Circles of Stone

by Ian Johnstone

Triste gave a wheezing laugh. “I’m not sure I’d call it rest, exactly,” he said, fixing her with his bloodshot eyes. “Dreams … strange dreams.” He frowned as he remembered. “Or perhaps … perhaps they weren’t dreams at all.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Sylas.

  The Scryer sipped at his water and shook his head. “All that darkness – all those shapes in the blackness, flowing from it …” His eyes snapped up. “It was the Black, I’m sure of it. It was as though … as though, with that chill in my veins, with that darkness in my heart, I could see it for what it was.” He looked down and shook his head again. “No, no that’s not it. I could see through it. I’m sure of it … I could—”

  Simia leaned forward and said softly: “Perhaps you should get some more rest before you—”

  “No!” snapped Triste. “You need to know what I saw!” He turned his eyes to them both, agitated now. “He was using it … using the Black to span the void, to speak across seas and mountains and deserts … impossible distances …”

  “Who?” asked Sylas.

  “Thoth!” cried Triste, his eyes wide. “I couldn’t see him, but I could hear him. And he wasn’t alone. The Black brought him his generals, his priests – the leaders of the four lands! They were all gathered together, feeding on the Black … sustained by it …” His face slackened and he seemed to lose focus, drifting back into his nightmare.

  Sylas leaned forward. “What were they doing, Triste?”

  “Preparing for war.”

  Sylas and Simia stiffened.

  “What … what kind of war?” breathed Sylas.

  The Scryer turned to him, his features dark and sorrowful. “A war to end all wars. A war of worlds.”

  Icy fingers crept up Sylas’s back. “No …”

  Triste nodded grimly.

  “A war between this world and … and mine?” asked Sylas, the breath leaving his lungs.

  “I fear so.”

  “But why? What’s my world ever done to him?”

  “Does Thoth need a reason for anything?” muttered Simia defiantly, but she too had grown terribly pale.

  Triste took another sip of his water. “And yet, if you think about it,” he said, “Thoth has every reason to attack your world. Here his power is unrivalled, his empire stretching to the very borders of the four lands. But beyond those borders, beyond the great divide between our worlds, he has no control. No dominion. And there –” a little of the sparkle returned to Triste’s eyes – “there he faces a foe greater than any he might have met before, a foe whose science reaches up into the skies and down into the seas: a foe with power beyond imagining.”

  “So why start a war?” asked Simia. “It makes no sense.”

  Triste coughed as he tried to drink some more water and hunched over to regain his breath. “Think about it,” he said finally. “For many years we’ve suspected that Thoth’s war on the Suhl was only ever about the Other, that the Suhl’s only crime was that we control that final border – the border between the worlds. That was enough to make him wage war on everything that we are. That’s how much he fears your world. We were never the threat. The Other – that’s what he’s afraid of!”

  “But why attack the Other if he fears it?” pressed Simia.

  Sylas had been listening with growing horror. “Because of me,” he said.

  Triste lifted his eyes and looked at him. Sylas could see the pity in his eyes. “I’m afraid so,” he said. “You have made the threat very real. And not just by coming here. Thoth knows Merisu’s prophecy, and that if it is true, you will one day—”

  “—bring the two worlds together,” finished Sylas, staring into the embers.

  Simia looked from one to the other. “And so … so Thoth thinks he has nothing to lose!”

  “And everything, everything to gain,” said Triste. “A whole new world of treasures and possibilities and powers and …” he trailed off, seeming reluctant to continue.

  “And … what?” asked Sylas.

  Triste’s features darkened. “In my dream, Thoth spoke of the worlds as an upper and a lower kingdom, as in ancient times. A kingdom of the strong, and one of the weak. One for the rulers and one for the ruled.”

  Sylas’s stomach turned. “Slaves …” he said.

  Images whirled through his mind: images of his own world, of the things that he had always thought would go on forever. Suddenly they seemed so distant, so frail. Because of him. He saw busy streets bustling with cars and people, children playing in parks, the lively comings and goings of Gabblety Row. He thought of his friends in the terrace – Sam Clump the locksmith, Mr Buntague the Baker – and for a moment he even thought of his mean-spirited Uncle Tobias, hunched over his desk, lost in his world of ledgers and balances and numbers with no idea that it could all come crashing down. He thought of the kindly Mr Zhi in his wonderful Shop of Things. But finally, painfully, he saw that precious, sepia-tinted memory of his mother, the memory he had kept so close and that, over the past few days, had started to feel so alive and real once more … so possible…

  What would happen to her now? Would Naeo ever be able to find her? And if she did, would she be in time?

  Triste watched him closely and seemed to see his thoughts. “You have to go,” he said resolutely. “You have to go right now! Find Isia, find out what she knows, and then do what you have to before it’s too late! Time is up against us, more than we thought.”

  Suddenly Sylas remembered the song in the Samarok, Isia’s Song: “Our hope quickly won will die in one moon,” he murmured.

  “Yes!” said Triste. “And that’s why you have to go!”

  “You mean we,” interjected Simia, looking from Sylas to Triste. “We have to go.”

  The Scryer smiled and shook his head. “No, I won’t be coming. Look at me, I’m a mess. I’ll stay here until I have the—”

  “No, you won’t!” cried Simia, horrified. “You can’t! The … the Kraven! They’ll be back as soon as it gets dark!”

  “Not if I have enough firewood to keep me going.”

  Simia gawped in disbelief. “But you’re too weak to be alone!”

  “I’m not, Simsi, but I am too weak to walk across the Barrens. At best I’ll slow you down and at worst I won’t make it at all. You have to go on alone.”

  “It is a warming thought, that each of us has another home in another world.”

  SIMIA LOOKED AT SYLAS, then back at the Scryer. “What if I stay with you and Sylas goes on alone?”

  Sylas shot her an anxious glance but nodded. “Yes, I’m sure I could—”

  “NO!” insisted Triste. “You need all the help you can get. You both have to remember why we’re here, and now more than ever. You must reach the Temple of Isia, for all our sakes.”

  Sylas and Simia looked at each other helplessly. This seemed so wrong, so cruel, but as hard as they tried, neither could think of any other way.

  “We’re wasting time,” said Triste. “If Naeo has made the passing as planned, things are already unfolding. You need to get on.”

  There was another pause.

  “Sylas, tell me you’ll go!” snapped Triste, wincing with the exertion.

  Sylas lifted his eyes and let out a sigh. “I suppose we don’t have a choice.”

  Simia glared at him, but he knew she wasn’t angry – she was blaming herself. He held her gaze for a moment and soon she looked away.

  They ate a sombre, meagre breakfast, talking through what they were going to do. Afterwards Simia gathered up the belongings that had been strewn about the previous evening and moved some provisions between the packs, then began digging a proper fire pit. Sylas went off foraging for firewood. It was so much easier by the light of day, and he was soon carrying a decent haul of dry and almost-dry wood.

  He gathered three loads, and each time he returned to camp Simia had made more and more progress with the fire pit. She was engrossed in her task, her hair matted with sweat. This pit would be deeper and better than any s
he had dug before. Triste tried to tell her to slow down, that that bank did not need to be that high, that the pit need not be so broad or so deep, but she was not listening. It was as important to her as it was to him.

  Before long she was putting the final touches to the earthen ring and Sylas was packing the wood around the outside, so that Triste would be able to reach it easily but it would be well away from the flames. Then he checked on Triste.

  If anything the Scryer looked worse. He was propped up against the bank, his eyes half closed and a faint wheeze passing his lips. Sylas rekindled the fire, placed a small pan of water over it to brew some tea, and adjusted the blankets.

  As he handed Triste the cup their eyes met.

  “Tell me,” said the Scryer. “Do you still feel her? Naeo – do you know she’s still … there? Now she’s gone?”

  “Yes, I think so,” he said. “I know that she made it.”

  The Scryer nodded. “I can’t see a connection,” he said, taking a sip of tea, “but I’m sure it’s still there. It must be good to know that she’s with everything that matters: your own world, your town, your home …”

  Sylas realised that the Scryer was right. Even now, the thought of Naeo – the sense of her – was strangely consoling. It gave him hope. He allowed himself to think of her drawing near to the town – perhaps even there already, walking up to the tumbledown terrace of Gabblety Row, peering in the window of The Shop of Things. And for an instant he felt that in some curious way he might be there himself, opening that door of possibilities once again. And then he had another thought that was more hopeful still. He felt a flicker of warmth in his stomach, a stirring of excitement.

  Perhaps, just perhaps, she was near her now. Near his mother.

  All this Triste saw in Sylas with his tired, failing sight. He saw the exquisite wisp of belief and the faint flicker of a half-formed hope. He witnessed the searing red glow of a son’s love for his mother.

  He reached out and took Sylas by the wrist, his fingers closing around the Merisi Band. “Not far now, Sylas,” he said. “Not far now.”

  Sylas drew a long deep breath. “Perhaps,” he said.

  The Scryer’s eyes were still at work. They saw the slightest trace of something else, something he had not seen before: a trail of silver that left Sylas and headed off into the nothingness, disappearing into a place he could only guess at.

  Triste frowned. He closed his eyes and tried to open his mind to it, but the more he tried the more indistinct it became.

  Even as he reached for it, it was gone.

  The ‘Closed’ sign slapped against the glass of the door as it shut behind them. They stood in the gloom of the dusty interior, listening to the off-key chime of the shop’s bell. Their eyes wandered over the high piles of crates and parcels arranged in haphazard rows trailing off into the dark recesses of The Shop of Things. The crooked glass behind them sprayed the room with the contorted rays of sunset, flooding it with sepia tones, like an old photograph.

  “It’s a weird old place, Gabblety Row,” said Tasker in a low voice. “Stuck in a time of its own. It’s almost like time leaks out of it …”

  Ash scoffed. “Leaks where?”

  Tasker turned to him and arched an eyebrow. “I don’t know. Somewhere between the worlds, perhaps.” He took a sharp breath then added breezily: “Anyway, come on! No time for the tour! Mr Zhi’s rooms are upstairs,” he said, strolling off between the nearest stacks.

  He led them through the extraordinary Things towards the back of the shop. While the majority were still sealed inside their parcels, some lay half unpacked in their crates, offering a tantalising sample of the shop’s wares: Things of wood and glass and iron, Things of colour and of grey, oblong Things and spherical Things, large Things and Things as small as a fingernail. At the end of one row, Naeo saw what looked like a plant erupting from the straw of a crate, unfurling leaves of parchment upon which were written thousands of rows of tiny runes and scripts. She desperately wanted to stop and try to read it, but Tasker and Ash had already disappeared. She tore her eyes away and ran to catch up.

  The Shop of Things was just as magical as Sylas had said and suddenly she was struck by a thought of Sylas, here, in this peculiar shop, among these very wonders. How strange it was to think that he had been here just a few days ago, before she had summoned the bell. And what a thought, that this dilapidated building had been his home for all those years, the years that she had been in the Dirgheon. It wasn’t that the building itself seemed out of place – in fact it seemed almost familiar. It was more the peculiar sense that by being here, she was looking back in time, back across the years of Sylas’s life. And in a way, her life.

  When she reached the back of the shop they were waiting for her next to a door.

  Tasker looked impatient. “Are you with us, Princess?”

  “Why do you keep calling me that?” she asked, irritated.

  “No reason!” he muttered before darting through the door and climbing the staircase beyond.

  “Take it as a compliment,” said Ash with a shrug. “He barely speaks to me at all.”

  As they climbed the crooked stairs, the sound of string music met their ears. It was a beautiful ebb and flow of notes played by a single instrument, rising up the scale only to tumble back down again, settling like leaves before being caught up once more and sent skywards. It soon filled their ears, though it was resonant rather than loud, reverberating in the old timbers of the building.

  Just as they were nearing the door at the top of the stairs, Naeo’s blood ran cold.

  She knew that sound: the dulcet notes, the sustained sound of horsehair against gut, the occasional squeak as a finger slid down a fingerboard.

  It was the sound of Thoth at play.

  “Mr Zhi wears the power of kings as lightly as a gossamer crown. For him, wisdom is just to think or speak; miracles are just to do.”

  NAEO EDGED UP THE stairs, hardly breathing.

  Tasker’s demeanour, meanwhile, had changed. His usual boldness seemed to ebb away so that he returned to his rightful size. His arms fell to his sides, his shoulders slumped a little, his movements became smaller and more careful. He lifted his hand to the door, hesitated for a briefest of moments, then knocked. He paused and then went in.

  The music flooded into the staircase, echoing down the tight passageway far more loudly than Naeo had thought possible for a single cello. She shrank away until Ash reached back and drew her into the amber glow.

  She stepped into a large room lit by several windows at either end. At the very centre, an elaborately embroidered rug had been laid on the floor, upon which sat a small old man, his legs crossed with surprising suppleness, his head bowed in concentration. He was dressed in a rather crumpled, dowdy old grey suit, which combined with his littleness to make him easy to overlook. The only distinctive features of his dress were his slump of a green hat and the length of fabric hanging from his neck, both of which were a bright green. Neither went with the suit.

  Naeo could not see his face – his head remained bowed as he listened to the music – but she knew at once who it was, and the thought sent a shiver down her spine.

  Mr Zhi.

  There he was, sitting right there, on the floor. She cocked her head on one side. For such a great man, he seemed beguilingly slight and humble. In fact on the face of it, there was nothing particularly remarkable about him at all.

  When he showed no sign of acknowledging their arrival, her eyes started to drift around the room. At one end, between two windows, was the smallest tree (or at least, the smallest fully grown tree) that Naeo had ever seen. Despite its size, it looked as twisted and gnarled as an ancient oak, leaning a little to one side as though it had begun to stoop with old age. Nevertheless, its miniature leaves seemed very much alive, quivering and vibrating with the music, dancing to its melodies.

  Then she saw why – on either side of it, two narrow black oblongs were inexplicably alive with notes and chords
. It was only then that she realised that they were in fact the source of the music, as though two tiny cellos, along with tiny bows and tiny cellists, were somehow crammed inside.

  Ash too was staring at the oblongs, his eyes full of wonder. “Science!” he said, in a reverent tone. “The Fifth Way!”

  Still the music played, building now to a crescendo. This was like no music she had heard Thoth play: it was beautiful and heartrending, simple but evocative – and she realised that she could no more think of Thoth when she listened to this than she could imagine Mr Zhi in the Dirgheon. The instrument may have been the same, but here, in Mr Zhi’s rooms, it expressed something utterly different, something that filled her with hope.

  Her eyes passed along the many bookshelves, crammed with volumes of all shapes and sizes. These were unlike the usual drab cloth and leather bindings she knew from the great collections of the Scribes: these were bright and various. The shelves were a celebration, alive with possibility and knowledge, brimming with the fascinating words of this astonishing world. How she wanted to take a look. She was considering walking over when suddenly the music came to an end. The strains of the cello fell to a single low note that hung in the air, then lifted to a final chord.

  All at once and apparently without any effort, Mr Zhi rose to his feet. He did not put down a hand or even uncross his legs. He simply rose, smoothed down his rumpled suit and smiled.

  “Please forgive my meditations,” he said, cheerfully. “When I heard your news I felt the need for a little Bach. He settles my spirits. Welcome! Welcome!”

  He went first to Naeo, holding out his hand, upon which she now noticed a beautifully embroidered velvet glove in the same shade of green as his hat and necktie. As she reached to take his hand, he slipped his fingers forward a little and she felt them brush the Merisi Band. His eyes twinkled.

  “I am Mr Zhi,” he said with a smile, his eyes full of warmth and welcome.

  “I’m Naeo,” she said, finding herself unusually nervous. “Naeo Bowe.”

  Mr Zhi raised his eyebrows. “Welcome, daughter of Bowe. Your father is a fine man, I hear. Perhaps it is he who taught you your love of books?” His eyes shifted to his bookshelves.