Memory of Stone Read online

  “My eyes are not nearly as good as they once were, and your work here is so delicate, child. Perhaps I am misreading.” He shook himself and the smile returned to his face. “I didn’t know that you knew how to spell or write.”

  She didn’t. She said nothing.

  After a moment, he lifted the lid from the box, and then his eyes grew wide, and wider still; his lashes seem fixed to his brows.

  “Master Sivold?”

  He continued to stare.

  “Master Sivold?”

  And when he finally blinked, his eyes teared almost instantly. He closed the lid of the box with great care, and set it down on the workbench. “When did you make this, Cessaly?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “Yesterday?”

  “Yesterday. And a little bit of the night.”

  He raised his hands to his face. “I knew we were doing you a disservice, child,” he said, when he at last chose to lower them. “But I thought that your parents would be happier if you—if you worked in the Free Towns.” He shook his head. “You must send for your parents, child. Tell them I need to speak with them. Tell them it is urgent.”

  * * *

  And so she had.

  They had come to speak with Master Sivold, and the closed door came between her understanding and their adult words—but she had waited just beyond the reach of the door’s swing, and when it opened, it opened upon her pale face, her wide eyes.

  Master Sivold was angry. Her father was angry. Her mother, grim and silent, stood between them, hands curved in fists, knuckles white as the bone beneath stretched skin.

  She knew better than to ask what had been said. It was obvious that their anger had had no good place to go, and she wasn’t about to provide one.

  But Master Sivold’s anger was pointed, directed; when he turned toward her, it smoothed itself away from the lines of his face. She almost wished it hadn’t; he looked old as it left him.

  “Cessaly, I want to ask you a question.”

  She gazed sideways at her father; his glance spared her nothing, but his nod was permission.

  “How did you make the box?”

  “How?”

  He nodded. Gentle, that nod, as if she were a babe. She didn’t like it.

  “Same as I make anything else.”

  “Tell me,” he said again. “Take as long as you like.”

  “I chose that piece of wood,” she said, “because it was the right wood. It took a little while.”

  “How did you know what to carve?”

  “Wood knows,” she said quietly. She never talked about her work, and it made her nervous to speak now. She wasn’t sure why. “I wanted to make it for you,” she added. “And I started the minute I got the wood home, but it told me to wait. It told me to wait for the longest day.”

  “And how did you know what day that was?”

  “I didn’t,” she said again. “The wood knew.”

  Master Sivold turned to look at her father. Her father, whose shoulders seemed smaller somehow.

  “And the sun knew,” she continued, thinking about it, feeling the wood in her hand, the warmth of that sun on the back of her neck, her head, its light on the dark streaks of grain.

  “Tell us what the sun said,” Master Sivold told her.

  She looked at his face for a moment, seeing in the lines around his eyes and lips the movement of wood grain. She reached out, unthinking, to touch him, to feel the surface of that skin, that grain.

  And when she opened her mouth, when she began to speak, she left bruises there, around his lips, where her fingers grazed flesh. There, and in the dark of his eyes.

  * * *

  They kept her until the harvest’s end, and then they travelled east, east to the Empire of Essalieyan. Her father and mother had argued three days—and nights, tucked in the battleground of their bed, their voices loud and rumbling, their words muted by log walls—and in the end, her mother had won, as she often did. Her brothers were to stay; she was to travel with the caravan until she reached the city, and from there she was to seek the Guild of the Makers.

  “But—but Da—”

  “It’s your mother’s decision, not mine. I don’t send my kin to—”

  “Father,” her mother had said, clipping both ends of the words between tight teeth.

  Cessaly wanted to be happy. Or she wanted him to be happy. She wasn’t sure. “But if I’m a maker—we’ll be rich. We’ll be rich, Da.”

  “You’ll be rich,” he said, gruffly. “And we’ll be farmers, here, in Durant.”

  “I don’t have to live there.”

  He looked at his wife. His wife said nothing.

  She did what any sensible girl would do. She went in search of Dell. Bryan was older, and minded his father’s commands.

  “Dell?”

  “Aye, Cessaly.”

  “Why can’t I live here?”

  “They think you’re makerborn,” he said.

  “But all of the makers don’t live in the Empire.”

  “No.”

  “Then why do I have to?”

  “Because you made that damn box, is why.”

  She wanted to tell him to burn the box, then, but she couldn’t quite say the words. Wasn’t certain why. “I did bad?”

  “You did too good,” he told her, when he heard the tone of her voice. “And now they’re all afeared. Master Sivold—”

  “What?”

  He shook his head. “It’s nothing. They think you’ll go crazy, Cessaly.”

  “Then why are they sending me?”

  He shrugged. “Because all the crazy people live in the Empire?”

  So she hit him. Lots. He wasn’t supposed to hit her back.

  * * *

  The crowds wavered like a heat mirage in Gilafas vision. The great doors had been rolled back, and light skittered off the sheen of marble and brass, abjuring its smoky green, its black, its curling greys. Beyond the open doors, the gabble of a thousand people moved and twisted like the ocean’s voice; he could make out no words because he could hear them all so clearly.

  “Master Gilafas?”

  He lifted a hand. “I think—I think, Sanfred, that I will have my pipe. Now.”

  “Your—ah. That one. Yes, Guildmaster.” He hesitated for just a moment, and then he waved another Maker over and relinquished his grip on Gilafas elbow, forgotten until that moment.

  Everyone hovered. It was annoying. Their shadows against the floor, the fall of their feet, the drifting haze of their cloudy beards, made him think of the storm. He waved them away. Ocean voice, he thought. What am I to do, today? It is not the time.

  Sanity. That was his curse. He listened to confusion dispassionately, refusing, as he had always done, to allow it reign. His brief dalliance with insanity had given him no cause to regret that decision.

  The pipe came, and he lit it carefully, inhaling bitter smoke. It was not to his taste, and not to his liking, and it would be less to his liking on the morrow when he woke to the taste of something dead and stale on his tongue. But the alternative was less appealing.

  “Send for them, then.”

  “Yes, Master.”

  * * *

  Hours passed. Of the many hundreds of hopeful applicants, Guildmaster Gilafas found two he was certain belonged within the guild walls. He treated them not only with the respect of their future rank, but with the affection reserved for kin, no matter how distant, who have found their way home against almost insurmountable odds. It was not an act. There was a brotherhood among the men and women who were, by nature of birth and some quirky, divine providence, driven to these strange acts of creation.

  That brotherhood buoyed him, although he was not entirely certain that some part of that warmth was not caused by the contents of his pipe. It had been some hours since he had filled it, and he hesitated, hand over pouch, to do so again.

  Looking up, he realized how costly that hesitation had been. He had never walked so close to the edge without re
alizing it; somehow he had stepped across it.

  Had he the voice for it, he would have cried out in fear or horror. It was the only thing in the long day that he would be grateful for later; his dignity was spared.

  For the doors were there, they were open; the Makers were in attendance; he was not in Fabril’s hall, and the visions of that complicated, terrible place did not hold him in their painful grip.

  Only memory did, but memory was enough, more than enough. He handed his pipe to Sanfred, hands shaking so much he feared to drop it before it held what he required.

  And he tried to smile at the young woman who walked towards him.

  In the privacy of his thoughts, he was still a coward, had always been a coward; he told himself that he was mistaken, old, befuddled, that the voices of the ocean and the voices of the Maker had grown strong because he had done too little, these past few days, to still them. He tried to tell himself that what he remembered could not be real.

  But cowardice provided no shelter: he recognized the girl’s face.

  She had lain upon a bloodied altar in a hidden room that he had never tried to find again.

  * * *

  When Cessaly saw the man who sat behind a table that was larger than any she had ever seen—including Master Sivold’s workbench—she froze.

  “Cessaly,” her mother said, impatient, fearful, angry.

  But for once, her mother’s voice was almost beneath her notice.

  As if he were wood, or silver, or gold, the man caught the whole of her attention, diverting it from daylight, the vast rise of ceiling, the width and breadth of wall. Only the ocean’s taste grew stronger as she met his eyes, and the inside of her mouth was dry as salt.

  She should have remembered that when she approached wood, or gold, or silver, she approached first with axe, chisel, knife, fire; that the only voice allowed these things that waited transformation was hers.

  She said to him, before she could think—and this, too, was akin to her movements with wood, with silver, with gold—“You make things.” It lacked manners, which would have been a crime in a different place; lacked them in the presence of a man of obvious import.

  But it spoke to the heart of the matter.

  “Yes,” he said gravely. “I make things.” His hand reached out, and out again, as if he would touch her; it stopped inches short of her face, and fell.

  She had seen glass in windows, although her family’s home had had none until the third year of her work with Master Sivold, and she understood that the one that stood between them now was closed.

  * * *

  You make things.

  “Yes. Yes, I make things.”

  She lifted a hand.

  “I do, too.”

  He would never hear the ocean again, not as he had. A man’s mind had room for only so much madness, and Gilafas’, less than any Artisan before him.

  “Sanfred,” he said, rising, pipe somehow no longer a danger.

  “Master Gilafas?”

  “I am done for the day. This girl is makerborn; ask her—mother?—for the information we require, draw up those forms that you deem necessary, do what needs be done.” He rose. Picked up the box he had ordered carried to this table with such care.

  “This was once yours,” he said.

  She looked at it, and her expression twisted. “It was never mine,” she told him solemnly. “I made it for Master Sivold.” She frowned when she said it, and her face lost some of its luster, some of its terrible lure. “Are you upset about it, too?”

  He nodded. Before he could catch himself—if he would ever be able to catch himself—his chin fell and rose in a sharp, jerky dip. “But for a different reason. I have not seen the inside of the box. I could not open it.”

  “Would you like me to open it for you?”

  “If you would.”

  She took the box carefully, placing the left palm firmly beneath the center of its flat, legless bottom. And when she opened it, Sanfred understood what Gilafas had not yet said, because he was standing just to his right, and he was human enough to be curious.

  The inside of the box itself was longer than the table at which the Makers now sat; it was as deep as a man’s arm from palm to shoulder.

  “He needed more room,” she told him gravely, “for the things that I made. Will you give it back to him?”

  “Yes,” he told her gently. He knew how important the answer was; she was makerborn, after all.

  * * *

  It took some hours to settle not the girl, but her mother. She would not leave without speaking to the Guildmaster—a sure sign of her ignorance of the workings of the Guild of Makers.

  Therefore Gilafas, exhausted and on the edge of compulsion, drove himself for a second time from the confines of his quarters in Fabril’s reach. Sanfred was nowhere to be seen; neither was the girl, although he had been quite specific.

  It was only when he reached the visitor’s lounge that he realized that hours had not, in fact, passed; the sun was wrong for it—it was still in the sky. He steadied himself against this dislocation as Sanfred appeared. Sanfred who could hide mortal concern behind a placid, workman’s expression.

  He sat in front of this dour woman, and she beside an older, dourer one. They formed the sides of a triangle; Sanfred, attending, was simple shadow, and moved like a trick of the light.

  Master Gilafas had only one desire when confronted with this woman, and it was strong, terrible, as visceral as any need to make, or make again, had ever been.

  Take your girl, take her as far away from this place as you can, and still live. Go North, to the barbarians; go South to the slavery of the Southern Courts; go West, to the kingdoms of which I know so little. Leave her anywhere but here.

  But he did not.

  “Will you take care of her?” the woman said. She was fidgeting now.

  “I assure you, there is not another place in all of the Empire where she will be—”

  “Because she’s always been a bit odd.” The woman, having said the words, lost half a foot of height. Her hair, dark with streaks of grey, seemed to frame a face too pale to carry it. “She’s more than a bit odd now. We’re her kin, we know what she means when she speaks; we know there’s no harm in her wild ways. She’s a good girl. She’s an honest girl.”

  He started to speak, but she had not yet finished.

  “She won’t thieve, mind, not for herself. But she takes a fancy to things she sees—bits of wood or stone, mostly—and she’ll pick ‘em up.”

  “We understand that, here.”

  “And she’ll work funny hours, if you don’t stop her. It’s hard, but she needs to eat.” Care had worn lines deeply into the material of her face. “Don’t forget it: she needs to eat. And drink. And sleep. She’s got to be reminded; we let her work once, thinking she would stop in her own time. Waited to see how long that was.” Hands were clenched, now.

  He stared at her. To his surprise, he wanted to offer her comfort. “She will be treasured here in a way that you cannot envision. Sanfred, the man who is hovering, was trained to do two things: he is a painter, here, one of few. And he is a … baby-sitter. We all work the hours that your child would work, unminded. And we have learned to watch out for each other. She will not go hungry; she will not go thirsty. Sleep is harder to dictate.”

  She wasn’t satisfied. He could see it.

  He said, simply, “There are things that she is beginning to learn that she should not learn on her own. The box—you saw it—is only the first sign of that. There are other things she might have made. In our histories, a boy much her age walked into the blacksmith’s forge shortly after a bandit raid. The raids that year were fierce and terrible, for most of the land had seen little rain, and the fields would not take.

  “He made a sword. It killed. That was all it did. It was his rage and his desire; he wielded it. It sang. He carried it to the bandit’s home, and he had his revenge, and it was bright and bloody.

  “But he had no s
word skills, and he was not a large lad; the sword itself contained both the desire to kill and the ability. In the end, the bandits themselves were not enough to slake its thirst, and he wandered into the village he had loved. Hundreds perished before the sheath that would hold that sword was created.”

  She was pale, now, pale as light on his beloved ocean. But she said, simply, “what happened to the boy?”

  A mother’s question.

  “He was mad,” he replied. “And he remained so.”

  “They didn’t kill him?”

  He hesitated. “No,” he said at last, and gently, “they did not kill him. They gave him, instead, to our keeping.”

  Before she could speak, he raised a hand. “And in our keeping, in the safety of these walls, or in the stewardship of those best suited to such a task, he made such things as Kings wield, and his work helped to change the face of the lands we now call the Empire. He was honored, he was revered. In his fashion, he was loved.”

  She closed her eyes. Opened them. “I can’t take her home,” she said, the statement a question.

  “No.”

  She rose, then. “Let me say my good-byes, and I’ll not trouble you further.”

  But she would. He could see it in the lines of her face, the depth of her concern. She would go home, to Durant, and the fate of her daughter would draw her out, again and again, to this vast, intimidating place. She would see a stranger in this daughter, and the daughter—he was not certain what the daughter would see.

  Because he was sane. Because he had always been blind, that way. He rose and offered the woman his hand; she accepted it as if it were an anchor on a short chain.

  * * *

  To be a failure was something Gilafas had contemplated for the better part of his adult life. But he had contemplated it in the temple makers made of quarters an accident of birth had granted him. To do penance for his failure, he had strengthened the guild immeasurably, giving it the steady guidance of which a madman could never have conceived. This, he did for the old man whose joy he had not the strength to live up to.

  If he could not increase the mystery of the guild, if he could not add to the grandeur of its legends, he could at least do that. And he had thought himself an honest man; had thought he had completely accepted his paltry ability for the better part of a peaceful decade.