Stonewiser (9 page)

“Come.” Sariah grabbed the woman's arm, all too aware of the torches gaining ground behind her. “Make haste, we have to run.”

She pulled Delis to her feet. The woman was too large and heavy to carry. Her weave was torn and the dead water must have been seeping in and burning her, but Delis threw an arm over Sariah's shoulder and stumbled a few paces forward.

“Damn.” The torches were nearing them. “Can they see in the dark?”

“Your bracelet,” Delis rasped. “It's the fifth night.”

Sariah stared at her wrist in disbelief. The nine stones in the bracelet shone with a crimson radiance, a lucent glow that would be visible in the dark to anyone, even as it was, covered under her weaved glove. She stopped, ripped her other glove and tied it around the bracelet. The glow was less but still visible, a red beacon in the black expanse.

“Take this.” Delis tugged at her face scarf. Sariah wrapped it around her arm, concealing the glow under the fabric's multiple layers.

A wild mane of dark hair bloomed around Delis's head like a smoky haze. “The light will burn through the fabric soon.”

“Great.” Sariah forged ahead, but Delis couldn't keep up. She came to a stop and nearly crumbled.

“Get up,” Sariah said. “We have to go.”

The woman just stood there, panting like an old cow waiting to die.

“And you called me a Goodlander weakling? The great Delis can't match a kitten's pace?”

Blue and violet eyes flickered with righteous pride. Delis rose, stumbled a few more steps, and then waded with more assurance. Their pursuers were falling behind, fanning out in all directions, unable to locate them in the darkness without the red glow. After a few more moments, the mob halted as if stopped by an invisible line.

“Nafa's boundaries,” Delis panted. “Can't follow us.”

At last, a break in their favor. She spied the shapes of people from Nafa watching her burning deck. So much for keeping the deck dark. She crouched low over the water, as low as she could go considering that she was loaded, had an entire arm exposed to the dead water without her glove and was trying to support Delis as well. Sariah forded the settlement until she could no longer see her deck. She helped Delis climb an abandoned deck in a quiet part of town. As soon as they were out of the dead water, Delis tumbled over like a broken boulder. Sariah could hardly breathe. Now what?

She needed to get Delis help and then she needed to find Kael and get out of Nafa. The deck was gone. How would they continue their journey without it? Panic. One problem at a time. Delis. Surely Nafa's people would render her assistance.

The old deck had no shelter, but Sariah untied the assortment of sacks and bags she carried and piled them beneath a cover of rotting ropes. She looked around. Light flickered nearby, but for the most part, the area seemed dark and sparsely populated. The air smelled of neglect. It wasn't the most prosperous part of Nafa.

She made up her mind and dragged the senseless Delis over a broken bridge to a more populated lane. The woman weighed more than a bull. The traffic was light, but she waited until no one was around to dump Delis's body on a lit deck. She rapped on the shutters before darting out of sight behind a nearby stack of broken crates. She wondered if this was how babies were gifted to the Guild, abandoned in the darkness at the massive threshold of the keep's gates.

She had done what she could for Delis. Now she had to find Kael. She took a last look to make sure Delis got the help she needed. A man came to the door.

“What do we have here?” He sounded half-drunk.

A woman appeared from inside. “It's a body, that's what it is. Is it your drunk of a brother again?”

“It's a woman. She's stuck with an arrow.”

“Why, poor thing. Bring her inside, fetch the healer.”

The man's tone had never been kind, but now it was down-right cold. “We ain't gonna spend no coin for a healer on this one. Look.” He pointed to Delis's forehead.

From her hiding place, Sariah strained to see. A mark was stamped on the right side of Delis's forehead near her temple, a mark that had been concealed by her wrap before, three diagonal lines crossed by another trio of equal but opposing lines.

“Lightning strike me, it's a net-stamped rot spawn,” the man said. “She's one of the executioners' mongrels.”

“Don't let the neighbors see it.” The woman kicked Delis's inert body. “Bloody bitch, off my deck.”

“I'll put her out to the flats. She'll be gone by morn.”

The man dragged Delis over the bridge and back the way Sariah had come. Delis's body grated against the wood. Her weave caught an edge and ripped further. The man cursed. Soon thereafter, a splash broke the dead water's calm.

By Meliahs. Delis was of the executioners, sent to kill her so that the mob wouldn't get their due and the executioners could wreck Sariah's search, claim Kael's assurances and Ars. No wonder the mob despised her. She was taking their profit from them. What Sariah had never known was that Domainers, or at least these Domainers, abhorred executioners to the point of refusing aid to a wounded woman. Perhaps they were right to resent someone who performed duties as foul as Delis's, but as much as Sariah despised her assailant, could she walk away knowing the woman was dissolving slowly in the agony of the dead waters?

Sariah waited for the man to return to his deck before retracing her footsteps. She found Delis half-sunk and struggling, holding her head out of the water but too weak to climb out by herself. Sariah grabbed her arms and pulled her back onto the deck with some difficulty. She thanked Meliahs for the night's darkness, the only real protection they had.

Delis was shaking from shock. “Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why are you helping me?”

Why indeed? “Wait here.”

The woman clutched Sariah's wrist with unnatural strength. “They'll tear me apart in the morning.”

“I'm going to find help. Let go. I promise I'll be back before daylight.”

By the woman's expression, Sariah could tell she didn't believe a word she said.

Sariah had barely gone a few lanes when she spotted a group of people coming up behind her, engaged in animated conversation. She tucked herself against the wall of a darkened shelter and waited for them to pass.

“A banished criminal?” a woman was saying. “Here?”

“That's why they've called a search,” a man said. “Didn't you hear the explosions?”

“And the flames,” someone else said. “Didn't you see the fire? Hurry up!”

Perfect. The survivors of the men who attacked her must have told their story to Nafa's marcher. Now the entire settlement was out searching for her. What else could go wrong this night?

“Look!” One of the men in the group pointed. “Do you see something there?”

The rest of the group turned to look in Sariah's direction.

A brutal push shoved her face-first against the deck shelter. “Don't move.”

As if she could.

“I don't see anything,” someone said. “Come on. We're missing all the fun.”

The group walked on. Sariah dared to breathe.

“Are you all right?” Kael whispered. “You've got rents and burns all over you.”

“How did you find me?”

“Stay as you are.” She heard him rustling through his shoulder bag, looking for something. “I saw the fire and figured your night was busier than mine. So I thought, if Sariah had to abandon the deck in haste, where would she go? That's how I ended up on this side of Nafa, wondering how by Meliahs’ dung heaps I was going to find you. But then, you made it easy for me.”

“Easy?”

“You're glowing.”

Sariah looked down to see her bracelet's red radiance seeping through the scorched fabric. “By the rot, the light burned through again.”

Kael wrapped his summer mantle around her arm, folding it many times over to a good thickness, until her arm felt like an enormous sausage packaged for sale.

“That should hold for a while,” he said. “What happened?”

They huddled in the dark while Sariah gave him a quick account of her night. “That group from the mob found me only because Delis broke through the window and allowed the light to escape,” Sariah finished.

“They sent Delis?”

“You know Delis?”

“I know
of
Delis. Where is she now?”

Sariah guided Kael to the abandoned deck where the woman lay.

“Wicked goddess, Sariah, the things you do.” Kael considered the unconscious woman. “We have no time for this. We've got to go.”

“We can't leave her to die.”

“She tried to kill you.”

“But then she smuggled me a stone. I can't leave her here. They hate her.” Just like they hated her.

Kael shook his head. “All right. Let's see what we can do.”

“I've got your medicine pouch.”

“Good thinking. Pass me the vinegar and the saffron salve.”

Sariah helped Kael to rip Delis's weave around the wound. “Did you find him? Did you find Leandro?”

“I found out about Leandro,” Kael said, “but he no longer dwells here.”

“Curse my luck. Where is he?”

“They weren't sure.”

“What do you mean? Who's ‘they’ and why weren't they sure?”

“They are his family, his daughters, to be sure.” Kael moistened a rag with water from his skin and groped about Delis's back, wiping off the crusted blood. “Leandro was taken.”

“Taken? By whom?”

“By a traveling healer, they said.”

Sariah's belly went to ice. “Was he ill? No. Don't tell me. Is he dead?”

“Not as far as his daughters know, but they haven't heard from him in a while.” Kael squinted in the darkness. “Damn, it's dark tonight.”

Sariah had an idea. She held her arm over the woman's back and peeled off some of the fabric covering the bracelet. The red glow illuminated the wound.

“That's better,” Kael said.

Sariah could barely contain her anxiety. If they couldn't find Leandro, if he was dead, her incipient search was over. “Where did this traveling healer take Leandro?”

“To the atorium, his daughters said. For a curative rest.”

“The what?”

“The atorium. A kinder name for the sanatorium, just as the term ‘curative rest’ is a discreet description of his malady.”

“Is he sick?”

“Apparently, Leandro had problems for many years. He failed as a roamer. He was a wagering man, a back alley player whose antics almost bankrupted his family. But that wasn't his only problem. It seems that your Leandro may be missing a twine or two from his deck, if you know what I mean. Would you hold the light steady?”

“Oh.” Sariah held out her arm stiffly. Leandro was crazy? Still, she had no other clues. “Do you know where this atorium is?”

“Sort of. There aren't too many of those in the Domain.”

“Can you take me there?”

“Either I take you there or I mend this wound,” he said. “Can't do both at the same time. The light, Sariah. You've taken your arm away again.”

“Sorry.” She turned her attention to Delis's wound. What was left of the broken shaft protruded at an angle above the woman's shoulder blade. The arrowhead was burrowed in the flesh.

“What say you?” Kael said. “Do you want it out?”

Sariah hadn't realized that Delis was conscious, but now she noticed the subtle change in the woman's respiration.

Delis rumbled. “What is it to you, whoreson?”

“It's nothing to me.” Kael sounded deceivingly placid. “To be truthful, I prefer you dead and out of the way, but she bids me to help you and I heed her wishes.”

Delis's blue and violet eyes shifted to Sariah. Sweat drenched the woman's narrow forehead. It dripped along the crooked bone of a long meandering nose and pooled above a narrow mouth and a set of naturally puckered lips.

“Is she yours then?”

A strange question.

“In or out?” Kael asked testily. “We don't have all night.”

“Out,” Delis said.

“‘Out,
please
' will do.”

How many hundreds of arrows had Kael extracted from runners and friends over a lifetime of hardship in the Domain? Evidently many. He wiggled the barb and, pressing down at either side of the wound, extracted the point with expert ease. Delis moaned like a calving ox. Sariah wiped the flow of new blood and smeared the salve over the wound.

“Who's there?”

Sariah recognized the voice calling in the dark. It belonged to the man from the deck where she had tried to find help for Delis. No doubt he was back to check on the woman's demise. Sariah readjusted the cloak to cover the bracelet's glow.

“We have to go.” Kael began to tie his harness's ropes to the old deck.

“In this?” Delis said. “Are you mad?”

“Have you any better idea?”

“Not at the moment, no.”

“You ought to, since you managed to burn our deck, wench.”

“Madame Executioner to you.”

Kael snorted. “Not a chance.”

“He's coming back,” Sariah whispered. “He's got friends.”

“She burned our deck and tried to kill you,” Kael said. “Are you sure you want to take this miserable waste of a rot spawn with us?”

“We can't leave her here to die.”

“This ought to make for an interesting trip.” Kael hacked the mooring ropes and took to the water, pulling the rickety deck into the vast darkness of a moonless night.