Cartomancy

by Michael A. Stackpole

  “I do not accept them.”

  Keles caught the pouch against his chest. “But you said that when a Viruk dies, if there are more white stones in his grave than black, he’ll be allowed into paradise.”

  “The white stones are earned, Anturasi, not just collected.”

  “And I could tell you a good deed you’ve done for each one. A good deed for me, a good deed for these people. If I told them what the stones were for, you’d have one from each of them, and then some.” Keles pointed at the Eyeless Ones. “Just venturing back behind their lines to delay them a day should earn you a mountain of white stones.”

  “That matters not.” The Viruk poked him in the chest with a finger. “I do not accept them because it would mean I agree with you that we are lost. I do not.”

  “But you said . . .”

  “No, you read into my words.” Rekarafi’s dark eyes became slits. “You gather stones to ease your mind of a burden. You have responsibility for all the lives here. The threat they are under is because of you. If I accept those stones, I am agreeing you have done all you can to save them.”

  “I have!”

  “Have you?” The Viruk cocked his head. “Here is the question for you, Keles Anturasi: have you done all you can to show these people how to live, or have you just shown them how to delay death a little longer? How you embrace death means nothing. How you live your life is everything.”

  Keles tossed the waterskin aside, peeled his robe down, and knotted the sleeves around his waist. “You think that’s it? You think I’m ready to die?”

  “Talk, talk, talk. An epitaph echoing.”

  “Fine, let’s go.” Keles bent over and dug at a stone. “You want stones, you want to earn stones, let’s go. I’ll match you stone for stone.”

  The Viruk laughed. “This is not a fight you can win.”

  “But it’s the best fight I have, until they come.”

  Fury and shame raced through Keles, coloring his cheeks. He ripped stones from the earth and staggered to the walls with them. He shrugged off attempts to help him carry them. He placed a stone and twisted it, fitting it to those below tightly, then returned for another, again and again.

  Rekarafi matched him, stone for stone, curse for curse, harsh laugh for harsh laugh. They laughed at how silly they looked, caked with dust and streaked with sweat. They laughed at the Eyeless Ones who couldn’t see how hard they labored at a futile task. They laughed at their own mortality.

  And yet somewhere within the futility and defiance, a thought took root in Keles’ heart. One more stone. One more stone. Somewhere there was a stone, the stone, the stone that would make the defense work. The stone that would hold the enemy back, the stone that would turn a sword or crush a head and break the back of the enemy advance. There would be a stone worth nine men or nine times nine.

  All around him the others began to work anew, as if his energy rejuvenated them. Though they had already worked themselves to the point of death, they rallied and worked harder. Those who fell were pulled aside, given water and revived, while others stepped up and accepted their burdens. A few did die, and a few others were too exhausted to continue working, but most returned to the construction with a few minutes’ rest.

  Someone began to sing. It was a simple song, an old song normally sung by farmers as they plowed their fields and cast aside rocks. The song spoke of their battles against weather and insects. The irony of it all prompted laughter, which people spun into singing even louder. As long as the song kept going, so would they.

  After nightfall, as the clouds rolled in to hide the stars and moons, Keles himself collapsed. He wasn’t aware of when he’d gone down or how long he had been unconscious. He realized he was dreaming when he heard thunder crack and echo through his skull. He opened his eyes and found himself in the bottom of a pit.

  It’s a grave.

  People passed by him on both sides. Lightning flashes revealed their faces. Some people he recognized from among the refugees even though their skulls had been crushed or faces slashed open. The children were the worst, for the wounds left by spears and sword were so much bigger. As each of them passed by they opened a hand above him and released a stone.

  A black stone.

  Ghoal nuan. Damnation stones!

  He struggled to escape the grave, but he couldn’t move. He couldn’t breathe. Lightning flashed again and Rekarafi dropped a huge black stone in that smashed his legs. Majiata tossed another black stone. His brother and sister, his mother, uncle, and grandfather also pelted him. Even his father, shrouded in silhouette, gave him a black stone.

  Then Tyressa came, and with her Jasai. Worse than the stones they cast were the looks of pity. They mourned not only the loss of their lives and his, but the loss of what their lives could have produced together.

  Thunder exploded again and rain began to pelt down. He raised a hand to wipe his face and opened his eyes again. Cold rain hit him. Fat, heavy drops exploded on stones. In the backlight of lightning he saw everyone surrounding him still working, though the song had died and the rain was beginning to erode their strength.

  Not yet half-awake, Keles rolled onto his stomach and began to claw at the midden that had once been the fortress’ central tower. “One more stone, one more stone, one more stone . . .” He tore at the dirt with his fingers, cast aside rocks and handfuls of mud. The rain splashed a ragged edge clean and he dug his fingers in.

  He tore at the rock and his hands slipped. Flesh ripped. “One more stone, one more stone.” This was it. It was the stone. He was sure of it. Once he had it, they would all be saved.

  But it would not come up. More rain revealed that the crack ran several feet, then turned across a clean edge. The stone he was trying to pull free would have filled the grave he awoke in. He could no more have moved it than he could have felled a moon by throwing a rock.

  “But it is the stone!”

  He pounded his fists against it as he screamed into the storm. Blood and tears and rain stained it, then flowed into the crack. He screwed his eyes shut and clenched his teeth, screaming louder to defy the storm. He hammered the stone harder than the rain and felt the distant pain of bones breaking.

  It wasn’t right.

  It was the stone!

  In his mind’s eye he could see where the stone belonged, where all the stones belonged. Tsatol Pelyn lived, incarnated again in all its glory. Towers tall, pennants snapping, its promise undiminished as the Empress and her heroes rode past toward Ixyll. The garrison stood tall on stout walls, sunlight reflected from the moat. It would take hours for her army to pass, but no man or woman would waver or turn away. Always alert, always ready, those defending Tsatol Pelyn would never be defeated.

  Yes, this is how it must be. If Tsatol Pelyn were once again what it had been in its youth, we would not die!

  Thunder crashed again and again, but the quality of it changed, muting and echoing. Wind whistled and shrieked, then something snapped above him. Keles looked up through rain-blinded eyes, then wiped them and stared again.

  Pennants snapped on the tower above him. He knelt on a walled parapet. He pressed his hands flat to the stone, ignoring the pain of fractured bones sliding against each other. It seemed solid enough, and the pain meant he wasn’t dreaming. He scrambled to his feet and rushed to the parapet’s edge, to look out.

  Tsatol Pelyn had been born anew. The moat had been hollowed and the rain struggled to fill it. The walls, which had just been rubble middens, again stood tall and strong. Towers had risen at the eastern corners and the west, and he stood in the tallest of them all. The handful of ministry warriors ran up to the top of the eastern wall, and Rekarafi laughed defiantly from atop the northeast tower.

  And beyond, the Eyeless Ones came. The uniform tramp of their feet rivaled the thunder. Lightning flashes moved them forward in jerks, closer, ever closer, with their hindmost ranks still hidden by distance.

  Keles clutched the stone. This is not enough! The fortress is wor
thless without its garrison. We must have the garrison.

  A sheet of rain whipped across his face, driving him back and blinding him. He shook his head to clear his vision, then stepped up to the parapet’s edge again. He narrowed his eyes against the rain, and though it washed away his vision more often than not, he clearly saw what was happening below.

  The adults stood, some frightened, some resigned, staring up at him. As lightning strobed they changed. They shed years as a snake sheds skin. Twenty, thirty, forty, and even fifty years sloughed off, returning them to their prime, when they were hale and hearty, brimming with courage, determination, and confident in their immortality. Hair darkened, bodies thickened and shrank, straightened, and gap-toothed smiles became whole again.

  As they held their arms out, mail sheathed them. Gauntlets materialized, and breastplates and helmets. Fierce battle masks covered their faces, armor covered their legs. Spears and swords filled hands. Bows appeared, as did quivers of arrows.

  And then the children rose. They pulled on the years their elders had discarded. As if wearing adult raiment, they looked odd for a moment, then they began to grow into those years. They sprouted up and muscles thickened. Childish softness hardened into angular adulthood. Armor wrapped them and implements of war came to hand.

  They followed their elders to the walls, and awaited the Eyeless Ones.

  The invaders came undaunted. Perhaps they imagined they were a wave that would wash over a lowly sand castle. No dismay registered as they began their descent into the moat or had to scramble up the other side. Mindless as well as blind, they crawled over each other, rising higher and higher to find the top of the wall.

  Arrows slashed down at them, twisting them around with the force of impact. Following commands that Jasai shouted above the wind, the archers drew as one and shot. Whole ranks of dead and dying Eyeless Ones wilted and thrashed.

  Still their companions tromped over them, climbing ever higher, only to be met with spear thrusts that toppled them down into the pit.

  Yet other Eyeless Ones pressed on and their line wrapped the fortress’ perimeter. They came at it from all sides, and here and there they reached the top of the wall. A sword cut would spin a warrior away, making room for another blind and another.

  Tyressa whirled into the battle, a blur of black and silver. She spun her spear over her head, slashing down through one blind, then shattering another’s skull with the weapon’s butt end. That blind arced back over the wall into the darkness. She swept two others from the edge, then stood there defiantly, challenging blinds to attack.

  Rekarafi proved no less magnificent. He leaped from his tower and scattered five blinds that had gained the wall below him. His claws flashed, shredding their flesh. Keles winced as sympathetic pain rippled up the scars on his back. Rekarafi grabbed one of the blinds at hip and throat and raised it above his head. He bowed the creature’s spine, then touched its shoulders to hips with a sharp crack.

  Still, it is not enough. Keles spat down into the courtyard. Tsatol Pelyn is not yet complete.

  Yet uncertain as to what was happening, Keles stalked around to the western side of the tower and gazed at the dug-out canal. It had once been eighteen feet across and half that deep, but the digging had only produced a shallow, three-foot-wide track. He’d seen deeper wheel ruts on a road.

  He closed his eyes, picturing the canal as it must have been. He saw it on the day the workers cleared the last bit of dirt. Water from the river pushed at the thin wall. The earth darkened, then crumbled, dissolving into a thick mud that the rush of water carried into the moat. He watched the water pour into the moat in a torrent, a fast-moving torrent that filled it quickly, washing away the Eyeless Ones, collapsing their pyramids of bodies.

  He pictured it in his mind and merged that image with reality. His body tingled as he forced reality to surrender to the image. As the fortress had been made whole, as the people had become the garrison, so the ditch would become the canal and it would be enough.

  And so it was.

  The water roared, leaping and foaming. It pushed a wall of mud with it that swept through the moat. Tumbling rocks shattered legs. Eyeless Ones pitched from the walls and disappeared in the roiling black water. Almost as if they had been made of mud themselves, the Eyeless Ones melted as they bobbed to the surface.

  Yet even this did not wholly stop them. One of the four-armed creatures leaped the moat and scrambled to the top of the wall. He scattered warriors with flicks of his hands, then rushed at Rekarafi. He roared furiously, and the Viruk matched his battle cry. People between them leaped to the courtyard below.

  As strong as the invader was, he lacked the Viruk’s speed. The two upper arms slashed harmlessly above Rekarafi’s head. The Viruk caught the creature’s lower arms by the wrists, then yanked. Ligaments popped as the arms tore free. The creature, stricken, looked down, then the Viruk battered it to death with its own arms.

  The battle for Tsatol Pelyn raged long into the night, and only broke when the storm slackened. The moat had become a swamp of dead blinds. Some human corpses bobbed there, but remarkably few given the ferocity of the fighting. As the clouds parted and the first faint dawn glow painted the eastern horizon gold, the blinds had withdrawn toward Felarati and every defender of Tsatol Pelyn knew they would not return.

  Chapter Fifty-six

  3rd day, Month of the Hawk, Year of the Rat

  Last Year of Imperial Prince Cyron’s Court

  163rd Year of the Komyr Dynasty

  737th year since the Cataclysm

  Wentokikun, Moriande

  Nalenyr

  The gnawing of the maggots in his arm kept Cyron awake. He had never wanted them sewn into his flesh, but the infection had gotten worse. He’d been feverish, and the Viruk ambassador had said that if he did not do something, he could lose the arm. Afraid and weak, delirious, he’d let Geselkir, under the Viruk’s watchful eye, plant the squirming white worms in his arm and sew the wound closed.

  And now he could hear them chewing and devouring him. He’d taken to naming them. Pyrust, Vniel, Turcol, invaders, Vroan. The last had been voracious and would not stop. Vroan was eating his way through Cyron’s system, to his heart, then to his brain. The Prince knew this as certainly as he knew it was night and that both he and his realm would likely be dead in the morning.

  He had done all he could, he knew that, but he had been pulled in so many directions. As much as he had expected and feared invasion from the north, the destruction of Erumvirine had just not been something he anticipated. Had the Virine ever cast lustful eyes north, he would have had time to react and to crush their ambitions. He might not have been a military man, but the Virine believed themselves invincible because of their Imperial heritage.

  Cold comfort in the grave now, I imagine, Prince Jekusmirwyn. The Telanyn Dynasty surely had to be dead. Even if the Prince had gotten any of his children out of Kelewan, no one who forced the invaders from Erumvirine would ever put a Telanyn back on the throne. I would not have.

  As he had done many times in his fever, Cyron ran over the events of the past months and years, seeking that point where he went wrong. There had to be one, just a simple one, a little mistake that just began to compound in ways he could not have anticipated. But he couldn’t see one. He had hoped to rebuild the Empire peacefully through exploration and trade. He hoped others would be persuaded to reunite the Empire without bloodshed. True, he did want it reunited under a Komyr Emperor, but wanted it for the benefit of all.

  That ate at him the most. Had he been coldhearted, he could have let the people of Deseirion starve. Had he done that, Pyrust would have been forced to launch an invasion, but his army would have marched on an empty belly. They would have been broken against the Helos Mountains. Naleni forces could have liberated Helosunde, then taken Deseirion. He would have come with food for all, would have shared the wealth of his nation. He would have made life better for them.

  But that was not to be. It was a
future that would not be realized because he could not have allowed them to starve.

  Unbidden came the thought of the Stormwolf expedition. Since Qiro Anturasi’s departure, he had learned nothing of what they had accomplished. He feared the fleet had met with disaster—a fitting end since he launched it, and clearly his other efforts had been disasters. Then again, the brave men and women who had undertaken that bold adventure deserved better than to be devoured by sharks.

  He wondered for a moment if they had found the continent of Anturasixan. It had been drawn in Qiro’s own blood! The thought of the map dripping blood, and the legend “Here there be monsters,” sent a shiver through him. It dawned on him then that Qiro was the author of the troubles in Erumvirine, and somehow this did not wholly surprise him.

  The man had ample reasons to be angry with Nalenyr. The Komyr Princes had kept him a prisoner in Anturasikun once he had returned from his unsuccessful journey to Ixyll so long ago. The aggressive exploration urged upon him had cost him his son. A murderer stalking Moriande had butchered his granddaughter. Cyron himself had denied the man the chance to walk free to celebrate his eighty-first birthday, and the needs of the state had demanded both his grandsons be sent into the unknown.

  Keles and Jorim. In some ways it would be best if they were both dead. Cyron twisted and flopped in bed, trying to find a comfortable position, but every little jostle jolted pain up his arm. He sat up, cradling the burning limb in his lap and panting as sweat stung his eyes.

  What a changed world they would return to. He would no longer be on the throne. Cyron laughed weakly. Who would be on the throne he couldn’t tell. He was certain Vroan would wiggle his ass into the Dragon Throne, but it would only be for a little while. The invaders would come north and Vroan couldn’t oppose them. He would move to try it, though, and Pyrust would sweep in from the north.

  The Hawk will perch on my throne after all. He sighed and licked cracked lips. “Perhaps that will be for the best.”

  His shoulders slumped and a lump formed in his throat. Staring into the darkness he saw his nation laid waste by war. All that had been golden and green became red and black, awash in blood, smoldering. And Moriande, his white city, gone; towers broken like teeth, walls shattered, and streets echoing with the anguished cries of mourners.