A Gathering Of Stones

14

For the next several nights Drinker of Souls hunted through the streets of Dil Jorpashil, soaking up energy so she could assume a new shape. During the days she was the Jantria

Bar Ma and kept up her healing, Jaril taking the form of a small M’darjin boy and acting as her attendant. A few of the local women asked about Carup; they were pleased, angry, happy for her and jealous, when Brann said she’d sent the girl home with a dowry.

Those same nights Jaril flew in and out of Isu sars and the Merchant doulahars, collecting clothing, jewelry and gold for the trip south. He was profoundly disturbed at the thought of leaving Yaril, churned to the point of instability because the days were passing and there was nothing he could do to shorten the time ahead and each day Yaril died a little.

One week after the abortive attack of the doulahar, an hour after dawn, when the new-risen sun was a muted blur in the clouds, providing little light and less heat, and the incessant east wind was whipping whitecaps off leaden water, a wealthy Jana Sariser widow attended by a M’darjin page dismounted from a hired palanquin and went aboard the riverboat Dhah Dhibanh.

About mid-afternoon the Dhah Dhibanh cast off her lines and started south, widow and page standing at the rail watching the city recede behind them.

Sending Todichi Yahzi home drained Maksim so completely he was easy prey to a party of demons (geniod) sent to capture him. He woke unable to speak or move; it was hard to think, impossible to act. The demons put him into his boat and took him out of the Myk’-tat Tukery into the sea called the Notoea Tha where they transferred him into a small sleek Coaster and nailed him into a large crate.

When Settsimaksimin surfaced enough for self-awareness, he was still in the crate and from the dip and sway of it, still aboard the Coaster. His thoughts oozed across a heavy, dull mind with the ponderous loiter of a sleep-drugged snail.

How long?

No thirst, no hunger.

Not much of anything.

I see.

Preservation spell.

He tongued at it sluggishly, smelled at it.

The stripes of light that came through the cracks between the boards of the crate crept across him, marking the passage of a day. Dark came before he finished the plodding exploration. He drifted into sleep, more from habit than need, almost despite the spell.

In the morning he thought:

No water.

No food.

How long?

Why do I think? Feel? See? Hear?

It was an extraordinarily subtle spell in that it left him aware of what was happening around him while keeping him in stasis until he was handed over to whoever or whatever had orchestrated all this.

Why?

Yes. I see.

They want something.

They want me to do something.

They want me to do something I probably won’t want to do.

They’re softening me up.

The stripes climbed over him, moving across his motionless body while he produced these long slow thoughts. Slowly so slowly like a sloworm crawling from one hole to the next, he considered the spell. Night came and his sluggard metabolism reacted again, dropping him into sleep.

Yellow light running across his eyes woke him.

He considered the spell.

It was a strange one, he couldn’t place the personality of the sorceror or other who cast it, but he had nothing to distract him and the effort it took to think acted as a focusing lens. When the swift twilight of the tropical seas dropped over him once more, he almost had it. There was a sense of something distantly familiar, the cousin of a cousin of a cousin of a memory from the part of the past he’d suppressed as soon as he escaped from it, his apprenticeship. He slept.

He woke with the same taste on his tongue.

He burrowed through memory to the time when he was sold into a pleasure House in Silagamatys, six years old, a street rat, father unknown, mother rotting to death from diseases she’d picked up when she worked the wharves as a stand-up whore. He remembered Musteba Xa.

He was bought out of the House by that anciently evil man, a dried-up old bag of perversions who had forgotten how to feel so long ago that even the loss was a dim memory, the most powerful sorceror in the world. He kept that claim real by sucking up life and Talent from his apprentices. Coveting Maksim’s Talent, he began to train the boy… no, he didn’t even see the boy, all he saw was the Talent. He cultivated that Talent like a gardener cultivating a rare plant; he put his hands on it and shaped it the way he wanted it to go. He made only one mistake-he taught Maksim too well, a mistake born out of his inattention to the whole boy and too much confidence in his ability to jerk him about like a puppet. With his icy precision and unmatched learning, his cutting tongue and hypertrophied intelligence, his ability to read muscle twitches and fleeting shifts of expression so that he knew every thought or intent that crossed Maksim’s mind even before Maksim knew it was there, he’d forced the angry passionate boy to learn an equally icy control. When he decided to harvest what he’d nourished, he summoned entities that were…

Were like these.

Yes.

Like these pseudo Harpish who controlled him.

Maksim’s mind shut down on him, the sudden burst of excitement drowning the delicate control he’d achieved over his spelled and dreaming body.

Later. Sun stripes hot on him.

He recovered enough to lay phrase against phrase and began teasing at that memory, pulling out strands of it and setting them beside his impressions of his captors.

The demons Musteba Xa summoned were similar to the ones who were holding him now.

But not identical.

The web those earlier demons threw about him was similar to the cocoon that prisoned him now, but weaker.

Back then, he’d reacted from instinct and training; he broke the bonds and provided Musteba Xa with the first surprise he’d had in centuries. He killed his master and flung his body into an empty reality as far off as he could reach.

Similar, yes.

Now that he had some idea what to taste for, he used his fingertips like a tongue to taste the bonds that held him. Time passed.

Sometimes he was aware of the thin lines of light running round him.

When he looked again, more often than not the lines were gone, the day gone with them.

Sometimes he overworked himself and his mind shut down again.

Sometimes he was focusing so intently, so narrowly, he wouldn’t have noticed if the ship were on fire.

Interminable and immeasurable, the hours crawled past, turned into days, the days into weeks and so on.

He reached a point where he needed to know more about where he was going.

He rested from his labors and watched the sunlines move. From the way the sunlight shifted about the crate, he decided the ship was heading west.

West of Kukurul the first port of any size was Bandrabahr. On an average, in the autumn of the year, it was thirty days from Kukurul to Bandrabahr.

He tried to count the days he’d been in the crate, but he could not.

There was a brisk following wind.

A wizard’s wind.

He could smell the power in it.

Great galloping gobs of power.

Whoever wanted him was spending it like water. Bandrabahr. Phras.

He considered the implications of that and wanted to scream his outrage at this, using the sound of his voice to hide his fear.

Amortis.

Phras was her ground, the source of her godpower. Her Temple was there.

Her priests were trained there.

Gods of Fate and Time, not Amortis!

The surge of emotion shut him off again.

When he came out of the dark, he felt a change in the ship’s motion.

He heard port sounds, shouted orders, men calling to each other or to boat whores, the women answering, bargaining, exchanging insults, laughing. Water taxis scooting about, their sweeps shrieking like the ghosts of murdered children.

The language was Phrasi.

The smells were as familiar as his own armpits. Bandrabahr.

He waited for the shipmaster to heave to and drop anchor. The ship kept moving.

Slowly, carefully, it wound through the heavy traffic of the busy port.

He listened.

He heard the sounds of cranes and winches, but not the ones on this ship.

He heard the grunts of the rowers on the towships, the drums that set time for them.

He felt the ship yaw slightly.

For a minute he didn’t understand this, then he knew the ship had entered the outflow from the river that ran through Bandrabahr, the Sharroud.

Forty Mortal Hells, am I being hauled off to Havi Kudush? He struggled to control his body’s reactions.

He couldn’t afford to go black now, he had to get loose. HAD TO GET LOOSE.

He almost lost it at that moment, but suppressed his sense of helplessness and went back to his investigations. The preservation spell was wearing thin.

His body was speeding up.

His senses were freer.

He could almost shake his mindreach loose.

He was distantly aware of the smells and sounds of the water quarter as the ship clawed upriver through the city.

He was aware of time passing, the minutes ticking faster and faster, moving from l0000ng l000ng pulses to the heart count of real time.

The sounds and smells of the city faded and finally disappeared.

He smelled gardens and plowed fields.

He heard birdsong, sheep bleating, the squeal of an angry horse.

They were in the Barabar Burmin, the Land of Hidden Delights, the rich, fertile hinterland of Phras.

He knew this county, he’d spent a century here, a lusty wasteful wonderful century.

Three days upriver was the junction of the Kaddaroud and the Sharroud.

He’d have his answer then.

If the ship turned up the Kaddaroud, Amortis was waiting for him in the Temple at Havi Kudush where she’d fry him alive and eat him for breakfast.

Crossgrained, intemperate bitch god.

She had reason to be annoyed, she’d lost a hefty portion of her substance running his errands, going after Brann for him when he was still trying to kill the Drinker of Souls before she got him.

Hunger began to nag at him.

By the second day on the Sharroud, thirst grew into a torment.

He ignored hunger and thirst and continued to tease ravels out of his bonds, dissolving them as soon as he had them loose so they couldn’t wriggle away from him and rejoin the parent weave.

He was beginning to burrow his way out. Soon, soon… By the beginning of the third day, thirst had him hallucinating.

He saw lightlines turn to serpents of gold that writhed and knotted and coupled in a frenzy of lust and rage, he cringed away from them, thinking that Amortis was coming for him.

Amortis was the patron of lust and frenzy.

He saw polymorphous gold beetles shimmer into uncertain being and drop onto him.

They crawled all over him.

The tickling of their feet grew worse and worse until it was unendurable.

There were other torments, all the worse for being self-inflicted.

He rode out the first waves of that disorientation, husbanding what strength he had left until he saw a chance to seize control…

He shaped a mind-drill and drove it through the decks into the river.

He turned the drill to a drinking straw and sucked up water through it. It was unfiltered river water with all that meant, the suspended soil, the sublife swarming in each drop, but it flooded with grateful coolth into his arid mouth and slid down his aching throat more welcome than the finest wine.

His stomach clenched, cramped and he almost vomited up what he’d swallowed, but he kept the water down and drew in more.

The hallucinations went away.

He returned to his raveling of the spellbonds.

Time passed in its uncertain way.

He looked around.

His vision was no longer confined to what his eyes could see.

He inspected the river banks, felt a flood of relief and pleasure.

They were deep into the great arid plain called the Tark that made up most of Northern Phras.

They were past the junction of the Kaddaroud and the Sharroud.

It isn’t Amortis who has me.

Tak WakKerrcarr in the Fringelands, we’ll be reaching him soon. If I can call him, if he’s in a mood to listen…

If I can’t, it looks like Jorpashil’s the endpoint of this voyage.

Interesting.

Thinking about Dil Jorpashil reminded him of Brann; he smiled.

Bramble, whoever’s got that devilkid of yours has put his hands on me, I’d bet my stash on that.

He drank some more river and slept a while.

The hot wind that blew incessantly across the Tark crept through the cracks in the crate, turning it into an oven.

He had to reroute some of his meager resources into cooling himself.

He had to find a way of ridding his bladder of urine without voiding it into the crate; the stench would bring attention he didn’t want.

When the ship came to the first of the Locks, he had almost reached the key strand.

One last sustained effort and he would make these bastards wish they’d never been whelped.

Outside the crate, there was frantic activity as the sailors prepared for the entrance into the lock.

The noise and shuddering of the ship faded from his senses as he narrowed and narrowed his focus.

He drew power from the heat in the planks he lay on and prepared himself for the strike that would free him.

He heard an immense rumbling roar and force smothered him.

The Others were awake finally.

He fought them, but he was still more than half bound by the old spinning so his reach was lamentably short, the power he could call on so small it was whiffed out immediately.

He screamed hate and rage at them, but could not get his curses past his tongue, the ties on it were iron-heavy, iron-hard.

He struggled to unlock his hands, but failed.

They were knowing and swift with their binding, but this time he was awake when they handled him and he learned more than they realized. Or so he hoped.

It was godFire they called on, no wage or sorceror, witch or warlock could wield that Fire without a god behind him. Or her.

Not Amortis

His mind slowed and stiffened.

Not Amortis

I know

I am sure

Who? Don’t Know

Don’t… kno… o… ow…