The Stone Key

  I stared up at her stupidly before realizing that she was asking me to accompany her. I got to my feet with clumsy haste, mumbling a farewell to the others, and followed her through the throng. She led me away from the feast site and toward the trade stalls. A silky breeze blew, carrying the scents of cook fires and perfumed oils and salt to us, and I asked if Bruna really meant to leave for the desert so soon.

  Jakoby’s laughter echoed merrily over the moon-drenched sand dunes. “Did you see Dardelan’s face when I said she would leave tomorrow?”

  “Then it is not true?”

  “It will be true, if I have not lit enough of a fire in Dardelan’s belly to hunt a mate,” Jakoby said crisply.

  “Hunt?” I echoed.

  “Three hours before dawn tomorrow, any man may hunt any woman whose name he has scribed on a stone and set into the bowl that stands before the tent of the tribal leader of the woman he desires, so long as she is not mated to another or deemed too young. The woman is given the stones at midnight as a warning, and she has an hour’s start on her hunters. She may favor the man when she glimpses his face, but still the man must catch her. The hunt ends at dawn.”

  “That is barbaric,” I said, appalled.

  She grinned. “It would be, if those hunted were not tribeswomen.”

  “Dardelan is no tribesman,” I said.

  “For this night, he must become one if he would have Bruna. He let her flutter from his fingers when she had given herself to him like a tamed bird, and now she has returned to the tribes. So now he must hunt her in the desert way. Right at this moment, several of my tribesmen are telling Dardelan of the hunt, and one of them will boast that he means to hunt Bruna. He is a strong, handsome warrior whom any woman might desire for a mate.”

  I did not know whether to be shocked or to laugh. “Does Bruna know?”

  “Of course not. She is all sad dignity and restraint since her return from the Land. She has told me that her love for Dardelan is dead. Maybe she even believes it. Yet in an hour or so, I will send someone to her with the stones that have her name scribed on them, and she will have no choice but to take part in the hunt.” Jakoby laughed wolfishly.

  “What if Dardelan does not put in a stone? What if the other hunter catches her?”

  “My daughter will not be caught, save if she desires it, and Dardelan will have to prove himself by catching her,” the tribeswoman said proudly. Then she smiled. “I do not doubt that I will go now and find there are two stones in my bowl for Bruna.”

  “I thought you were opposed to their match,” I said.

  “I was in the beginning, but there is true love between them, and recent events tell me that the days in which Sador stood apart from people of the Norseland and your land are coming to an end. Yet, they will still decide the matter between them, the boy chieftain and my daughter. I am done with a mother’s meddling.”

  Jakoby stopped, and I realized where she had been leading me; the Earthtemple loomed ahead.

  “The overguardian has summoned me?” I asked, looking into the dark cleft in the earth that was the entrance to the Earthtemple.

  Jakoby nodded, and we walked in silence down into the dense pool of moonshadow where the Temple entrance lay. The last time I had come here, I had entered this rift in broad daylight. Long lines of petitioners had waited in the shade of the rift walls—people wanting prayers said for them or a futuretelling, healing or medicines, or those needing to exchange coins from the Land for tokens. The veiled guardians had gone up and down the lines dispensing advice, exchanging coin for tokens, accepting gifts, and handing out medicines and, occasionally, reproaches.

  Tonight the rift was empty.

  “We must wait here,” Jakoby said, a grim note in her voice.

  “Jakoby, do you dislike the Earthtemple because it allows the immersions?” I asked softly.

  She glanced up at the star-specked sky and said almost wearily, “Do you know I might have served here as a guardian, for my mother entered an isis pool when she was pregnant. Though she did not know it at the time, there were two inside her belly. Both of us were born perfect, save that my sister had a deformed jaw and mouth. Seresh remained with me and our mother until we were five, for my sister needed no special care such as the Earthtemple offers. My father disapproved, for deformed babies were generally given immediately to the Temple. I do not know what motivated my mother to diverge from tradition, but she left my father and lived apart from our tribe, so neither my sister nor I knew that she was deformed. I only knew that I looked like my mother and my sister did not, but we supposed that she resembled my father, whom we believed to be dead.

  “You would think I would have known she was terribly deformed in the face, but the ideal of beauty is learned. Despite the difference in our faces, my mother adored us both and lavished us with affection and tenderness, telling us over and over that we were beautiful. Then one dark-moon night, she brought us to Templeport. We came here and waited until a Temple guardian emerged. I do not know how, but it had been arranged in advance. Only at that moment did we realize Seresh was to stay, but not I. We wept and clung to one another, for there was great love between us, and we did not understand why we must be parted. “It is an honor!” my mother cried to my sister, and tore her fingers from mine and dragged me off.

  “I ran away as soon as I could and came back here, but the Temple guardians would not let me see my sister. They said she needed time to become accustomed to that life. When I was older, my mother told me everything, but I came here many times against her wishes, seeking Seresh. I wanted to see that she was happy, as I had been promised. Finally, they allowed me to see her. She was veiled, but when she drew back her veil, I gasped, for I had not seen her since we were children, and I saw that her face was ghastly….”

  Jakoby’s eyes glittered with tears. “Seresh saw my reaction, of course, and she asked me in a bitter voice what hurt she had ever done to anyone that I should have beauty and she a monster’s mask. I did not know what to say, so I asked foolishly if she was not happy serving in the Earthtemple. “I am a monster among monsters,” she answered.

  “What happened to her?” I asked, full of pity.

  “She ran away from the Earthtemple. The guardians said she drowned herself, and I believe that is truly what they thought. But when I was older and had been made tribe leader, an overguardian who was a kasanda summoned me and told me that Seresh had not died but had stolen coin and escaped upon a ship that had berthed here to collect water and food. The overguardian had dreamed it and dreamed that I must be told. She did not tell me why. Perhaps she did not know.”

  “But…where could she go and what could she do?” I asked.

  “There is not a sevenday that passes when I do not ask that myself,” Jakoby said. “Needless to say, when Bruna lay in my belly and my bondmate said it was dark-moon and time for me to go to the isis pools, I refused. He left me, saying I was no true woman. You saw tonight how many of the tribesfolk revere the practice of immersions.” Her expression was cold and dreamy. “You know what I remember most? Seresh loved pretty things. She dressed in my mother’s silks and jewels and danced with such grace that it was pure beauty, and neither of us ever knew she was hideous to behold. How she must have hated it in the Earthtemple where they wear only rough white weaves and never dance.”

  At the sound of stone grinding on stone, Jakoby’s face became a blank mask. “Go. The overguardian awaits you.” She turned and strode away without looking back.

  “What do you seek of the earth?” asked the veiled girl who had emerged from the narrow gap beside the great pivoting stone that was the entrance to the Earthtemple. Her form was slight and not visibly deformed, but she limped when she walked.

  “I seek that which the seer Kasanda left for the Seeker, as promised to me by the last overguardian of the Temple,” I replied.

  “May you nurture the earth and find harmony,” the guardian said. It was no true answer, for these were words of ritual o
ffered to all who came to the Earthtemple. The guardian gestured for me to follow her, when suddenly I remembered that Maruman and Gahltha were supposed to come here with me for the fifth sign and one of Kasanda blood as well! Was it possible that I was wrong in thinking I had been brought here to get what Kasanda had left me?

  “Come,” said the Temple guardian, for my doubts had slowed me almost to a stop. She led me deep into the many-layered labyrinth of tunnels and caves that was the Earthtemple. The air was cold and strangely scentless, though outside the night was warm and fragrant. As I followed the steady, padding footsteps of the silent Temple guardian, I thought of Jakoby’s twin sister, Seresh, dragged weeping and terrified from her beloved sister’s arms. She had been only five, younger than I had been when my parents were burned. How terrified she must have been to be brought into these cold stone corridors and informed that she must henceforth live veiled among men, women, and children all deformed in their own ways. Were the veils ever removed? If so, the deformities of the other Temple guardians would have frightened the little girl, for she had not known that she was deformed. No wonder Seresh had run away, but where could she have gone, for she could not run away from her deformed face?

  The Temple guardian stopped and turned to me, lifting her lantern, allowing me to see the shadowy darkness of her eyes and hair through her veil’s thin gauze. She indicated a narrow doorway cut into the stone behind her, saying, “You must go through this door into the chamber beyond it and wait. I will tell the overguardian that you have come.” She unhooked a lantern from the wall and gave it to me.

  I did as she had bidden, knowing what I would see, for I had been here before. Soon I was gazing upon the panels that Kasanda had created and that I had been shown on my previous visit to the Earthtemple. It was strange to think that they had been carved by the laughing, dark-haired, dark-skinned Cassy of my dreams, who had laughed with her Tiban lover and argued with her mother and father.

  I went to the first panel, which showed a Beforetime city. I had thought it the city we now knew as Newrome under Tor, but maybe it was another. The city was very beautiful in its queer, angular way, a forest of slender square towers rising impossibly high into the sky. The panel depicting it paid homage to the art and power of the Beforetimers and was in stark contrast to the next panel, which showed the city again, but as a great, soulless, devouring beast that smothered the earth and befouled the waters, killing all living things other than humans. The third panel focused on the skies, showing them clogged with the filth that spewed from hundreds of pipes rising from human buildings. I noticed, though I had not noticed before, that in one corner, the carved black smoke parted to reveal a full moon peering through a torn patch, almost like an eye peeping through a spy-hole. This sly moon eye made me think of Rushton, his moon-hating ancestor, and my theory.

  Later panels showed forests, waterways, the sea, wetlands, and mountains, all damaged and besmirched by humans and the scabrous outcroppings of their cities. The panels’ message was as simple and starkly clear as it had been when I came here the first time: The Beforetimers had used the earth ruthlessly, disregarding everything but their own immediate desires. Their heedless greed and arrogant desire for power had brought the Great White upon the earth. The last panel showed the Great White, and I gazed at it, thinking of Cassy’s father, who had believed the Sentinel project would save humans from themselves, even though his own bondmate had left him because she could not believe it.

  I heard a step behind me.

  A tall, slender, veiled figure entered the chamber, and I knew it must be the woman who now served as overguardian of the Temple, but I gaped to see Maruman prowling by her side, his yellow eye gleaming smugly.

  “Greetings, Seeker,” the overguardian said before I could beastspeak Maruman. It was a young voice for all its cool poise, and I remembered that the previous overguardian had been little more than a child as well. How was it that the guardians chose a child to set above them?

  “Most overguardians are children,” said the thin formal voice. “Age brings experience, it is true, but experience does not always bring wisdom. Often it brings complacency or confusion or anxiety. But you are mistaken in thinking that the overguardian of the Temple is chosen by the previous overguardian. We are not chosen. We are foreseen.”

  With a little shock, I realized the overguardian had answered a thought that I had not voiced!

  “I am a kasanda,” she said composedly.

  “Do you think it courteous to listen to my private thoughts?” I asked aloud, a little sharply.

  “I would think it discourteous, if I had the means to prevent myself,” she said tranquilly.

  There was nothing to say to that. I drew myself up and said, “Why did you have Jakoby bring me here? Is it because I am to collect whatever Kasanda left for me, because if it is, the last overguardian told me I was supposed to come here with Gahltha and a companion who has Kasanda blood, as well as Maruman. Perhaps he meant you, when he spoke of a Kasanda blood, and Maruman came here before me, but even if I summoned Gahltha, he could not fit in here.”

  “By here, the overguardian may have meant Sador, rather than the Earthtemple,” she responded mildly.

  I clenched my fists, feeling almost as irritated as when I spoke with the Futureteller guildmistress at Obernewtyn. I did not want speculations and guesses; I wanted clear answers! “The overguardian made it seem like it had been predicted that I would come here, but in fact, you sent Jakoby for me. Why didn’t the last overguardian tell me that I would be summoned?”

  “Perhaps when he foresaw what he did, the strongest likelihood was that you would come here of your own accord, but something changed, which brought to me the revelation that Jakoby must be sent after you.”

  “Why didn’t you just send her to find me?”

  “I knew that you would come here and that Jakoby had some part to play in your future that was vital and important, but much in my foreseeing was unclear. It seemed safest to do as I did, sending Jakoby to the Moonwatcher and allowing the rest to unfold as it would, thereby leaving you free to come here if you chose.”

  “What is the fifth sign?” I asked, suddenly weary of mysterious talk.

  “It is not a thing to be told,” the overguardian said. She reached out and laid her hand on the final panel showing the Great White. With a faint grinding sound, the whole panel suddenly swung outward on a pivoting stone to reveal a narrow passage behind it. The overguardian made a gesture for me to go through. I did so and Maruman followed, but the overguardian did not. Seeing or maybe hearing my puzzlement, she said, “None may walk here, save the seer who made this place, the Seeker who seeks it, and the Moonwatcher.”

  There were a thousand questions to ask, yet I knew that I would receive no proper answers here. As I turned to follow the narrow passage, my heart quickened at the thought of finding some communication from Kasanda awaiting me.

  “What made you come here?” I asked Maruman as we made our way along the narrow tunnel.

  “I came because I dreamed I came,” Maruman said dreamily.

  The passage ended in an entrance to a large cave with nothing in it, save a slitlike opening in the wall opposite the passage. Maruman was already moving toward the opening, and I hastened to catch up with him, wondering what the overguardian had meant by saying “the seer who made this place.” Surely she did not mean that Kasanda had literally carved out the passage and the cavern. The opening was truly more a slit than a doorway, and I had to turn sideways to get into it. Feeling uneasy, I pressed forward, and two steps later, I stumbled into a wider space that immediately blazed with a shimmering, coruscating purple radiance that completely blinded me. After a moment of blinking and squinting, my eyes began to adjust, and I realized that the blaze of brightness was nothing more than the light of the lantern I carried, reflected from a thousand shining jagged surfaces.

  Fian had once shown me a small dull-looking boulder, which, when cracked open, turned out to be a ho
llow stone shell lined in tiny perfect crystal spikes. He told me that the Beforetimers had called such a thing a thunder egg. What I had entered now was part of a giant thunder egg lined not in white quartz crystals, but in dazzling purple amethyst. Some seemed to reflect the lantern light blindingly, and only after studying the walls for a moment did I realize that some had been cut into diamond-like facets. Indeed, it seemed there was a pattern in the polished stones. So absorbed was I in trying to make out what it was, I did not at first notice something gray and square sitting on the floor.

  I knelt down and gazed at a flat rectangle of plast the size of a tea tray and as thin as two of my fingers. Atop it was a black glass panel like a window, but I could see nothing through it. Setting the lantern down carefully, I leaned closer and noticed that there was scribing on the plast. Not gadi words, but some language that I did not recognize. There was also a join all about the edges, which suggested that the rectangle was some sort of case, but there was no lock or keyhole or any sort of handle to open it. I touched the case warily, but it felt merely cool as anything kept long in a cave would feel. I touched the glass, and when nothing disastrous happened, I tried simply prizing the case open with my fingers.

  It would not budge, but the case was very light. I sat down cross-legged, lifted it onto my knees, and examined it minutely. I had not noticed before a small recessed shape, almost invisible in the side of the case, alongside a small square gap. Remembering the recessed hand shapes on Norseland and in the Westland, I pressed a finger carefully into the space. Nothing happened, and the sickening thought came to me that perhaps the key that was supposed to have been left in Jacob Obernewtyn’s tomb, along with his and Hannah’s bones, would have opened this case. That was the first time it occurred to me that just as Ariel could not see all, neither must Kasanda have been able to do so. I set the case back on the ground and stood up, wondering if all of Kasanda’s careful plans and sacrifices had come to nothing because she had failed to foresee that Hannah would not be at Obernewtyn when the Great White came.