Jo Clayton - A Gathering Of Stones

“The gods are busy tonight.” Firtina spoke idly, turning her teabowl around and around in her short clever fingers. “I haven’t seen so many of them about since the NewYear feast.”

Korimenei sipped at her tea and said nothing. Her Ordeal was taking on the haze of myth. Not quite dream. Not quite memory. If I let myself slide into megalomania, I could think all that’s put on for me, she thought. She smiled. Not likely, I’m afraid. She glanced at Firtina, smiled again. She almost believes it. I can see that. I wonder why? She’s got a special touch for divining. “You think something is stirring?” Frit chewed on her lower lip. She reached for the teapot

100 Clayton and filled her bowl again. “You’ve got the right word,” she said finally. “Stirring.”

“What?”

“Ah. That’s the question. I don’t know.” She frowned, pushed back the dark brown hair that fell in a veil past her eye and curved round to tickle at her mouth. “It’s, it’s well, like standing over a grating and hearing things, you know, things, slithering about under you. You don’t know what they are and you’re quite sure you don’t want to know. That sort of stirrmg.” She gulped at the tea, shivered, refilled the bowl and sat holding the warm porcelain between her palms. “Yuk.”

“Well, it can get on with it without me, I’m off as soon as my things are finished.”

“Well…” Frit set the bowl on the table and frowned across the bay at the mountains, dark and quiet since Geidranay had vanished with the sun and her attendant dragons. get the feeling… I just started noticing… it smells stronger every breath I take… I think you’re some kind of… of magnet for it. When you move, it moves. I’ll do some looking when we get back, see what I can find.”

“Thanks. I think.” Korimenei made a face. “Portents. Gah! I don’t believe a word of it, you know. Come on, you’re still under Rule, we don’t want to get you chucked out before your time is up.”

Six days later Korimenei Piyolss, sorceror in posse and possessor of portents too nebulous to grasp despite Frit’s efforts and her own, Korimenei followed a porter and her pouches onto the merchanter Jiva Marish and sailed south for Jade Halimm.

IV: Danny Blue

The pocket reality of the Chained God

The village at Haven Bay c. The city Dirge Arsuid Danny Blue After ten years, he emerges from the sleep pod and is propelled on his way to his meeting with the Talisman Klukesharna also: Lio Laux, owner of the ship Skia Hetaira

Braspa Pawbool, fifth-

rate sorceror in the employ of the Prenn

Ysran of Dirge Arsuid

Felsrawg Lawdrawn, thief and assassin Simms Nadaw, thief Trithil Esmoon, secret geniod, Phrasi courtesan

The Daniel Akamarino part of him woke first because Daniel had been through this before.

He opened his eyes and saw the translucent white petalform of the pod cap slanting up away from him. Sleep pod? He swallowed. The taste of burning insulation that filled his mouth warned him he’d been down for more than a few hours. He stared at the cracks clouding the cap and trembled with terror/rage. The starship was older than time and rotting to dust. He could have died in that pod. If the coldsleep system had broken in the smallest part, he would be dead now and rotting with the ship.

Dead and rotten. For a god’s whim, Chained God playing Spin the Boogie with Fate. Live? Die? Who cares.

Mutely cursing the god and h/its reckless interference in his life, hands shaking with anger and inanition, Daniel Akamarino stripped leech-feeders off the emaciated body he inhabited and tried to sit up.

*Your life? Our Het* The words exploded in a head already blind with pain. Ahzurdan was coming awake. Sharing the body with Daniel, he shared the terror, the rush of adrenalin, though he couldn’t know what caused it since he was entirely ignorant of starships and their mechanisms. *My life also. Daniel saw the words as black against red with liquid white halos flowing around the outside of, the letters. He cursed again, shoved angrily at the intruding Other. “Go away,” he shouted, asserting control of the voice they shared. “Leave me alone.”

Ahzurdan seemed to acquiesce, then slammed into Daniel with a sudden flare of power, trying to expel him from the body.

Their joint flesh humped, twitched, threatened to boil off the bone, their shared bones creaked and shuddered. Ahzurdan screamed, the SOUND tearing at their throat. Daniel howled and tried to shape the howl into words, to gasp at words and use them to kill the Other or, if killing were impossible, to force him from the body. This was a mistake. Words were Ahzurdan’s technology, he could unmake with them as well as make and he strove desperately to unmake Daniel Akamarino and control the body that was born from the forced melding of their flesh.

Danny Blue, their rueful and unappreciative sort-of-son, woke and hovered like a ghost above his battling half-sires.

Not so long ago in conscious time, impossible to know how long in world time, Daniel Akamarino was walking down a road in another reality, was a starman/trader looking for a bargain, was a man who had a deep contempt for self-styled magicians, considering them deluded idiots with a yen for power but too inept or lazy to acquire the real thing, or charlatans, milking the deluded idiots that swarmed about them. On that day when he was walking along that road, Daniel Akarnarino was past his first youth, with blue eyes bright in a face tanned dark, was bald except for a fringe of hair over his ears like a halfcrown of black thorns, was a tall man, lanky, loosely put together, but fast and hard when he had to be. Amiable, competent, unambitious, and generally somewhere else when you needed him.

Not so long ago in conscious time, in this reality where magicians are the technocrats, Ahzurdan was a sorceror of high rank with a dreamdust habit that was killing him. Back then he was a tall man with a handsome ruined face and eyes bluer than the sea on a sunny day, with fine black hair, a beard combed into corkscrew curls and a bold blade of a nose. Among ordinary folk for his vanity’s sake he spread a glamour about himself, wearing pride along with wool and leather, wearing power like a cloak, pride and power put on to cover the blind weak worm within. An ineffectual driven man, despite the power he commanded. Bitter, angry, dominated for too long by a neurotic mother, then a charismatic master.

Danny Blue’s half-sires, fighting insanely over a body neither had the strength to control.

He snorted with disgust when he discovered what was happening. If one part of him destroyed the other, it would be an act of suicide. Ahzurdan and Daniel Akaniarino were ghosts, incapable of independent existence; apparently neither of them could or would recognize this. Since he had no soft yearnings for easeful death, he gathered himself, slapped his warring parts into order and rolled his fragile body up until he was sitting with his legs hanging over the edge of the pod, his head cradled in dry bony hands.

He sat that way for several minutes, trying to dredge up sufficient strength to hunt out his quarters and see how much time had passed while he was stashed away in coldsleep. He scrubbed a hand across his mouth; his lips were cracked and dry. Painful. Whole body’s in bad shape, he thought. He shivered; the clammy chill of the pod chamber was seeping into him. He reached up, caught hold of the cap and levered his wasted body off the cot.

He swayed, pressed his free hand hard against his eyes as his head threatened to explode. He lowered his, hand and frowned at it. I look like the tag-end of a seven-year famine, he thought. He trembled again and his knees went soft on him. That miserable conglomeration of rot, I could have died in there. He clutched at the cap, steadied himself, then took a tentative step toward the open arch between the squat, cylindrical pod-chamber and whatever was outside it; he didn’t lift his feet but shuffled along like an aged, aged man, body bent and swaying. When he reached the arch, he closed his hand around a broken bit of the wall and stood panting and shaking as he looked about.