Stonewiser (35 page)

Something landed unexpectedly between Sariah and Delis, a stinking leg as wide as Meliahs’ pillars, standing on a paw the size of her head. Long claws brushed the bushes as the tall beast passed, unleashing a rain of shredded leaves on Sariah's face. Leandro's clawed terrors had arrived.

Sariah would have screamed if Delis's hand hadn't landed over her mouth. She would have crawled and scurried out of the woods like a scared possum if Delis hadn't held her in place.

The shadow looming over her moved on, matching the pace of its companions at either side. Those animals were hunting together, Sariah realized, like a pack of wolves, only they were most definitively not wolves. They were hunting humans. They were going after the Shield.

“Shouldn't we run?” she whispered.

“We stay put,” Delis murmured. “More. All around us.”

A horrendous howl overtook the night. Vicious growling echoed from the Shield's camp. Voices shouting commands combined with the terrifying screams of those facing the beasts. Sariah had never seen Delis shaking like this.

“Meliahs’ hounds,” Delis whispered. “Mara told me they dwelt here.”

“That's just—”

“Legend?” Delis peered into the forest in the direction of the Shield's camp. “Those things kill, my donnis. They're no legend.”

“There must be an explanation—”

“They're coming back.”

They huddled together, watching in terrified silence as the beasts retraced their steps. The brackens shook under heavy paws. Sariah stole a quick glance up and saw a crumpled man skewered on a set of brutal claws. With a vicious swing, the creature strung the victim's guts on a gnarled oak. A broken rib cage, still pink with flesh, landed next to the brackens. Sariah swallowed a scream.

The beast licked the blood off a cracked skull. It savored the dark flow for a moment, before dropping the mangled head and uttering a hair-raising howl. Howls answered from all directions, enlivening the night. Then, as quietly as they had come, the beasts lumbered away and disappeared into the woods.

On the twentieth night after their escape from Targamon Farm, Sariah and Delis ventured around the Shield's camp and up the escarpment that led to the Bastions.

“What if those things come back?” Delis asked.

“Let's just pray they don't,” Sariah said.

The beasts’ attack had rattled the Shield, but Arron didn't give up. In fact, after the beasts’ first attack, it had gotten more dangerous for Sariah and Delis. The Shield had increased their daily patrols and strengthened their night watches. Twice in the last few days, Sariah and Delis had come close to discovery by patrols in the woods. Once, they had stumbled upon the bloodied remains of a massacred Shield patrol. They had no doubts as to what had caused the carnage.

The forest's varieties, pines, firs, cedars, tamaracks and leafless aspens stopped abruptly at an invisible line. The steep escarpment at the foot of the Bastions was dotted sparsely with juniper, spiny sagebrush and slippery rocks. The going was slow. In the darkness, Sariah walked carefully, mindful of twisting an ankle or breaking a foot. It was Delis who tripped.
Crunch
. Something tumbled and shattered against a rock.

“Are you all right?”

“I'm fine,” Delis whispered, rubbing her bruised shin. “What was that?”

Sariah crouched on the ground and lifted her wrist wrap to add her bracelet's glow to the tenuous light of a faint crescent moon hiding behind a bank of clouds. She picked up a piece of the remains of an earthenware vessel.

“It was a clay jar of some sort,” she said. “It was decorated with some kind of dotted design. There's script on it. The old language, I think. It's a shame Kael isn't here. He could tell us what it says.”

“Here's another.” Delis limped a few feet. “And another.”

The moonlight broke through the clouds. For an instant, Sariah spotted the sinuous shapes of thousands of vessels standing around an open-mouthed Delis. The vessels were under the trees, in between the rocks, all along the escarpment's slope. Some were small and some were large, some were squat and round, others were fluted or narrow-necked. Some were heavily decorated while others were simple and unadorned. Then the moonlight was gone again, leaving Sariah clutching the cold pottery shards in her hand.

“Maybe it's an offering,” Delis whispered. “To Meliahs’ hounds. To keep them away.”

“There are no people around here. We haven't seen houses since we entered the forest.” Sariah picked through the broken pieces on the ground and cupped a fistful of tiny white pebbles in her hand. “Maybe these are food stores of some kind?”

Under the tenuous light, Delis examined the pebbles in Sariah's hand. “I don't think so, my donnis. Unless you think of humans as food, little children at that.”

The hair at the back of Sariah's neck stood on end. The little teeth were but speckles of bones and yet they burned her palm. She suppressed an urge to drop them. Instead, she returned them to the broken vessel as carefully as she could manage and wiped her hands.

“Let's not break any more of these.”

Delis crouched. “Fresh tracks. Here.”

“Are they people's footprints?”

“They might be.” Delis looked closely. “This one isn't.”

The beasts. They had tracked this way, not too long ago. Sariah could barely swallow. She wouldn't be dissuaded from her duty by a pack of… what? She was having a hard time with the notion and yet when she recalled the beasts, the idea of the goddess's hounds wasn't as hard to accept as she had first thought.

Sariah and Delis advanced up the escarpment and through the trees, mindful of the prolific vessels. The crescent moon came out again, illuminating the deeply grooved, copper-streaked rhyolite cliffs that rose above them like an impenetrable fortress. Sariah had to stop, despite her trepidation, to admire the earth's extraordinary creation.

The massive stone mountains had been birthed in the earth's core, fused, compacted, crystallized, heated and cooled in chaotic progressions. Expelled from those turbulent depths, they had escaped en masse through a stubborn crustal rift in a slow but catastrophic transformation of the landscape, only to be further tortured by the elements, sculpted by ice, eroded by wind, transformed into a stunning monument to the earth's power.

“The Bastions,” Sariah said. “The drop of three thousand spans. Possibly more.”

Delis eyed the cliffs. “Do you want to climb this?”

“We can't call the beam from the forest. The Shield would be on us in a snap. Those beasts, too. But if we find a way up the cliffs, we can call the beam from the top. It would take the Shield a long time to follow us.”

“No offense, my donnis, but it will take us a long time too. It will be a difficult climb. And if the Shield spots us on the rock face, we'll be practice targets to their arrows.”

“I have to make it up there. I can't keep wasting time. I have to call the beam.”

“All right. For you, I'll try it. How about over there? There appears to be a long groove on the rock face, a vertical crevice. It's partly sheltered from sight and wind.” Delis reached out to examine the cracks on the cliff face.

A flash of light flared against her hand. As if hurled by the goddess's own hand, Delis flew backwards, tumbled down the escarpment and crashed back-first against a thorn bush.

Sariah skidded down the hill. “Are you wounded?”

Delis wrestled with the bush. “More like pinched and pricked, right about now. Sorry, my donnis. It's just not my night. What happened?”

“I'm not sure. Let's get you out of here.” Sariah helped Delis untangle her weave from the thorns. After she was back on her feet and Sariah was satisfied that she wasn't hurt, they returned to examine the cliffs.

“Don't touch it,” Delis whispered.

Sariah reached out with her palms to sense the wising, a muted buzz that tickled her eardrums. She recognized a command in that vibrant layer. She braced her mind to absorb the shock and pushed her hand through the invisible layer and directly against the striated rhyolite.

Repel. Reject. Refuse.
The commands were unbearable shrieks to her mind. Vivid and extraordinarily shrill, they converted will into sound and sound into force, generating the physical repulsion of flesh. Sariah was stunned. She had experienced the will of the Domainers’ gifted imprinters on the stones they used to contain the rot, as well as the wall's powerful wising, but she had never encountered anything like this. Only her mind's readiness to absorb the wising kept her from harm. She didn't know how long she could stand the assault on her senses, or if she could even manage an ascent on those cliffs while taming the powerful wising. Who had wised these magnificent stones?

The howl startled her out of her thoughts. The replying chorus left her trembling with dread. The pack was out this night and, judging from the howls, in more numbers than before. Fire burst from the direction of the Shield's camp. A battle was ensuing.

Now. The Shield was engaged. The beasts were hunting the Shield down by the camp. She wouldn't find a better moment to call the beam without having to climb the forbidding cliffs. She knew she risked attracting both Arron and the beasts. But she also knew this was her only chance.

She fetched Leandro's game from her bag.

“My donnis, what are you doing?”

Sariah set the cloth board on the ground, placed her stone on the black space and lined up the little snakes and scorpions at their starting places.

“Now? You're going to call the beam now?”

She moved the pieces as fast as she could manage.

“Those beasts, they'll come, my donnis. The Shield, too.”

Sariah was completely focused.

“My donnis, are you sure?”

“If you want a running start, go ahead.” What was next? Pair of threes. It was done.

The rumble started much sooner this time. The whole of the Bastions growled. Loose dirt and gravel rolled downhill. The hum echoed through the escarpment and charged down the cliffs. The beam followed, plummeting toward her. She pulled back from the light at the last moment.

The beam landed on Leandro's set and ignited the pieces to little flames. It seemed to feed on them, to nudge them into sparkling, pulsing brilliance. Sariah pushed herself from the ground and stepped back to get a better view. All she could see was the beam rising from somewhere behind the Bastions and the light diving along the cliffs to land on the game.

“The rot take me.” They'd have to find a way up those wised cliffs regardless. The call of the beam had shed little light on her direction. The sounds of battle had quieted in the Shield's camp. She knew she had very little time. She snatched the cloth board, toppling the pieces, sending the beam into retreat. The snakes and scorpions were hot to the touch as she scooped them back in the bag.

“My donnis?”

“Almost done.”

A little scorpion slid a few paces down the hill. Sariah scooted on her hands and feet after it. The tiny piece came to a halt at the drop's edge. It clunked faintly against the curved claw of the enormous paw planted firmly on the ground.

The beast that looked down on Sariah belonged to another world, where evil gods and goddesses engaged Meliahs in a fierce battle to destroy her Blood. Huge black eyes stared from a desquamated skull. A heavily fanged snout dribbled with bloody slobber. Colossal horns coiled about the massive head. Sariah would have groveled in fear if it hadn't been for her body's paralysis. Her heart had stopped beating and her knees were rooted to the gravel. Seized by some suicidal spell that eviscerated all sense for self-preservation, she couldn't take her eyes off the hideous creature. She was thinking when she should be running. Thinking!