Stonewiser (35 page)

On the tenth night after her escape from Targamon Farm, Sariah still hadn't called the beam. It wasn't that they hadn't made enough progress. On the contrary, using her new strategy, she and Delis had followed Arron and his warriors and arrived at the mountains’ foothills right behind them. Instead of trying to outrun the Shield, she had decided to trail it closely. It was safer that way, because Arron was concentrating on the forest ahead of him, combing it to the last bush and pine needle. It also allowed her to keep good tabs on the Shield without sacrificing her pace.

The problem was that she couldn't call the beam to verify her destination without giving away her position. The Shield was too close. She could wait until they reached the mountains before she set up the game, but after that, she would be wasting time she didn't have.

Sariah spotted a growth of thick brackens. She shook them to scare away the critters and then flattened the concealed undergrowth towards the middle to make a bed. She stretched her wet blanket over the fronds and lay down. She was likely to die from exhaustion.

“Not bad, my donnis.” Delis laid her blanket next to hers. “A little wet, but at least the rain has stopped. Here's the last of Mara's corn biscuits for your dinner.”

She had really liked Mara's biscuits hot from the oven. Now she gnawed on a hard, dry mockery of those biscuits, watching the clouds chasing each other in the dark sky above and wondering how Mara and Malord had fared with the Shield. It must have gone well enough. She hadn't spotted fire or smoke coming from Targamon's direction and the Shield had moved on too fast after her to account for an attack on the farm.

She wondered how Kael was doing. He would be mad at her, but she had no doubt that he would understand her reasoning and do as she swore. She closed her eyes and tried to sleep. He would be worried. Somewhere in Targamon Farm he waited for the sight of a beam that wasn't going to glow tonight either.

The slightest touch traced her lips in the darkness. Delis. Her fingertips were light on her skin, outlining the shape of her face with barely a contact. Sariah didn't move. She kept her breathing steady and her eyes closed. Hadn't she endured much more than an unwanted caress from people as fickle and selfish as her Guild masters and mistresses?

The rich scent of clove-spiced molasses dwarfed the humid frond's lush smell. A slight brush of cheeks announced the nearness of Delis's face, the slow, hovering approach of plush lips. Just when she expected the inexorable landing, something happened. Delis shook Sariah. When she opened her eyes, Delis crouched beside her, hatchet in hand.

“What is it?”

“Something's coming this way.”

Sariah thanked Meliahs for the Domainers’ blessed hearing. They were the keenest creatures in the world. She waited among the ferns, stone in hand. She didn't see anything at first. Then, the tall sinister shape of an animal she didn't recognize lumbered from the woods.

Something landed unexpectedly between Sariah and Delis, a stinking leg as wide as Meliahs’ pillars, standing on a paw the size of her head. Long claws brushed the bushes as the tall beast passed, unleashing a rain of shredded leaves on Sariah's face. Leandro's clawed terrors had arrived.

Sariah would have screamed if Delis's hand hadn't landed over her mouth. She would have crawled and scurried out of the woods like a scared possum if Delis hadn't held her in place.

The shadow looming over her moved on, matching the pace of its companions at either side. Those animals were hunting together, Sariah realized, like a pack of wolves, only they were most definitively not wolves. They were hunting humans. They were going after the Shield.

“Shouldn't we run?” she whispered.

“We stay put,” Delis murmured. “More. All around us.”

A horrendous howl overtook the night. Vicious growling echoed from the Shield's camp. Voices shouting commands combined with the terrifying screams of those facing the beasts. Sariah had never seen Delis shaking like this.

“Meliahs’ hounds,” Delis whispered. “Mara told me they dwelt here.”

“That's just—”

“Legend?” Delis peered into the forest in the direction of the Shield's camp. “Those things kill, my donnis. They're no legend.”

“There must be an explanation—”

“They're coming back.”

They huddled together, watching in terrified silence as the beasts retraced their steps. The brackens shook under heavy paws. Sariah stole a quick glance up and saw a crumpled man skewered on a set of brutal claws. With a vicious swing, the creature strung the victim's guts on a gnarled oak. A broken rib cage, still pink with flesh, landed next to the brackens. Sariah swallowed a scream.

The beast licked the blood off a cracked skull. It savored the dark flow for a moment, before dropping the mangled head and uttering a hair-raising howl. Howls answered from all directions, enlivening the night. Then, as quietly as they had come, the beasts lumbered away and disappeared into the woods.

On the twentieth night after their escape from Targamon Farm, Sariah and Delis ventured around the Shield's camp and up the escarpment that led to the Bastions.

“What if those things come back?” Delis asked.

“Let's just pray they don't,” Sariah said.

The beasts’ attack had rattled the Shield, but Arron didn't give up. In fact, after the beasts’ first attack, it had gotten more dangerous for Sariah and Delis. The Shield had increased their daily patrols and strengthened their night watches. Twice in the last few days, Sariah and Delis had come close to discovery by patrols in the woods. Once, they had stumbled upon the bloodied remains of a massacred Shield patrol. They had no doubts as to what had caused the carnage.

The forest's varieties, pines, firs, cedars, tamaracks and leafless aspens stopped abruptly at an invisible line. The steep escarpment at the foot of the Bastions was dotted sparsely with juniper, spiny sagebrush and slippery rocks. The going was slow. In the darkness, Sariah walked carefully, mindful of twisting an ankle or breaking a foot. It was Delis who tripped.
Crunch
. Something tumbled and shattered against a rock.

“Are you all right?”

“I'm fine,” Delis whispered, rubbing her bruised shin. “What was that?”

Sariah crouched on the ground and lifted her wrist wrap to add her bracelet's glow to the tenuous light of a faint crescent moon hiding behind a bank of clouds. She picked up a piece of the remains of an earthenware vessel.

“It was a clay jar of some sort,” she said. “It was decorated with some kind of dotted design. There's script on it. The old language, I think. It's a shame Kael isn't here. He could tell us what it says.”

“Here's another.” Delis limped a few feet. “And another.”

The moonlight broke through the clouds. For an instant, Sariah spotted the sinuous shapes of thousands of vessels standing around an open-mouthed Delis. The vessels were under the trees, in between the rocks, all along the escarpment's slope. Some were small and some were large, some were squat and round, others were fluted or narrow-necked. Some were heavily decorated while others were simple and unadorned. Then the moonlight was gone again, leaving Sariah clutching the cold pottery shards in her hand.

“Maybe it's an offering,” Delis whispered. “To Meliahs’ hounds. To keep them away.”

“There are no people around here. We haven't seen houses since we entered the forest.” Sariah picked through the broken pieces on the ground and cupped a fistful of tiny white pebbles in her hand. “Maybe these are food stores of some kind?”

Under the tenuous light, Delis examined the pebbles in Sariah's hand. “I don't think so, my donnis. Unless you think of humans as food, little children at that.”

The hair at the back of Sariah's neck stood on end. The little teeth were but speckles of bones and yet they burned her palm. She suppressed an urge to drop them. Instead, she returned them to the broken vessel as carefully as she could manage and wiped her hands.

“Let's not break any more of these.”

Delis crouched. “Fresh tracks. Here.”

“Are they people's footprints?”

“They might be.” Delis looked closely. “This one isn't.”

The beasts. They had tracked this way, not too long ago. Sariah could barely swallow. She wouldn't be dissuaded from her duty by a pack of… what? She was having a hard time with the notion and yet when she recalled the beasts, the idea of the goddess's hounds wasn't as hard to accept as she had first thought.

Sariah and Delis advanced up the escarpment and through the trees, mindful of the prolific vessels. The crescent moon came out again, illuminating the deeply grooved, copper-streaked rhyolite cliffs that rose above them like an impenetrable fortress. Sariah had to stop, despite her trepidation, to admire the earth's extraordinary creation.

The massive stone mountains had been birthed in the earth's core, fused, compacted, crystallized, heated and cooled in chaotic progressions. Expelled from those turbulent depths, they had escaped en masse through a stubborn crustal rift in a slow but catastrophic transformation of the landscape, only to be further tortured by the elements, sculpted by ice, eroded by wind, transformed into a stunning monument to the earth's power.

“The Bastions,” Sariah said. “The drop of three thousand spans. Possibly more.”

Delis eyed the cliffs. “Do you want to climb this?”

“We can't call the beam from the forest. The Shield would be on us in a snap. Those beasts, too. But if we find a way up the cliffs, we can call the beam from the top. It would take the Shield a long time to follow us.”

“No offense, my donnis, but it will take us a long time too. It will be a difficult climb. And if the Shield spots us on the rock face, we'll be practice targets to their arrows.”

“I have to make it up there. I can't keep wasting time. I have to call the beam.”

“All right. For you, I'll try it. How about over there? There appears to be a long groove on the rock face, a vertical crevice. It's partly sheltered from sight and wind.” Delis reached out to examine the cracks on the cliff face.

A flash of light flared against her hand. As if hurled by the goddess's own hand, Delis flew backwards, tumbled down the escarpment and crashed back-first against a thorn bush.

Sariah skidded down the hill. “Are you wounded?”

Delis wrestled with the bush. “More like pinched and pricked, right about now. Sorry, my donnis. It's just not my night. What happened?”

“I'm not sure. Let's get you out of here.” Sariah helped Delis untangle her weave from the thorns. After she was back on her feet and Sariah was satisfied that she wasn't hurt, they returned to examine the cliffs.

“Don't touch it,” Delis whispered.

Sariah reached out with her palms to sense the wising, a muted buzz that tickled her eardrums. She recognized a command in that vibrant layer. She braced her mind to absorb the shock and pushed her hand through the invisible layer and directly against the striated rhyolite.

Repel. Reject. Refuse.
The commands were unbearable shrieks to her mind. Vivid and extraordinarily shrill, they converted will into sound and sound into force, generating the physical repulsion of flesh. Sariah was stunned. She had experienced the will of the Domainers’ gifted imprinters on the stones they used to contain the rot, as well as the wall's powerful wising, but she had never encountered anything like this. Only her mind's readiness to absorb the wising kept her from harm. She didn't know how long she could stand the assault on her senses, or if she could even manage an ascent on those cliffs while taming the powerful wising. Who had wised these magnificent stones?