The Burning Stone

Who was Fidelis protecting himself against? From whom was he hiding?



And then they loomed above her, manifesting out of the light, resplendent and terrible, spirits burning in the aether with wings of flame and eyes as brilliant as knives, and when their gaze struck her, it was like being struck by lightning.



“Where is the child?”



Their voices rolled with the searing blaze of flame torn from the Sun. She was no longer on earth, she knew that then, and she was lost because the road had vanished before her and behind her. She covered her eyes but she was already sightless, blinded by their refulgence, and desperately she staggered backward, hoping to escape.



But she fell. She fell and the wind rushed past as though she had fallen and was falling and would fall for a thousand thousand years. Darkness swallowed her, and she saw no moon and no stars. She knew then which road she had followed: She had taken the last step over the precipice and now she was plunging forever into the bottomless pit, where her sins had led her.



XI



THE PALACE OF COILS



1



HAD Zacharias known how far away lay the palace of coils, he might not have followed her. They walked west through the marchlands that summer, and then, as the autumn rains and storms came and went, they walked through Wendar, tramping down the paths and old roads of the duchies of Fesse and Saony, on into the old queendom of Varre which now lay under the rule of Wendish kings. They came close enough to see the towers of Autun, but never did they enter any city or town. They hunted game and gathered herbs and reeds and flowers in the forests and wild lands. The horse did well enough on grass and weeds.



Sometimes at villages he traded pelts which he’d skinned or baskets or magical charms woven by Kansi-a-lari in exchange for flour or salt or cider. Once, they traded a charm for fertility to a barren householder in exchange for a length of cloth. The young farmwife’s monthly courses had ceased just after her marriage, but no child had ever come. Kansi-a-lari’s interest in this problem amazed Zacharias. She had so little interest in the doings of humankind, but for this barren woman she interrupted their trip for fully four weeks while she plied her with hazelnut porridge, marjoram tea, and various oils and potions out of blind nettle or jessamine. Zacharias watched her carefully; he had a good memory, and she knew things that were forbidden by the church. As if by a miracle, the young woman’s courses resumed for the first time in five years. The grateful householder sewed them tunics out of the cloth, and that made the trip easier, because now Kansi-a-lari could wear something other than the skin skirt and Quman jacket and he something other than his torn frater’s robes, something to make her look a little less foreign and him look more like a man. With these disguises they could even work for bed and board at outlying farms when their supplies ran low.



At Candlemass they paid two copper coins and a charm against warts to the ferryman who took them over the Olliar River, and when they stepped onto the opposite shore, they stood on Salian soil. Zacharias discovered to his surprise that Kansi-a-lari spoke Salian better than she spoke Wendish.



Here in Salia, it rained perhaps one day out of ten, never snowed, and even in the mornings no more than a film of ice coated such puddles as laced the ground. It was fine weather for traveling, but he sensed a tide of desperation in the countryfolk as they surveyed their sparse winter crops and their wasted woodlands. If the rains did not come soon, there would be no spring flowering. Because of their fear, the countryfolk wanted no outlanders in their villages, so he and the Aoi woman took to camping in the woods every night. It was no great hardship. They wore tunics, now, and leggings and cloaks made of fur. He missed ale and cider, but there were running streams aplenty to drink from, and he rarely suffered from the stomach complaints he had been plagued with while living as a slave among the Quman.



They came at last to a country rich in rocks, and here their path led them to the edge of the sea. Zacharias had heard tell of the sea, but he had never seen it, a river so broad the far shore lay beyond view. Waves pounded on the shore below at the base of a rugged cliff. Farther along, the cliff gave way to a crescent of sand where spume lay in pale arcs at the highest reaches. A stream poured down through rocks and cut a channel through the sandy beach to reach the sea. Salt stung his dry lips, and he wept tears of astonishment and exhaustion as he stared at the horizon and the westering sun. The ceaseless motion of the waves made him dizzy.



“Soon we will be there,” she said, shading her eyes against the sun. She licked her lips, as though tasting the salt in the air, then pointed west—to the horizon where the setting sun gleamed on surging waters. Or was that gleam the sun? Something else lay out there, so far away that it flickered bright against the dull waters and vanished, then reappeared as the angle of the sun brought it back into view.