Tejohn was sure a single stack of wax tablets would not be enough for his entire story, but there were three left over when he was done. At a nod from Veliender, Ulmasc carefully gathered her things and withdrew.
“Monument sustain us all,” Beacon Veliender said. “King Shunzik did not treat you well, did he?”
Tejohn said nothing. He’d expected her to demand that he swear to the accuracy of his story, but now that she hadn’t, he didn’t know what to say next. He noticed the old priest at the next table suddenly staring at him with a fierceness he would never have expected from such a frail figure. He looked slightly familiar, too.
“If you think it’s not important,” she continued, “then it is not. Still, I apologize for the way you’ve been treated in our city. Your city, yes? You grew up near here, didn’t you?”
“On a farm. I visited the city, but….”
“Now you will see that King Shunzik did not free you and you are in no danger of being sent back to his dungeons. He isn’t clever enough to think up that sort of ruse, not when he thinks he can have his way through brute force. You’ve already seen how he treats his own people, taking everything from them, making slaves of them--we no longer have to obey the Peradaini ban on that word, do we? Let us be done with empty codes. He is making slaves of his own people and working them to death in quarries. And for what? A berm of broken stone?”
She gestured out toward the rising sun, which had broken through the horizon during his story. There, well beyond the city walls, he could see it. A broad, flat stone expanse with a low berm on the border. That was the parade ground where he had marched in formation so many years ago and had worked like a convict only a few days ago. Even at this distance, he could see the berm wasn’t very high. How was it supposed to stop the grunts with that? And where would he find the spears to guard it? “Whose idea was that?”
“The king’s himself,” Veliender answered. Her voice and her expression were flat. “He expects his court scholars to break that stone expanse into fertile farmland, and for the city to sustain itself.”
Tejohn glanced out at the city again, which was now teeming with ordinary people hurrying about their business. With his new eyes, he could see them all clearly enough to note their hair color, body shape, and clothing choices. What’s more, the streets were busier than he’d ever seen in his life. Ussmajil was packed with refugees.
Even if he could break the parade ground into arable soil--and he couldn’t--there would never be enough land to feed so many. One look at the priest’s face showed she was thinking the same thing. “He’s gone mad,” Tejohn said simply.
“Despair has ruined him,” Veliender said simply, as though she was talking about a worn-out water wheel. “He makes useless plans to keep the people busy while he feasts his friends every night. They live like condemned men. Alone of the cities and holdfasts of Peradain, Ussmajil has best chance of withstanding the grunts’ assault, but not with Shunzik Finstel on the throne.”
Tejohn nodded. Ussmajil was the city of his childhood, no matter that it was less than half the size of the Morning City. He was grateful for the chance to see it one more time.
The beacon wasn’t finished. “That’s why we were hoping you would kill him for us.”
Chapter 6
The last building lay on the far side of the second tower at the end of another low corridor. It was only one story tall, and not only was the room square, the floors were covered with stinking tidal-flat mud. It was possible, Cazia thought, that there was no floor, just heavy stone walls set into the mud. There were no windows, cubbies, beds, or other structures, and the only break in the wall was an open arch that faced away from the ocean.
Cazia, Ivy, and Kinz sat hunched in the low corridor, their shoulders pressed against the stone roof. None of them wanted to step out into the reeking floor with its mosquitoes and tiny, swarming gnats. They could see that just beyond the arch, there was a small pool, ringed with a solid hoop of black stone, that rose and fell like a breathing creature.
“I will go,” Ivy said, stepping suddenly into the squelching mud. Cazia immediately followed. She hadn’t realized the others were waiting to see who would go first; she assumed that none of them would leave the clean, dry corridor stone.
Ivy and Cazia took cautious steps toward the arch. If there was anything interesting in this room, it was buried in the mud, and that’s where it would stay. However, the little pool of water, which was only about ten feet wide, was another matter. Cazia cautiously approached. The way the surface moved suggested it was being pumped, but that didn’t make any sense. “Why is it moving up and down like that?”
“I assume it is connected to the surf by an underground channel,” Ivy answered, as though this wasn’t an incredibly alarming thing to say.
Ivy hopped by her and crouched by the edge of the pool, which seemed foolhardy to Cazia. She hurried forward and caught hold of the girl’s shoulder. “Come away.” Cazia had promised to bring the princess home, not to bring her to the water’s edge where she could be snatched away and devoured.
“What do you think this place is?” Ivy asked, making no move to retreat.
The stone hoop around the pool was itself ringed with stones, and she could not see the bottom through the murky green water. Just the thought of it made Cazia’s skin crawl, but she supposed it was too narrow to let an eel or sea giant pass. On the far side of the pool was a stony beach, rockslides of jagged black stones much like the stones north of Fort Samsit, and then the black cliffs of the Northern Barrier.
How long ago had she and Ivy come across the destroyed Indregai camp? It seemed like such a long time, but she still remembered the sense of disarray, the bodies, the broken things. There was none of that here. Whoever--or whatever--built this place, they left it in an orderly way, leaving behind only a few things.
“An outpost?” Cazia ventured. “Maybe something came in from the ocean and built this...winter home?” The idea gave her goose bumps, but the building had been abandoned a very long time ago, possibly hundreds of years. The Tilkilit’s patrons, whatever they were, would not return here today. Not today.
“Or perhaps they came out of the portal, made the way to the shore, and after a brief delay for some reason when they built this shelter, ventured into the sea?”
In that case, they were definitely not coming back; the oceans were filled with the deadliest kinds of creatures. Most sensible people didn’t even trust fresh water, unless they were Redmudds or something.
Still, she had no idea how to explain that monstrous eel skeleton in the freshwater lake. Something had forced it upriver to die in waters where it could not survive, but what? Could it have had something to do with this structure?
An odd shape at the other side of the arch caught Cazia’s eye. There was another right-angled white lever much like the one on the upper floor, except both ends of this one were nearly as long as Ivy was tall. Also, this one did not have a space to fit a Tilkilit stone. Instead, the horizontal end swelled into a sharp-edged cube. If the other end had an ornamentation, it wasn’t visible. That end went straight down into the mud.
There was a small stone arch laid across the horizontal length like a weight to hold it down.
Once she noticed that, Cazia examined the place where the levers met. Yes, it was another stone hinge. She scraped at the mud around it, trying to clean it out. When she lifted the weight away, she would be able to rotate the whole thing and dip that sharp-edged cube into the pool.
“What does this do?” Ivy asked at her shoulder.
“Let’s find out.” Cazia removed the weight.
“Wait!” Ivy said. “What if it has some sort of magic?”
Of course. Cazia stood and peered closely at the cube. It was enchanted. She could feel the magic on it like the tingle at the edge of a high cliff. Some scholars, she had once been taught, could identify spells just by being near them, but her own training had never gotten that far. “You’re right. It
is. I wonder what it does?”
“Maybe it collapses the building,” Ivy said, laying her hand on Cazia’s. “Maybe it will set us on fire. Maybe--”
“Little sister, would you put a lever in your home that would make the roof and walls fall on you? You might build one that would close a door or, if I’m right, purify the salt water in that pool, but one that would burn you to ashes or crush you?”
“It could be a trap.”
“Without even a lock on the doors? You distrust magic too much.” Cazia immediately thought that she might not distrust it enough, but Fire and Fury, she’d just had her magic taken away again by one of those Tilkilit stones, and she wanted something back. She wanted whatever this lever would do for reasons that had nothing to do with common sense. She flipped the lever up, and the long end swung down and splashed into the pool.
The water rose up, then receded again, but the cube went deep enough that it stayed submerged. Cazia and Ivy watched it rise and recede again, then again. If there was any effect, it was invisible. Cazia dipped her fingers into the very edge of the pool and raised them to her lips. It was still salty. The lever didn’t purify the water after all.
Rise, recede. Rise, recede. What had they done? Nothing? Ivy turned a quizzical expression to Cazia, who could only shrug in return.
Then something leaped from the pool and struck Cazia full on her chest. She screamed in fright, falling into the chilly mud at Ivy’s feet and pushing the slimy thing away. The creature that had struck her hit the wall with a wet smack.
It was a fish as long as her arm and as thick as her neck. Its scales were a gleaming greenish black and its teeth looked like needles. It flopped in the mud twice, then shuddered, gasping.
“Ugh!” Cazia wiped her hands on the front of her shirt. Was there blood? No. Good. The thing hadn’t bitten her. Ivy took her hand and tried to pull her to her feet, but the sucking mud held onto her. Kinz climbed out of the corridor and hurried forward. She took Cazia’s other hand and practically yanked her upright.
“Stay clear of the arch,” Kinz said, drawing them both away from the opening. The cube was still there, under the water, and they waited to see if another fish would appear.
Cazia was soaked to the skin with stinking mud, and the buzz of mosquitoes set her teeth on edge. Whatever excitement she’d felt at the chance to use a little magic, even if it was the magic of some other, long-forgotten people, had evaporated. There was no place for her to clean her clothes except in the filthy puddle upstairs and in this pool in front of her. The one with fish in it.
“We are going to eat tonight,” Kinz said, and of course she was referring to more fish.
“But we are going to cook it this time,” Ivy said, “right?”
Kinz had a determined look in her eye. “If we can get enough wood to make the drying rack and the fire, we will not have to.”
Still, no second fish appeared. Kinz crossed to the lever, lifted it out of the water and lowered it in again. She stepped back with the other girls. In very little time at all, a second fish leaped from the water onto the mud. This one was golden and squashed like a piece of flatbread.
“It works like a distress call, I think,” Ivy said. “Like a pit trap. We have those back home.”
Cazia relaxed a little. This was a good thing, actually. A necessary thing. As gross as fish were, they were food. She could create water for their trip over the mountains, but not food. In diverting from their mission, they had stumbled onto a way to stock up on provisions.
“It is not making to flop around the way it should,” Kinz said.
The flatbread fish was not flopping around, it was true. It had beaten the mud twice with its tail, then lay still, as if it had given up. Cazia wondered if fish could understand the hopelessness of their situation and feel despair.
Cazia and Kinz approached the fish, crouching around it. Kinz laid her hand on its side as though holding it down, although it wasn’t necessary. “We catch these in the Shelterlands, at the eastern edge of the continent. They are called sun wheels. When they are healthy, they make to fight the long time before they die.” She bent low. “Look at its eye.”
Cazia did. There were red splotches in it, and more were forming with each moment. “Blood?”
Without answering, Kinz turned her attention to the first fish. “This one, too. What does it mean?”
Ivy stepped through the squelching mud and stood over them. “I do not think we should eat them until we know if they have been poisoned or not.”
“We must make to do this right,” Kinz said. She took the piece of flint from her pocket, then sat at the edge of the corridor and gently struck the flint with the iron crown, slowly flaking off pieces. In a little while, she had honed the sharp edge.
Once that was done, it was short work to slicing the head off the sun wheel and look inside. They had to crouch at the base of the arch--with the water perilously close--for enough light to see, but it still took a long while before the eldest girl found something she thought worth mentioning.
“Its skull is made cracked,” she said finally. “It is bleeding through. See, its brain is made like a string of beads, and--” She pried the bones apart with her fingers. Cazia wasn’t squeamish about meat, not at all, but she had to look away when she heard the tiny cracking sounds. She and Ivy looked at each other, and the little girl looked just as uncomfortable. “Well, this is not right. In the Shelterlands, we catch these by the dozen in our winter nets, and it is the children who make to clean them. Their brains are not supposed to look like this.”
“Like what?” Cazia asked, stepping closer to see. The memory of Doctor Whitestalk pressing a sparrow’s guts against her tongue back before the Scholars’ Tower fell returned to her, as sudden and vivid as if it had just happened that morning.
Kinz turned the butchered fish toward her and pointed at something with her bloody fingers. Cazia couldn’t tell one piece of flesh from another. “This part of the brain is mush,” Kinz said. “Like it has been struck with a rock.”
She found the same thing when she investigated the other fish. While she cut it open, Ivy took the sun wheel and Cazia’s muddy jacket through the low corridor back into the tower. By the time Kinz had finished with both fish, Cazia had an idea what was happening. “The magic in the lever is damaging them,” she said. “Spells can affect anything but a person’s mind. You can’t magic someone into falling in love with you, and you can’t magic them into undying loyalty. You can’t make them fight or flee in terror--”
“Right,” Kinz said, “or your soldiers would make magic in every battle.”
Again with the soldiers. “Sure. The point is that you can’t change a person.”
“Then how does the translation magic work?” Kinz said. There was something odd in her tone, as though she was trying to uncover a lie that had bothered her for some time.
“It’s a good question,” Cazia said. “Doctor Twofin—he was my teacher—said no one is quite sure where to draw the line between what’s possible and what isn’t. Some believe the words exist as a separate thing from the person, that it’s part of the world.”
“Not a physical part.”
“No, of course.” I could be hanged for this conversation. “Not physical, but outside us. It doesn’t change us when we hear translated words. Then again, some people believe magic can do much more than we’ve been told. That we’ve been lied to all along.”
Kinz’s expression was stoic. “What do you think?”
“I think there’s too much I don’t know. Peradaini scholars have the thirteen Gifts, and we’ve altered them in small ways. You know about that.”
It wasn’t a question, but Kinz treated it like one. “The Evening People gave you a spell to heal illness and you changed it so it would make to heal battle wounds.”
“Yes,” Cazia said. Fire and Fury, she should not be saying this, but they were all alone out here, with the ocean just on the other side of the wall and a mountain range
between them and the dubious safety of the Sweeps. Cazia suddenly realized that she wanted the older girl’s friendship. They’d been through so much together, and yet the clan girl with her beautiful dark face and her oiled braids--fraying now; should she offer to re-braid them after all?--still regarded her with suspicion.
How could Cazia convince the girl to stock up on food and head southward immediately if they could barely share a civil word? Getting home alive, and getting the princess home alive as well, would be hard enough if they worked together. Bringing the Tilkilit stones back to whatever scholars were left in the world would be impossible alone.
“Yes,” Cazia continued. “That’s why those stones in the pouch at your hip are so important. With them, scholars could create instant fortifications to protect people, without fear of going mad. And they could even join in the fight--”
“With a fire-lighting spell that became a torrent of flame.”
So, she wanted to talk about the way the scholars changed the Gifts. “And the spell to purify drinking water became a spell to create it out of nothing, and--”
“Does that not seem strange to you?”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“The spells are related because they both involve water,” Kinz said, “but one makes water safe and the other makes it out of nothing. Perhaps it brings the water to your hands, the way the portal brought the Tilkilit to this valley. Perhaps it makes to transmute one element into another. Still, one is cleansing and one is creation. It is as though the child who had learned to scrape mud from his sole suddenly knew how to make the boot with nothing more than force of will. How do you get from one to the next?”
“I hadn’t thought about it,” Cazia answered, surprised by the question. “When you put it that way, it doesn’t make sense at all. What I can tell you is that the way the spells are cast--the gestures and thoughts--are very similar. The differences between them are pretty slight.”
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