Jo Clayton: A Gathering Of Stones

“When we leaving?”

“Maksi says he should have all he can get in two-three days, say three days. Then I’ve got to Hunt, he says wait until he finishes his sweep and I agree. Say two nights more. All right?”

“Has to be. You look tired.”

“I am.”

“Sleep.”

“Cant turn my head off.”

“Come to bed. I can fix that.”

“I don’t want to dream, Jay.”

“I won’t mess with dreams, Bramble. If you do, you need to. Come on.”

“I come, o master Jay.”

Maksim was embarrassed and worried when he came to her suite two days later. “I don’t know who, I don’t know why. I tried every means I know, Bramble, but I found out nothing.” Hands clasped behind him, he went charging about the room, throwing words at her over his shoulder. “Do you hear? Nothing! Even the cave is closed off from me. All of it.” He stopped in front of her, glared at her. “I don’t think you should go there, Bramble. Not alone.”

“I won’t be alone. Jay will be with me.”

He brushed that away. “You have a year. Give me two months. Come with me to meet Kori when she leaves the school. As soon as I finish there, I’ll be free. I’ve never seen anything like this, Brann; god or man, no one has shut me out like this since I was a first year apprentice.”

“No, Maksi. Now. It has to be now.”

“If I don’t snap you to the cave site, it will take you at least two months’ travel to reach it. Give me those months.”

“If that sled Danny Blue made hadn’t gone to pieces, I wouldn’t have to beg. I hate this, Maksi, but I’ve got no choice. Please. Do what you said you’d do. I’m not being stubborn or perverse. It isn’t Jay working on me. This is…

I don’t know, a feeling, something. It says NOW. I don’t know. Please, Maksi. Do you want me on my knees?” She started to drop, but he caught her arm in a hard grip that left bruises behind when he took his hand away.

“No!” He shouted the word at her. “No,” he said more quietly. “Here.” He stretched out a fist, held it over her cupped hands. “Call-me’s. If you need me, put one under your heel and crush it. I’ll be there before your next breath. If I can find you.” Grim and unhappy, he dropped half a dozen water-smoothed quartz pebbles in her hands. “If I can. If you aren’t blocked off from me like the cave.”

Drinker of Souls prowled the streets.

A band of prepubescent thieves came creeping through the fog to find their Whip limp and lifeless on the filthy cobbles.

A childstealer dropped from a window with a bundle slung over one shoulder. A hand came from the darkness, slapped against his neck. A mastiff howled until a houseguard came out to throw a cobble at the beast. The guard heard the baby crying, saw the bundle and the dead man, woke the house with his yells.

An assassin prepared to scale the outside of a merchant’s house. When the streetsweepers came along, they found his body rolled up against the wall.

Inside the BlackHouse a man was beating a boy, slowly, carefully beating him to death. When he finished, he left the place, strolling sated between his bodyguards. His gardener found the three of them stretched out under a bush, dead.

And so it went.

In the cold wet dawns the streetsweepers of Kukurul found the husks she left behind and put them on the rag and bone cart for the charnel fires.,

In the cold wet dawns the Kula priests went sweeping in procession through the tangled streets, setting silence on the newborn ghosts. Ghosts that were highly indignant and prepared to make life difficult for everyone around them. They fought the grip of the priests but lost and went writhing off, pulsing with blocked fury. The wind blew them off to join the fog out over the bay and the debris from older cast-out souls.

On the evening of the third night, with Jaril trotting beside her, Brann climbed the mountain above the inn and waited for Maksim.

The Wounded Moon was a vague patch of yellow in the western sky, a chill fog eddied about the flat; the stones were dark with the damp, slippery lightsinks and traps for the unwary ankle. Brann pulled her cloak tighter about her body, muttering under her breath at Maksim’s insistence on this particular spot for his operations. At the same time she was perversely pleased with her surroundings, the gloom around her resonated with the gloom inside her. Jail was even more unhappy with the place. He’d kept his mastiff form but replaced his fur with a thick leathery skin that shed the condensation from the fog like waxed parchment. In spite of that he was uncomfortable. The wet stole ,heat and energy from him. He was prowling about, rubbing his sides against any boulders tall enough to allow this, impatient to get away.

In the fog and the cold and the dark, Jaril whining behind her somewhere, Brann began to wonder if Maksim had changed his mind again. She eased the straps of her rucksack; though the leather was padded, they were cutting into her shoulders. Soft, she thought, but I’ll harden with time and doing. She looked at her hands. They glowed palely in the dense dark, milkglass flesh with bone shadows running through it.

“You can still change your mind, Bramble.” Maksim’s voice came out of the dark, startling her; she hadn’t heard or sensed his approach. That worried her.

“No,” she said. “Jay, come here. Do it, Maksi.”

Brann stepped from one storm into another. The slope outside the cave mouth was bare and stony; a knife-edged icewind swept across it, driving pellets of ice against Brann’s face and body. Jaril whimpered, ducked under the snapping ends of her cloak and pressed up against her.

Brann dropped into a crouch, put her mouth close to his ear. “Where’s the cave? We’ve got to get out of this.”

Jaril shivered, grew a thick coat of fur. He edged from the shelter of the cloak, waited until she was standing again, then trotted up the slope to a clump of scrub jemras, low crooked conifers with a strong cedary smell that blew around her as she got closer, powerful, suffocating. She plunged through them and into a damp darkness with a howl in it.

Once he was out of the wind, Jaril changed to the glow globe that was his base form and lit up a dull, dark chamber like a narrowmouth bottle. He hung in midair, quivering with indignation and cursing Maksim in buzzing mindspeak for sending them into this cold hell.

Brann ignored the voice in her head as she would a mosquito buzzing; she slid out of the shoulder straps and lowered the rucksack to the cave floor. Her cloak was wet through, she was cold to the bone. “Jay, in a minute give me some light out there. I have to get a fire started before

I perish…” She gasped and went skipping backward as a stack of wood clattered to the stone, followed by a whoosh and a flare of heat as a clutch of hot coals and burning sticks landed near the woodpile. She laughed. “Thanks, Maksi,” she called. She laughed again, her voice echoing and reechoing as Jaril darted to the fire and sank into it, quivering with pleasure as he bathed in the heat.

She bustled about, spreading mat and blankets, restacking the wood, organizing the coals and several sticks of wood into a larger fire. When she finished, she sighed with weariness and looked around. Jaril was gone. He couldn’t wait, she thought. Well, she’s his sister and night and day don’t matter underground. She rubbed her back, frowned. What do I do if he’s trapped like Yaro? Idiot boy! A few more hours and I could have gone with him. She dropped onto the mat and pulled a blanket around her to block off the drafts. Staring into the fire, she grew angrier with every minute lumbering past.