Stonewiser

by Dora Machado

  They had almost crossed the bailey when a group of Hounds trotted in through the gates carrying an oxen-skin-wrapped bundle. At the head of the group, Sariah recognized Torkel, the keeper's brother. A wail echoed in the bailey, and it wasn't just the wind screeching.

  Kael frowned, then slowed down. “The patrol is back early.”

  Sariah halted.

  Torkel's eyes went wide when he saw her. “Saba, really, I didn't think much of it. It was just a patrol around the walls. He wanted it so much. It's all my fault. I wanted to please her.”

  Sariah was faintly aware of Kael's hold on her arm. The Hounds parted to allow her to pass. She came to a dead stop and knelt before the bundle laid on the ground. She took a deep breath before she uncovered the face.

  Rig. His young face was partially gone and his eye had sunk into his crushed skull, but his irrepressible black curls stirred in the cold breeze as if he were still alive. The wind cut through Sariah like a set of the Hounds’ claws. She didn't have to ask how. Mia and Rig had eroded Torkel's resistance and persuaded him to let Rig go on patrol.

  Sariah's heart ached with angry grief. The war. The destruction. They seemed worthless compared to the young life lost. A small crowd was assembling around them. Metelaus had just arrived. The keeper was glaring at his brother with both fury and concern.

  Her mind suddenly registered the familiarity of the heart-wrenching wail. She looked up to see Mia restrained in Metelaus's strong arms. Her curls were crusted in blood. Her face was covered with tears. Black flow leaked from her fisted hands. She was screaming like a bolt-stricken fiend. Her wailing haunted the sunset and became the sound of Sariah's most perturbing nightmares.

  Sariah walked with the weight of a thousand boulders on her back. She couldn't delay her meeting with the executioners and there was nothing she could do to console Mia. She felt like the coldest wench in the world. She felt selfish too. She would have wanted the child with her for what was to come. But Mia was in no condition to help. Sariah left her in the care of Celia and Pru and marched on to meet her fate without delay. The night had arrived with the storm. When the sun rose tomorrow, atonement would be over.

  But Torkel was not easily appeased. He planted himself in her path and offered her one of his claws. “He who errs shall be maimed from his sorrows.”

  “Stand aside,” Sariah said. “I'm not going to maim you because you made a mistake.”

  “But saba,” the keeper said, “it's the law.”

  “For my honor,” Torkel pleaded. “What's respect but trust in the blood?”

  “I think your anguish is enough punishment.” Sariah sidestepped Torkel and strode on toward the Hall of Stones.

  “I'll speak to her later,” she overheard the keeper muttering to his brother, before he fell in with the rest of her escort.

  “Perhaps you should have punished Torkel,” Kael offered quietly.

  “So you too think that everything we do should be tainted by blood?”

  “Sometimes people can only be comforted in their own strange ways.”

  “I can't even afford the time to console poor Mia and you want me to stop and punish Torkel? I should have stayed with Mia. Torkel, he is a grown man. Sooner or later, grown men need to learn to comfort themselves.”

  Kael's silence diffused Sariah's fury. A slushy drizzle crunched beneath her quick steps. The stink of ashes scented the courtyard. Poor Rig. Poor Mia. Poor Torkel. Maybe Kael had a point after all.

  Lexia was waiting for them at the Hall of Stones’ entrance. “What's this I hear? You're meeting with the executioners?”

  Sariah couldn't help but notice that Lexia was well-informed. “Domainer justice.” She kept up the pace through the hall's cavernous vestibule. “It shouldn't take too long.”

  “Did you tell Uma and Lorian?”

  “I didn't see the need to complicate things.”

  Lexia halted. “I think things are already complicated.”

  The Hall of Stones’ massive doors were thrown open to reveal the jet stone aisle crowded with a host of black-robed stonewisers. Lorian and Uma stood framed by the ornately sculpted doors, waiting for Sariah like Meliahs’ weeping twins—plague and slaughter.

  The sheer length of Lorian's gangly limb transformed the sweeping motion of her arm into an even grander gesture. “You'll enter the Hall of Stones and account for your actions.”

  “Let's do this later. I have something very important to do and very little time.”

  “Whatever you have to do can wait,” Lorian said. “The Guild always comes first.”

  “Not this time.” Sariah marched on, knowing herself free from the Guild and secured by her escort's claws. She had taken three steps away from the doors when a dull thump stopped her advance. She pushed against an invisible wall. It yielded some, but then contracted as if she was caught in an invisible net.

  Kael ran his hands over the unseen obstacle. “What by the rot is this?”

  The surprised gasps coming from the keeper and his Hounds announced they too felt the barrier when they tried to step away from Sariah.

  “Saba?” the keeper said.

  “This fight requires a different set of weapons.” Sariah faced the two councilors. “It's just a guess, but I believe one of you has a wising trick in progress.”

  “We tire of hearing exclusively about your wising prowess,” Lorian said. “We too can wise a good trick or two.”

  “What kind of trick?” Kael asked.

  That would have been an easy question to answer, indeed, a quick problem to solve, if she hadn't lost the bulk of her stonewiser's power to the banishment bracelet. As it was, she didn't even have enough strength left to probe the wising. Trapped. She didn't need this right now.

  “Look,” Sariah said. “Domainer executioners have come for justice. I have to respond to their law before it's too late—”

  “Their laws are no good here,” Lorian said. “They can't kill you or take you by force, not here, at the keep, where they're outnumbered by stonewisers and Hounds.”

  “They might not be able to take me just now,” Sariah said. “But they can harm an awful lot of Domainers if I don't deliver what I promised.” She didn't tell them that her life was at stake too. No sense in adding to their advantage over her.

  “You forget there's rot in the keep, disorder in the Guild,” Uma said.

  “I wish I could forget,” Sariah said. “Let me go.”

  “You'll yield your election to us,” Lorian said. “Else you'll be trapped here for the rest of the night, for the rest of your life, if need be.”

  Time was the one thing she didn't have. The night was advancing fast. The silver haze had almost filled the last of the crystals and a strange numbness had settled on her right hand's fingertips. Was it a last warning? Or was it the beginning of the end? She didn't have her stonewiser's power to counter the councilors’ wising, and as good as Delis and the Hounds were at spilling blood, a fight would not release the wising that held them there. She had to think of something and fast.

  Sariah considered the Council members. She had an idea. Of the two, Uma was the more secretive, Lorian was the more reactive. Did she know enough to do as she proposed? She didn't want to do this here and now, but the fools gave her no choice. They didn't know they were clamoring for their own destruction. As pressed for time as she was, Sariah understood that they required nothing less than total defeat. Plunge the ax deep into the timber to split the future's kindling, the words echoed from her stores of Vargas's bloody Wisdom.

  Quickly then. She had resisted any involvement that could splatter her with the Guild's dung, and yet here she was, charging at the future with the Guild's fate stuck in her reluctant claws. Somewhere in Meliahs’ gardens the sages must be laughing, not just at the dubious notion of a Guild election, but at the sheer irony of her election.

  Forty-seven

  “LEXIA, GIVE ME the brooch,” Sariah said.

  “What?” Lexia stared at her, openmouthed.


  “The brooch,” Sariah said impatiently. “Do you have it?”

  “Oh.” Lexia fumbled through her pockets until she found it. “Yes, here it is.”

  It was Kael who took the brooch from Lexia. “Are you sure you want it?” he asked. “You've fought so hard to shed it.”

  Sariah met his stare. “I am what I am. And this is the only way I know.”

  Kael's kind green eye dominated his gaze when he relinquished the brooch. Sariah felt like a fake. Here she was, accepting the brooch, when she didn't have a lick of stonewiser power running through her veins. She wasn't wearing a stonewiser's robe, so instead of pinning the brooch between her breasts in the usual fashion, she clasped it on the mantle knot over her shoulder. It felt strange, heavy and baroque against the fur-trimmed mantle. But it was firmly on.

  Then, as if she hadn't done herself enough wrong, she walked past the Council members, through the massive doors and down the jet aisle, the only route allowable by the wising trick entrapping her. Her friends followed. Lorian and Uma tripped over each other as they scurried to catch up.

  She stopped short of the dais and turned to face the restless audience. Once, the Hall of Stones had been filled to capacity with black-robed wisers and pledges. Now less than a fourth of those remained, scattered in small groups among mostly empty benches. Their smaller numbers were no consolation to Sariah. The last time she had spoken to this crowd she had gotten a man killed. She had never formally addressed her fellow stonewisers, never dreamed she would, least of all on a day when she was nothing more than an ordinary woman forsaken by Meliahs and deserted by the stones. She was suddenly very frightened of the stonewisers before her, of the expectations she spied in their eyes.

  “Go on.” Kael stood behind her like one of the sages’ statues. “They're listening.”

  She didn't have a lot of time for talk. She took a deep breath and tried to suppress the tremor from her voice. “Do we all agree that this election is binding?”

  “It was fairly done,” someone said.

  “We voted freely,” someone else added.

  “You said you didn't want to rule the keep,” Uma said.

  “I said that, and I meant it. But if I've been—” the word got stuck in her throat “—elected, and if we all agree, then it follows that my decisions should be accepted by all the stonewisers in the keep.”

  “That's why we elected you,” Lexia said.

  “But you rejected rule,” Uma reminded her.

  “I might have been a bit premature.”

  Kael's broken eyebrow climbed high on his forehead.

  The fingers on her right hand had gone numb. She needed the goddess's touch as much as she needed a hefty drink to steady her voice. In the absence of both, she resorted to pure confrontational bravado.

  “And you?” She challenged the stonewisers in the chamber. “Do you agree to stand down and follow my directions?”

  It was a testament to the direness of the Guild's situation that the majority of the stonewisers present murmured a muted assent.

  “Very well, then. In my capacity as the keep's first elected ruler, I'll pronounce my first decree.” There. She sounded firm enough.

  Kael stared at her in open puzzlement. Lexia, the two councilors and the rest of the stonewisers were perched on her every word. Even the keeper and the Hounds seemed interested, an astonishing break in their usually stoic demeanor.

  “In accordance with the Guild's laws, I'll appoint one of the councilors as my deputy.”

  She managed to shock them into total silence for a moment or two. Then Uma and Lorian exploded into questions.

  “One among us?”

  “Who?”

  “The one best suited for the task,” Sariah said, sounding more assured by the moment. But who would that be?

  “I swear to do as you say,” Uma pledged, forestalling Lorian.

  So it was to be Uma first. Sariah didn't have time for a long elaborate argument, so she went for the kill right away. “I suppose you'll have to stop courting the little girl Mia then. She's just that, a little girl. Her kind of healing has nothing to do with yours.”

  The words were as effective as bursting stones.

  “Did you approach the abomination?” Lorian's brows knotted in a fearful frown. “Did you speak to that misbegotten thing? We agreed that no hall would pursue new pledges.”

  Uma stuttered. “I didn't—”

  “She who has the power will rule the world with her might,” Sariah said. “Isn't that what you said to Mia?”

  Lorian hissed. “You did approach the accursed girl!”

  “She's a natural healer,” Uma said. “She belongs in the Hall of Healers.”

  Sariah seized the opportunity. “Who can blame Uma for promoting her hall's interests? It's only natural that wisers of the same hall stick together to protect their hall. The Hall of Healers is famous for hunting in packs. Do we remember to which hall Grimly belonged before becoming the Prime Hand?”

  It had been nothing more than a hunch, but she knew she had hit home when Uma's golden complexion paled to silvery gray.

  “Did the Prime Hand ask you to join Lorian and Olden so she could keep tabs on them?” Sariah asked. “Are you reporting to her about the situation here? Did she leave you behind as a plant to do her bidding?”

  Gasps and whispers filled the hall and grew into outrage.

  “Grimly's minion,” someone cried from the stands.

  “We don't want a traitor at the top,” someone else said.

  And just like that, Uma's chances were squelched. It was amazing how the facts had come together like the pieces of a wooden puzzle. Sariah had considered all she knew about Lorian and Uma, her observations, her hunches, the sequence of events.

  “Uma should be stoned and quartered,” someone shouted.

  Sariah's blood drained from her veins. She didn't want another execution, least of all in the Hall of Stones.

  “We're charged with the stone truth,” she said with steel in her voice. “You might decide after a proper hearing that this woman should be punished for her actions, but we can't afford to repeat the same mistakes. No more mob lynchings. We must return fair rule to the keep with the justice of our actions.”

  A murmur of agreement swept the hall. Uma was taken into custody, but she wasn't harmed or dragged away. Sariah experienced a new thrill—her voice had been heard and heeded. A sense of power flushed her body with warmth almost as seductive, sweet and pervasive as the heat of a stone trance. Then the bracelet squeezed tighter and her whole hand went numb from the wrench.

  “So it is to be me.” Lorian tried to conceal the triumph in her voice.

  No time for dillydallying. No inclination for mercy. Sariah shot to kill. “How long have you known about Grimly's trials at the Mating Hall?”

  “Me?” Lorian stammered.

  “My guess is you've known for a while. I think you knew as soon as Leandro's game disappeared from the Hall of Numbers.”

  “Leandro's game?” Lexia asked.

  “Only a brilliant mind from the Hall of Numbers could have created a wising as precise and logical as the one found in Leandro's game. I should think that since you've been the First of your hall for over twenty years, Lorian, you know what I'm talking about. Did you notice it gone? Was it stolen from you? Or did you give it to Grimly to aid her cause?”

  “Is she in cahoots with Grimly?” Lexia's question was an accusation.

  “It appeared so,” Sariah said. “Until I started thinking. What could the First of the Hall of Numbers do if her hall's sacred treasure disappeared under her watch? Denouncing the theft would be an admission of stupidity, gross neglect and incompetence. It would also cost someone like Lorian not just her position as the First of the Hall of Numbers, but her Council seat.”

  “Did you lose the teacher's treasure?” Lexia asked. “Answer me, mistress. I belong to the Hall of Numbers. We have a right to know.”

  “A right?” Loria
n scoffed. “What has happened to the Guild when a ragtag wiser like you thinks you can question me?”

  “Times have changed,” Lexia said. “We must all ad just.”

  The chamber rallied behind her, including Lorian's own escort.

  “I'm not incompetent,” Lorian said. “I didn't neglect the vaults. I've been a good First for my hall. When all the halls have scattered, the Hall of Numbers endures whole. Will no one see that? I didn't give the game to Grimly. She took it. It was there one day when we toured the vaults together. It wasn't there the next. I couldn't very well go to the hall and announce that our treasure had disappeared, but I couldn't accuse the Prime Hand either. So I did the next best thing. I started looking for it.”

  And for her, Sariah realized. Lorian would have gone after Sariah, because she suspected Grimly wanted Sariah to find the teacher's treasure. It made sense. Grimly had stolen Leandro's game, Eneis's carved druses, from the Hall of Numbers and put it into play precisely because she wanted the stone reunited. Sariah had been Grimly's tool all along.

  Beware of he who plays the stone and not the game, the old crone in Alabara had said. His tales are your demise. A caught Domainer roamer would have been easy to turn for someone as cunning as Grimly. It was all becoming clear. Grimly's scam. Arron's catch.

  She met Kael's eyes. He had figured it out as well. Grimly had turned the Domainer roamer Leandro and forced him to take Eneis's game into the Domain to bait Sariah. The ordeal caused Leandro to go mad, but still, he put the tale out there and Sariah followed it dutifully. Arron must have discovered Grimly's plan, at least in part. He knew enough to track Leandro. So he sent his Shield into the Domain to find Leandro, and once found, held him prisoner as evidence of Grimly's plot.

  “Ilian took you to see Leandro,” Sariah said. “Uma and Olden went with you. But Leandro is completely mad now, and you weren't convinced.”

  “And now, after playing all your games, you want to rule the keep?” Lexia was unable to conceal her contempt. “I don't think so, mistress. There's no vote that will ever elect you.”