Stonewiser

by Dora Machado

  “I'm not sure what will happen,” she said to the keeper. “It could be dangerous. It could be deadly.”

  “We couldn't make them go if we wanted to,” the keeper said. “It's their right to live or die by the domes. Do as you must. So will we.”

  Damn the Hounds’ rights. They shouldn't be there. But Sariah knew of no way to persuade them to leave, and a cursory glance at her bracelet reminded her she didn't have time to waste. Courage's link was at the top, as if the goddess's sister was urging her on. She picked up a game piece from the bag. Carefully, she set a little snake, bottom first, into the outermost gap. It fit perfectly.

  The coiled snake sparkled to life. It fused to the geode seamlessly, as if it had always belonged there. One by one, with deliberate care, she fit all the pieces in place. Something nipped at her mind each time. She could feel the energy gathering in the stone, the void reaching out to draw from her strength. She had a sense of loss, knowing that with each snake and scorpion she yielded, she was forsaking the stones that had led her to the Bastions.

  At last all the gaming pieces but one were in place. She had to chuckle at the stone's eerie grin. A mouthful of snakes and scorpions. Who by the rot pits thought of that?

  The botched scorpion was the last one. Only one slot remained at the hollow center. Sariah noticed something strange then, something that had been concealed by the light's refraction on the surrounding crystal. There was a portion missing. She didn't think it was nature's work. It was a clean, straight-edged extraction. Precision was a human trait. Would the wising work with a piece of the stone missing? Was it a provision or an omission?

  Nothing to do but try. The light gained brilliancy as she pressed the botched scorpion into place.

  The geode's core ignited, hot as simmering fire. A fist of hot air blasted Sariah and pinned her against Tirsis's statue. A short beam uncoiled from the stone and broke apart into four columns of humming light. The columns pierced the statues’ colored eyes. The stone sages glowed. Their arms lifted. They clasped each other's hands, trapping Sariah in an indomitable circle of energy.

  Poe's lips moved. “Behold. We have returned as it was foretold to redeem our theft and ourselves. Our dreams turn to tale. Our tale turns to blood.”

  Sariah's mind refused to accept what she was seeing. A thousand wild thoughts interfered with her reason. Stone. She needed to commit this moment to stone. She fumbled for the little memory stone she wore around her neck and pushed her memories out of the way. She would be incapable of remembering every detail. If she lived through this. If she survived.

  She looked up to see that Tirsis's face was liquid on her stone façade. Her laughter filled the dome, brisk, joyful and sweet.

  “Fear not, my beloved,” Tirsis said. “You're ready. The goddess blesses your path. The stone leads you to its lair.”

  “Why must we perish to thrive when we thrive without perishing?” Eneis said.

  “Because we're pledged to Meliahs,” Vargas said. “Because we were born and bred to die. Of the stone we were created. With the stone we'll be avenged.”

  Sariah could only hope that her simultaneous inscription was working and that she would live long enough to understand the sages’ words, because every word they said triggered a hundred questions and every one of her questions had a thousand possible answers.

  Tirsis's eyes settled on her, and even though she knew that the woman had been dead for hundreds of years, she couldn't help but gape at the sage's vitality, at the beauty of her broad face, at the wisdom burning in her stare.

  “Our ways are most likely primitive to you,” Tirsis said. “But it was all we had.”

  Primitive? If only Tirsis knew. The Guild's prohibitions had weakened stonewising, forcing the craft to revert to its simplest and earliest stages. Only Zeminaya's wisings matched the complexity of these sages’ wising and even then, her work had been buried and suppressed.

  Questions. Sariah had questions. Was the sages’ extraordinary wising capable of interaction? There was so much she wanted to know, about the Hounds’ origins, about the Guild and the sages, about the Wisdom, about the amazing stone powering their revival. Where to start? The tale. She had to focus on her search.

  Sariah's voice was raw to her own ears. “Where can I find the bane of the pure, the tale that can unite the Bloods?”

  “See with your eyes,” Tirsis said. “Feel with your heart. What you seek is beyond proof. It's reality.”

  “What's pure but stone?” Eneis asked. “What's more credible than proof, more credible than action and moment, but substance itself?”

  “The dream dreamed us thieves for a purpose,” Poe said.

  Sariah's hand was numb from clenching her stone. Her knees were weak from the effort. She slid down and sat against Tirsis's legs. Her own strength was being sapped to power the sages at a time when she needed it most to make sense out of chaos.

  “I don't understand.”

  “Stonewiser,” Tirsis said patiently. “You've found the bane of the pure.”

  “I have?”

  “This is the pure.” Tirsis's ethereal hands cupped the brilliant stone at the center. “And we, my beloved child, we are its bane.”

  Meliahs help her. All that time looking for a people called the pure, when she was instead looking for the stone these sages called the pure! She wanted to kick herself for her ignorance. Yet she had wised this stone already, and the tale it had sung to her had been sweet and peaceful, but it wasn't the tale she was looking for. Where was the tale that would bring unity to the Blood? Where was the one tale that was going to satisfy the justice gathering, the executioners, and both Domainers and Goodlanders?

  Vargas eyes flared. “Can you sense it? She's sealed. She's Zeminaya's spawn!”

  “One of Zeminaya's?” Poe said. “Just as I dreamed it.”

  Tirsis's crystal clear laughter filled the dome again. “She tried and she triumphed, Meliahs bless her skillful hands.”

  “She should be destroyed,” Vargas spat.

  “But aren't there different climbs to the same summit?” Eneis asked. “And who's the thief? She or we? Who shall prevail in the end?”

  “As if we could know the end to any beginning,” Tirsis said. “We have no choice but faith alone. Time's done. Our blessings and our apologies, stonewiser.”

  “For what?”

  “For what has been, is, will be. For the legacy unleashed, for the burdens bestowed.”

  “What burdens?” Sariah asked, but the sages were no longer listening to her. They raised their linked hands towards the dome.

  “I grant you leave to live my dreams,” Poe said.

  “I add my questions to yours,” Eneis said.

  “To you I entrust my Hounds.” Vargas glared. “You'd best be faithful to my beasts.”

  “Wait. Wait. I don't want—”

  “The waiting's over,” Tirsis said. “The scent is the spark of a reckless life. What thrives in the light yields only to its own darkness. What restores the whole destroys the parts. I give you a warning: two fortnights. That's all the beam will last, or else the darkness of generations.”

  The light changed, pouring into the statues at an accelerated pace, igniting them crimson. The heated draft of the noiseless explosion rendered Sariah flat on her back. The entire dome shook and seemed to expand with the blast. The earth quaked. For a few, long moments, she couldn't breathe the scalding air singeing her lungs. Words burst from her mind. Voices settled on the surfaces of her wiser's core and then sank into her consciousness. The Wisdom. She could hear it all at once, a chorus imprinting itself on her soul.

  Her eyelids fluttered open just in time to see the statues shattered. Tirsis and her fellow stonewisers no longer stood. If she had only known, if she had sensed the trigger in the wising, she might have been able to prevent the statues’ destruction. She had talked to the sages and in doing so she had almost touched the goddess's hand.

  She rubbed her eyes in disbelief. A cloud o
f the statues’ debris whirled just above the intact stone in the chest. Before her, before the bewildered crowd, the debris transformed from pulverized rock into dots of brilliantly colored lights. The lights floated up towards the dome, like cotton blooms surfing the air. They landed languidly against the cupola, forming four distinct clusters of highly stylized script.

  Sariah gasped with the crowd. An enormous, glorious engrossment was born out of the statues’ destruction. The four sages’ Wisdom had survived their makers, not just in Sariah's mind, but also on the Dome of the Going. Colorful images began to form around the dome's open apex. Curls blowing in the wind, a wisp of a woman led a procession, trailed in turn by a long spiraling line of Hounds.

  She had no time to consider the image.

  Light gushed up from the geode stone, punching through the dome's opening like a steaming geyser, escaping out of sight. People forsook their places at the dome in droves, racing outside. Another beam. Sariah felt her knees give way. She was exhausted.

  “My donnis?” Delis's strong arms held her.

  Sariah slipped her hand in her pocket and clutched the amplifying stone to check on the baby's protective weave. It was sound and undamaged, perfect, like the life it held in trust.

  Sariah could hardly speak. Somehow, the keeper convinced Delis to follow him. Soon, Sariah stood on the Dome of the Going's balcony propped up between Delis and the keeper like a rag doll. The light streamed out of the dome, over the Bastions, and sank into the distant horizon.

  Some things began to make sense to Sariah, not what these people had stolen or why, but rather, from where. “Is that—?”

  “Aye,” Horatio said. “The right direction.”

  Sariah tore her eyes from the beam to look at the crowd gathered around the dome. The high plain was covered with people for as far as she could see. They had gathered here from all over the Bastions just to see the beam. How many? Thousands? Millions? More?

  A chilling howl echoed in the plain. At once, the people turned into armed Hounds. All the people. The rotting skulls claimed the faces of old and young, and a rhythmic cry resonated throughout the Bastions. Sariah could barely make out the words.

  “We pledged to come,” they chanted. “We pledge to go.”

  “What do they mean?”

  “They're ready,” the keeper said. “They'll follow you.”

  “Me?” Horror was glutting at her throat.

  “By the domes, you're the saba.”

  “The saba?”

  “In the old language. The guide.”

  “The guide to what?”

  “Wise are those who recognize the signs, for they will be the people of the going, the hands of Meliahs’ restoration. Look.”

  The beam's luminous path formed a third dome in the sky, an identical reproduction of the other two domes’ distinct outlines. What was it that Tirsis had said? Our apologies. For the legacy unleashed, for the burdens bestowed.

  Sariah wiped the sweat from her brow. Great. Just perfect. Damn sages. The joke was on her.

  “As I see it, you've got no choice,” Horatio Maliver said, even though she hadn't asked for his advice. “You've gained yourself a few new followers, wiser. I don't know when or why these people came to the Bastions, but I tell you, they're going back to the Goodlands now, and with a thirst for blood. The Goodlands are history. The Guild's screwed.”

  Sariah flashed him a look that should have burned him to cinders. Didn't he understand? She didn't want this. Any of it. She didn't want Vargas's damn Hounds, and she didn't need Eneis's questions adding to her own. She didn't want Poe's dreams either. She had her own nightmares, thank you.

  Wasn't there enough violence as it was? And what about these zealous people, these lethal, blood-licking fighters who had created a new and rich existence for themselves high in the Bastions’ isolation? Did they deserve annihilation just because of blind piety and old pledges?

  “Face it,” Horatio said. “Their entire existence has been devoted to preparations. The idle wait they called it, but have you seen their weapons? Over the years, they have accumulated a wealth of destruction. Catapults, pikes, spears, rams, claws. Their weapon-making furnaces are lit day and night. Every toddler knows how to use claws. They have been ready for generations.”

  “There's no real threat to the Goodlands.” Sariah pretended a measure of calm she didn't feel. “They can't lower all of their weapons in those rickety lifts. It's just not possible.”

  Horatio had no qualms about thrashing her hope. “They're ready, I tell you. They've made every necessary provision to transport themselves and their equipment down those cliffs. Trust me. I've commanded many armies before. They have plans to bring everything with them—families, cattle, possessions. Everything.”

  It would be a disaster for them, for the Goodlands, for the Domain, for all the Blood. Was she the only sane person who could see that?

  “They're making arrangements as we speak,” Horatio said. “Do you know they're organized in waves of warriors? I heard them talking. Devastating. I have to give it to you, wiser. You've done well. You've gotten yourself an army to shred Arron and Grimly to the rot pits.”

  An army? For Meliahs’ sake, she was a stonewiser. Horatio Maliver couldn't begin to understand her horror.

  “We could leave, my donnis,” Delis said. “They're too busy with their celebrations to notice if we escape.”

  It made all the sense in the world. Run away, escape, finish what she had set out to do, abandon these blood-lapping mad people to their communal hysteria. Then, if they went, if they lost their lives tumbling down the cliffs or fighting the Shield in the Goodlands, their deaths would be on them, not on her. Aye. Leave. Quietly. Unseen. Undetected. That was the option that appealed to Sariah best.

  “What about the stone?” Horatio asked. “Don't you need it to prove your innocence?”

  Sariah had been thinking a lot about the stone. Leandro's game, useful as it had been, was now lost to her. It had become part of the stone. The stone itself contributed no helpful tale. The wising had only given her a new direction. The beam would shine for two fortnights, twenty-eight nights, and if she was right, it would lead her to the one place where it had all started, the very place she dreaded.

  That's where the sages had sent her. That's where she was going. Alone.

  “Stop arguing with me,” Sariah whispered. “Delis, you'll travel to Targamon and then to the Domain, and that's final.”

  “I won't leave you alone, my donnis. I can't.”

  “Of course you can.” Sariah turned to Horatio. “And you, you're not coming with me.”

  Horatio flashed his infuriating smile. “Think of me as your newest pet.”

  “I warn you. Be gone. I don't want you with me.”

  “I'm coming,” Horatio said. “And right now, you're in no position to prevent it. If you try to leave me behind, I'll shout so loud that every Hound within ten leagues will know you're trying to escape their adoration.”

  “Carcasses don't shout,” Delis rumbled.

  “A peep from you, Horatio, and I'll turn you over to the Hounds. They'll enjoy teaching you the Wisdom.”

  Horatio had the grace to pale a little. He too had seen the treatment that defectors received. Sariah was fairly sure Horatio had had no dealings with the Hounds until the day he came up the lift. That he had braved the Hounds and the lifts to come after her was a true measure of his urgency. He had risked much. But even if she bought the notion of his desperation, she didn't believe him.

  Sariah crept down the trail towards the next cluster of trees, thankful for the darkness's protection. The night was cold. Snow crunched under her feet. They were close to the cliffs. She could hear people talking just over the hill, and the quiet sound of the ox teams’ muffled hoofs, pounding the ground at a steady pace. Followed by Delis and Horatio, she skulked toward an abandoned stone wheel and halted there to put on the heavy Hound suits they hauled.

  Horatio wrinkled his nose. “
The stench.”

  “The better part of fear,” Sariah said. “Stay then. Don't forsake your nose's sensibility for the likes of me.”

  “There's only one way down,” Horatio said.

  “I can make it faster for you,” Delis offered.

  The stolen cape was too big, the skull was too heavy, the damn claws burst open every time Sariah touched them, threatening to cut off her fingers or nose.

  “Where are you going?” The keeper's voice froze Sariah's clumsy attempt at Hound-dressing. “You're not leaving, are you?”

  The panic in the man's voice threatened to undo Sariah's resolutions. “No, nay, no. There are… arrangements that must be made. There are things I must do before—”

  “We can help,” the keeper said. “We're ready. We can scout, infiltrate, attack. We can do anything you need.”

  “Heed me, keeper, the time is not right yet—”

  “But the dome, the sages, the signs. They're all there. We're worthy. Let us show you.”

  The misery stamped on the man's face was too much for Sariah to bear. It was not just the keeper who would feel this way. Her desertion would affect all of the Hounds. She didn't want to use them for her own purposes and yet here they were, at her feet, begging to be used.

  She hurt for them, but a descent from the safety of those cliffs meant more useless destruction. She didn't want them dead or annihilated. She had to keep them here. It took her by surprise. When had she begun to care for Vargas's blood-licking Hounds?

  “Listen to me, keeper. You're right. The signs have been given but it is I who must decide the time of the going. There's much work to do before your people can come down from the Bastions.”

  “I understand. It's foretold. The guide will know the when and the how.”