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

  The Emperor had told him that rarely had the Sun Banner been better honoured than in that moment.

  Jack ignored the fire in his left leg, the hanging weight of his right, the uncertainty of the ice pick. Very slowly he slid his left hand along the rock until he came to his face, and then he tucked the silver hairpin awkwardly into his hair. Slid his now-empty hand down the stone, around his throbbing knee, until it gripped the ledge. Transferred his weight from his left foot to his hands, braced himself on stone and steel, pushed his foot off the ledge, scraped his shin all the way down the edge, bumped his knee again, for a sick moment was hanging over the abyss with nothing but his faltering strength to hold him, and then his right foot found the next ledge and he was for the moment safe.

  Twice more he repeated this before he got to the hole. It was bigger than it had seemed from above, as the basalt columns had been farther apart. He could get his head, even his shoulders through. It was very dark inside, and the General had stopped singing.

  Could be he was tired, or despairing, or dead.

  Could be a guard had entered.

  Could be he had heard Jack, and didn’t know what evil was coming next.

  Jack lowered himself flat on his belly, head well away from the hole. He didn’t want to silhouette himself against the brilliant stars. He lay prone, feeling the cold winkling in—how was it there was anything that was not already numb?—listening, listening, listening.

  The General said: “Come in, then. I am prepared to die.”

  He spoke in Shaian, his defiance there in his calm voice, thin though it was with exhaustion and cold and fear and pain. Never had Jack admired him more. He had been the one to order him up that cliff in Orkaty, and had been the second person up behind him.

  “General,” he said very softly, “are you prepared to live?”

  Four

  FOLLOWING THE WHISPERED directions from the General he inched forward, legs spread wide, and lowered his head, shoulders, arms, torso into the hole.

  “I can stand,” the General said, something in his voice making it clear there were other things he could not, now, do.

  Jack opened his legs yet wider, his eyes unable to see anything in the hole. “General, can you reach for me—can you reach my hands?”

  There was a soft shuffle, low-voiced cursing, and then beneath Jack’s groping hands was suddenly the wiry close-cropped hair of his commanding officer. The General made an appalled noise, hastily muffled.

  “Take my hands,” Jack said again. The blood was rushing to his head, throbbing.

  “I—they broke my hands—”

  “Stay right there,” he said. He scrabbled back out into the air, sat upright with his back against the cliff, considered as the blood settled back into its proper circulation. The hole opened out on a kind of platform, an irregular circle about four feet across.

  The General was tall, but not any taller than Jack. Jack had been able to reach his head without being fully lowered—but he was tired, cold, hurt, and his stomach muscles not strong enough to do that again more than once. He had to get the General up.

  Go all the way in, and he could probably push the General up. Could he, then, get himself out?

  They broke my hands ...

  Better that long step off the cliff than wait for what they had done to Lady Norcell, to Kitani, to Laranghi, to Ruz.

  He shifted position, his tunic catching on the rock behind him. He put his hand to release the fabric, felt a ridge running below the cloth.

  The rope belt ... Would it be strong enough?

  Perhaps not, but then again, Kitani had believed in the best quality for her equipment, and who knew what she had intended the thin silk rope for?

  He unwound it from the tatters, stuck the folded bit of cloth with one glimmering scale into the rats-nest of his hair, and ran the rope through his hands. Three and a half feet or so ... if that was what he had, then that was what he had.

  He tied as good a knot as he could between the two ends, then twisted around so he was lying prone again. Inched forward, rope like a line of shadow.

  “General, sir,” he whispered, “loop this around your armpits, then raise your arms towards me.”

  He dropped the rope down, felt the General tugging at it, whimpering a little, very softly.

  They broke my hands ...

  Finally Jack felt the tension steady. He inched forward, obedient to the pressure, until he could loop his half of the rope around his own arms, braced on his elbows.

  Clenched his stomach, spread his legs wide for balance, braced his feet against the cliff edge, reached down—and down—past the misshapen hands—down forearms—following the straining line of rope—until his hands caught the General’s elbows.

  “On three, jump as hard as you can,” he whispered. “Ready, sir?”

  “In your own time, major.”

  “One ... two ... and—”

  General Halioren jumped, and Jack pulled, back screaming bloody murder, and he pulled some more and he shoved some more and at length he rolled until his back hit the stone and there, gasping and whimpering beside him, was his General.

  They lay there recovering for too long. Another distant avalanche roused them, a series of small kaboom—boom—boom—just as he and Vozi and Ngolo had been hearing for so long as they came up to the castle of Loe and saw the banner going down.

  Jack pushed himself up to a sitting position. His eyes had re-adjusted to the faint light, and he could see for himself the mess of his General’s hands. The General was not old, precisely, but he was some decades older than Jack—albeit Jack’s thirty-five years currently felt like several hundred—and though his torture had not been as bloody as Lady Norcell’s, torture clearly there had been. He was not going to be able to manage much.

  “We are men of Astandalas,” the General said, as if in response to his thought. “We hold the Sun.”

  The motto of their division, the ones who were always in the vanguard, always first over the ridge, always the ones to plant the Sun Banner on the new territory. Jack smiled lopsidedly.

  He looked around, tracing out the thin shadowy line of his ledge (shuddering at the scree face above it, below it). His ledge finished at the eruption of basalt columns, where the mountain rock changed. Past the black rock was the sheer cliff where some of the rock piled below had fallen, white limestone jumbled with ice from the glacier.

  It occurred to him then that it was a similar combination to where he had first entered the fastness.

  For the first time he looked straight down, gripping the stone beside him tightly, praying vertigo would not strike. The concave scree slope went down a hundred and fifty feet or so to the lip of a hanging valley, and then fell straight down from there. He had been unable to see what lay below that lip from the ledge, the other side of the hanging valley, but from here he could see that the basalt columns stepped down sideways until they were buried under the avalanche debris.

  Was the pavement where he had left Vozi and Ngolo down there?

  He had seen a mountain goat traversing that cliff face.

  It must be three hundred feet straight down.

  He looked at the General again. He had managed to sit up, back against the stone, hands cradled in his lap. He was almost naked, Jack realized suddenly. The General was ethnically Shaian, his dark brown skin disappearing in the shadows against the dark rock. Jack hastily took off the tunic he had taken from the Valleyite, held it for him. “Here, sir,” he said urgently, “you will freeze—”

  He held the sleeves as the General carefully slid his hands in, one at a time, stuck his head through the neck; had to tug it down for him as well. “That’s b-better,” the General said. “Always—on your—t-toes. P-plans?”

  Jack looked back at the ledge, and saw a shimmer dance along the rock face.

  “On my back,” he said hurriedly, taking back the rope, looping it numerous times around the General’s wrists and elbows until he held them together. “Over
my neck, sir—”

  The General complied, though he whimpered again as Jack inevitably banged his hands. “I’m sorry, sir, I must—”

  “Don’t be an idiot, major.”

  He grabbed the ice pick. No one had come through the cliff—yet—

  Fear was a remarkable motivator. Even with the General’s added weight—which was nowhere near what it should have been—had the siege in the castle been so hard the command staff had been starving? It had been three weeks, surely they had had enough rations to last them that long—he swung his legs down over the basalt column, ice pick wedged into the joints of the columns. Some were not far down, and his feet reached easily. For some he had to use his arms to hold his whole weight and the General’s.

  But he swung down, and over, and down, and over, until his feet crunched into snow.

  He pushed back into the shadows between ice and cliff, looking everywhere for those hallucinatory glimmers, trying to breathe quietly, trying not to give away their location. The General was silent, not even whimpering—because he had fainted, Jack realized, twisting to look at his face. He would just have to pretend that it made it easier.

  He waited as the sweat congealed again. Overhead the stars seemed to be dimmer, the shadows around him less defined. He could see no glimmers, hear nothing. Was the stone shaman watching, waiting, smiling? Or—or—?

  He had the two hairpins, the ice pick, and he had the General.

  He looked down. He was still a good two hundred feet above the pavement, an endless distance above the real valley. But he was almost sure that he could see the darker shadows of the juniper thicket, could imagine he could almost smell the resin. If he could get down there, off the stone, off the ice, they had a chance—just a chance—of getting away.

  He had to hope the jumble of rocks and ice boulders was stable, that the mixture of elements somehow mixed the stone shaman’s magic. Stone speaks to stone, and water to water ...

  He would not give in. He had to take Jemis to see the Giant’s Bridge in the back country behind the Woods Noirell, in the strange hinterland of a country fully within the Empire but on the border between worlds. He and Olive would take Jemis, they would make a family picnic of it, they would go call on the old witch of the Woods, his mother-in-law, and then he would teach Jemis how to read the haiku about the bees ...

  He would get home. He had to. His son was counting on him. He had promised Olive he would come home. She had said she would wait for him.

  He settled the General’s weight on his shoulders again, and with protesting muscles and protesting mind he gripped the ice pick and started down the ice fall.

  Sunlight in summer

  The secret gift of flowers

  Joy of winter night

  The ice was cold, not slick but slippy, the loose snow almost worse. He put his foot through strange pockets of loose matter, scraping his legs, his arms, his body on rocks and jagged ice crystals. He had to stop frequently now to catch his breath, though each time he refused to let himself loosen his grip on the ice pick for fear he would never be able to grasp it again.

  He did not want to articulate to himself his fear that he would reach the bottom and there waiting for him would be the stone shaman and his guards, smiling.

  He kept going. Refused to think of distances, of heights, of certain death and uncertain torture. Refused to think of hunger, and cold, and exhaustion, and cold, and thirst. Jab ice pick, slide foot down, slide hand down, other foot down, until something reached a hold, then repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Slide; catch yourself; rest. Repeat.

  The light was changing, he thought stupidly. The stars were almost faint, the sky no longer impenetrably dark blue, the shadows no longer ones you could drown in, but blue, blue like the heart of a glacier in sunlight. Blue.

  Dawn, he thought even more stupidly, resting his forehead against the ice, braced against the dead weight—no, sleeping weight—of the General against his throat. He moved his arm, sank the ice pick in, slid his weight over, and—

  He threw himself against the cliff, unable to protect the General’s hands, unable to protect his own face, all his attention focussed on getting that ice pick jammed into something, keeping his grip on it. His feet caught on obtrusions, his flailing left hand, his knees, his groin, his chest—everything caught, nothing held. All around him the ice thundered.

  His knee caught something hard with jarring force, just enough to stall out his plunge. Right hand jarred as the ice pick bounced, scraped, caught.

  He shuddered against the rock, moisture sliding out of his eyes, his nose, his mouth. His hand was cramping. His knee was throbbing. The General was still out cold. His ankle was trembling. He had no idea whatsoever how far down the cliff he was. He shifted cautiously, trying to feel how sturdy his foothold was.

  A bird whistled shrilly. His body stopped as abruptly as at the top off the cliff, the noise hitting some deep chord of—training? Fear?

  Please say it wasn’t one of the Valleyite falcons.

  He had never felt so cowardly as he did just that moment. He could not force himself to open his eyes, to turn his head, to face death like a soldier of Astandalas. He felt the water leaking from his eyes, the snot from his nose, blood or saliva from the corner of his lips where his muscles were becoming slack with exhaustion.

  You are no coward, he said to himself. You were given the Heart of Glory. In his reign the Emperor has presented five—five!—and you were given one.

  But he could not move. He was frozen to the ice, supporting his weight and the General’s with his right hand in the ice pick, his chest and shoulders hunched over it, his left knee on some rock or ice block sticking out, his right foot straining at a weird angle on some other protuberance.

  He could not move.

  He was sick within himself.

  He was so afraid of falling the rest of the way—

  Voices.

  They took a long time to resolve into sense. His mind was jerky, still trying to convince himself to move, when he realized that the words were in Loëssie. He froze.

  “I’m sure,” said one.

  “Half the lorok went down into the valley.”

  “We should still—” Something, that the speaker felt very stubborn about.

  “Umiaan,” said a third voice, with a note Jack recognized immediately as command. He tried to concentrate on listening, not on how his hand was almost not able to grip—

  “Sir!” said the first, followed raggedly by the second.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Looking for the escaped prisoner, sir,” said the first, with a tone Jack read as truculent. He knew the sort: doing his job, despite provocation from his partner, despite it being a stupid job ...

  “Leave it. The shaman’s finished the auguries. Orders are changed.”

  “But what about the prisoner?”

  “What about him?” the commander said. “He’s inside the holdfast, isn’t he? Let him wander the irketz tunnels until he dies. Unless he’s learned to walk through walls, he’ll not get out.”

  “Tirok said he heard something on the outer wall—”

  “Yeah, the lorok falling,” the second guard said, with a tone almost audibly eye-rolling. “Unless you think the dingo can fly?”

  “Enough. We’re moving out at dawn. Something big is coming, we’re called to the front.”

  “What? Really?”

  “Unless you want to doubt the shaman’s augury from the blood of four dingos? He said the sign’s for sunset—”

  “Sunset?”

  The voices were fading, moving away, through towards the wall, perhaps, the gate through stone—

  “They call their emperor the sun,” the commander said, and he said something more, but the voice faded.

  We hold the Sun, Jack swore. I will not let the Sun go down on my watch.

  The bird whistled twice, and Jack, his mind working again through its fog and frozen slowness, realized it was his scout patrol’s signal for
safety. Once for danger, twice for safety.

  He opened his eyes, turned his head. The shadows were grey-blue-violet, the ice glimmering palely. He was in a kind of a trough, where most of the ice and rubble had slid away. His knee was on a piece of rock sticking out of the ice. His foot was wedged into a crack between two ice boulders. One of the boulders was the edge of the trough.

  On the other side of the boulder was a darker grey-black blur that his eyes took a long time to resolve into the basalt pavement, ten feet below him.

  He looked at his right hand, at the ice pick. It was so deeply embedded that he could not even make it wiggle. He moved his right foot. He got the sole of his foot—the sole of the stolen boot—against the one boulder. Took a deep breath.

  With almost the last piece of his strength he pushed off against the boulder. He got half-on the other side, and there, so close to safety, he could not—

  Then, like a miracle, Vozi came running across the pavement, under the cliff, casting wary eyes at the place where the door was invisible in stone, in ice, in shadows. She did not say anything, just planted herself at the bottom of the cliff, reached up. Her eyes were so—proud—that Jack found some tiny piece of strength, and he hauled himself the rest of the way over the boulder, and he turned on his stomach, and with his arms shaking, his hands nearly falling off with cold and exhaustion, he lowered himself as slowly as he could until hands touched his legs, and then he felt sturdy strong Vozi take the General’s weight, and in a semi-controlled slide down the ice-fall he landed.

  Vozi lifted the General’s bound hands over Jack’s head, picked up the General in a dead-man’s lift, and without a word hastened back across the juniper bushes. Jack stumbled over, tripping over his feet with tiredness and numbness, catching himself, then falling face first over Ngolo when he misjudged a step over a root.

  “GO,” HE SAID, THE ONE word he dared say.

  Vozi and Ngolo exchanged glances, looked like they wanted to protest, but though Jack was shaking, swaying as he forced himself back onto his feet, he was determined. Something big is coming. Sunset ...