The Summon Stone

by Ian Irvine

  She would force him to choose, and either way it would be a disaster.

  60

  THE BROKEN SABRE

  “You’re holding out on me!” said Thandiwe as the sun rose. “You know something about Mendark that you’re not saying, and I’m going to find out what it is.”

  Llian clenched his fist in his pocket. She had been at him from the moment they rode out the gates, trying to wear him down. The technique was infuriatingly familiar by now and he was not going to give her the pleasure.

  Despite their situation he could hardly keep his eyes open. Last night’s telling had lasted for five hours and he had put his soul into it. Snoat had been right about him: even believing he was going to die when it was done, Llian could do no less than the best telling his enemy had ever heard. It had been utterly draining, especially the abrupt truncation of the tale only minutes before its completion, which had left the ending recycling through his mind. Normally after such a performance he would have slept for sixteen hours. Now, with the lack of sleep and the traumas of the night, he was practically climbing the wall.

  Thandiwe started in on him again, and Llian snapped.

  “This is why you’ll never be a great teller,” he said venomously. “You go on and on and on until everyone is bored out of their wits.”

  Her mouth closed with a snap and she gave him a look that would have melted brass.

  “And you’re utterly and offensively insensitive,” he added, jerking his head towards Wilm.

  He sat bolt upright in the saddle, so rigid that he might have frozen solid, holding Dajaes’s body in his arms. Wilm had wept until his tear ducts ran dry and his bloodshot eyes squeaked when he blinked. His thin face was swollen and his knuckles were chewed almost to the bone.

  Llian could not bear to witness his grief. How much worse must it be for Wilm, a lad of just seventeen? To have found such a girl; to have worked with her for a week on an utterly impossible project, and pulled it off magnificently; to have loved her, then lost her to the casual malice of a vicious brute. Llian could not have endured it; he would have tried to claw down the heavens.

  They were leagues north of Chanthed, travelling across a dry, sparsely grassed plain in the direction he knew the salt lake megaliths to be. Thandiwe, her face like stone, galloped off. Llian nudged his horse up alongside Wilm.

  “I never thanked you or Dajaes.”

  Wilm stifled a howl.

  “I wish I’d known her,” said Llian. “She must have been a wonderful girl.”

  “She was the nicest, smartest, sweetest woman who ever drew breath,” said Wilm, almost choking, “and she loved your Great Tale. Dajaes thought it was the greatest story ever written, and the moment she heard about your troubles she had to save you. It was her idea to dig the tunnel, and she had to do all the work. I’m useless underground; I panic.”

  “Yet you overcame it.”

  “I just carried the dirt. She did the hard work and the clever stuff.”

  “If you hadn’t whacked Snoat over the head with the decanter I’d be dead.”

  Wilm’s face went blank. He wasn’t interested in talking about himself, only about her, and who could blame him?

  “How did you meet?” said Llian.

  “She was the first student at the scholarship test. She gave the right answer, and they failed her because she’d used an old book!” he cried, outraged all over again. “I saw her at a café that night and we… became friends.”

  Wilm looked down at her still face and his own crumpled. It was awful to watch. Llian looked away, giving Wilm a few minutes to compose himself.

  Llian could not bear to cause him any more pain, but it had to be said. “Wilm,” he said gently, “we’ll have to find a place – you’ll have to find a place – to bury Dajaes.”

  Wilm’s mouth became a gash twisted by a silent scream. Llian could not tell whether the lad wanted him there or a thousand miles away, though on balance he thought he should stay close. It was the least he could do for someone who had done so much for him.

  “I know,” said Wilm after several more minutes. “It’s just… laying her in the ground makes it final. I don’t… I can’t…”

  He could not find the words. Llian, who had the vocabulary of four thousand years of the Histories at his disposal, wasn’t sure that he could express what Wilm was feeling either. Perhaps his grief was best left unarticulated.

  They rode on, and after another mile or two crossed a small rivulet running in a series of meanders like green brush strokes through the undulating brown landscape. The trees were taller along the river, the air cooler. It was a pretty place.

  “Here,” said Wilm at the foot of a gentle green rise with a view of the sandy river. He stopped, went to dismount then realised he could not do it with Dajaes in his arms. “Llian?” he croaked. “Would you take her for me?”

  Llian swallowed. In Wilm’s eyes it must have been the greatest honour he could bestow. Llian steadied himself, then reached up. Tenderly, reluctantly, Wilm lowered her and Llian took her in his arms.

  Wilm scrambled down, hit the ground with jarring force and almost collapsed. His muscles had locked from holding her, unmoving, these past four hours. He steadied himself, took her back and walked around for a minute.

  “Here,” he said, marking a spot with his heel.

  He laid Dajaes down several yards away, where he could see her, then set to work on the soft turf with Snoat’s sabre, cutting a rectangle and lifting the turf out. He attacked the exposed dirt furiously with the magnificent weapon, as if he wanted to ruin it because of his fatal inability to use it when Unick had taunted him.

  Digging a grave with a sabre was hard work, and when the hole was only a foot deep the predictable happened – the blade snapped halfway down. Wilm continued with the hilt and Llian joined him at the other end, cutting the gritty soil with his knife and ruining the edge in the process.

  So it went until the hole was four feet deep, where they hit a layer of hard clay.

  “We won’t get through that,” said Llian.

  They scooped the last of the earth out. Wilm glanced at the body, at Llian and at the hole.

  “Would you like to be alone?” said Llian.

  “No!” Wilm cried. “She did it for you. She’d want you here.”

  He strewed the yellow clay with green grass and wildflowers, gulped, knelt beside Dajaes and kissed her eyelids, then arranged her earth-stained clothes as best he could and lowered her into the hole. He remained there for some time, head and shoulders over the edge, weeping silently, then stood up and looked uncertainly at the earth pile.

  Thandiwe rode up and took in the scene in a glance. She withdrew a square of blue silk from her pack, bent and gently placed it over Dajaes’s face.

  “To keep the earth off.”

  Wilm thanked her, nodded to himself, then took a double handful of soil and allowed it to stream down on Dajaes. After she was covered with a thin layer Llian and Thandiwe joined in until the grave was full and the turf replaced. They weighed it down with cobbles from the river, then retreated. Wilm stood over the grave, his lips moving.

  He rearranged some of the cobbles and turned away. “Thank you,” he said. “If you would ride ahead now.”

  They did so. When they were a hundred yards off, Wilm let out a howl of anguish. Shortly he joined them and did not look back.

  But Llian did. Cutting off the stirrups would not delay Snoat’s guards for long, and his fear of pursuit was growing by the minute. Wilm and Dajaes had believed Snoat to be dead, but Llian had not checked to make sure. Why hadn’t he choked the swine where he lay?

  The euphoria of the telling. Every teller was familiar with the phenomenon, especially after telling one of the Great Tales. After such a towering performance it could take hours, even days to return to normality, and if the telling was abruptly cut short, as Llian’s had been, the return could take even longer. With everything that had happened afterwards, he wasn’t yet back to his
normal, analytical frame of mind.

  There was another reason why Llian hadn’t killed Snoat on the spot. It wasn’t in him to murder an unconscious man, even one who had been planning to have him killed. It was a serious defect in his own character, Llian knew, one that he would probably rue.

  If Snoat was alive, they had humiliated him in a way that no narcissist could endure. He would make it his life’s work to destroy them.

  It occurred to Llian that he had not checked on Rulke’s key for some time. He turned away from Thandiwe and surreptitiously inspected the stitching of the secret compartment in his belt. It was still sound.

  They bought food at a goat herders camp – a hindquarter of goat, a grubby round of crumbly white cheese and a bag of sprouting onions. Thandiwe respected Wilm’s grief and they rode north across the arid plains in blessed silence.

  Llian was wrestling with his unruly memories, trying to discover how Mendark’s rise to power had come about at such an early age. The Histories were so silent on the matter that he suspected they had been rewritten at Mendark’s behest.

  History is as it is written. Or rewritten – the true historian’s bane.

  But Llian’s memories would not yield up this secret. He was too exhausted.

  “Where are you going, anyway?” said Thandiwe.

  Llian jerked out of his daze. “The salt lake megaliths.”

  “What do you hope to find there? Something you can’t find at that dreary old estate with your wife and daughter?”

  He ignored the barb. He wasn’t going to give her anything she could take advantage of. He lapsed into the daze again, only to jerk awake as he began to slide sideways out of the saddle. Ahead, occasional twisted trees marked the course of a dry riverbed. He rode to the nearest tree and dismounted. Wilm did too. Thandiwe stayed on her horse.

  “I’ve got to sleep for half an hour. Wilm, can you keep watch?”

  Wilm roused himself from his dark place. He looked haggard. “Of course, Llian.”

  “No, you need sleep more than I do.”

  “Nothing could bring me sleep,” Wilm said in a cracked voice. “It’s bad enough being awake. I keep seeing it, over and over and over. Why did he do it? Dajaes had done nothing to him.”

  “He’s an evil man. And the device called Origin is linking him to the summon stone, corrupting him even more.”

  Llian sat on the dry ground, wrapped his coat around himself and focused on sleep.

  “Llian?” Wilm said tentatively.

  “Yes?”

  “Can you teach me how to use a sword?”

  Llian snorted. “You do realise who you’re talking to.”

  “In the Tale of the Mirror it says you saved Karan’s life with a sword. You fought and killed a lorrsk – a huge, savage beast that had clawed its way in from the void.”

  “So I did,” said Llian, momentarily taken back to that desperate time, “but entirely by accident. As Karan describes it, I chucked the sword at the lorrsk the way a labourer shovels manure into a cart. The blade just happened to slice into its neck and sever an artery.”

  Wilm shook his head. Clearly he thought Llian was being far too modest. “Can you teach me?”

  “Why do you want to learn?”

  “I’ve got to be able to defend the people I care about.”

  “We all should be able to do that.”

  Llian searched his memory, then got out his journal and began to write and sketch at the back. “I once read a pamphlet on the seven basic strokes of sword fighting. It’s just the elements but I suppose it’ll be better than nothing.”

  He wrote down the descriptions of the seven basic strokes and knew they were word perfect, for that was the first of a chronicler’s arts. Under each description there had been a diagram showing the movements of the stroke. Llian reproduced them as well, tore the pages out and handed them to Wilm.

  He studied them for a few minutes, nodded to himself, then began to practise strikes, thrusts and parries with the broken sabre.

  “You should wait until you have a decent sword,” said Llian. “The weight and balance will be all wrong.”

  “I’ve got to learn now,” Wilm said between his teeth. “Tomorrow could be too late.”

  61

  BAGS OF GOLD

  Wilm woke Llian after an hour. They changed horses and continued north at a fast pace, leading the spares.

  “Where’s Thandiwe?” said Llian.

  “She rode ahead.” Wilm glanced sideways at Llian. “Why is she so angry? I thought she was your friend.”

  “I thought so too, until I found out that she’s been blocking me for years, refusing to agree to my ban being overturned.”

  Wilm was outraged. “Why would she do that?”

  “Perhaps she got sick of doing the right thing and getting nowhere.”

  “What kind of a person would betray a friend!”

  “I suppose she saw me as a threat. But that’s not why she’s angry.”

  He told Wilm about the election for Wistan’s replacement, and how he, Llian, had made the disastrous decision to give his vote to Norp instead of Thandiwe.

  “How could you have done otherwise?” said Wilm. “You could never vote for someone you knew to be corrupt.”

  He saw things in black and white, but it wasn’t that simple. If only Llian had voted for Thandiwe… But it was no use following that train of thought.

  They rode on.

  “What’s at these megaliths?” Wilm asked after they had gone several more miles. Then, hastily, “Sorry, you don’t have to tell me.”

  “You saved my life,” said Llian. “I’m happy to tell you. Though I’d prefer you didn’t say anything to Thandiwe.”

  “Not even if she tortures me.”

  “I think Mendark might have known about the summon stone.”

  “Known what?”

  “Where it is. Where it came from. How the drumming works.”

  “I’d like to learn mancery,” said Wilm.

  Llian looked at him in surprise. “I thought you wanted to study at the college?”

  “I haven’t got the heart for it any more. Dajaes so wanted to be a teller, and she would have been a good one.” He rubbed his eyes. “But if I became a mancer…”

  Wilm was flailing around, trying to find his place in the world, but mancery wasn’t it. “You’ve got to have the gift,” Llian said kindly, “and a gift for mancery isn’t common. Have you ever done anything strange or inexplicable?”

  “No. My life was very boring until I met you.”

  “Does your mother have a gift?”

  “I wouldn’t think so. She’s had a very hard life, and surely if she had—”

  “What about your father?”

  “I don’t know anything about him,” Wilm snapped. “And I don’t want to. He never gave us so much as a holey grint!”

  “Does he know he has a son?” Llian said mildly.

  Wilm didn’t answer. Llian did not pursue the topic.

  “Do you think there could be a magical talisman in Mendark’s cache?” Wilm said later.

  “I don’t know what he kept in his caches, apart from bags of gold.”

  “Bags of gold!” Wilm sighed. “In my entire life I’ve never seen a gold tell.”

  “Don’t expect too much. Not all caches are full of treasure.”

  They rode on across a tussocky brown plain. A chilly wind came up, blowing from the south. Llian pulled his collar up over the back of his neck. Wilm was practising moves with the broken sabre again. Llian did not see the point.

  Yet the lad had to make his way in the world, and it would help with his grief if he were actively doing something to protect the people he cared about. A lesson he, Llian, would do well to emulate. He had to find the summon stone, fast.

  “Wow!” said Wilm.

  The diamond-shaped standing stones, three times the height of a tall man, had been cut from red and black ironstone, presumably from the low range of hills called the Iron
stones further on. They were arranged in the shape of a figure eight about three hundred yards long and half as wide, with the tallest stones being where the lines crossed. Each loop of the eight contained two smaller concentric loops. Some of the stones had fallen and a number of the others were tilted.

  At the centre of the figure eight the ground dipped down into a stone-lined reservoir sixty feet across and shaped like a saucer, presumably so stock could water at it safely even when the level was low, as now. The stones ran down through the water. They led the horses down to drink and filled their water bottles.

  The country was dry, the vegetation restricted to scattered tussocks of grey grass and the occasional stunted multi-trunked tree with small blue-grey leaves. Between the stones and the hills the westering sun struck dazzles off a thumb-shaped salt lake a couple of miles long.

  “Do you want me to unsaddle the horses?” said Wilm.

  Llian looked back, wondering why there was no sign of pursuit. And where had Thandiwe gone? She had been remarkably quiet since Dajaes’s burial. She was up to something.

  “No, we might need to leave in a hurry.”

  “Who built the megaliths?”

  “Nobody knows.”

  “Why not?”

  “We know they’re more than eight thousand years old because they’re mentioned in the oldest written records from Meldorin. But how old, no one can tell.”

  “There’s an awful lot of them. How are you going to find the cache?”

  “Tallia said it’s at the inner base of the tall squared-off stone in the outer line of stones.”

  They walked around the figure eight. There were dozens of squared-off standing stones among hundreds that were unfinished. However only two stones in the outer line had been squared off, and one was stumpy, the top having broken off long ago.

  Llian headed for the other, which was shaped like an obelisk. The stone was two yards across at the base. Using his knife, he gouged at the grey earth, which was littered with flat pieces of ironstone. He worked his knife a foot into the ground, almost to the hilt, and struck something hard. Llian thumped the hilt with the heel of his hand. The knife went no further.