The First Stone

by Mark Anthony

  Yet he had been right, hadn’t he? It was real.

  I picked up the vial. The gold spider on the stopper shone in the candlelight, the ruby set into its abdomen winking at me. Then, before I could reconsider, I unstopped the vial, held it to my lips, and tilted my head back. The fluid coursed down my throat, hot and thick. I knew fiery pain, then only blackness.

  It was morning when one of the servingwomen found me, sprawled on the floor of the library. She shook my shoulder, begging me to wake, but when I finally opened my eyes she clasped her hand to her mouth, stifling a scream, and fled.

  I pulled myself up and caught my reflection in the glass doors of a cabinet. Startled eyes stared back at me, gold as coins. By all that was holy, what had I done?

  A strange sensation came over me. I felt, not stronger, but horribly weak, as if for the first time in my life I sensed the encroaching decrepitude, the constant rotting of my body, that was a correlate of mortality. And I also sensed that, for the moment, that mortal progress had ceased.

  I called for the servants to help me, but no one answered my call. Shaking, I pulled myself up to the desk and sat. My eyes fell upon the open journal, and a breath of wonder escaped me, for I saw words upon the pages I had not seen before.

  A palimpsest—I had heard of such things. They were twice-written books, created when a monk or scribe took an old book, rubbed its pages clean with sand, and cut and sewed them anew to make a fresh book to write in. However, sometimes, in the right light, the old words might yet be seen, bleeding through behind the new.

  The journal was like a palimpsest. Only it was the old words that had been easily read, and the newer words that could only be seen in the right conditions. However, it was not light that showed these other words, but rather new, golden eyes. The writing seemed to dance upon the page, bright and shining, as if written with molten metal.

  As I have begun a new life, so I begin this journal anew. We are di ferent now. The Philosophers, we call ourselves, as though all mysteries are ours to understand. But I know, as perhaps the others do not, that there is far more for us yet to learn, that this is only the beginning. . . .

  I clutched the journal and read. The house was silent; no servants disturbed me. At last the light outside the windows failed. I shut the little book and buried my face in my hands. What a fool I was. I had been wrong about everything.

  “It wasn’t you, Alis,” I murmured. Anguish burned in me, hotter than the blood I had consumed. “It wasn’t you at all. It was I.”

  “What are you talking about, Marius?”

  I looked up. In my despair, I had not heard her footsteps on the carpet. She stood in the door of library, dressed in red, a smirk on her lips.

  “Rebecca,” I croaked. “What are you doing here?”

  She sauntered in. “I might ask the same of you. This is hardly a cave in the Highlands. I had a feeling you might be up to something, Marius. You had a secretive air about you when you left, so I decided I would follow you and see what you were up to. I hope you don’t mind that I let myself in, but there’s no sign of your servants anywhere, so I—”

  A gasp escaped her. She had moved farther into the room and was staring at me.

  “Gods, Marius, your eyes. What’s happened to you?”

  Despite my fear, I smiled. “I think you know now why the servants fled.”

  She only shook her head, taking a step back. I rose.

  “I’m like them now, Rebecca.”

  “Like who?” she said, shaking her head, only then a moment later she said, “The Philosophers.”

  “Yes.”

  Her eyes went wide. “Oh, Marius,” she breathed, reaching a hand toward me. I thought perhaps it was a gesture of supplication, of forgiveness. There was a softness on her face I had not seen since we were lovers.

  Rebecca’s eyes rolled up, her arm went limp, and she slumped to the floor. The hilt of a dagger jutted from her back. Even as I stared, trying to comprehend, three figures clad in black drifted into the room.

  “Why?” I choked on the word.

  The two men pushed back the hoods of their cloaks, and the woman lifted the veil from her face. They gazed at me with serene gold eyes.

  “Our kind must never be seen,” the woman said.

  I knelt beside Rebecca, feeling for the beat of her heart, but there was none. I looked up at them. “But she didn’t see you.”

  “No,” the woman said. “She saw you, Marius.” She glanced at the men. “Leave me, Gabriel, Arthur—I would do this, if I may.”

  The men nodded and left. She approached the desk, brushing the journal with a gloved hand.

  “Ah,” she said. “Albrecht’s journal.”

  I stood and turned away from Rebecca’s body. I wanted to weep for her but could not. “You sent them here to fetch it all those years ago, didn’t you? Rebecca and Byron. Only I hid it from them.”

  “No, we sent them here to fetch you.” She laughed at my shocked expression. “Do not be so surprised, Marius. There is nothing you have read in this journal that we do not already know. As he grew weak, Adalbrecht confided everything to us. Much as he wished to betray us, in the end he could not. We are bound to one another by the blood we have drunk. It sees itself in each of us, and knows its kind, and prevents us from doing harm to any other in whose veins it flows. So you see, much as I’ve been tempted to throttle one of the others from time to time, I cannot.”

  Her words horrified me, for I sensed they were true. “But what are you really?”

  Her eyes fixed on me. “Do you not know what we are? And what you are, Marius?” She tapped the journal. “I believe you do.”

  I thought of the headaches that had afflicted me with growing frequency over the years. From my coat I pulled out the silver cloth I had carried with me for so many years. It glimmered softly in the gray light. “I’m like them. The folk of the tavern. I’m like Thomas Atwater. Like Alis.”

  “You were.” She picked up the empty vial. “You are like us now.”

  I shut my eyes, thinking of all I had read in my master’s journal, trying to understand. He had described his journey to Crete with the others, how they had found the forgotten passage leading beneath the ruins of Knossos, and there had stumbled upon a tomb containing seven stone sarcophagi. They opened the sarcophagi and found within seven figures masked in gold, jewels of lapis and jade adorning their burnished skin.

  Impossibly, the beings seemed alive, for they were warm to the touch, and their bodies were not corrupt. However, if they were alive, then they slept, for nothing could cause them to stir, not even when one of the alchemists cut them.

  It was she who had done it—the one woman among them. Her name was Phoebe. What instinct had caused her to bend her head, to drink the blood that flowed forth, my master did not know, but they had watched the transformation come upon her. Then they had all drunk of the blood of the Sleeping Ones.

  All but one, that was. Eight alchemists had gone to Crete, but when one of them tried to flee, afraid to drink the blood, Phoebe had murdered him with a knife to the heart. For no one who was not one of their own must ever be allowed to know their secret.

  With one dead, the alchemists were seven in number just like the sarcophagi, and so each drank from a different being— though Adalbrecht was the last. And all of them were transformed.

  The Philosophers had found other things in the tomb besides the Sleeping Ones. They had found tablets with writing they could not fathom, and the remains of a stone doorway, now fallen to ruin. Some of these things they brought with them back to London, though the Sleeping Ones they left beneath Knossos, and they concealed the passage so that no one else might ever find it.

  After that, the journal told of my master’s years as a Philosopher. He had not taken part in the attempts to restore the doorway, to open it. Instead he had sought to decipher the writings from the tomb. After many years he had made little progress, but he had learned enough to know that the Sleeping Ones came from a
nother world, that they had come to escape some great conflagration, and that they were waiting for something—some ultimate act of transmutation. As always, transformation required the proper catalyst. Only what that catalyst might be, he did not know, though he had suspicions. Nor did he know the nature of the transformation the Sleeping Ones sought—only that it would come when their world drew closer to this one.

  In time, Adalbrecht grew weary—weary of enduring, weary of making the trek to Knossos once every decade to drink another sip of their blood. He had begun to fade. The other Philosophers had known it, and they did not protest when he retired to Scotland. Then, one night in Edinburgh, he saw a boy on the street. He had known the folk of the tavern, and in an instant he knew this boy was like them. The silver cloth could only have been made by one of their kind. And it shone in the boy’s eyes.

  The boy was me. Why he took me in, the journal did not say. Perhaps it was pity, or perhaps it was some desire to make amends for what had been done to the folk of the tavern. No matter, the result was the same.

  “It wasn’t her,” I said. “You gave me the mission of watching Alis Faraday to see if she would discover her true heritage. But she wasn’t the real subject of the study. It was me. You wanted to see if I would discover what I really was.”

  The woman—Phoebe—nodded. “And so you have, Marius. I confess, we began to grow a trifle impatient toward the end. Hence our words spoken beneath the Charterhouse, and our giving you an assignment in Scotland, close to your home.”

  I hung my head. So they had known I was there in the locked room, listening.

  “No, Marius, it matters not. These were only nudges. You have learned everything on your own. This experiment is over.”

  Experiment? So that was all this was to her. We were simply things to be used to satisfy their curiosity. Myself. Alis. They had made me watch her die for their little experiment.

  I glared at her now, rage filling me. “Why didn’t you simply tell me these things?”

  “Because you loved Adalbrecht too much. You would have done as he asked out of loyalty to him. You would have lived a quiet life here in the north. We could not allow that. And so you had to find out on your own.”

  My rage subsided. I was too weary, too full of sorrow. They had used Alis just like the folk in the tavern. Just as they had used me.

  “I know you are angry, Marius,” she said. “But it will soon pass, you shall see. Your old life is behind you now. The pain you had started to feel—the headaches, the weariness—I think you will feel no more. You have been remade.” She held out her hand. “It is time for you to join us.”

  Astonishment replaced anger. “Join you? You mean become a Philosopher?”

  “Yes. A Philosopher.”

  I struggled to comprehend. “But what do you need me for?”

  “Adalbrecht is gone. Our number is diminished. We would be seven again.” She studied me with her golden eyes. “And it is too late for you to undo what has been done. You are like us, Marius, whether you will it or not. It is better for you to be with your own kind.”

  “And if I refuse to join you?”

  She smiled. “You will join us. You are too curious not to. After all, how can you hope to continue Adalbrecht’s work in translating the writings from the tomb?”

  I cursed her, even as I knew she was right, and we left that night in a carriage bound for London.

  That is how I was the first and only Seeker ever to become a Philosopher. In the centuries that followed, I did just as Phoebe had said I would—I continued the work begun by my master, seeking to translate the writings from the tomb of the Sleeping Ones, trying to understand what it was they were waiting for.

  However, as the carriage rolled away from Madstone Hall that night, I knew there was one thing Phoebe and the others did not know—a secret they would never uncover. I thought of Queen Dido, and how she had thrown herself on the pyre when she had lost all that she loved. In a way, I had done the same. For the Marius I had been was dead.

  Yet like a ghost that lingered on, I remained, and always I craved revenge. Only I was bound to them by my transformation. As the centuries passed, Phoebe’s words were proven true. The blood of the Sleeping Ones connected us. I could not harm them—at least not directly. But I schemed, I waited, and I knew the day would come when the time would be right, and when another would help me achieve what I sought.

  That time is now. And that other is you.

  Now you know what no other besides our own kind has ever known. Now you know the truth of the origin of the Philosophers.

  And now, I beg of you, help me bring about their end.

  PART FOUR

  CATALYST

  33.

  Aryn stood at the window of her bedchamber, watching distant fires burn in the night.

  Teravian lay in the bed behind her, asleep by the slow rhythm of his breathing. There was no point in waking him; she always saw the fires now. In the morning, Teravian would send his men—those that remained, at any rate—out beyond the castle, and they would find more houses burned, or perhaps even an entire village.

  A week ago, Aryn herself had ridden to a village not a league from Calavere, and she had spoken to a man who had burned his family alive in their cottage.

  “There was no hope for them,” he had said when she asked him why he had done it, eyes blank in his sooty face. “No hope at all.”

  “What do you mean?” she had said, trying to comprehend. “Were they ill with plague?”

  But the man hadn’t answered. He had sat on the ground, drawing empty circles in the dirt with a stick, until the king’s men came to haul him away to the castle’s dungeon. Later, from another villager, Aryn had learned that the man’s wife and children had been healthy and happy, and that he had been the proudest farmer in the village.

  Aryn lifted her gaze from the fires to the heavens. She didn’t need to look to the north to see it anymore; the rift had grown rapidly over these last days, spreading out across half the sky like a blight, blotting out the stars. It was visible even by day now as a shadow against the blue of the sky, and it made the sunlight feel pale and wan.

  The night breeze wafted in through the window, and her nose wrinkled at the foul odor rising from the bailey. The whole castle smelled putrid. Most of the servants had left, and those that remained did so little work they might as well have departed with the others. Aryn had taken to emptying chamber pots herself, and she was forced to scrounge in the kitchens with everyone else for what foodstuffs had not spoiled. No goods had come to the castle in days, and carts stood abandoned on the road that led up to the gates. She had gotten a little milk two days before by convincing a boy to milk a cow that had been bellowing in the lower bailey, neglected, its udder swollen.

  On her way back into the castle, she had passed an old woman lying dead in the mud of the courtyard. People had shuffled past her without so much as looking. Aryn had to call for guards three times before someone came to take the body away.

  That same day, Teravian had ventured out for a ride. When he returned to the castle, his face had been grim. He had seen entire villages abandoned, and crops—ready for harvesting—left to rot in the fields.

  “Where have all the people gone?” Aryn had asked.

  “I’m not sure, but more than once I heard stories of people in white robes. They gather on hilltops where they stand and raise their arms to the sky, waiting. Waiting for something. I saw some of them, walking along the road. At first they made me think of Raven Cultists. But they were dressed in white, not black, and they were silent. I called to them, but they only stared, mouths open. I looked into the eyes of a woman who marched with them, and I saw nothing, Aryn. Nothing at all.”

  He had trembled as she held him, and she had wished she could brew something to calm him. However, she seemed to have forgotten how to concoct the simplest potion. Her mind was addled; she could not think. Flustered, Aryn had tried to contact Lirith over the Weirding, to ask the
other witch how to make a soothing draught. However, she had managed to touch Lirith’s thread only for a moment.

  The stars go out, Lirith had said. She is not coming back.

  That was all. Aryn had called out again and again with her mind, and even with her voice, but she could not reach Lirith. All the same, she had understood whom Lirith had meant, who was not coming back.

  Grace. It was Grace whom Lirith had pictured in her mind.

  Aryn rested a hand on her belly, but she could not feel the child move within. She tried to use the Touch to sense the little life, but the threads were too fragile, too tangled. Or maybe there was no life there to sense. Maybe the man who had burned his home, his family was right. Maybe there was no hope after all.

  Behind her, Teravian let out a soft moan in his sleep. The nightmares again. Aryn knew she should go to bed. Instead she stayed at the window, gazing into the night, and watched the fires burn.

  34.

  The sun sank toward the horizon, its light spilling across the desert like blood. Grace knelt on the edge of the patch of slipsand, staring at the place where Travis had vanished. This couldn’t be happening; he couldn’t be gone.

  Farr bound a rag around his right arm. “The bloodspell that created the sand creatures must have been keyed to Travis. I think he knew that. I think he knew, if he perished, the sand creatures would as well.”

  Larad’s shadow fell upon Grace. “He saved us, Your Majesty.”

  “Then let us save him!” Vani said, pushing Larad aside. She knelt beside Grace. “You sensed him, didn’t you? Where is he?”

  Grace shook her head. It didn’t matter. She had felt his thread go dark. Travis was dead. Truly dead.

  Vani gripped her shoulder. The T’gol’s fingers dug into her flesh. “I said where is he, Grace?”

  The pain cut through the dullness in Grace’s mind. “There.” She pointed in front of her. “Down there. Six feet. Maybe more. I’m not sure. He could have been drawn farther down after he . . . after his thread . . .” She couldn’t speak the words.