by Dorian Hart
As Kibi came closer, he felt a hum, a resonant vibration almost too faint to discern, coming from the ring of standing stones.
“You feel that?” he asked Ernie, who walked beside him.
“Feel what?”
“Feel that deep thrummin’ from the Mirrors.”
Ernie stopped and made a show of listening. “No.”
That didn’t surprise him. Nobody else felt the things Kibi felt, or heard the things he heard.
Back in Eggoggin, the village of his birth and all his life until this strange wizard business, he had done his best to downplay his odd affinity for stone. The masons and architects he worked with knew something was amiss, but Kibi had been careful not to do his…oh, he hated to call it magic. It wasn’t magic. It was too natural for that. Beneath his fingers, stone melted, became malleable, workable like clay. He could suggest a new shape, and if the stone had no objection, it became what he wanted. As far as he knew, no one had ever witnessed him plying his unique skill until he had shown it to Ernie on the journey here.
If it were only that, he might have explained it to someone, even showed it off before now. But it was also deeply personal. The earth was like a friend who was cripplingly shy around anyone but him, but who trusted him implicitly. It wanted to be worked, shaped, but it was nobody’s business but his own. And Kibilhathur knew that because, in their own lugubrious way, the stones spoke to him.
That had first happened when Kibi was seven, as he toiled in the fields beside his father. They were clearing away rocks from a new half-acre intended for rye, and Kibi had been tasked with carrying out the biggest ones he could lift. As he struggled to flip over a wide slab of granite a feeling had come to him, seeping into his fingers through the stone. Too heavy. Not words, exactly, but he understood.
He had stood quickly and looked around. There was his father, ten feet off, smashing up a boulder.
“Father, can the stones speak?”
Bim, grunting with the effort of his labor, brought down his pick. “’Course they can. This one here’s sayin’, ‘I give up!’”
“No, I mean it,” Kibi had insisted.
His father had puffed a few breaths, leaning on his pick handle and smiling at his son. “Get yer head out a’ th’ clouds, boy. No, rocks don’t say nothin’. And if they did, what would they say? They’re jus’ rocks.”
Kibi had nodded and looked back down at the granite slab. I’m sorry, he thought to it. Father’s going to break you up to get you out of this field.
But the stone didn’t mind.
In the intervening years, the stones had spoken to him many times over, in their vague, doleful way. And the bond held in both directions; the earth trusted him, trusted him to treat it with respect, to understand its watchful, solitary existence.
As an apprentice stonecutter, he had refined the ability to knead and shape stone with his hands, always in small ways, improving his work, strengthening it. By laying his hands upon a slab, he knew exactly how it should be cut, how it wanted to be cut, where to place the chisel, how hard to strike, so he never lost so much as a flake. On his off days he collected rocks the size of his fist and carved them cunningly using his gifts (but never so well that others would suspect how he achieved such fine detail). He sold these to a peddler, who said there was great demand for such ornaments in the city of Hae Kalkas.
And so he continued for another decade, absorbed in his work, keeping largely to himself, knowing that his reputation as a solitary eccentric was well deserved. He just went on about his business, until the day it became a wizard’s business.
* * *
Kibi stopped when he reached the perimeter of the circle formed by the Mirrors. It was clear how they got their name; though the outward-facing surfaces of the obelisks were rough-hewn, their inward-facing sides were flat and polished to a reflective black shine. Kibi walked clockwise until he stood immediately beside one. The deep rumbling in his innards grew stronger. There was strength in these stones; they were ancient, forbidding, and yet anticipatory, as if they were built for a purpose that had not yet been realized.
Though the cautious part of his nature warned against it, Kibi reached out and placed his palm against the rough plinth. A jolt of energy shot through him, not painful, but it set his arm to trembling. An overwhelming power resided here, a power that thrilled and terrified him, a power that was his, or that could be his, though these towering menhirs were not meant for him.
Kibilhathur. Your time is long past, but it has not yet come. Abide, and return.
He pulled his hand away. The voices of stones had always been heavy in his mind, but the words of the Mirror had been like deep-rumbling boulders rolling through his soul, shaking him nearly senseless. And they were words! Not just feelings and moods that his mind interpreted, but speech, true speech. Kibi stumbled; Ernie held him up.
“Are you okay, Kibi?”
“I think I might ought a’ sit m’self down,” he said dizzily.
The others had dispersed soon after arriving at the Flashing Day fair. Dranko and Tor were now haggling at a cluster of little carts, out of which some enterprising craftsmen and farmers were selling foodstuffs and souvenirs. Morningstar was sitting in the lengthening shadow of the easternmost Mirror, talking animatedly with Aravia. Grey Wolf was moving casually through the crowd, looking for anyone or anything suspicious; he had admonished the rest of them to do the same, though Flashing Day’s big moment wasn’t until noon tomorrow.
Kibi and Ernie walked to a stretch of grass a little ways removed from the bulk of the crowd and well outside the area circumscribed by the Seven Mirrors. Kibi took a long pull from his water skin and waited for his quivering bones to quiet. The skull-rattling subsonic vibrations eased the farther he removed himself from the huge obsidian standing-stones.
A cluster of children appeared nearby, tussling and jostling one another, all staring at him, some with poor enough manners to point. The oldest, a girl of thirteen years or so, took a few steps toward him.
“Why’d you do that, mister?”
She looked pointedly at the closest Mirror.
His mind was still wobbly, but Kibi made himself smile at her. “You mean touch that thing? Dunno, really. Why?”
“Bad luck,” said the girl. “Don’t you know it’s bad luck to touch the Mirrors?”
“No,” Kibi admitted. “I didn’t. Why is it bad luck?”
“Just is. My momma’s been bringing us here since I was five, and she says not to touch the Mirrors. Never seen anyone do it all this time, but you did.”
“What did it feel like?” asked a boy, maybe eight or nine.
“Like rock,” Kibi said, smiling. “Bit cold, given the sunshine, but nothin’ strange about it.”
“Did it eat your soul?” A second boy asked this odd question, a boy a year or two older than the first, but less bold. He hung back, just behind the shoulder of the older girl.
“Doubt it,” said Kibi. “I’d be dead, wouldn’t I?”
“My dad says the Mirrors eat your soul if you touch them,” said the boy. “Make it so you never even existed at all.”
Kibi turned to Ernie, who was smiling uncertainly at him. To the children he said, “Well, you seem a bright lot a’ young’uns. I’m sittin’ right here. Do I exist, or not?”
None of the children answered, and faced with such superstition-dispelling evidence the bunch of them turned inward toward one another before dashing back into the crowd. But now a number of men and women were looking his way, talking and gesturing toward him. Damn, but maybe setting his hand to the Mirror was a bad idea. They were there to keep a lookout for something the bad guys might want to keep secret, and here he was calling unnecessary attention to himself.
As if to drive this point home, a man detached himself from the edge of the crowd and sauntered towards them. He was whippet-thin and carried a rapier at his side, though Kibi's attention was mostly drawn to his perfectly manicured salt-and-pepper handlebar mustache,
curled up at both ends. A long loaf of bread was tucked beneath his arm, and he gave Kibi and Ernie a broad, friendly smile as he approached.
“First time at Flashing Day?” he asked.
“Not for me,” said Ernie. “My family used to come most years. But this is the first time for my friend here.” Kibi nodded though his head still buzzed.
“My name is Sagiro,” said the mustachioed man, his voice formal and soft. “Sagiro Emberleaf. Whom do I have the honor of addressing?”
“Ernest Roundhill at your service. And this is Kibi. But I don't remember seeing you here before, and your mustache would be hard to forget.”
Sagiro smiled, stroked his handlebars, then tore off two hunks of bread and handed one to each of them. “I used to come quite often, but I have not been back to this most remarkable place in almost a decade.”
Kibi knew he ought to be more sociable, but even now at a farther remove from the Mirrors, the brain-numbing vibrations, not to mention the deep earth-bones earthquake voice that had sounded in his mind, had left him with a powerful bewilderment. He was happy enough to let Ernie do the talking.
“What made you come back now, then?” asked Ernie.
Sagiro rubbed his clean-shaven chin. “I'm not entirely certain. I always found Flashing Day to be a fascinating phenomenon, but life becomes so busy, it can be hard to find the time for little forays into the countryside. But what of your friend? Kibi, is it? Back when I used to come every year, visitors had a superstitious aversion to touching the Mirrors, but I saw that you had no such compunction. Is there basis to the fears of the crowds, would you say?”
Sagiro bit off a piece of bread, seemingly content to chew while waiting for Kibi to answer, but Kibi’s stone-affinity was a private thing, and he never did think much of nosy folk.
“Nah,” he said. “Things are just big ol’ stones, aren’t they? Seems funny to go through all the trouble a’ polishin’ ’em up.”
“It helps with the flashing, I imagine," said Sagiro. He gave Kibi a thoughtful look, then turned back to Ernie. “Have you ever run the Mirrors?”
Ernie laughed. “No. My parents always said it was a foolish thing to do. ‘Don't get mixed up in magic you don’t understand,’ they told me, and I was a good son and listened to their advice. I saw a couple of people do it when I was younger; Dad said it all came of too much ale, but nothing bad ever seemed to happen to anyone who ran out into the lights. But what about you, Mr. Emberleaf?”
Sagiro looked out at the obelisks. The band of children was playing rag-ball inside their circle, laughing as they kicked a wad of bound-up old cloth back and forth across the grassy spaces between the Mirrors.
“No,” he said. Then he looked back at Kibi and Ernie. “I’m not so foolish as to get mixed up in magic I don’t understand.”
The mustachioed gentleman bowed before them. “It has been a pleasure meeting you both. Kibi, as I’m sure your friend here has already told you, the Flashing will occur at noon tomorrow. I’m certain you will enjoy the spectacle.”
Sagiro took one more bite from his baguette and wandered back into the crowd.
* * *
Kibi’s headache had subsided by the next morning, but the hum of power radiating from the Mirrors had taken up a permanent residence inside his skeleton. The words the Mirror had spoken still rang in his memory. Abide, and return. But a night’s sleep had not granted him any new insight.
More travelers must have arrived overnight, for the size of the crowd had swelled, and new pilgrims were arriving every hour.
“We should spread out,” said Grey Wolf. “Everyone find a different vantage point, so we’ll have the greatest chance of seeing whatever Abernathy thinks we might see. Keep a sharp eye out for Sharshun.” He squinted up at the sky. “Probably less than half an hour. There aren’t any hills nearby, so we’ll just have to work our way towards the front of the crowds.”
“People don’t usually get much closer than twenty feet from the Mirrors,” said Ernie. “Unless they’re running them, of course.”
“But what if what we’re looking for takes place back in the crowds somewhere?” asked Morningstar.
“There are too many people here for us to watch them all, and the Mirrors too,” said Grey Wolf.
“I can work the crowd,” said Dranko. “Each of you pick a spot near the front, and I’ll mosey through the spectators, keeping an eye out for anyone acting oddly, or baldly, or…blue-skin-y.”
Grey Wolf assigned each of them a location, as the mass of onlookers formed their own secondary ring surrounding the circle of obsidian obelisks. Kibi dutifully pushed through the crowds, ignoring the glares and protestations, until he had obtained a front-row seat barely fifteen feet from the nearest Mirror. Much of the audience was sitting on the grass, but Kibi chose to stand; he should be ready if anything interesting happened.
“Are you ready for the big moment?” Sagiro Emberleaf had appeared silently beside him.
“I suppose,” said Kibi. Being this close to a Mirror had set his teeth buzzing and raised goose-flesh on his arms; how much of his physical discomfort was showing on his face, in his body language? He fought an urge to walk over and see what more it might have to say.
As the shadows of the black pillars shortened, the crowd became quieter, and many people swiveled their heads around, probably wondering who, if anyone, was going to dash bravely out into the center of the stones when the lights came on. Kibi found himself becoming unusually nervous. Sagiro had gone quiet, his eagerness to witness the spectacle written clearly on his face.
The sun reached its zenith, and several things happened with such unexpected speed, not to mention sensory overload, that Kibi had trouble piecing together a coherent narrative afterward.
First, there were the lights.
Ernie had already explained what “flashing” meant in the context of the Mirrors, but Kibi was not prepared for the reality of it. From each standing stone, a tall blade of white light leapt silently from the mirrored inward-facing surface, sheets of dazzling radiance that shot across the interior of the ring as though walls of pure luminescence had sprung into existence. The Mirrors were angled such that these planes of light instantly formed a crisscrossing seven-sided star. Though the sun shone down unobstructed, these rigid curtains were bright enough to appear nearly opaque.
Where the seven walls of light intersected, they formed a smaller seven-sided shape in the center of the Mirrors. Each face of that heptagon shimmered with a different color: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, purple.
Kibi absorbed all of these visible details, but only barely, because his body had become a sieve through which some molten energy was being forcibly strained. The Seven Mirrors contained something like a pure concentration of Kibi’s natural affinity for stone. Standing so close to the perfect slashes of light slicing out of the shining black pillars was like enduring the roaring impact of a mile-tall waterfall.
And yet, for all of that, Kibi kept enough focus and sense of his surroundings to see that someone was, in fact, running the Mirrors. A tall figure in a long dark robe, his face hidden in its deep hood, was sprinting toward the confluence of light curtains. Something clutched in the runner’s left hand was trailing an emerald light; streamers of green flowed from between his fingers like glowing ribbons.
From the corner of his eye Kibi saw that Sagiro was leaning forward, intently watching the runner in the robe. But Kibi’s attention was quickly diverted by a second runner, a tall youth with a sword strapped to his back. He was dashing in from a different side of the circle, a quarter-turn farther around clockwise.
It was Tor.
The two were converging, which was inevitable given that they were both sprinting for the middle of the same circle. But Tor moved faster, and in another handful of seconds Kibi could see that he was not headed for the rainbow-colored heptagon, but was rather on a trajectory to intercept the man in the robes.
Ten feet shy of the multicolored center, To
r leapt and bowled over the other man with a perfectly executed flying tackle. Both tumbled to the grass, and as the robed man put out his hands to break his fall, he let go of the glowing green object. It was the size of a large walnut and clearly visible as it escaped the man's grasp, trailing green fire. But away from his grip its emerald glow faded and it lost itself in the tall grass.
As for the man himself, the hood fell away from his head, and though the color of his skin was impossible to tell in the harsh light of the Mirrors, his head was as bald as a melon.
Next to Kibi, Sagiro gasped and sucked in a quick breath, and he bolted for the center. Kibi instinctively gave chase but felt something akin to drunkenness from having endured the relentless outpouring of power from the Mirrors. Sagiro was weasel-quick and easily outran him, but the rest of the company was already rushing to Tor’s aid from all around the ring. They arrived nearly at the same time, but while Kibi’s friends concerned themselves with Tor and the Sharshun, Sagiro himself dropped to his hands and knees and searched in the grass.
Kibi’s progress was painfully slow, as though he were fighting a massive headwind, but when he passed through the invisible perimeter described by the Seven Mirrors, everything changed. The deep-earth power of the Mirrors still raged all about, but it no longer troubled him. Quite the opposite; Kibi was nearly overcome by a surge of psychic clarity. There was a magic in the earth, and it was his. It had always been his, a power that came from below, from the earth-bones of the world, and the Seven Mirrors were fingers dripping with magic from that megalithic source.
It all came to him, the obvious clear truth. The Sharshun had been carrying an Eye of Moirel—an emerald, most likely—and now Sagiro was searching for it while the rest of the company concerned themselves with the man who had dropped it. But Sagiro was looking in the wrong place. Kibi could tell because the prize the man sought, the jewel dropped by the Sharshun, now appeared to his eyes as a fiery green star. While his friends struggled with the bald man, Kibi walked forward calmly, reached down into the sawgrass, and picked up something like an enormous emerald, smooth, round as a plum and as big as a baby's fist.
