Jo Clayton - A Gathering Of Stones

The kwitur dragged himself up, moving with painful slowness. Maksim watched, frowning, angry at first, then amused. “Ooohhh, tragedy, the very image of it.” He laughed for the first time in days, the sound booming back at him from the hollows of the cliff. He held to the mast, his weight keeping the boat steady as Todich clambered out.

The kwitur sank ankle-deep into the damp sand. He hummed his distaste for the clinging stuff and continued cursing in his insect voice as he trudged to the rock and began picking his way carefully upward, climbing with the steady sureness of his kind.

Maksim contemplated the slope and considered snapping himself to the top; his mass and relatively high center of gravity made him less than sure-footed on rock faces and he was beginning to feel the weight of his years despite his skill at using earthfire to boil off the poisons of aging. He dropped overside into the shallow water, pulled the boat higher on the sand and moored her to a handy rock; he wasn’t about to thrust an anchor here in the Tukery.

He got to the top, weary, shaking, scraped about like a stew carrot. Todich was crouching in a pitiful knot, looking more miserable and mistreated than ever. Maksim snorted. Todich was overdoing the victim to the point of absurdity. He began building a small fire with the coal and tinder he’d hauled up in his backpack. In the middle of this business, he looked up to see Todich watching him. He’d never been sure he read the kwitur’s minimal expressions with anything like accuracy, but he thought he saw a flash of amusement, even affection there. That startled him so much he forgot about fanning the tiny fire and it went out on him. Exaggeration? Resentment caricatured beyond absurdity? Beyond? Absurdity? THAT LITTLE GIT WAS PAYING HIM BACK FOR THOSE TEN YEARS AND HAVING SOME FUN AT THE SAME TIME!!! “You! YOU! You perfidious inglorious diabolic old fraud.”

“Slow,” Todichi hoomed. “Got old, han’t you.”

“Yeh, you right. Looks like any brains I had ‘ ye turned to suet.” He dug into the backpack, tossed a blanket to the kwitur. “You’re shivering. You’d better wrap this round you till I can get this damn fire lit.”

The reluctant coals finally caught. Maksim set a pan of water on a tripod, watched it a moment to see that the tripod was stable and the fire was going to keep burning, then he sat on his heels and contemplated Todichi Yahzi. “Tell me about it,” he said and settled himself to listen.

They talked and sat in a shared silence and talked some more, drank tea when the water boiled, made peace with memory while they waited for the appointed hour.

When the time came, Maksim sent Todichi Yahzi home as gently as he could, then collapsed beside the remnants of the fire.

When he struggled back to awareness, at first he couldn’t remember where he was or what had happened to deplete him so thoroughly.

Memory crept back slowly, so slowly he was disturbed; his mind was not working right.

He tried to sit up.

He was tied.

His arms were tight against his body, his hands were pressed against his thighs; ropes passed round and round him; he couldn’t wiggle a finger; he could barely breathe.

He tried to speak.

His tongue was bound, not by ropes but by a force he couldn’t recognize.

He tried to mindcall a firesprite to work on the ropes, something he was able to do before he could read his name. His mind was bound.

He sweated in claustrophobic terror until he managed to override that bloodfear, then he gathered will in shoulder and neck and got his head up off the stone.

Fog.

Like white soup, ghosts bumping about in it, swirling about him and whoever had caught him.

He ignored the ghosts.

Jastouk, he thought. I talked in my sleep and he betrayed me. He wept and was furious at himself for weeping. Time passed.

He couldn’t feel his body or count the beats of his heart.

There was nothing he could use to tick off the minutes, nothing to tell him if a day had passed, a week, or only an hour.

He eased his head down.

He fought the helplessness that was worse than the claustrophobia. He called on two centuries of discipline, then waited with the patience of a cat at a mousehole. His captors had given him time to collect himself. Stupid of them. Or maybe they didn’t care. Overconfidence? He produced a wry smile. 1 hope it is overconfidence.

Time passed.

The ghosts backed off.

New shapes solidified in the fog.

He heard a foot scrape against stone and decided he was still on the islet.

Someone spoke.

He heard the voice but couldn’t make out the words. Answers came from several points.

He strained to make out what was being said, but it was as if his ears were stuffed with something that deafened him just enough to make sure he learned nothing from what he heard.

The exchanges continued.

It began to feel like ritual rather than speech.

He couldn’t tell if that was a trick of his fettered mind or something real. This irritated him, his incapacity was like nettles rubbed against his skin.

By the Gods of Fate and Time, I will make you suffer for this, he thought at them; he struggled to shout it; his jaw ached with the need to shout at them.

The binding held.

Not a sound came out, not a sound!

With such a cork shoved in his mouth, need was building up in him.

He was going to explode.

He visualized himself blowing apart, hot burning pieces of him rushing outward, colliding with the things out there prattling like fools, colliding with them and ashing them. I’m getting giddy.

Gods of Fate and Time! Keep hold of yourself.

Think of Vechakek and Jastouk.

I owe them.

I’ll pay them.

I pay my debts. Always.

Feeling trickled back into him.

The chill of the damp stone struck up through his body, sucking away what warmth he had left.

He pressed his fingers into the meat of his thigh and won a little space.

He worked his fingers, trying to gain enough movement for a simple gesture.

The stone softened under him, flowed up around him. Lumpy, faceless elementals like animate gray clay lifted him and carried him down a spiral ramp that created itself before them.

Complaining about the abrasions of the sand in subsonic groans like rock rubbing against rock, they lumbered across the beach and rolled him into his boat as if he were a dead fish.

He managed to keep his head from crashing into the deck but collected bruises over every part of his body.

Fog billowed about him.

Ghosts /loomed in the distance, frightened off by those other entities, whatever they were, who stood on air about the boat, thickenings in the fog, featureless, serpentine, bipedal.

He didn’t recognize them.

Smell, aura, everything about them was unfamiliar. He wasn’t surprised.

The layered realities were infinite in number and each sorceror had his own set of them in addition to those that they all shared.

His head wasn’t working right, but he settled grimly to learning what he could about them.

Two figures dropped onto the deck.

They dragged him into the hutch and laid him out on the sleeping pad.

They wore black leather top-to-toe like the Harpish and black leather cowls with only the eyes cut out.

They weren’t Harpish.

Forty Mortal Hells, who are you and who is running you? Amortis?

Gods of Fate and Time, I hope not.

She’d watch me burn and throw oil on the fire.

They tossed a blanket over him and went out.

He felt the boat float free.

She shuddered, yawed, rolled.

Those two didn’t know codswallop about sailing. They got the sails up finally and the boat underway. Maksim settled to working trying to free his hands a little. There were gestures so minimal they required almost no space but could focus sufficient energy to cut him free.