Stonewiser: The Heart of the Stone, page 32
“The tribe has arrived,” someone shouted and a throng of people ran to the outer decks.
A girl jumped from one of the arriving decks and rushed through the crowds. A young man running from the wall met her halfway. It was a shy greeting, first formal then fumbling as they bumped their foreheads when they kissed. Sariah saw with the young man's eyes. She recognized his square jaw and gray eyes. Horatio.
It struck Sariah that the girl he kissed had sparkling green and blue eyes. She was New Blood. What was Horatio doing kissing a New Blood? Beyond that, her features were familiar. Where had she seen this girl before?
Horatio's heart beat rapidly inside Sariah's. He actually felt affection for the New Blood girl. Sariah was happy to recognize the emotion firsthand. For that, she had Kael to thank.
An angry face dominated the tale. In an ornate chamber overlooking the Barren Flats, a man stood above Horatio bellowing at the top of his lungs. Anger gleamed in the man's black eyes. A dent formed between his eyebrows when he frowned, the same line that Sariah had noticed between the Shield's eyes when he was mad. Horatio's father had been the Main Shield of his time.
“Father, please,” Horatio begged.
“You'll learn to treat vermin as vermin,” the man said. “You'll learn to cleanse whatever New Blood you carry in your veins and become a man of the Shield. Haven't you failed enough in your short life? Thank Meliahs you're not marked with the curse.”
Sariah gasped. Horatio Maliver had a New Blood mother? Sariah found the notion impossible to accept. The Bloods mixed easily at the wall—everybody knew that—but it was difficult to understand that the New Blood's staunchest enemy was part New Blood himself. On the other hand, she now understood why Horatio had a memory stone and a measure of imprinting skills.
“You failed at the Guild also,” the old Shield said. “They found no inclinations of the wising craft in you. You're fortunate that they sent you to me. You'll be trained to be a man of the Shield and on my oath, you'll rise to command at the wall. Tell me, what are your duties?”
“Father, I—”
The man barked. “What are your duties?”
“I must stop the spread of the rot,” young Horatio said. “I must defend the wall. I must uphold the Guild's authority.”
“And what does the Guild decree?”
“The Shield must hunt all New Blood wisers and confiscate their stones.”
“I sent you to locate the New Blood stonewiser. I sent you after wisers and stones and you return with what? A damned New Blood girlfriend.” The man grabbed Horatio's tunic and jerked him off the floor. Horatio was face to face with his father, close enough to smell the bile in the man's blustering breath.
“Father, please—”
“If you learn to despise them—to despise the part of you that is New Blood, you'll be able to serve the Guild and lead the Shield. I'll teach you. It's my duty.”
“I love her, Father,” Horatio said.
“I'll show you what you like about her.” Horatio's father grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and dragged him to the fortress's dungeons. Horatio stumbled down the stairs and through the halls. A small door led to the cells, a place as dark as the Shield's soul. A guard rushed to open one of the cells and his father pushed Horatio through the door. The stench of rotting wood and feces was unbearable. Sariah shared in Horatio's shock. Strapped to a cot in the cell was Horatio's pretty New Blood girlfriend.
“Take her,” the Shield commanded.
Horatio couldn't understand.
“Take her. Now. Take the little vermin in the only way that vermin can be taken.” The man pushed Horatio to the cot. “You think you love her. I'll teach you what you love.”
“No, Father. No.”
The old Shield's fist sent Horatio crashing against the wall.
“Do I have to teach you how to do this as well? Have you no instinct to do as a man must?” The old Shield unfastened his pants and struggled with the woman's legs.
Sariah wished she had substance in the stone world. She wanted to pounce on the old Shield and wrench him from the girl. She wanted to protect the woman from the evil that emanated from the man.
“Free her, I tell you.” Horatio wiped the blood from his face. “She has done nothing wrong.”
“She'll bring the stonewiser to us. Meanwhile, she'll learn lessons vermin ought to know.”
Horatio was paralyzed against the wall, a young man caught in a nightmare and unable to wake.
“Mine is a world of choices.” The old Shield's sex spilled from his breeches. “What say you? Me or you?”
“I can't,” Horatio said. “I won't.”
“You'll do as I command.”
The old Shield pinned Horatio against the corner. He drew his sword, cut open the fastenings from Horatio's breeches and snatched them down to his knees. Horatio was crying as the old Shield pushed him down on the girl, sobbing like a little child.
“I'm sorry. This is not how it was supposed to be. I swear.”
The old Shield drew his sword and smacked Horatio's arse with the flat of his blade. Horatio pulled away from the woman's skirts. Sariah shared the horror that bloomed on the young man's face. Between his legs, Horatio's sex stood stiff and engorged.
The Shield laughed. “So you're a man, after all. Use your wares to rule.”
Sariah sensed Horatio's exhaustion. Defeated by his father and betrayed by his body, the young man surrendered. Horatio's sobs joined with the woman's wails in an unbearable cry of misery. When the deed was done, Horatio's father dragged him from the cell and slammed the door closed. The girl's sobs followed Horatio as he stumbled behind his father, listless, bleeding and destroyed.
Sariah's heart was breaking twice, once for Horatio, who had been young and wrecked by his terrible father, twice for the girl, who had been betrayed by the man she loved and hurt as no woman should be hurt. The guard who came to fetch Sariah for her morning meal with the Shield found her doubled over and vomiting, and wondering if she had the courage to wise the rest of the terrible tale.
“My guard tells me you were not feeling well this morning.” The Shield broke the yolks of his eggs with a chunk of bread. “Nothing that will interrupt our work, I hope.”
“I'm fine.” Sariah sipped her tea, wondering if Horatio Maliver deserved a bit of compassion.
“Good then, because I have a treat for you.”
The offer caught Sariah's attention.
“I'd like you to wise this.” The Shield placed a single stone before Sariah, a small white stone streaked with black and barely sculpted into an irregular oval.
“Another one of your tests.” Sariah didn't bother to hide her disappointment.
“Perhaps one of the last?”
She flashed him a cutting look. “Do you like to play with your food before you eat it?”
He laughed. He really enjoyed leading her by the nose and she knew it. Sariah tapped her fingers on the stone. She wasn't sure what she was seeing at first, but her belly twisted when she realized what it was. “This is nothing I care to wise.”
The screams of the guards Horatio tortured under her window returned to haunt her. Horatio had conveyed the entire Shield to the courtyard. He had taken care to read the accused names from the list she had prepared. Sariah had watched from her window as four men and a woman were stripped, lashed, and hanged for accepting bribes from the New Blood while standing guard at the wall. Since then, fresh hatred gleamed in all of the guards’ eyes every time she met their stares.
“We only found one of the New Blood you named on your engrossment,” the Shield said. “We killed him on the run. Do you find it curious that none of the others have been caught?”
Sariah shrugged. Meliahs help her. She'd made the terrible choice. One New Blood name to appease the Shield. The other names were all made up, but she wasn't about to confess. She wondered if the stone truth was worth the blood. She had to force herself to push such thoughts aside. Her answers were changing lately. She didn't want to decide who died and who lived; she didn't want to carry the terrible burden anymore.
She made her smile cold to match the Shield's. “I'm a wiser, not a snitch.”
“Perhaps I can persuade you without ears or toes?” The man was frozen inside. “If you wise this stone and give me the locations I require, then I'll allow you to wise what came in this.”
He had prepared the moment well. He dropped the intricately decorated leather pouches on the table, the obvious lure of a deadly trap. “Are these interesting enough?”
Sariah didn't dare to move. “How did you get those?”
“My father traded for these.”
“A trade?”
“Beloved life for beloved stones. Theft, if you ask me, for one didn't grant the other. My father got them from a stonewiser.”
Without a doubt, the uniquely engraved leather pouches had come from Aya. Aya had granted twin stones to the Shield? The notion was incomprehensible. Why? She couldn't think of any reason that would compel a stonewiser to surrender such treasure to anybody, let alone someone as undeserving as the Shield.
Horatio tapped the leather pouches on the table with long elegant fingers. “How bad do you want to wise whatever came in these pouches?”
The frost in the Shield's eyes was irreversible and deadly like a lethal disease. He had nothing but emptiness inside. He was a shell of a man, a shattered damaged soul who had learned to seek out torture for amusement and death for pleasure.
He must have seen the anguish in her look, because he grimaced his brightest, most joyful smile yet. “How about it, wiser? These in exchange for the locations of the New Blood's demesnes?”
THIRTY-SIX
SARIAH WITHDREW THE stone from the pocket she'd fashioned by loosening the threads beneath her chamber's thick carpet. She considered the memory stone in her hand, her only clue to Horatio Maliver's putrid mind. She needed to find the twin stones and a way of escaping the fortress with the people in the pen, because she wasn't about to leave them behind to suffer her punishment. She needed to do it soon, because when the Shield assigned to the destruction of the demesnes returned, her ruse would be discovered. She'd given Horatio a hand-drawn map with the location of a handful of New Blood demesnes. The first was an undeveloped water source. The second was a tiny piece of land-making that had failed in the northern flats. The third one had been vacated on account of the stubborn rot. The others didn't exist. Meliahs knew she didn't want to unleash destruction in the Domain and yet she knew that as long as the Shield's skiffs sailed the dead waters, no New Blood was safe.
One matter at the time, though. The first step was to finish wising the Shield's memory stone, to figure out where he kept the twin stones. Sariah grasped the stone and sensed the rush of the little trance enter her mind. She leapt over the parts of the story that she had already wised. She had no desire to witness the misery again. She picked up the stone tale as Horatio followed his father into the fortress's courtyard. The gutweed bloomed in the acid water outside the fortress, but the smell stinking the courtyard was fouler than the stench of the dead water weeds.
A man lay on the quartering block mutilated beyond recognition. He was alive. His gaze was still bright, black and green eyes that recognized Horatio and his father.
“You look unwell, Ars,” the old Shield said. “You've given me a jolly time, but not the stonewiser Aya.”
Ars, Sariah recognized the name immediately. Kael's father.
One of the Shield stepped forward from the ranks. “My lord, I beg your forgiveness. I've failed in my task to bring the stonewiser to you.”
“You're the one I sent with the message to the stonewiser Aya. Did you see her?”
“I did, my lord, but she's not free to act of her own accord. Her people are holding her prisoner. They won't allow her to surrender herself. She managed a word with me. She wanted me to tell you that if you let her kin go, she'll come to you. She swears on her wiser's oath that she'll give herself up once her people let her go.”
The Shield snorted. “I've never believed a wiser and I'm not going to start now.”
“She offers ransom, my lord, the richest treasure any Shield could have, she says.”
“What can she give me that I don't already own?”
“My lord, the witch said that if you ever wanted to be free of your prison, these would be the stones to wise. And that if you spare Ars, she herself will come to wise this tale for you.”
The messenger offered a sack of stones to the old Shield. He glanced inside the bag. “Twin stones? Valuable indeed. Secure these,” he said to one of his men.
“What does she mean, if you ever want to be free?” Horatio asked.
“Quiet, boy, I have all I want and sanction to do my will. I'm the freest man in the Domain.” He turned to Ars on the quartering block. “It seems your time is at an end, my friend. Aya won't be coming. You've entertained us aplenty, a good deed in this rotten place. I've been thinking how to make your end more interesting. Bring the other prisoners.”
Sariah's stomach plummeted, eerily in tandem with Horatio's. The guards brought Horatio's New Blood girl to the courtyard. She begged the old Shield for mercy. Horatio's father laughed. Mercy was a jest for a man like him.
The guards dragged a struggling kid to the courtyard, a tall gangly boy, thick of bones and new of muscle, who kicked and bit and managed a good racket.
“Stop it or I'll kill Ars,” the old Shield said.
Sariah recognized Kael's defying black and green stare right away.
“Horatio, please,” the girl begged. “Help us.”
Horatio's father took an ax to Ars's remaining leg. He struck quickly, bathing in the squirts of Ars's pumping blood. Ars was silent, as if he were already dead. The girl and Kael clung to each other. The Shield took a chunk of Ars's leg and threw it at the children's feet.
Sariah witnessed Kael's fortitude bloom beyond courage. Blood, his father's blood, dripped from Kael's arms and stained his tunic as he clutched the bloody mass to his chest. “Your blood I praise for as long as I live, Father.”
Ars managed to turn his head and meet Kael's eyes. Sariah saw the smile in his eyes. She saw pride there too.
A screech rose above the strange beat thumping outside the fortress. It was coming from Horatio's mouth. Sariah followed his bewildered stare. She witnessed horror beyond horror. The girl clutched one of her eyeballs in her hand while she clawed the other one out of its socket.
“Ali, no!” Kael cried.
Sariah suddenly realized the bitter twist of fate taking place before her eyes. In the stone tale, Alista, daugther of Ars, Kael's sister, snatched her eyes out without so much as a whimper from her lips. She stood with her eyeballs cupped in her hands and her sockets bleeding and empty, quivering from the shock, a terrible vision belonging in Meliahs’ rot pit.
Sariah remembered what Alista had told her once. There are choices more terrible than blindness, sights worse than darkness. She understood now.
Kael rushed to his sister's side. “Your eyes, Ali, what have you done to your eyes?”
“I will not be forced to watch,” she said. “They can't make me watch.”
It was an unbearable sight, young Kael trying to fit a bloody eyeball back in his sister's socket and Alista refusing it. Ars died then—from loss of blood, from lack of breath, from the pain of watching his daughter's demise, Sariah didn't know.
“Horatio Maliver?” Alista cried out.
Horatio whimpered. “Alista?”
A bloody blob struck his forehead and spilled down his face. Horatio caught Alista's eye and screamed like a man gone mad. Murder finally made an appearance on his face, but it was too late. Kael bolted, grabbed the ax that the Shield had used to mutilate his father, and attacked. Horatio's father smiled and unsheathed his sword. He parried with the boy as if Kael were a favorite toy.
The old Shield was a good swordsman. He poked at Kael, nicking his legs and pricking his feet, making the boy hop about like a hare. He thrust upwards but Kael jerked away at the last minute. The blade slashed his eyebrow in two. The boy wiped the blood from his eye and hacked at the Shield. The man's cackles echoed in the courtyard. He was having a great time. Horatio was paralyzed by the sight. He couldn't look at Alista. She huddled against the wall, bleeding from her sightless eyes, convulsing with shivers.
“Join me, Horatio. Would you like a piece of this cub?” The old Shield's face was a leathery mask of evil. “Have some.”
The Shield's sword plunged toward Kael's foot. The boy whisked his foot out of the way, but not fast enough. The blade hacked parts of his small toe and the toe next to it. The boy tumbled to the ground in agonizing pain. The Shield scooped Kael's severed knuckles and presented them to Horatio on the flat of his blade. “For you.”
When Horatio didn't move, the Shield tilted his blade and dropped the bloody toes down Horatio's tunic. They slid down his belly like hot, slimy leeches. Horatio hopped like a man possessed, trying to shake the horrid gift from his garments.
“Enough amusement for one day.” The old Shield planted himself before Kael and lifted his sword to deliver the final blow. He was careless in his devastating superiority. The boy reacted quickly. He took advantage of the old Shield's downward momentum, and rammed the spike at the top of the ax pole through the Shield's sternum. The Shield was dead when his body hit the cobblestones. The expression on his face was one of pleasant surprise.
“He was mine to kill,” Horatio whispered. Sariah sensed all the warmth seeping from him, the chill creeping into his soul. She felt more than saw the emptiness in his life, the brutal maiming of his spirit, the evaporation of all ability to give or accept affection.
