Memory of Stone

by West, Michelle

“It was not a request. The matter is of a sensitive nature.”

  “As is she,” Gilafas replied evenly.

  Duvari frowned. The frown was unlike the one that normally adorned his features, and Gilafas instantly regretted his words.

  “Very well, Guildmaster. King Reymalyn has sent me with a message.”

  “And that?”

  “The Sword,” he said softly, “was drawn this morning.”

  Heart’s blow. He lifted a feeble hand to ward it, but it was far too late.

  “I confess that I could not read what was writ in the runnels, although the words were clear to me. The King Reymalyn labored under no such handicap.”

  “The Sword was forged by Fabril,” Gilafas said, the words leeched of the pride that once might have lodged within them. “If I were to guess, I would say that no one but the King Reymalyn—with the possible exception of the King Cormalyn—might read what is written there.”

  “You are correct.”

  “Why have you come?”

  “If you must play at ignorance, I will indulge you. I came—”

  “Gilafas, look!”

  Cessaly had run from the room’s corner, her eyes bright. She reached out and caught his apron, tugging at it insistently. “Come, look, look!”

  He obeyed her, aware that he risked Duvari’s wrath. Like a shadow, the Lord of the Compact followed, dogging his steps. Gilafas, mindful of this, pried her fingers free, replacing cloth with the palm of gloveless hand.

  In the circular globe, the butterfly hovered, wings flapping. They brushed the concave sides of the glass, and the glass trembled in response.

  Duvari said quietly, as if there had been no interruption, “The Sword must be reforged, the Rod remade. They were meant to stand against the Barons; they were not created to stand against the darkness.”

  “Then you are doomed,” Gilafas said, but without hope, “for the man who made those emblems of the Kings’ power is long dead.”

  “Indeed. But it is not by his hands that they must be remade.”

  Gilafas stiffened. He was surprised, but he shouldn’t have been. The Lord of the Compact, it seemed, made all secrets, all hidden histories, his business.

  “I had thought it might be by yours, Guildmaster.” Duvari bowed, and when he rose from the bow, his face was as smooth as the surface of the glass that now contained the floating butterfly.

  Gilafas had a moment of clarity, then, standing before the most feared man in the Empire. He saw the pity in Duvari’s face; the pity and the ruthlessness.

  “It is trapped,” Duvari said, speaking for the first time to Cessaly.

  “Oh no,” she said, eyes round, face serious. “It is safe.” And then she frowned. “I have something for you,” she told him. “Can you wait here?”

  He nodded gently. He, who had never done a gentle thing in his life.

  Cessaly floated from the room, bouncing and skittering around the benches, her arms flapping.

  “Understand,” Duvari said quietly, when she had vanished, “that the Kings have no choice in this. The darkness has risen, and it is gathering. The Kings cannot go unarmed into that battle, and they will go.”

  “She is a child,” Gilafas replied.

  “She is an Artisan, and if I understand the hidden histories well enough, she is the Artisan for whom Fabril built the reach. What she needs to learn, she must learn here, and she must learn it quickly.”

  The Guildmaster closed his eyes.

  “Because if I am not mistaken, she will not survive long.”

  “She is not the power that Fabril was.”

  “She does not have his knowledge,” Duvari replied, “nor the allies with whom he worked so long and so secretly. But the power?” Again, something akin to pity distorted his features. “Affection is a dangerous burden, Guildmaster. We go, in the end, to war, and the chance of victory is so slight we can afford to spare nothing.”

  “It is not in my hands,” he said stiffly. That was his truth. It was not, it had never been, in his hands.

  “Is it not?”

  She came then, before Gilafas could frame answer, and her hands, so often spread wide to touch the surfaces of the world around her, were clenched in loose fists. Sunlight caught the edges of gold, the brilliant flash of diamond.

  She walked up to Duvari without even a trace of her usual caution. “These are for you,” she told him gravely.

  “For me?”

  “Well, maybe for the Kings.”

  He held out his palms very slowly, as if she were a wild creature. She placed in them two pendants. They were eagles, the guildmaster thought, wings spread in flight, flight feathers trailing light. At their heart, large as cat’s eyes, sapphires. To Gilafas’ eyes, they glowed.

  “These will help,” she told him quietly. “With the shadows.”

  “The shadows, Cessaly?”

  She nodded. “We have them here, and I don’t like them. I made one for me, too. When I wear it, I don’t hear shadow voices. Only the other ones. The stones,” she added, by way of explanation. “The wood, and the gold—the sapphires are quiet, but you need the quiet—and Master Gilafas.”

  “You hear the shadows here?”

  “Don’t ask her that!” Gilafas cried out.

  But her face had turned, from Duvari, from him. Skin pale, her eyes darted along the workroom’s walls. Here, the voices of nightmare were weakest; this was Gilafas’ space.

  But the nightmares had been growing stronger; there was now not a single moment in which she could safely be left alone without some sort of work in her hands. She jerked twice, as if struck, and then turned and fled the room.

  Gilafas, prepared in some fashion for these episodes, ran to the workbench and swept up the satchel in which the most portable of her tools were contained.

  “Guildmaster,” Duvari began.

  “Not now, Duvari.”

  He did not expect argument; he did not receive it. But he was angry enough that he could not stop himself from speaking as he strode to the door. “If I have lost her again, you will pay. One day, she will go someplace where she cannot be found; she will be beyond us, working until she starves. If that day is today, I swear to you—and to the Kings you protect—that the Guild will never again serve at your command.”

  He did not wait for the reply.

  And perhaps he would have been surprised to know that none was made.

  * * *

  Cessaly did not run far.

  Had she been afraid of Duvari, she would have, but she found herself liking the man; he was very quiet. He wasn’t cruel, but he wasn’t kind; he was almost like the stonework on the walls: made of a single piece, and finished. He needed nothing from her.

  The shadows were not afraid of him either. The moment he mentioned their voices, she heard them clearly, and they were some part of his. But although they touched him, he somehow did not touch them.

  Important, that he never heard their voices.

  She had used sapphires to capture quiet, and diamonds to capture light; the eagle was simply the ferocity of a flight that did not necessarily mean departure. She had made those in the round room because she had been afraid. But she had made three. One, she wore; because she wore it, she could now find her way up—and down—the winding stairs that led to the below.

  But two she had simply held, and when she had seen Duvari—when he appeared at her side as the butterfly began its flight—she knew why: they were for him.

  But she didn’t like his thank you very much, and she wasn’t certain if she wanted to see him again.

  Maybe. Maybe she wanted to be able to see him.

  She frowned. Things she had not tried now suggested themselves in the brilliant hues of the floor of the round room. She had her stone, of course, and she carved while she paced the floor, a hollow feeling in throat and stomach. She would ask Gilafas for what she needed. He always gave her what she needed.

  * * *

  He found her almost instantly, which s
hould have stilled his anger; it did not. She was working, although not in a frenzy, and when he entered the chamber—her workroom, as she often called it—she offered him a smile at home in the deep, soft rainbows cast by sun.

  “Master Gilafas,” she said, as he bent a moment and set his knees against those colors, “could you bring me a loom?”

  “Yes. Yes Cessaly. After lunch, I will bring you a loom.” He did not tell her that such an undertaking would take more than a single morning, and did not ask her where the loom should be set; he did not speak to her of cost, the responsibility of expenses, the things that had always balanced his momentary frenzied desires.

  She did not care; could not.

  And in truth, neither did he.

  * * *

  The loom should have been foreign to her; the working of metal was a gift that had been taught over the course of months. But he was not surprised to hear the clacking of the great, wooden monstrosity that now occupied some part of his workroom. There were no other rooms that could house it in Fabril’s reach—at least none that he was aware of, and if Cessaly knew otherwise, she did not choose to enlighten him.

  He considered her carefully as he worked, and he did work; the voices were upon him, and they rode him unmercifully. He no longer knew if ocean’s voice drove his hands, or if hers did—or worse, if his own now moved him, with its anger and its self-loathing. Not good, and he knew it; not good to be driven by that last voice. Men died for less, grabbing in a frenzy at those things that might still it—and not only the makerborn; all men with hollow power.

  But it drove him.

  Glass was before him, broken, colored, and around it a skein of lead; the things he knew better than he knew himself.

  The loom was wracked with the passage of her hands. It seemed fitting that they should work in this fashion. He was surprised that he was aware of her at all, for he knew by the feel of the glass in his hands that he should have been beyond her.

  He failed in his duty, this day; he forgot to feed Cessaly. Forgot to feed himself.

  Was not aware, until Sanfred forcibly removed his hands from his tools, of what he was making.

  But Sanfred, having wrested the cutters from his hands paused, frozen, in front of his mosaic.

  For the first time, Gilafas permitted himself to see what the glass contained.

  Cessaly.

  Cessaly, who, in bleeding hands, carried two things: A rod with a crystal orb that must deny all hint, all taint, of darkness, and a blade whose edge glittered like the diamond wings of her eagles.

  And he looked at the sky, red and dark, sun bleeding into the night of the horizon. Three days, for three more days, the light would wane early, the night sustain itself. The heart of the month of Scaral would arrive, and with it, the longest night.

  * * *

  Duvari returned two days after his first visit with Cessaly. He came without warning, which was wise; had he offered warning, the Guildmaster would have forbidden him entrance, and would have personally dismissed anyone who disobeyed that order.

  But he offered no such introduction; worse, he did not come alone. The companion he had chosen to bring to the guildhall had caused concern and quiet outrage long before the two men had mounted the stairs that led to Fabril’s reach.

  Gilafas understood why the instant he laid eyes on the second man. His hair was long and white; it fell across his shoulders like the drape of an expensive cape. He had not chosen to bind it, which was unusual; Gilafas had never seen that hair escape the length of formal braids.

  “Guildmaster,” the man said.

  “Member APhaniel,” he replied coolly. “To what do I owe this … singular … honor?”

  “To the busy schedule of Sigurne Mellifas, alas. The Council of the Magi occupies all of her waking time at the moment.”

  “I had heard there was some difficulty.”

  Meralonne APhaniel shrugged broadly. “Among mages, there is always difficulty.”

  “Among Makers, the same can be said.” But only grudgingly. “Although I confess that I have seldom had cause to resent the difficulties that keep Member Mellifas away, I resent them this day.”

  A pale brow rose in a face that was entirely too perfect on a man of Meralonne’s age.

  “It is understood. Sigurne is better at handling difficulties of this nature. In all ways. But perhaps I am not entirely truthful.”

  Gilafas snorted. “Of a certainty, you are not entirely truthful.”

  “No? Ah well, perhaps my reputation precedes me.” A glimmer of a smile then. “And one day, when we both have time, you must tell what that reputation is. The dour and incommunicative Duvari cedes not even the most paltry of rumors to the mageborn. He is significantly less … suspicious of the makerborn.”

  “Not, apparently, their guildmaster.”

  “Well, no, of course not. The guildmaster actually possesses power.”

  “Gentlemen,” Duvari said coldly, “may I remind you of the scarcity—and therefore the value—of our time?”

  Meralonne reached into his robes and drew from it a long-stemmed pipe. “May I?”

  “Of course.”

  “You might join me, Guildmaster.”

  Gilafas started to say that he did not smoke, and thought better of it. He did, and he guessed that the mageborn member of the Order of Knowledge knew exactly what it was that burned in his pipe when he chose to bring it to his lips. He reached for pipe, box, and bitter, bitter weed. Spread dry leaf in the flat bowl of his pipe.

  “I have seen the work of your apprentice,” Meralonne said, when smoke lingered in the air. “The two pendants.”

  “And they?”

  “You must guess at what they do, Guildmaster.”

  “I confess that I have not the resources—or the desire—to test them. They are effective in some measure against the—against our enemies?”

  “Yes.” Meralonne’s cheeks grew concave as he inhaled. “I had not thought to see their like again, not newly made. But yes.” He turned, then, to the corner of the room in which Cessaly lay sleeping. In sleep she was much like a cat; she found it as it came, and took it where she sat, stretching out against floor or chair.

  “She is young,” he said at last.

  “She is.”

  “Do you understand what it is that is asked of her?”

  Gilafas could not find the words, but for once, he didn’t need to. He turned to his bench, and lifted the gauze he had placed across his work, setting it aside with care; he wanted no dust, no wood shavings, no metallic slivers caught in its threads. Then he lifted the glasswork, the mosaic of transparent color, and he turned its bitter accusation toward the Magi.

  Through the wild skein of Cessaly’s hair, he saw the golden skin of Meralonne APhaniel.

  “I see,” the magi said quietly, “that she is not the only Artisan to busy herself in Fabril’s reach.”

  “I have always worked in Fabril’s reach,” Gilafas said, dryly.

  “Oh, indeed. But you have only twice created something that blends the skill of the Maker with the deeper, wilder magicks. Ah, I stand corrected; this is the third, and if I were to guess, the most subtle, the most powerful, of the three.”

  It was Gilafas’ turn to be surprised. “Is it?”

  “The most powerful?”

  “A work.”

  “Do you not know?”

  He said nothing.

  “Magic—such as mine—is not sanctioned within these halls, Guildmaster, but were it, I am not certain it would be capable of divining the purpose behind your creation. Certainly it will not tell me more than you yourself know. But I will say this, and perhaps I say too much. I am not Duvari. I am aware of what is asked, both of you and your apprentice. Duvari accepts all cost and accrues all debt in the cause of the Kings. I? I do not believe that debt ever goes unpaid, and I am loath to accumulate it.

  “And I believe your apprentice is waking.”

  Gilafas frowned; he had heard nothing. But he d
id not doubt the Magi. He turned to see that Cessaly had taken to her feet. She was smiling shyly.

  “Have you come to see my work?”

  “I have,” Meralonne replied. “And I have come to bring you something. Which would you have me do first?”

  “My work.” Her smile was unfettered by such things as caution or suspicion. She walked over to the closet Gilafas had emptied for her use, and drew from it three bundles of cloth. One was as blue as cloudless sky, one as dark as midnight, and one the color of light seen through the fog of cloud. “I made these,” she said, as if it were not obvious.

  “Did you make them for anyone?”

  “I don’t know. But I made them. They are all too large for me. The loom moves quickly and the cloth chatters.”

  She handed him the darkest of the three, and as he unfolded it, Gilafas saw that it had a hood. A cloak, he thought.

  “Put it on.” Her little, imperious voice was the only one in the room.

  Meralonne did not hesitate. He laid hand against the weave of the cloth, and ran his fingers across it, his eyes wide. “Child,” he said softly. Just that. But there was no mistaking the longing—and the wonder—in the single word. “You remind me of my youth.” He caught the cloak by its upper edge, and twirled it backward until it fell over his back, obscuring the length of his hair.

  He raised the hood, and then, with a smile, fastened the silver clasps that hung at his collar. Gilafas was not surprised to see him vanish.

  Cessaly clapped her hands in glee.

  The hood fell, and the man reappeared. “My lady,” he said, and he fell to one knee before her laughing face. “We have come to beg a boon of you.”

  “Member APhaniel—”

  “We have brought, for your inspection, two things.” He gestured. Magic, the Guildmaster thought.

  “I have the Kings’ writ,” Duvari said evenly, before Gilafas could voice even token outrage.

  A bundle appeared in Duvari’s outstretched arms. He brought it to Meralonne APhaniel, and the magi unwrapped it with care, until he was left with two things.

  Gilafas bore witness; he could not bring himself to move.

  Cessaly came to Meralonne as if she could no longer see him, as if she had eyes for only what he held. Bright, her eyes, like liquid, like the ocean in summer. And dark, like its depths.