A Gathering Of Stones

2

“Hoist it, Maksi.” She jerked the covers off him, slapped him on a meaty buttock. “Wake up, you bonelazy magicman, I need you.”

He grunted and cracked an eye. “Go ‘way.”

“Uh-uh, baby. You’ve slept long enough for ten your size. Pop me to Kukurul, luv. I woke up wanting.” He closed the eye. “Take the boat.”

She took his earlobe instead and pinched hard.

“Ow! Stop that.” He grabbed for her arm, but she jumped out of reach. “Witch!”

“If I were, I wouldn’t need you.”

He groaned and sat up. “You don’t need ine.”

“Come on, Maksi. Housewraith decided to make breakfast this morning. It’s spelled to wait, but I’m hungry. I’ll take the boat all right, but I want you with me.”

He shoved tangled hair off his face and looked shrewdly at her. “What is it, Bramble? Something’s eating at you.”

“No soulsearching before breakfast, if you please. I’ve run your bath for you, I’ve had mine already. I’ll wait twenty minutes no more, so it’s your fault if your eggs are cold.”

The fire crackled briskly behind the screen; the heavy silk drapes were pulled back to let in the morning sun. Brann paced back and forth, her body cutting through the beams, her shadow jerking erratically over the furniture. She swung round, scowled at Maksim. “Well?”

“Of course I’ll go with you. Matter of fact, I’ve been thinking for several days now it’s time for another visit.” He rubbed his hand across his chin. “What’s itching at you, Bramble-all-thorns?”

“The usual thing. What else could there be?” She turned her back on him and stared out the window.

“I don’t think so.”

“Oh you.”

“Me.”

She moved her right arm in a shapeless, meaningless gesture; she started to speak, stopped, tried again, had even less luck finding words for what she wanted to say; the trouble was, she didn’t know what she wanted to say. “I’m useless. There’s nothing to do here.” She turned round, hitched a hip on the windowsill. “Nothing real.” She lifted her hands, let them fall. “I don’t know, Maksi. There’s no point to anything. Nothing I try… works. I tried potting, you know that, you shaped my kiln for me. It was horrible. Everything I did… mediocre… bleah! At Shaynamoshu I was content a hundred years. Happy. Here…? I paint a pretty flower, don’t I. Dew on the petals, pollen on the stamens, you can see every grain. Lovely, right? Horrible. A dead slug has more soul. Useless, Maksi. Out to pasture like a broke-down mare. Even the damn gods don’t need me anymore. Maybe I should go to Silili with you and give Old Tungjii a boot in the behind. Maybe something would come of that.”

“It probably would. I doubt you’d be pleased with whatever it was.”

“Pleased? That doesn’t matter. It’d be something to do. Some reason to get out of bed in the morning. To keep on living. You know what I’m talking about; you’re restless too, magicman.”

“Brann, I…”

“No. You don’t need to say it. I know what’s going to happen. You’ll go to Silili to see your protege through her Passage Rite and you won’t come back. Why should you?”

“Thornlet, come with me.” He lay back in his chair and laughed at her and let his voice boom out, dark velvet rubbing her bones. “Come wandering with me and see the world. Sure somewhere there’s a prince who needs his bottom whacked, a lord to be taught his manners, a bully who needs his pride punctured. Let us go out and do good, no matter how much chaos we leave behind us.”

“Ah Maksi m’luv, you’re such a fraud, you evil old sorceror, you bleed at a touch and put yourself to endless inconvenience. I don’t know. Maybe we just need some hard living for a while so we can appreciate peace again.

Anyway, let’s scratch our ordinary itches and see what comes of that.”

Kukurul. The place where seapaths cross. The pivot of the four winds. If you sit long enough at one of the plaza tables of the cafй Sidday Lir, it’s said you’ll see the whole world file past you. Kukurul. Expensive, gaudy, secretive and corrupt. Its housefronts are full of windows with screens behind them like the eyes of Kukrulese. Along the Ihman Katt are brothels for every taste, ranks of houses where assassin guilds advertise men of the knife, women of the poison cup; halfway up the Katt there’s a narrow black building where deathrites are practiced for the titillation of the connoisseurs, open to participation or solitary enjoyment. At the end of the Ihman Katt is the true heart of Kukurul, the Great Market, a paved square two miles on a side where everything is on sale but heat, sweat, and stench. Those last are free.

Brann patted at her face with a square of fine linen, removing some of the dust and sweat that clung to her skin. It was one of those fine hot airless days that early autumn sometimes threw up and the Market was a hellhole, though few of the shoppers or the shopkeepers seemed to notice it. She pushed the kerchief up her sleeve and lifted a graceful vase. Eggshell porcelain with an unusual glaze. She frowned and ran her fingertips repeatedly over the smooth sides. Unless she was losing her mind, she knew that glaze. Her father’s secret mix and Slya’s Breath, never one without the other. At Shaynamoshu she’d tried again and again to get that underglow, but it was impossible without the Breath. She examined the lines and the underpainting. It wasn’t her father’s work or that of any of his apprentices, but there was something there… the illusive similarity of cousins perhaps. Biting at her lower lip, she upended the vase and inspected the maker’s mark. A triangle above an oval, Arth Slya’s sigil. The glyph Tayn. The glyph Nor. These were the potter’s seal. Tannor of Arth Slya. She carried the vase to the Counting Table. “Arth Slya is producing again?”

The old man blinked hooded eyes. “Again?”

“You claim this is oldware?”

“Claim?” He shrugged. “The mark is true, the provenance can be produced.”

“I don’t doubt the mark, the glaze alone is enough to guarantee it.”

“You a collector?”

“No.” She smiled as she saw the glitter in his eyes fade before that cool negative. “Earthenware is at once too heavy and too fragile to survive my sort of life. I will take this, though, for the pleasure it gives me. It’s a cheerful thing when a dead loveliness comes to life again. Twenty silver.”

He settled to his work and his pleasure. “New or old, that’s Arth Slya ware. Silver is an insult. Five gold.”

When the bargain was concluded, Braun had him send the vase to the Inn of the Pearly Dawn where she and Maksim were staying. She left the Market and strolled down the Katt to the cafй Sidday Lir, confused by the conflicting emotions awakened by the vase. She was pleased because her father had left workheirs; she was jealous because that place was hers by right and talent. She wanted to go home. Home? Arth Slya? What made her think that place was home more than any other patch of earth? Kin? She couldn’t claim them, who would believe her. If they believed her, they’d back away from her, terrified. And could she blame them?

She chose a table with a view out over the harbor and sat watching the ships arrive and depart, wondering if one of them was a trader like Sammang’s Panday Girl, like her working the islands north and east of the Tukery, like her calling in at Tavisteen on Croaldhu where Brann had started her wandering. She wallowed comfortably in nostalgia as she sipped at the tea and enjoyed the dance of the ships and the streaming of the ladesmen working the wharves below; she wondered what the Firemountain Tincreal looked like these days, whether the eruption and the weathering of two centuries since had changed her out of all recognition, wondered if she’d recognize the descendants of her kin if she saw them. Was there any more reason to go back to Arth Slya than there was to return to Jal Virri? I’d like to see it again, she thought. I’d like to see what the ones who went back made of it.

When the teapot was empty, she sat considering whether she wanted more tea or should call for her bill and return to the Inn for a bath and a nap until it was time to go looking for something to warm her bed. Before she reached a decision on that, she saw Jaril walking down the Katt and settled back to wait for him.

The changer wound toward her through scattered tables, drawing stares enough to make him uncomfortable; Brann watched him shy away from a clawed, hand reaching for his arm, pretend he didn’t hear a half-whispered suggestion from a Hina woman of indeterminate age, or drawled comments from a group of Phrasi highboms lounging at three tables pushed together. He looked a teener boy, fourteen, fifteen years old, a beautiful boy who’d somehow avoided the awkward throes of adolescence, hair like white-gold spun gossamer fine lifting to the caress of the wind, elegantly sculptured features, crystal eyes, a shapely body that moved with unstudied grace. He pulled out a chair and sat down, fidgeted for several moments without speaking to her.

“Add a few warts next time,” Brann said, amused. She felt suddenly happy. Her son was come to visit her. She looked past him. Alone? “Where’s Yaro? Saying hello to Maks?”

“No,” he said. “Yaro’s not with me.”

She eyed him thoughtfully, caught the attention of a waiter and ordered a half bottle of wine. When he’d gone, she said, “Tell me.”

Jaril touched a fingertip to a drop of spilled tea and drew patterns on the wood. “Remember the swamp before we got to Tavisteen? Remember what happened to me and Yaro there?”

Brann closed her eyes, thought. “That was a while ago,” she murmured. She remembered gray. Even during daylight everything was gray. Gray skies, gray water, gray mud dried on sedges and trees, gray fungi, gray insects, gray everything. She remembered waking tangled in tough netting made from cords twisted out of reed fiber and impregnated with fish stink. She remembered little gray men swarming over the island, little gray men with coarse yellow cloth wound in pouty little shrouds about their groins, little gray men with rough dry skin, a dusty gray mottled with darker streaks and splotches. She could move her head a little. It was late, shadows were long across the water. A gray man sat beside a small fire, net woven about him and knotted in intricate patterns describing his power and importance; a fringe of knotted cords dangled from a thick rope looped loosely about a small hard potbelly. In a long-fingered reptilian hand he held a drum; it was a snakeskin stretched over the skull of a huge serpent, its eyeholes facing outward. He drew from the taut skin a soft insistent rustle barely louder than the whisper of the wind through the reeds; it crept inside her until it commanded the beat of her heart, the pulse of ‘her breathing. She jerked her body loose from the spell, shivering with fear. He looked at her and she shivered again. He reached out and ran a hand over two large stones sitting beside his bony knee, gray-webbed crystals each as large as man’s head, crystals gathering the light of the fire into themselves, miniature broken fires repeated endlessly again. Yaril and Jaril frozen into stone. She knew it and was more frightened than before. He grinned at her, baring a hard ridge of black gum, enjoying her helpless rage.

She blinked, brought herself back out of memory. “The swampwizard,” she said. “Ganumomo, that was his name. Why him? Did you go back to Croaldhu and fall in that trap again?”

“No.” He sipped at his wine and gazed out across the bay. He was uncomfortable and she couldn’t make out why. He was worried about Yaril, but that wasn’t it. She watched the level of the wine sink lower in his glass and remembered something else; neither he nor Yaril would talk about their people or their home. Had something happened to Yaril that was connected to their homeplace? “Caves,” he said; he seemed to taste the word like hard candy on the tongue. “Caves. We love them because they’re terrifying, Bramble. We could die if we were shut off from sun too long, we would go stone and lie there in stone, fading slowly slowly until there was nothing left not stone.” He poured more wine in his glass, tilted it and watched the rich red sliding down the curve. “Yaro and me, we were poking about some mountains, the Dhia Dautas, if you want the name, and we found this set of caves. Splendid caves, Bramble. Shining caves. We went a little crazy. Just a little. We soaked up all the sun we could before we went down. We weren’t going to stay down more than a day or so, we’d have plenty of push left to get us out of trouble should we run into any. Not that we expected to.” He gulped at the wine, went back to staring at what was left.

Brann waited. His lack of urgency was reassuring. Yaril wasn’t dead. She was sure of that. Jay would be… different… if his sister was dead.

“She was flitting along ahead of me. Actually, I was chasing her… it’s an old game… from home… complicated rules… the thing he… whoever… didn’t count on.” A crooked angry grin, a hunching of his shoulders. “I wasn’t close enough to get caught with her. I was round a bend about twenty feet behind when the thing closed round her. The trap I mean.”

“Trap?”

“It wasn’t something natural.”

“What was it?”

“I don’t know. Yaro went stone before I got round the bend. I saw her sitting there… you remember how we looked… gone stone…” He shuddered in his peculiar way, his outline melting and reforming, his hands growing transparent, then solid. “I tried to get to her. There was a barrier. I couldn’t see it, I couldn’t feel it either, not really, I just couldn’t get to her. I tried going over it. Around it. Under it. I went into the mountain itself, I slid through the stone. That’s dangerous, it’s so easy to get confused so you don’t know up from down, but I did it. No good. It was a sphere, Bramble, it was all around her. I couldn’t get to her. I leaned against it and called to her; if I could wake her, maybe we could do something together. I couldn’t reach her. I couldn’t even feel her there, Bramble. Do you understand? My sister. The only being in this place who’s LIKE me. If I lost her, I’d be alone. I couldn’t TALK to her. Not even TALK to her, Bramble. I went wired for a while, I don’t know how long.” He shuddered again, the pulses of fleshmelt moving swiftly along his body, clothes as well as flesh because his clothing was part of his substance. “When I knew what I was doing again, I was miles south of the caves.” He gulped at the wine, then with a visible effort steadied himself. Brann watched, more troubled than she’d been a short time before; Jaril was barely containing his panic and his control was getting worse, not better. “I was eagleshape, driving south as fast as I could fly. I couldn’t think why for the longest, I wasn’t capable of thinking, Brann, but I kept on flying. After a while, I decided I was coming for you. I knew you’d help us. And prod Maksim into doing what he can. He doesn’t like us much, but he’d do a lot for you, Bramble.”

Brann clinked her spoon against the teabowl and waited for the waiter to bring the check. “We’ll go up to the Inn,” she said. “And go over everything you can remember first, then you can hunt Maks up and bring him to me.”

Jaril nodded. “Bramble…”

She thrust out her hand, palm toward him, stopping him. “Later.”

He shifted round and saw the waiter walking toward them.