Memory of Stone

by West, Michelle

  Or so he had told himself. It was not his fault; it was not his failing. And on the day that he had been completely overtaken by the voice of the ocean, on the day that he made, out of crystal, a decanter that returned to the waters of that great body the clarity and the purity of its essential nature, the acting guildmaster had cried tears of joy.

  There is magic here, Gilafas. Look. He had lifted the decanter to the eye of the sun. The waters placed in this vessel can safely be drunk. Do you understand? You are not a simple maker—you are an Artisan.

  The old man had, with great ceremony, ordered the opening of the upper remove, and installed the young man within its stone folds. What you need to learn, you will learn here. Or so our history says.

  Aye, history.

  That old man had been dead twenty years. Dead, a year and twelve months after the day he had made his joyful discovery. Gilafas had attended him for the two weeks he lingered abed with a fever that he could not shake. Healers had been sent for, and healers had been turned away; the Guildmaster would have none of them.

  “I’m an old man,” he had said, “And close to death, and I’ll not drag a healer there and back for the scant benefit of a few more months of life.” His hair across the pillows was his shroud, his chosen shroud. “And I’m happy to go, Gilafas. You’re here. You’re Artisan. You will guide our guild.”

  “The Artisans,” he had said, “all went mad, Nefem.”

  “Not all.”

  “All of them.”

  “Not Fabril.”

  “I’m not Fabril, Nefem.”

  “No. But you will be Guildmaster. You are an answer to the only prayer I have ever made. I give you the responsibility of the guild, and its Makers. They are fractious. You’ve seen that. But fractious or no, there is no greater power in the Empire.” He lifted a hand. “Say what you will. The mages can kill men; they can raise them to power. But they cannot accomplish what we have built here.”

  “The Kings—”

  “Even the Kings, when they choose to come here, come as supplicants. Be the Guildmaster, Gilafas. While you are alive, the guild will have no other. Listen to the halls in the upper remove; hear the voices that we cannot hear. You have the ability.” His cheeks were wet. “Protect what I have built.”

  The Maker’s cry. Protect what I have created. Never ‘protect me.’

  Gilafas had become a Maker without parallel, and in the streets of the city, in the streets of the Holy Isle, that counted. But here, within the stretch of the great hall in which the Artisans, since the founding of the guild, had lived and worked, he was almost inconsequential. The walls spoke to him seldom, and when they did, they spoke in a language that was almost entirely foreign. Until the day the demon voices had filled the Old City with the cries of the dying.

  The halls had been dark as thunder-clad sky when he had come to them, gasping for air, desperate now for the answers that his meager talent denied him. He had starved himself of all sustenance: company, food, and water. For three days, while the moon rode high in the harvest sky, while the winter waxed with the bright, jeweled ghosts of the Blood Barons and their legacy of indulgence and death, he had had for company, for clothing, for sound, nothing but the walls themselves.

  The walls. He had traced their passage from one end of the hall to another, over and over, creating a maze of his movements. Closed eyes, open eyes, breath creaking through the passage of a tight, dry, throat, he had lost his way. Become lost in his home of decades. Lost to stonework. Lost to the hand of the Artisan.

  And lost now, absolved of all dignity, of all power granted him by the accolades of other men, he had come at last to the altar.

  It was in a room that did not exist. Sanity knew: Sanity had denied him egress. Some part of his mind, stubborn, sane, anchored to the world of his compatriots, could not be dislodged, but it had been shaken so thoroughly he had at last his proof of the truth of his existence.

  The halls had opened the way, for him, and he had walked it.

  And he wept, to think of it now; wept bright tears, salt tears. Ocean tears.

  For he had come across the broken body of a young woman, her pale, pretty face scarred in three places by the kiss of blade’s edge—her only kisses, he thought, the only ones she had been permitted. Hands bleeding and blistered by some unseen fire, she was the sacrifice.

  Demon altar. Dark altar.

  And upon it, across the naked skin of her pale, upturned breasts, she clutched them, broken: the Rod and the Sword of Kings.

  He heard laughter; could not think that it could be hers, she was so still. This was a monument the Barons would have been proud to own.

  When Sanfred and Jordan found him again, wandering naked, bleeding, skeletal, they had taken him in silence to the lower halls, and he had made good his escape.

  But in escape, he carried knowledge: The Rod and the Sword would fail. The orb would be shattered, and the runes on the blade would speak in the tongue of an accusation he understood well: They were hollow vessels, their metal and their finery too superficial for the task at hand.

  * * *

  The line stretched on forever. Grandmother, mother and daughter, they faced it like a family faces drought: grimly, silently. Cessaly was uncomfortable in the present, and she was young, adept in ways that her elders, too slow and rigid, could no longer be. She sought the past. Found it.

  Cessaly’s father, his pride contained by the scarcity of his words, had taken some of the things she had made to market when the merchants began their spring passage through the Free Towns on their way to the Western Kingdoms, those lands made distant and mythical because she would never set eyes upon them.

  She had been younger, then; a good five years younger, and still prone to be mistaken for a boy whenever she travelled in the company of her brothers. But she had gone with her Da when he took the wagons into the common, and she had stood by his side while he offered the merchants—at some great cost—the fruits of her half-forbidden, half-encouraged labor.

  She had made horses, that year. Horses fleet of foot and gleaming with sunlight, manes flying, feet unfettered by the shod hooves that the merchants prized.

  “You made these?” the merchant asked, lifting the first of the horses.

  Her father shrugged.

  “These are Southern horses. You’ve seen action, then?”

  He said nothing. The Free Towners knew that her father had been born on the coast; knew that he had survived the border skirmishes that were so common between the North and the South. They also knew better than to ask about them.

  “You’ve a good hand,” the merchant continued, eyes narrowing slightly. “What do you want for them?”

  Her father named a price.

  The merchant’s brows rose in that mockery of shock that was familiar to any Towner who had cause to treat with him.

  They had bickered, argued, insulted each other’s birth place, parents, heritage. And then they had parted with what they valued: her father with the small horses, the merchant with his money.

  It might have ended that way, but Cessaly, impatient and bursting with pride and worry, had said, “What’ll you do with ‘em?”

  The merchant raised a brow. “Sell them, of course.”

  “To who?”

  “To a little girl’s parents in the West. Or in the East. They are … very good. Perhaps if you had paint,” he had added, speaking again to her father. “For a price—a good price—I might be able to supply that.”

  “You wouldn’t know a good price if it bit you,” her father replied, mock angry.

  “We want the paint,” she’d answered.

  And the merchant turned to look at her, at her eager eyes, her serious face.

  “What will you do with paint, child?”

  She smiled. “I don’t know.”

  And then he frowned. “Did you make these?”

  “Yes.”

  “By yourself?”

  “Yes.”

  “And who tau
ght you this, child?”

  Her turn to frown, as if it were part of the conversation. She shrugged.

  The merchant went away. But when he came back, he handed her—her and not her father—a small leather satchel. “You can keep these,” he told her, “if you promise that I will have first pick of anything you make with them.”

  “If the price is right,” her father told the man. “If we don’t like the price, we’re free to take them elsewhere.”

  “Done.”

  * * *

  To find sunlight again was a blessing. Master Gilafas paused at the foot of the steps and bowed. Sanfred was at his side before his stiff spine had once again straightened. He felt the younger man’s solid hand in the crook of his elbow, and was grateful for it: the memories of that early passage through Fabril’s reach had teeth, fangs, gravity. To struggle free of them today was almost more than he was capable of.

  Once, that would have pleased him. And perhaps, if he were honest, it pleased him in some fashion today. But triumph gave way to horror, and horror sent him scuttling away like insect evading boot.

  He cleared his throat. “The applicants?”

  “Waiting, Guildmaster.”

  “Good.”

  Sanfred had never once asked him why he had chosen to oversee this testing. No one had.

  By unspoken consent, the Makers, fractious as only the creative could be, granted him the privacy of their admiration. What he could make—in theory—no one among them could ever hope to make.

  A mage could, he thought, irritable. A mage of lesser talent and no ambition. But he had too great a love for his own authority to speak the words aloud.

  “Take me.”

  “Yes, master.”

  “And bring the box on that desk. I do not need to remind you to handle it with care.”

  * * *

  After that day, Cessaly’s size was no longer a problem. Her father spent some part of the summer building a small addition to his barn, and he placed her tools, her paints, and the pieces of wood that he found for her use, beneath its flat roof. He had no money for glass, but the doors themselves opened toward the sun’s light, and Cessaly worked from the moment it crossed the threshold of the room, ceasing when it faded.

  The merchant returned three times in the year, bringing different tools, different materials, different paints. He asked if she had ever seen metal worked, and when she shook her head, he offered to take her to a jeweler in the largest of the Free Towns. It was an offer that was flatly rejected by both her father and her mother.

  They were very surprised when, two years later, that jeweler made the trek at the merchant’s side when the caravan returned.

  “This had better not be a waste of my time,” he said curtly to the merchant.

  “I’m paying for your time,” the merchant had replied, with a very small smile. “But I know my business.”

  “Where is your young paragon of creativity, Gerrald?”

  “In front of you.”

  “What, this girl?”

  “The very one.”

  The jeweler frowned. He was balding, and the dome of his skull seemed to glow. “How old are you, child?”

  “Twelve.”

  The frown deepened. “Twelve. And you’ve never apprenticed to anyone?”

  She shook her head.

  “Well. I’m not sure that I can offer you such a position—I’ve heard that your parents won’t hear of you travelling, and this town is not my home. But Gerrald has offered me much money to teach you for the summer, and I admit that the offer itself is unusual enough to have piqued my curiosity. If you are willing, I would teach you some small amount of my craft.”

  He brought with him gold and silver, sparkling gems and glossy pearls, opals and ebony, a small dragon’s hoard.

  But he brought something better, something infinitely more alluring: fire. Fire, in the heart of the rooms her father had built.

  She had waited for her father’s permission, and her father had granted it.

  * * *

  The man in robes came again, three times, the water jug heavy in his hands. She watched his shadows against the cobbled stones, and her hands ached. Her grandmother’s hands ached as well—but she blamed that ache on the ocean Cessaly could taste when her tongue touched her lips.

  Cessaly had not yet seen the ocean; she had seen buildings, horses, and streets that went on for as far as the eye could see. There were white birds in the air above, birds with angry, raucous cries; there were insects beneath her feet among mice and rats; there were cats sleek and slender, and dogs of all shapes, all sizes.

  There was no workshop; she had been forbidden all of her tools. When travelling along the road, she had been permitted to idly carve the pieces of wood she had taken from the farm; they were gone now.

  She wanted them.

  There was no dirt beneath her feet; there were stones, smooth and flat, longer than she was and at least three times as wide. There were fences, too, things of black iron or bronze. Nothing that she could work with.

  She plaited her hair instead, until her mother caught her at it, and grabbed both her hands, stilling them.

  “Not here,” she had said, severely. “Not here.”

  Her hands began to ache; her eyes began to burn. She could not wait forever.

  * * *

  The jeweler stayed in the town of Durant for four years. He bought a house for himself, very near the common; he built his workshop, sent for his apprentices, and brought his business to the town. He also made a room for Cessaly, and her mother brought her to it, and took her from it, every day except for the Mother’s day.

  Cessaly worked with gold, with silver, with platinum. She handled his diamonds, his emeralds, his rubies, the blinking eyes of curved sapphires, the crisp edges of amethyst and firestone. He had begun by telling her what he wished her to achieve, and had ended, quickly, by simply giving her material to work with.

  He often watched as she worked; often worked by her side, making the settings upon which he might place the results of her labor. He was not a man who was given to praise, and indeed, he offered little of it—but his silence was like a song, and his expression in the frame of that silence, a gift. Cessaly liked him.

  And because of that, she decided that she would make something for him. Not for the merchant to whom all of her work eventually went, but for Master Sivold himself.

  Because she wished the gift to be entirely her own, she chose wood to work with; wood was something that she could easily afford. The merchants came in the spring, and when they did, she asked if they might bring her something suitable. But she did not ask for soft wood; did not choose the oak that came from the forests a few miles outside of the village. She requested instead a red, hard wood, something riven from the heart of a giant tree.

  She was so excited when the merchant placed it in her hands; she was absorbed by the tang of its wood-scent, its rough grain, the depth of its unstained color. She wanted to rush back to the workshop, to begin to work right away.

  But she heard its voice, wood’s voice, and it bade her wait.

  Voice? No, not voice, for the words it spoke were not quite words, and the wood offered her no more than that; she could not speak to it, could ask it no question and receive no answer of use. But she could feel it in the palms of her hands as if it were a living heart; could see it move, shrinking in size until the truth of its shape was revealed.

  She waited.

  Four days later, at the height of summer, during the longest day of the year, she began to carve. To cut. To burn. She worked until the sun had begun to touch the colors of the sky; worked until the first of the stars was bright.

  And when she was finished, she saw that her mother was asleep in the great chair in the corner; that the lamp had been lit and rested on the table beside that chair; that the workshop itself was empty.

  She was very, very tired, but she tucked the box away, hiding it beneath the heavy cloths that protected the g
ems and the metals from sawdust and insects. Then she woke her mother and together they went home.

  The next day was the day that changed her life.

  She came to the workshop later than she usually did; her mother had had a great deal of difficulty waking her, and was concerned that she might have fetched ill. But Cessaly wasn’t running a fever; she didn’t cough or sneeze, didn’t shake much, didn’t throw up—and in the end, her mother had relented and accompanied her to the jeweler’s house.

  There, shaking off lethargy, Cessaly ran inside, ran to her workbench, and grabbed the box she had made. It was simple, perhaps too simple for a man like Master Sivold. But it was not without adornment; she had carved a pattern around the lip of the lid that made the join between lid and box almost invisible. Only with care could she see it herself.

  “What’s that, then, Cessaly?” he said, as she approached him.

  “Last month you said that you’d run out of space for the things—the things that you can’t bear to part with.”

  “Did I?”

  She nodded. “And I—you’ve done so much for me here, you’ve shown me so many new things, you’ve let me make what I—what I have to. I—”

  His brow rose. “Is this for me?”

  “Yes. I made it. For you. Only for you,” she added. “It’s not for Gerrald. And anyway, it doesn’t matter if he does see it. It won’t do him—or anyone else—any good.”

  He smiled and held out his hand. “It’s very elegant, but a little too plain for Gerrald’s taste. Or for his customers.” He lifted it, examining the carving around its side. “Cessaly, what is this?”

  His fingers brushed the trailing strokes of letters, letters hidden in the movement of leaves, the trailing fall of their branches.

  “Your name,” she told him.

  “My name?” He frowned. And the frown deepened. “Why do you say that, child? It does not say Sivold.”

  “It doesn’t?” Her eyes widened then, with panic and fear. She reached for the box, and he must have seen the horror on her face, for his frown eased. But he did not return it to her hands.