A Gathering Of Stones

6

A worn broom under one arm, a lantern in her free hand, Korimenei turned slowly in an open space where an ancient had fallen in some long-ago storm. Woodcutters had carried it off, leaving only the hollow where the roots had been. The cedars ringing the glade were young, their lower branches sweeping the ground, lusty healthy trees with no limbs gone. She held the lantern high; there was no down-wood anywhere, not even chunks of bark. “Cht!” she breathed. “Pak Slij. No doubt he’d sell air if he could figure out a way to bottle it.”

She set the lantern down on a relatively level spot and began sweeping away the loose earth and other debris. Working with meticulous care, she removed everything movable from a circular patch of ground, ignoring insects, worms and other small-lives because she couldn’t do anything about them anyway. When she was finished, she took a fragment of stone and drew a pentacle with the same finicky care, humming absently one of the nursery songs her dead mother sang to her. After the drawing was done, she took off her sandals and laid them beside the lantern, shucked off her outer robe, folded it and set it on the sandals. She took a deep breath, smoothed down the white linen shift that was all she was wearing, then stepped into the pentacle, carefully avoiding the lines. The night was old, near its finish, the air was chill and damp; frost hadn’t settled yet, but it would before the sun came up. Shivering, eyes closed, she stood at the heart of the drawing. By will and by skill she smothered the fire in the wick; the lantern went dark.

By will and by skill, chanting the syllables that focused patterning and re-patterning, she redrew the lines, changing earth and air to moonsilver until the circled star shone pale and perfect about her.

She opened her eyes, smiled with pleasure as she viewed her work. It was one of the simpler exercises, but there were an infinite number of ways it could misfire. She dropped to her knees, then sat with her legs in a lotus knot, her hands resting palm up on her thighs, heat flowing through her, around her.

Minute melted into minute, passing uncounted as she sat unthinking.

The Moonstone emerged from her navel, oozed through her shift and rolled into her lap. Moving slowly, ponderously, as if she were under water, she lifted the stone and looked into the heart of it.

She saw the village. It was dead. The palisade gate sagged open; the streets were filled with bodies, men, women, children. Mutilated, eviscerated. She looked into the houses. They were filled with the dead. Ghosts wandered through the rooms, reliving what had been.

She saw the Lock House. The raider deadpriest had chased the ghosts away so they wouldn’t alarm the crew on the boat they expected, but the dead were there, sprawled or bound. She saw again the game of stones-and-bones, she saw hillmen curled up, sleeping, she saw hillmen gnawing at plugs of tjank, eyes red and unfocused, she saw hillmen with three girls from the village, passing them around like the tjank.

She considered what she’d seen.

There were fifty-five raiders, fifty-three fighters, a warleader and a deadpriest. She thought about the fighters. Patterns. The original band must have been five groups of twelve. The villagers had gotten at least seven of them. That pleased her.

The Moonstone moved in her hands. She pressed it against her navel and it melted into her.

“Every act has consequences.” Her voice was soft as the wind whispering through the cedar fronds; she spoke with a formality that was almost chanting, using memories from school to give her the confidence she needed. She was young and untried. Serious and a bit pedantic. She could not afford to doubt herself once the search began if she expected to emerge from it alive and intact. “Every refusal to act has consequences.” Her voice comforted her, grounded her; ten years’ study spoke through her. “Consider them. Look beyond the moment. If I kill them all, will their kin kill more folk to avenge them? The people of Kol Sutong are dead. They can’t be hurt. What about other villages? Karoumang and his crew? There are other boats. Will they be more at risk?” She smiled as she saw fireflies flickering among the trees and heard an early bird twitter close by, life balancing death, a small beauty balancing a great horror. “No. Raiders raid; it is their purpose. Raiders kill for loot more often than vengeance. The death of those men will help more than hurt those who live by the river and on it.” She mourned a little for them; she owed that to herself. They were brutal bloody murderers, but they were also men. “Fifty-five men dead because I willed it. I don’t know them. I don’t know anything about their lives. I don’t know why they do what they do. I reach out and they cease. What am I? Maksim fed a child a month to BinYAHtii for fifty years because he considered it a small evil compared to the good he was doing. Am I going to walk that road? I don’t know.” She mourned for herself, for her loss of innocence; this virginity cost more in blood and pain than the first had and there was no pleasure in its loss. “Do what you must,” she sang softly, “but do it without pride, without anger, knowing they are simple, stupid men, helpless before you.”

Centered and ready, she sank into silence, letting the sounds of the waking forest flow through her. Hands on thighs, she sat not-thinking, not-waiting, open to whatever came to her.

Presently she was swimming among the realities as she had on the third night of her Ordeal. At first she wandered without direction, then she felt a tug. She flashed faster and faster past the layered realities, the infinite, uncountable elsewheres, faster and faster until she burst into one of them, a universe of heat and light where salamandri swam in oceans of sunfire.

She drifted, pushed here and there by the lightwinds. Salamandri swam to her, hovered about her.

She contemplated them. Pulsing slippery shapes, constantly changing, growing extra limbs, absorbing them, growing denser, attenuating, shortening, lengthening, they were vaguely like the rock skinks she played with when she was a child. She caught one in a mindseine because once upon a time she’d caught a skink in a net she’d knotted for herself. It lay passive, eyespots fixed on her though she doubted it actually saw her. She caught another and another with no more reason than the first, went on catching them until their weight began to strain the meshes of her mind.

She drifted with her captives. They glowed like coals at the heart of a fire, redgold-whitegold, flickers of blue. She was reluctant to release them though she had no thought of using them. It took no effort to hold them, they were not struggling, they seemed content to stay with her. They warmed her, pleased her eyes and oddly enough her palate.

She felt a sudden twinge and started to move.

She came to the membrane at the edge of the reality. The salamandri stirred, gracefully undulant.

She thought about releasing them. She thought about taking them with her. Vaguely she understood the danger in that. She knew it in her mind but not in her bones. Yes, she thought. Yes. I can, I must, I will.

Dragging the netted salamandri behind her, she broke through the membrane. Faster and faster she fled, running for her homeplace. Faster and faster until she was sitting within the pentacle, the salamandri swooping in swift orbits about its outer rim, turning the moonsilver red with their fires; around and around they raced, keening their anger and their triumph in a high, terrible whine.

They fought her. They were wiry, wild, leaping against her hold, their bodies were hard and strong, bumping, bumping, bumping against her. They’d lain passive all this time to catch her napping; they knew what she was, they knew she’d come for them, knew it before she did; they knew there was a world they could plunder and burn. They fought her and nearly won free before she hardened her hold on them.

She hadn’t actually handled demons before, that was meant to happen when she had a Master backing her, but she drew on analogs from her training and descriptions of the process from her teachers; she cast lines at them, sank hooks into them, seven lines for seven salamandri. They lunged at the cedars with their enticing explosive resins. She jerked them back. The tips of several fronds sizzled, filling the air with an acrid green fragrance. That was all they got, the trees stood intact, untouched.

She laughed. “I’ve done it. I’ve really done it,” she shouted to the night. “I have summoned demons.” She was sweating though, and underneath the laughter she was shaking. She refused to acknowledge that and broke the demons to her hand. They swung round and round her, keening, sad. Round and round until she rode their senses and reined their bodies. Round and round until they answered her will as swiftly and surely as her own body did.

She sent them arcing up over the trees, out along the river, racing faster than the wind, pulsing eerie unsteady fireforms flitting over the water.

They came to the Lock House_ The windows were shuttered against them, the door was barred. They burned through a wall. The deadpriest tried to turn them. The lead salamander shot out a long red tongue and licked his face off the bone. The warleader slashed at one and saw his blade melt. The salamander wrapped itself about the man and a moment later dropped a chalky skeleton and swooped on.

What Korimenei received through their senses was strange beyond anything she could have imagined, but she learned to read it and kept them from the House, its furniture, everything but the men. Only the men, she droned at them, over and over, only the men. She kept them from the captive girls, though a quick hot death might have been more merciful than life after what the raiders had done to them. She counted the kills and when the number was fifty-five, she jerked on the leashes and called the salamandri back to her.

They didn’t want to come. They wanted to burn and burn until the world burned with them, hot and glorious and wholly theirs. They fought her; they turned and twisted and contorted themselves, trying to throw out the hooks. They flung all their weight and strength against the lines again and again and again, they never seemed to tire. Every inch she won from them was contested with a fury that seemed to increase as her own strength decreased.

She faltered. A salamander leaped away; it almost broke free. The jerk tore something inside her. She struggled to enfold and smother the pain and at the same time keep her hold on the demons. If they got loose… She didn’t dare admit even the possibility of failure. She pulled the demons to her and they came, slowly, painfully, but surely, they came. They brushed against tree tops and the trees burned. They cawed their pleasure, jarring shrieks that started high and squeezed to a thready wail as the sound soared out of hearing; they swung at the ends of, the lines, back and forth, back and forth, working at her, changing the direction, the force, the intensity of the pull. She trembled. She was so weary. She couldn’t think. She /led on and held on. Inch by slow, torturous inch, she dragged them back to her. Strength oozed out of her. So tired. So tired. Her muscles were mush. Every nerve in her was vibrating raggedly. She was going to give way. There is a point beyond which will cannot drive body. She was reaching it, but she held on, she held…

Coolness spread over her like a second skin, the waves of shivering slowed and smoothed out, a flow of energy came like water into her. She lifted her head and whipped the salamandri across the final stretch, brought them to her whimpering and cowed. She wasted no time with them, she squeezed them into a clot of fire and flung them back where she’d found them,,sealing the aperture behind them.

Coolness peeled off her and pooled in her lap, weariness flooded back. The pool sublimed to mist, the mist swirled and billowed, took a familiar form. Ailiki.

When Ailiki was solid again, her plush fur neatly in place, her catmouth open in her mocking catgrin, Korimenei lifted her, held her eye to eye. “Once upon a time I said watch my back, Aili my Liki. You make one fine bodyguard, Lili.” She settled the mahsar in her lap, smoothed her hand again and again down Ailiki’s spine. Breathed the syllables that banished the moonsilver, erased the pentacle. Earth was earth again, air was air. “Ahhhh, I’m tired, my Liki. Consequences, gods! I could have burned the world to ash. One salamander was enough to handle that pitiful bloody bunch. Shuh! More than enough. So I bring in seven? Pride, my Liki. Carelessness. Jah’takash must’ve been beating her pig bladder about my fool head, dubbing me idiot, fatuity supreme. I won’t try anything like that again soon. I won’t be awake enough, I’m going to sleep for a year.”

A laugh. She looked up. A lantern swinging by his knee, Karoumang came from under the trees. “I’ve known women like that. I take it you managed to come up with something. What were those streaks?”

“Salamandri. You don’t have to worry about the raiders any more.” She yawned, thought about rubbing gritty eyes, but her arms were too heavy, too mushy to lift that far, “You going to sit there the rest of the night?”

“Probably. Unless someone feels like carrying me.”

“That bad, huh?”

“Tired, terrified, and frozen.”

He lifted his lantern, turned the lightbeam on her face. “Preemalau’s fins! If you were dead, you’d look better.”

“Thanks for telling me, huh.” She giggled, then sobered. “I came close, Karou. Came close to killing you and everything. I nearly lost control of them.” She yawned again, slumped over Ailiki, her head swimming.

He swore, took a step toward her stopped. “I’ll be back. One minute.”

She was barely conscious when he returned with one of his sailors, a man name Prifuan. Karoumang scooped her up and started for the ship; Prifuan came along behind them with the lanterns and the rest of her gear.