Stone Speaks to Stone: A Tale of the Nine Worlds Read online

  In that spirit of defiance he pulled the headless neck of the serpent towards him. He gouged at the elastic skin with his fingernails until his thumb bled but he had one perfect opalescent scale as a prize.

  He would place it within his book of haikus, on the page with the illustration of high mountains against a starry sky. He murmured the haiku to himself, softly, roughly translating the Old Shaian.

  Above the mountain

  Infinite the lake of stars

  A fire burns brightly

  His son Jemis liked to see the little objects he brought home, the stories of where and how he had found them, why each was located where it was. Last time he was home he had begun teaching Jemis how to read the ideographs.

  Next time he would stay long enough to tell all the stories.

  Next time he would stay, period.

  His breath clouded the air before him, the cold seeping up through his rough garments. He realized he was sitting there in pooling blood, rubbing the scale over and over with his finger, his nine-year-old son laughing in his mind’s eye.

  He could not at first get up. He had to push himself over to the wall, use it to lever himself upright again. He was so cold. His fingers were numb. He flexed them, knuckles creaking. He would be fortunate indeed to—

  No. He would get home. He would. He had to tell Jemis about the mountains, about the carved glaciers, about what it was like over the Border. He stuck the scale into the scrap of cloth with the remaining hairpins in it.

  He went the way the serpent had come from, lurching along the wall, trying to be quiet. Stone speaks to stone, and water to water ... But here they were, inside their fastness, where a monstrous ice serpent roamed at will ... He could not assume there would be no other guards.

  The corridor, the tunnel, curved, coiled its way into the mountain. It rose under his feet, sometimes in sharp inclines. One was so steep and so long he nearly couldn’t make it up, had to wedge himself against the wall and push himself laboriously up, an inch, two inches at a time.

  Above the mountain, he gasped to himself, the words silent in his mind, imagining his son asking him about the scale.

  Infinite—would Jemis know the word? He would be ten by the time Jack got home, a bright and brave lad, always asking questions, always eager to know, always determined to find out.

  Infinite the lake of stars.

  He would tell Jemis about the skies outside the Empire, where the nights were darker and the stars brighter. There were no good maps for Alinor outside the Empire, those strange lands where wild magic ran free and the people would rather destroy themselves and all their work than submit.

  A fire burns brightly.

  Because home was always best. He would go home again.

  He was still sitting exhausted at the top of the incline when someone came out of the wall beside him and tripped over his leg.

  “What the fjoyot—” the Valleyite cursed, turning, but by then some soldier’s instinct beyond thought had made Jack pull out one of the hairpins and stab the man in the face with it.

  He collapsed within two seconds, something snapping as he hit the ground. It was the hairpin, Jack saw when he gingerly turned him over. It had gone into the side of his nose, had broken off with only an unusable gold bead left outside his skull. Jack stared at it glumly. Whatever was on the hairpin was swift and lethal. The man’s skin was already going cold.

  He was not a guard, was dressed in what Jack considered common Valleyite garb, rough brown clothing and leather boots. The only mercy—besides his death—was that he was not far off Jack’s size. Jack stripped him and put on the long tunic over his rags, shoved his feet into the boots. The relief from the cold was so strong tears started.

  “Don’t be an idiot, man,” a harsh voice came floating out of the wall. “The irketz is on guard. Get back in here. I need you to hold the prisoner down.”

  That made him sound alone. Jack blinked hard, surveyed his remaining weapons. Four hairpins, one gold, two with a silver bead, and one with a green and white jade one. He had no idea what the jade bead signified, but in Fiellan they worshipped the Lady of the Green and White, and he hoped with a faint, embarrassed fervour, that she would protect him. He promised recklessly that he would be more pious, more generous, more—everything—if only he was granted more—time.

  Officer’s fashions for the Fourth Division owed something to court fashions in Astandalas. Jack’s wavy hair was long enough to reach into a queue, messy though his braid was now. Remembering Kitani inserting the deadly hairpins into her coiled braids he swallowed, twisted his queue up clumsily, and with many inchoate prayers slid the jade hairpin into place, followed even more gingerly by the gold one. He could feel the cold steel against his skull.

  He pushed himself to his feet using the wall again. Took one of the silver hairpins in each hand, took a deep breath.

  “Come on, man,” the harsh voice said again, more closely this time. Another mutter, stomping footsteps, some curse Jack had not learned to decipher. He edged as silently as he could towards the source, centring his weight, cursing inwardly that his feet were starting to tingle as they warmed up.

  “Idiot,” the hidden speaker said again, sighing with audible exasperation. “Never can work the passage—orlichan!”

  The stone face before him shimmered and thinned, revealing a silhouette like a figure emerging from mist. Jack waited until he saw hands emerge from the wall, then leaped forward, all his weight behind the silver hairpin, aiming for the throat.

  Whether skill or divine assistance or luck, he got the needle-point through jugular into brainstem, and the man was dead as they crashed down into the room behind the wall.

  They fell against a table on which was spread-eagled the body of Lady Norcell. Jack stumbled upright, trying to brace himself in case there was someone else there.

  There was a slow, rattling, bubbling noise. It was coming from the table.

  Jack had seen many horrible things in battle, in the aftermath of battle. He was desperately glad that the Valleyite had fallen across the bottom half of Lady Norcell’s body. What he could see of her, head and shoulders, was bad enough.

  The worst was that she was still alive.

  The room was small, the floor bloody, the walls cold stone. The Valleyites were not sophisticated in their torture, used nothing but chisels and ropes. Jack looked at the silver hairpin in his hand, then reached up and carefully withdrew the gold one.

  He went to her head, carefully keeping his eyes on hers. Her eyes were staring, her mouth open for the slow, rattling, bubbling breaths.

  He said softly, “I will send you home, Lady Norcell.”

  They had cut out her tongue; the blood was dribbling out of her mouth. She focused on him with one wild, desperate agony, and then with a supreme effort she moved her head, tilted it to the opposite direction from where he had come in, eyes frantic.

  “That way?” he said.

  She closed her eyes, the closest she could get to assent, then opened them. He hoped he would never see that expression again.

  “May the Lady of the Green and White grant you peace in her garden,” he said. He did not know Lady Norcell well. She was from Lind, a country over from his own Rondé, but she was a noblewoman of high lineage and her life almost unknown to him. He reached over, brushed the hair from her face, and slid the golden pin into the side of her neck. “May the Goddess of Merciful Death take you home.”

  She sighed out her last breath. He waited a moment, then reached to close her eyes. He could give her no burial, no cortege home, just release from pain on the far side of the Border.

  There was something like an ice pick on the table beside her. There might have been more instruments somewhere in the bloody mess, but he had nothing to carry them with, and he was so weak with cold that he did not think he could move the Valleyite’s body to look—and he could not bear to further desecrate Lady Norcell’s remains.

  The chamber appeared to be four stone walls
with no doors. The ceiling was ice, luminescent as had been the wall of the room where he’d been imprisoned. He was not strong enough to break it from below. He went to the wall Lady Norcell had indicated, savagely grateful that her dying thought had been to help him. That strengthened his spine. He would not fail her, nor Kitani, nor Laranghi nor Ruz, all of whom had given him some final gift by their deaths.

  It took him several tries to get the word right, but finally he hit the right tone for orlichan, and the stone before him started to glimmer and waver and become passable under his hands.

  He shuffled through, ice pick in his right hand, silver hairpin in his left, trying to keep his weight ready for anything.

  He stopped so abruptly he nearly fell.

  It was an atavistic reaction, as automatic and unwilled as any much-practiced thrust or parry or strike. Even before his eyes registered what he was seeing his body reacted.

  Far above him the sky was that infinite lake of stars. He did not dare look below him for a fire. It would not be the fire of home.

  The stars were brighter this side of the Border, bigger, more luminous, more glorious. But below them the darkness was far more absolute, the shadows darker, deeper, dangerous. Back home anyone could go abroad at night without need to fear more than drunkard or madman. Out here ... out here the Dark Kings were still able to be summoned through shadow and blood and moonlight.

  Jack took three deep breaths. Behind him he could feel the stone solidifying, nudging him into the cold clear air.

  He stood on a tiny ledge, not even as wide as his feet. His arms were stretched across the face of the cliff-wall, hands clenching ice-pick and hairpin, face tingling in the cold, cold air. He had no idea where he was, the shapes of all the mountains against the stars unfamiliar and strange. He could not see any hint of moon glow to give him east or west. He did not recognize any of the stars.

  Lady Norcell had said to come this way. Why?

  She would not have sent him to suicide; of that he was certain. This was the way to rescue or revenge. Or both.

  He closed his eyes to stop the threatening vertigo. The stone behind him was cold, gritty against the palms of his hands, smelling of ice and dust. A faint breeze came from his left, frigid, dry, deathly.

  He could hear nothing—

  No. There was something on the wind. He pressed back against the wall (better to think that than cliff), dismissing the sound of his clothes catching on the stone, the too-loud movements of blood and heart. Listened to the faint, faint hint of something beyond wind.

  It wavered on the edge of his ability to hear. The wind in pines? A distant cataract? Something wailing?

  Then, very clearly, three words: “... city of roses ...”

  They were in Shaian, not Loëssie.

  Someone was singing?

  Singing the anthem of Astandalas?

  Jack opened his eyes, because he daren’t lose his night vision. He turned his head slowly until his ear rested against the cliff face, his chin and growing beard rasping against the stone. Then slowly, not lifting his feet, he slid his left foot along. Brought up his right. Closed his left eye to keep grit from getting in. Slid along another few inches.

  It took ... forever. Forever while the stars stayed where they were, while the wind blew delicately in his face, ice crystals stinging against his exposed skin, while he sweated and the sweat froze again. Forever while the singing faded in and out of hearing, the singer’s voice wavering with exhaustion and pain but never ceasing in the endless long repeated refrain of the anthem of Astandalas.

  O let us sing of the golden city of roses

  The city of golden roses

  And the citizens of the city of roses

  Who brought light to the darkness of worlds

  The ledge curved eventually, bringing Jack around a bulging outcrop. He slowed even more as he came to the outermost part of the curve, not at all sure he was thinking clearly enough to respond to what he might find on its other side. The stone shaman laughing at him again?

  Stone speaks to stone, and water to water ...

  Thinly, quaveringly, sounding a thousand years old, the voice started the anthem again from the beginning.

  O let us sing of the city of roses

  The golden city of roses

  And the sun in our darkness

  The lord of rising stars

  No one was stopping him, Jack realized slowly. No one was thumping the prisoner, torturing him, beating him for his defiance. It might be a trap, but the voice was so thin—so nearly hopeless—that it was impossible to believe it was a Valleyite singing.

  Jack had once been sent on a scouting mission along some beach, somewhere. Seabirds were nesting in the dunes at the edge of the beach, the best guard system he had ever come across. Every strange motion caused the birds to react, the closest pretending to be injured, a decoy, so that the rest could mob the intruder.

  If they knew he had escaped ... if they had found the dead serpent, the dead torturers ...

  He still had three weapons, and was he not Mad Jack Greenwing? Did he not have the luck?

  Was there not a five-hundred foot drop to certain death below him?

  He edged around the outcrop.

  Before him was a jumble of white, hurtfully brilliant in the starlight, the shadows suddenly as sharp-black as the illustrations in his book of haikus. He blinked, trying to clear his eyes, trying to focus. Below him was an avalanche chute, full of ice boulders and blocks of stone. His ledge, a thin line of shadow, snaked across the bowl where the stone and ice had fallen; above him, when he stopped to very carefully crane his neck to see, was the lip of an overhanging glacier.

  The singing was just louder here, echoing disharmoniously off ice and stone, its origin impossible to determine. Jack pressed himself against the outcrop, looking for sentries, enemies, traps.

  Looking for singer, rescue, revenge.

  His eyes adjusted slowly to the contrast between ice and stone, started to be able to make out differences in the shadows. The curving bowl, the strange dim light, the too-bright stars, the too-dark shadows—all of it made it so hard to judge where stone cast shadow or hid hollows or holes.

  He waited, for inspiration, insight, something.

  —Kaboom.

  The singer stopped; Jack thrust himself back even harder against the cliff face; the air seemed to hold its breath.

  When he opened his eyes the world swam. He blinked hard, the cold steel chisel in his right hand, the hairpin in his left, the stone cold and rough even through tunic and rags and tatters. After a little he managed to clear his eyes enough to see that the air was full of ice crystals and dust motes, sending strange dim rainbows in unexpected directions.

  As far as he could tell, the avalanche had happened somewhere else. Close, close enough for the vibrations still to be thrumming through the stone, the air, the echoes, but far enough that only a trickle of snow and ice had fallen from the glacier lip. His eye traced the spill of brightness down the bowl, latching onto the oddly regular jag where it had gone over or around something that was otherwise invisible.

  The singer made a few false squawking noises, then, even more quaveringly than before, came the words: O let us sing of the golden city of roses ...

  Yes, Jack thought, keep singing. The echoes had changed, were no longer bouncing the words around into meaninglessness, were occupied perhaps with the rumbling avalanche and aftershocks. He slid foot by foot along his ledge, all around the bowl, the cliff face always hard behind him, but always also he was aware that any moment it could dissolve like mist into a doorway by the stone shaman’s magic.

  At last he reached the spill. The song was clearer here, if no louder, though clearer too was the fact that the singer was nearing his last energy. Stay strong, Jack prayed, for himself and for the singer. Stay alive.

  The ledge was covered with glinting, glittering fragments of ice and stone. Beyond them was another bulge, where the fracture that had created the ledge h
ad met some outcropping of other stone, the black basalt of the other side of the mountain. It was powdered with ice crystals, beautiful in a way, reminding him of how the Emperor’s sister had worn diamonds and silver dust in her hair when he had gone to Astandalas to be given the benediction and reward for his role in the Battle of Orkaty.

  The hexagonal basalt column stepped down and away from him. Down there, where the shadows had hid it, where it was outlined now by the snow crystals still dancing in the air, curling from the currents over the cliff face, down there was a narrow hole like a chimney. The singer tried to start singing again, squawked, and softly, ruefully, regretfully, in a familiar voice said, “Damn,” and coughed.

  General Halioren.

  Jack was leading with his left side. He had to swing his right leg out over the abyss to switch, feeling all the uncertainty of his weight redistributing, praying that he would not fall here, so close to the goal.

  That time in Astandalas the Emperor, his beloved Emperor, the Lord of Rising Stars, the lord of ten thousand titles, had awarded him a great golden pectoral, the Heart of Glory, the highest honour that could be given to a soldier.

  He had held a Border, that time. He had held the Sun Banner outflying on the wind at the top of a cliff—he had been the first one up the cliff—General Halioren, who was a Colonel then, had been the second. They had defended the clifftop until their soldiers followed, until at last the units behind his caught up with them. They had not anticipated the enemy to be there, he and his patrol when they were sent out to claim the next ridge for Astandalas; but they had been, and Jack knew his duty to the Sun Banner, his comrades, his superiors, his Emperor.

  And afterwards, when they were negotiating a parley, he had still been holding the Sun Banner when an enemy had ceased feigning death and leapt up to inflict it on Colonel Halioren. Jack had been the only one with anything like a weapon in his hand. He had spitted the enemy with the spearhead of the banner.

  Face against the stone, he was able slowly, slowly, slowly to lower himself out over the abyss, sliding the ice pick along the rock face quietly, quietly, until it jammed into a crack, until his left knee was bent painfully tight, his calf pressing against his thigh, and his right foot still not touching anything.