Sariah's confused mind had trouble discerning whether the New Blood were real, whether her hopes had worked themselves into the stones’ tales or her mind's delusions had finally taken over. Why were they here? This was her trouble, the ill result of a lifetime of blind service and the unavoidable consequence of her stone greed and her stupidity.
“Sariah,” Kael roared with the water.
The emotions that flashed on his face were easy wising to Sariah's overwrought mind. He was furious when he entered the milling floor, righteous in his arrival, but when he saw Sariah tied on the grindstone, his jaw went slack and his eyes widened in shock. Hatred took over then, indignation, bursting wrath that swept the room like simmering fire.
The crescent blades flashed in his hands. Metelaus's blade was out too, although it served only to knock Eve insensible. Kael went directly for Ashmid, but as he passed by Desiree, she tried to stop him. He slew her with a casual side blow, a hack to the throat that left the woman's head twisted and dangling from her neck's corded tendons. She was an abandoned lover in her death quivers, thrashing as if Ashmid was using her.
Ashmid had a moment to stand and consider his fate, but only a brief moment. Sariah tried to warn Kael about Ashmid's lethal competencies, but no sound made it through her throat. Ashmid took his stand, reached for his staff and, finding it broken, pulled out the black daggers he had taken from the dead hunter. He launched a fulminating round of kicks and slashes. The speed and skill of his attack would have overwhelmed any other man, but Kael deflected Ashmid's strikes with the small buckler strapped to his wrist and watched Ashmid for the span of seconds with that feline intensity of his. Then, as Ashmid kicked, in one perfectly timed blow, Kael sliced Ashmid's foot from his leg.
Whether Ashmid would have prevailed if he'd had his slayer's staff on hand, or whether shock or surprise conspired to defeat him, Sariah would never know. But in that moment before Kael struck, when Ashmid teetered on his hobbled leg and blood gushed from his limb like a well-cranked spigot, she recognized horror on Ashmid's face, the terror and awe of confronting a rage greater than his own. Kael's blow took him at the head, cleaving his face in two uneven halves, a cut that spilled a heap of brackish blood and brain matter on the floor before he collapsed. Ashmid had slain his last beast.
“I never thought he would hurt you.” Kael was at her side, cutting the ropes from her body with great care, undoing the cruel contrivance, freeing her swollen limbs. “Piss of the goddess, filth of the dung, I never thought the bastard would do this to you.”
Sariah hadn't realized how rigidly cold her body was until Kael's mantle enfolded her. It was strange; that's when she started to shake, a hard, uncontrolled, painful rattle of her bones that wouldn't quit.
“Are you real?” Sariah's voice came out as a hoarse whisper. “Are you a stone tale or are you really here?”
“I'm here,” he said, almost as hoarse as she was.
“And he?” Sariah gestured to Metelaus, pressing a ladleful of water to her parched lips. “Is he real?”
“I'm real,” Metelaus said, feeding her water she drank greedily.
“Is she real?” Sariah pointed to white-haired Zeminaya standing at the foot of the grindstone.
“Who?” Metelaus looked about the room.
“The woman,” Sariah said. “Can't you see her?”
“There is no one else here,” Kael said.
“We'll not bother you overly much,” the intrusion said. “Don't forget the stones.”
“I thought you had gone to join your old master,” Kael was saying. “I thought you planned to escape us, to forsake your oath to the New Blood.”
“Ashmid would have killed you,” Sariah tried to explain. “The stone matters. The stone carrier matters naught.”
“Meliahs curse me, Sariah, you matter.” The misery on his face was as bad as the pain racking her body. “I've done no honor to my oath.”
“Hush now, Kaelin.” Sariah stroked his hair with the back of her battered hand. “You can't trust me. The Guild can't be trusted. The stones can't be trusted. I wouldn't trust me.”
“Sariah.” He gasped her name as if it meant sorrow, as if it was a sob repressed in the confines of his throat.
“She is crying blood,” Metelaus said. She must have looked bad, terrible in fact, judging by the horrified look on the New Blood's faces.
“Don't bleed, Sariah,” Kael groaned. “Don't die.”
She realized she had never seen fear in his eyes before, that he had never uttered a plea in her presence until this day. She tried to move but her bones seemed to screech as loud as the rusted wheel. Her knees had turned to gutweed. Her feet recoiled from the floor, too sore to stand.
Kael examined the welts on the bottom of her feet. “Meliahs curse me. You can't walk on these.”
“Don't forget the stones,” the intrusion said.
“The stones. You had them,” she realized belatedly. “All that time you had them.”
“Damn the stones,” Kael said. “Curse the evil things to Meliahs’ rot pit.”
“Please, no, don't leave them. Promise me. Bring them to an able wiser. Three, I think. Three pairs.”
Blood tears were irresistible to any man.
“Bring them,” Kael said to Metelaus.
Kael collected Sariah in his arms, careful not to hurt her more, but she couldn't help wincing. She was sore everywhere and each movement he made echoed with pain in her body. She understood they had to leave and quickly, but she didn't think she could manage.
“Take the stones,” she said. “I can't go.”
“I'm not leaving you here and you're not giving up. Do you hear me?”
“Kaelin, I—”
“You're coming with me. I'll be careful, I promise.”
She had no other choice than to brace against his chest, stand the pain, and go along. Daft man. He wasn't going to leave her behind. Metelaus made a fast job at gathering the stones scattered about the bloody milling floor.
“Rot with the weeds.” Kael kicked Ashmid's body into the wheel stream.
They fled the mill and took to the road in the darkness, dodging the night patrols. Kael carried her with great care, as if she was the Guild's most valuable stone. Sariah rested her head against his chest, listening to his heart's quick, determined beats, absorbing his body's heat. Once, when her hand brushed his back, she felt the warmth of his blood there.
“Your stitches.” She had taken good care to make them even and tight.
“That's nothing, Sariah.”
She hurt for him too.
He found an old two-wheel haywain parked outside an abandoned byre and cushioned her gently in a bed of hay. “Better, aye?”
She nodded for his benefit. They joined a group of shepherds and their sheep on the road.
“There will be much trouble in Adanton because of a milling floor full of death,” Metelaus said as he hauled the cart.
“We'll be far from here when Eve wakes,” Kael said. “We'll meet up with Lazar and the horses in a few leagues. I could have been at the mill yesterday, but I was so mad at her, convinced that she had betrayed us, that I didn't think the day I took to plan our escape would make a difference.”
Sariah couldn't blame him and she was too weary to explain.
“You couldn't have known,” Metelaus said. “Are you thinking of taking her to Malord?”
“I know of no other stonewiser healer.” Kael caressed her forehead, a pleasant feeling among so much hurting. “Don't sleep, wiser.”
Sariah didn't want to cause Kael more grief but the night air was fragrant and the stars shone brightly in the sky. The haywain tumbled down a country lane, lulling Sariah's battered senses to rest.
“Not even in the long sleep must you forget the stones.” The intrusion rode along in the haywain.
“Stay awake,” Kael said. “Stay with me.”
Sariah regretted the misery reflected in Kael's eyes. Then her eyes closed and darkness replaced his face.
EIGHTEEN
THE SUN OUTLINED the weave of the finely thatched roof, shining through the tiniest openings in a sequence of twinkles that reacquainted Sariah's eyes to the fine concept of light. The plaited branches that made the walls and the logs that comprised the floor where her pallet lay smelled fresh and sweet. Bunches of dry herbs and flowers dangled from the beams. The place swayed at a pleasant rhythm, prolonging Sariah's lull, cradling her in luxurious comfort, serenading her with the splash of water murmuring a quick passing to wood. This place was far from the water mill of her nightmares.
The mill. The twin stones. The stone truth. Had she really quit the Guild? She turned on her side and managed to sit up. Barely. What was this place? She had to wait until her eyes focused and the dizziness eased a little.
Sariah's legs were too wobbly to carry her, but with some effort she forced her knees to crawl through the small shelter toward the opening that served as a door. She pushed the cloth aside and discovered a new horizon, dominated by the light's reflections on a narrow space between the white swirls of the dawn's mist and the water. Reflections of water and sky sparkled with the light and transformed into random-colored rainbows. Sariah was sure she was trapped at the edge of a stone link, caught in the wasting sickness or mad. It was a sight too perfect not to belong in a stone tale, too beautiful to be anything other than someone's enduring memory.
Sariah crawled outside the shelter to the end of a log platform. The gulls’ cries reverberated around her like laughter. A wake rippled ahead of the shelter, a frothy rush of divided waters following the shadows of the taut cords that sprang from the platform. As if following her mind's slow whirl, the sunlight scattered the mist and the outline of three broad backs emerged ahead of Sariah. She squinted. She recognized the familiar figures, one more joyfully than the others, and thanked Meliahs for the good company. Real or not, the New Blood's presence in this world was as comforting as the sunlight.
Sariah tried to greet them, but her voice cracked in her throat. In the middle harness, Kael turned, as if he had heard her soundless call. He trudged back through the knee-high water, taking off the pulling harness as he neared her.
“Are you real?” she asked when he froze before her.
A smile pulled at the corners of his tightly pressed lips. “I am. And you're real too.”
“I'm glad to know, because this beautiful world looks too much like a stone tale.”
The sunrise illuminated his face and shared dawn's wonderment with his eyes. “Do you think this world is beautiful?”
“I do.”
“You're out of the wasting sickness!” Lazar landed on the platform and hugged her.
“Wicked goddess, the wiser lives.” Metelaus arrived. “Stop crushing her, Lazar, you may yet break her. I can't tell you how worried you had us. Even when the stone healer tried to heal you, we had little hope you would live to wake.”
“Are you sure that I'm awake?”
