Stonewiser (67 page)

The chamber fell deadly quiet.

“Give them their weapons.”

“But, my donnis—”

“Their weapons.”

The men accepted their swords with trepidation, no doubt expecting a thrust through the gut at any time.

“Can we leave now?”

“You can. Or since you're already here, you can hear me and assess what I have to offer. I'm alive and present. You cannot claim the assurances unless you hear my proof. Am I right?”

The executioners exchanged troubled glances with each other. Somewhere in the Domain, their tribe was packing up for the jubilant trip to the Crags. They would do nothing to jeopardize such triumph.

Sariah's eyes fell on Belana, tucked of her own accord in the chamber's darkest corner. She called her to her side. Like a wild beast, Belana crawled out of the shadows, blind gaze trained on Sariah's face.

Delis elbowed the slacked-jawed executioners. “Didn't your mother teach you not to stare?”

Sariah was keenly aware of the time, of the numbness, of her weakness. Her life's wick was burning down to the end, but she refused to give up without assuring the future of Kael's kin, her kin.

“You really don't have to endanger yourself to humor their primitive laws,” Lorian said.

“But I do have to honor their laws,” Sariah said, “as the Guild will have to do if we're to restore peace to the land. Whatever happens today, for good or bad, from now on, anyone who comes here for justice shall receive it, including Domainers. Remember? Justice is the call of the stone.”

Lorian opened her mouth and closed it several times before she could speak. “You mean to establish—”

“A record of justice,” Malord said.

“For Domainers?” Lexia croaked.

“For everyone.”

The executioners looked taller and more at ease for the distinction. Outside, the wind groaned with renewed urgency. Sariah felt the cold in her bone marrow. She knew daylight was straining to break the night's hold as surely as the poison in her veins was grinding down her body's weary defenses.

“Do you have it, Belana?” Sariah caressed Belana's fair hair. “I need it again.”

The woman relinquished the prism she clutched to her breast.

“Who will stand for the Domain?”

Kael stretched his arm before Sariah. He understood precisely what was required next. She was counting on all she had learned about the stone, from the sages, from her terrible experience with the prism, from the sisters. It was time to give the hound a fair scent.

A little wobbly on her feet, Sariah braced herself. “Only a tiny prick.”

She used her left hand to turn the prism's point in the blood pooling at the base of Kael's wrist in the same way she remembered the sisters turning the point over her navel. Nothing. She added her useless right hand and tried again. Nothing. She had not a drop of stonewiser power left to spare. Corrupted by the bracelet's poison, not even the last of her vital force was enough to power the thing.

“Take it from me.” Kael placed her hand over his heart. “Take it all. Without you, it matters naught to me.”

Tears stung Sariah's eyes. She couldn't accept his precious gift because her palms were numb to his emotions. But she thanked him with a brilliant smile, a smile which brought the furious grin she loved to his face, a fitting last sight to her heart.

They went to their knees together, she leaning on him, he steadying the both of them onto the cold floor. She rested her forehead on his shoulder and listened to the steady beat of his heart, marking the last moments of her ebbing life. She had been lucky, she knew. She had known the stones, freedom and him. She thanked Meliahs for all three favors.

Forty-nine

 

T
HE NUDGE FELT
shaky at first, a tentative trickle of strength, a contribution of a few more seconds of life, coming from the rhythmic taps on her shoulder. Then the infusion doubled with the addition of a steady rapping against her shoulder blade. She craned her neck. Lexia and Malord were tapping with concentrated expressions on their faces.

“How do I do it?” Lorian also began to tap. “Like this? Is it working?”

It was working. Their strength was sweeping through her body like a rising tide, warming her core and heating her muscles, animating her limbs—even her right arm—compelling her organs to function. She channeled the joyous infusion to her core and from there, to the prism. She gasped when the stone lit up in her hands, a wink of yellow glow that gained brilliancy with her sustained effort.

There was no time to lose. She returned the prism's point to Kael's wrist and turned it slowly in his blood. A light shot from the prism. Sariah ducked to one side but held on to the increasingly unwieldy prism. It was hot and heavy in her hands, difficult to turn. It was like trying to move one of Meliahs’ hulking pylons. The light flickered on the ceiling before dying down. She had managed to power the thing, but she didn't know quite how to use it.

“What's wrong?” The strain was showing on Kael's blank face.

“I'll try it again.”

“We'll do it.” Belana's ghoulish face came into Sariah's field of vision.

Of course. Why hadn't she thought of it? Belana was the natural choice.

“This is different from what you've done before,” Sariah said. “It could be dangerous.”

“We were made for the prism,” Belana said. “Our blood remembers.”

“You're very brave.”

Belana placed her hands on top of Sariah's hands, unleashing a harsh issue of smoldering heat. Sariah surrendered to the contact's intimacy, to the striking sense of oneness emanating from the strange union. Her palms began to sweat over the prism's increasing glow. The prism turned with more ease. The point ignited with a particularly bright shade of orange.

It happened then. Colored shapes shifted within the prism and projected upwards. An ornate symmetrical pattern emerged as Sariah and Belana rotated the stone in the tiny pool of Kael's welling blood.

“It's working.” Sariah smiled. “It's working!”

The light flared three times and then died, leaving an intricate pattern carved on the stone ceiling, a decorative rosette similar to a delicate carbon drawing, something that could have been sketched by a most talented artist. Sariah couldn't believe it.

“You did it, Belana.”

“Is little sister pleased?”

“More like delighted.” Sariah hugged Belana. “More like mad with happiness.”

“This isn't proof of anything,” the executioner said.

“Not yet.” Sariah caught her breath. “But soon. Who will stand for the Goodlands?”

“I will,” Lexia offered.

“No, no, let me,” Lorian said.

Sariah and Belana pricked a point of Lorian's blood on her wrist and then repeated the process, until the kaleidoscopic array projected from the prism and flared three times before stamping itself on the ceiling.

Sariah understood that it would match Kael's, but the sight of the twin rosette felt like rapture to her soul. She giggled like a wide-eyed girl. “See? They're the same. The same!”

“I don't understand.” Petrid scratched his head, a caricature of his tiny monkey.

Lorian narrowed her eyes on the ceiling. “Are they—?”

“Blood prints,” Malord said. “We're looking at blood prints. This is a tale beyond my wildest dream, beyond redemption.”

“It's an ancient notion,” Lorian said when she saw that the executioners were still at a loss. “It's a stone practice believed lost generations ago.”

“Is it like a pennant for a creature's kind?” Metelaus asked.

“Exactly,” Sariah said. “In a world where greedy stonewisers had broken the pact, the prism was created for the very purpose of recognizing Meliahs’ Blood.”

“Extraordinary.”

Yes, it was amazing, but Sariah knew she couldn't afford to delay. “Who will stand for the Hounds?”

“My blood is yours, saba.” A visibly excited keeper endured the puncture without trepidation. His blood's pattern fit Kael and Lorian's in every way, to the last three light shifts and the matching rosette imprinted on the ceiling. And so did the blood prints of the rest of the men and women in the room.

“It's true,” Malord whispered when his turn came.

Delis couldn't take her eyes off her blood's print. “So my blood is no fouler than yours?”

“We're all of the same blood,” Metelaus said. “Sariah's been saying that for a long time.”

Everyone in the room was staring at the prints on the ceiling in awe. The chief executioner, however, was perturbed. “This is quite remarkable. But how can I trust this is not a wiser trick when there's no comparison to be had?”

It was a fair question. “Here,” Sariah said. “Lend me your monkey.”

“What?”

Sariah called the little beast. It climbed up her arm and perched on her shoulder, chattering all the while. She cradled it in her arms like a baby. The creature yelped and gnashed a yellowed set of tiny fangs when Sariah and Belana pricked it with the prism, but a tickle under its chin calmed its irritation. The prism flashed briefly and only once before the monkey's blood print embedded itself in the ceiling.

“You see?” Sariah said. “Your monkey's blood print is different from the rest. If we were to apply the prism to every animal in the land, each kind of animal would share the same print. Yet as you can see, the pattern is quite different when comparing it to yours.”

Petrid was neither appeased nor content. “Not so fast, wiser. The prism's blood print is proof that there were
things
created beyond the Blood's purity, things beyond the Old and the New Blood, abominations. But the tale you've wised out of it in no way serves to unite the Bloods. As I see it, all of these patterns could be of the wrong blood. We could all be abominations in this room. Couldn't we? So you see, wiser, you've furnished nothing helpful, nothing as agreed.”

Sariah wondered if Petrid understood what he proposed. He was willing to cast the abomination spectrum over his people and himself to claim his assurances and fulfill his greed. But of course, his tortuous argument made perverse sense. What harm was an accusation of bad blood to a people who saw themselves as foul-blooded when they stood to gain so much? Sariah realized that all her efforts had been in vain, unless she could somehow shut down Petrid's objections once and for all.

Sariah remembered Grimly's prized scroll. She recalled the sisters’ reverence when they spied her name on it. She didn't want to open that door, but a measure of clarity was trying to break up the storming night. The sun would come through the clouds and ash any time now. Her hand was trembling as she put the prism's point like a blade to her wrist. Little sister, they had called her. Could it be?

“We'll do it.” Belana grabbed the stone and pricked her own wrist. “We're the tale you seek, little sister.”

A culture of blood took shape before Sariah's very eyes: the Hounds’ revolting worship; the Domainers’ relentless quest to redeem themselves from the execration's accusations; the Goodlanders’ obsessive preoccupation with their blood's own purity. It all came down to the generations’ ingrained distrust in their own ability to contain the crime of creation as the ultimate temptation. They had all been right.

Belana's blood justified their skepticism. The fantastical light patterns that shone from the prism were a distorted version of the others. The colors blurred; the tonalities were opaque. It shifted six times instead of three. It left a different print on the cellar's crowded ceiling—a muted, blunted geometry lacking the others’ elegant complexity.

Lorian whimpered. “What have we done?”

Sariah's voice failed. “Who was your mother, Belana?”

“The mistress,” Belana said. “She said never to say it.”

“You can tell me.”

“We were grown in the stone's belly. The prism is my father. The stone is my mother.”

Sariah's throat was too tight to make words. “Belana, little sister, how old are you?”

Black tears spilled on her face like blotched ink. “We were nine as of the last chill.”