A Gathering Of Stones

4

Late that night Maksim went up the path behind the Inn to the flat where he’d sent Brann and Jaril on their way. Using a broom he’d borrowed from a tweeny at the Inn, he swept the stone as clean as he could, then he drew a circle with a length of soft chalk. Working quickly, he finished the sketchy pentacle; precision wasn’t important for what he planned, there was little danger in casting mantaliths. What he wanted, what he needed was privacy.

The chalk had a tar base so the damp from the fog didn’t wash it away; he stripped off the cotton gloves he’d used to keep it from clinging to his hands and knelt at the heart of the pentacle. He drew out a soft leather pouch and twitched the knot loose that held the drawstrings tight. Muttering the manta chanta under his breath, he poured the rhombstones into the palm of his left hand. He closed his eyes, visualized the reality he needed to reach, then spoke the word: WHEN? And spoke other words: WHAT DAY? With a snap of thumb against finger on his free hand, he shouted the Trigger, his deep voice booming through the fog, echoing back at him, the overtones lovely in their murmurs and their silences. When the echoes died, he threw the mantaliths and read their answer.

Two days hence. Third hour past noon.

At that time Todichi Yahzi’s home reality would in some inexplicable way be closer to this one, easier to reach, the membranes between the two softer, thinner, the number of realities between them lessened somehow. He passed his hands over the stones, murmured the releasing manta chanta, the blessing on the mantaliths, the delivery of his gratitude for the answer he’d received.

He gathered up the stones and the broom and went away, leaving the rain to wash away his traces.

Maksim raised sail an hour before dawn on the chosen day; Todichi Yahzi sat in the bow of the boat, looking out across the black water, his back to his one time master. He hadn’t said a word to anyone since he left the Pens, his anger was too deep. As Maksim sent the small boat scooting south into the Tukery, he glared at the kwitur and choked on his guilt and smoldered with an anger of his own-and sometimes was sad at losing an almost-friend.

By the time the sun rose they were deep into the narrow crooked waterways. Already he had crept through the patches of dense fog that swung in complex orbits around and about the Tukery, fog inhabited by howling souls cast out from Kukurul, souls spilling over with fury and despair, doing their futile best to drive him onto razor-edged rocks or into quicksands that could swallow a boat between one breath and the next. Twice he’d driven off ambushing bands, throwing fire and dissolution at them, pulling their sailing canoes apart under them and dropping them into schools of hungry needlefish. He didn’t know exactly what he was looking for, he just sailed on and on, waiting for his Talent to seize onto a place.

Through all this Todichi Yahzi sat silent and brooding in the bow, ignoring Maksim, staring at things only he could see.

When the sun was directly overhead, Maksim saw a rocky islet with vents in its precipitous sides voiding steam into the cold dank air; it was a truncated cone rising about a hundred yards above the water. Here and there swatches of orange and faded-olive lichens interrupted the drab dun stone; near the vents ferns were lush lacy patches of a green so vibrant it hurt the eyes. There was a small halfinoon of sandy beach on the north side, the side he came on first; he circled the islet and came back to the beach, drove the nose of the boat up onto the sand and tossed the anchor overside. He slipped his arms through the straps of his rucksack and got cautiously to his feet. “Todich, you think you can make it to the top?”

The kwitur dragged himself up, moving with painful slowness. Maksim watched, frowning, angry at first, then amused. “Ooohhh, tragedy, the very image of it.” He laughed for the first time in days, the sound booming back at him from the hollows of the cliff. He held to the mast, his weight keeping the boat steady as Todich clambered out.

The kwitur sank ankle-deep into the damp sand. He hummed his distaste for the clinging stuff and continued cursing in his insect voice as he trudged to the rock and began picking his way carefully upward, climbing with the steady sureness of his kind.

Maksim contemplated the slope and considered snapping himself to the top; his mass and relatively high center of gravity made him less than sure-footed on rock faces and he was beginning to feel the weight of his years despite his skill at using earthfire to boil off the poisons of aging. He dropped overside into the shallow water, pulled the boat higher on the sand and moored her to a handy rock; he wasn’t about to thrust an anchor here in the Tukery.

He got to the top, weary, shaking, scraped about like a stew carrot. Todich was crouching in a pitiful knot, looking more miserable and mistreated than ever. Maksim snorted. Todich was overdoing the victim to the point of absurdity. He began building a small fire with the coal and tinder he’d hauled up in his backpack. In the middle of this business, he looked up to see Todich watching him. He’d never been sure he read the kwitur’s minimal expressions with anything like accuracy, but he thought he saw a flash of amusement, even affection there. That startled him so much he forgot about fanning the tiny fire and it went out on him. Exaggeration? Resentment caricatured beyond absurdity? Beyond? Absurdity? THAT LITTLE GIT WAS PAYING HIM BACK FOR THOSE TEN YEARS AND HAVING SOME FUN AT THE SAME TIME!!! “You! YOU! You perfidious inglorious diabolic old fraud.”

“Slow,” Todichi hoomed. “Got old, han’t you.”

“Yeh, you right. Looks like any brains I had ‘^ye turned to suet.” He dug into the backpack, tossed a blanket to the kwitur. “You’re shivering. You’d better wrap this round you till I can get this damn fire lit.”

The reluctant coals finally caught. Maksim set a pan of water on a tripod, watched it a moment to see that the tripod was stable and the fire was going to keep burning, then he sat on his heels and contemplated Todichi Yahzi. “Tell me about it,” he said and settled himself to listen.