Philip Athans - Scream of Stone

He stepped over the little wall and found himself in a graveyard.

Maybe three dozen stones had been scattered, seemingly at random, on the cut grass. None more than three feet tall, they were simple and carved with names.

Willem sniffed the air again and stepped between the stones.

The sound of a voice drifted from far away, carried on the cool pre-dawn air. Willem looked in the direction he thought the voice had come from, but he saw nothing. Looking into the shadows he felt a sense of impending doom wash over him, so strong he almost fell to his knees.

He shook his head when the scent intruded on him-if it even was a scent. It could have been more an impulse-a need to find her.

Whatever the mechanism, Willem knew she was close, and he was certain that when he found her, she would make everything all right. She would save him. He didn’t know her name or how they knew each other. He could form no picture of her in his reeling, increasingly dull mind. But he knew her, and he knew she was-

There.

Under the ground, buried.

He let a ragged growl tremble unvoiced in his throat, and he fell to his knees in front of a stone. His fingers found the engraving and traced the letters. He blinked but couldn’t see them, and though he wasn’t conscious of being able to read, he knew the letters came together to spell her name.

HALINA.

“Who is that there?” a woman called out to him.

He jumped to his feet, his head spinning, and cast about for the source of the voice.

Though so much of what was left of him longed for it to be her, he knew it wasn’t Halina.

“By the Blessed-” the woman shrieked.

He saw her step out from behind a tree, just inside the low wall around the cemetery. She clutched at her chest. The light from her lantern lit her face from below, twisting her features into a grotesque mockery of human.

Willem, overwhelmed by the need to kill the woman, moved toward her, his hands poised to rip her head from her shoulders. The woman raised the thing she’d clutched at her neck for and a brilliant white light overwhelmed Willem’s vision.

He couldn’t see any details of the symbol, but he knew what it was. The power of a goddess he was unfit to name rolled over him like a thunderhead rolls across an open plain.

He turned and ran. His legs moved, and his arms bounced at his sides. He couldn’t think. The need to find Halina was gone, the overwhelming necessity to kill Ivar Devorast also fled, and all that was left was the immediate, irrepressible need just to get away.

The woman drove him before her, and he ran all the way to the high wall. He climbed it faster than before, cut himself more deeply, too, but once he was over he ran and ran and ran into the growing light of the awakening city.

By the time he found an abandoned shed behind a ramshackle storefront in which to hide, there was nothing left of Willem Korvan. The man had been erased, and the monster knew only one thing.

Kill.

Kill Ivar Devorast.

20 Tarsakh, the Year of Lightning Storms (1374 DR)

BERRYWILDE

Phyrea heard someone call her name. In the dark, still expanse of the country estate, she had heard her name come from nowhere before, had for years spoken with apparitions of violet light, but the voice that came to her that night was different.

She lay in a tub of warm water that she’d scented with lavender oil. The little knife she’d brought from the kitchen lay on the marble tile within easy reach, but she hadn’t cut herself yet. The little girl floated a few inches off the floor in the corner of the room, adding a purple glow to the orange candlelight.

“I like your dress,” Phyrea told the little girl. “It’s pretty.”

The girl grimaced-an expression that looked wrong on her baby face-but she didn’t say anything. After a tenday at Berrywilde, they had spoken enough.

They’d told her again and again that Pristoleph meant to destroy them. They told her that her father was still alive but that he’d abandoned her, and the only family she had left was them. They begged her to kill herself, then they demanded that she do it, then they begged some more. They made her cry more than once, and she even put a knife to her throat one night. She looked the old woman in the eyes, then, and the desperation she saw there, the longing, almost made her slit her own throat, but she didn’t. Even days later she didn’t know why she’d spared her own life.

Just then all she wanted was to sit in a lavender-scented bath, close her eyes, and soak as much in the silence as the water.

You’ve already become one of us, you know , the little girl said. You just don’t know it yet .

Phyrea looked at her, met her eyes, and smiled. The girl faded away.

And that was when she heard her name.

She closed her eyes and whispered, “Leave me alone. I’ll die soon enough.”

Phyrea .

She shook her head and was about to speak, when the voice came again.

Stay away from the canal .

“Ivar,” she said, and her eyes flickered open.

She sat up in the tub and looked behind her. There he was-made of the same violet light as the rest of them.

Phyrea, I know you can hear me .

“Ivar,” she whispered. “Can you see me?”

She looked at his eyes, but they didn’t meet hers. He stood, his feet an inch off the floor, and he looked up at the ceiling. When he spoke, the movement of his lips didn’t quite match the sound of his voice-a voice that sounded in her head, but not in her ears.

Tell Pristoleph. It isn’t safe .

“Where are you?” she asked, the sound of her own voice so loud in the otherwise silent house that it startled her.

I’m not there. I’ll find you . She blinked and he was gone.

“Ivar?” she whispered.

She gasped and held the breath. She rose to her knees and came part of the way out of the bath water. There was no sign of him, and no sound in either her ears or her head. Tears welled in her eyes and she wiped them away with a lavender-scented forearm.

“Ivar?” she whispered. “What’s happened?”

There’s no one here named Ivar , the man with the scar on his face said.

The cool violet glow once again mixed with the candlelight, but she didn’t look at it. She knew it wasn’t Devorast.

“He was here,” Phyrea whispered.

No one was here , the man said.

They didn’t see him, Phyrea thought. They didn’t hear him.

She let herself sink back into the tub so that only her face was above water.

“Why would he warn me away?” she whispered.

Because he is finished with you , said the old woman.

He doesn’t want you anymore , the melancholy woman added.

“He looked like you,” Phyrea whispered. “Is he dead?”

She sat up straight in the tub, her jaw clenched tight and her hands shaking.

“He’s dead,” she said, again too loudly, startling herself and sloshing water from the tub. It splashed onto the knife, which slid a few inches across the slick marble floor.

“Is he dead?” she whispered, and reached for the knife.

She gasped for a breath and felt her chest tighten around her heart as though her own body meant to squeeze the life out of her.

“Ivar?” she gasped. “Are you alive?”

No , the old woman said. He’s dead .

He has to be dead , the little girl said.

There’s only one way to see him now , said the sad woman.

Phyrea sank the blade of the kitchen knife into her forearm and screamed through the pain that made her hands stop shaking. She cut herself again and she could breathe.