“Mizka, recall that… Mizka? Miz—Miscellaneous Stones!”
Lanie lifted heavy eyes from contemplation of her morning gruel. She found Mak regarding her across the rough boards they used as a table, his expression stern but not without concern.
At least, Lanie thought he was regarding her. But as her spare pair of spectacles was much older and cloudier than her old ones, irrevocably shattered at Midsummer, Mak’s face was a bit of a blur. She squinted him into better focus.
His expression shifted, from concerned to expectant. He obviously wanted a vocal response today, so she replied wearily, “Yes, Mak?”
“I am reminding you that I will be away today. All day. And for most of the night. I need you,” he explained patiently, “to look after Datu.”
His words seemed to seep through miles of underground tunnels before they reached her place of comprehension. Lanie wondered how many times Mak had already reminded her. She hadn’t slept in... she couldn’t remember. Not much, in the last twelve days. (She was clear, at least, on the twelve days part. Lanie always knew where she was in relation to the last high holy fire feast and the next.)
Twelve days since Midsummer.
Twelve days since she had failed Goody.
“Datu,” she repeated slowly, glancing over at the pallets on the floor: her own, unslept in; Mak’s, trussed up in its neat roll for the day; Datu’s, a sprawling nest of blankets and easy-to-reach weapons, with Datu forming a central lump beneath them. The lump did not stir at the sound of her name.
“Of course, Mak,” Lanie said with more certainty. “I can look after her.” The lump did not, after all, seem to require much looking after.
Mak flashed her a look, half-furious, half-tragic, that almost made her want to laugh, except for the line of worry bisecting his brow—as much for herself, Lanie thought, as for his daughter—which had deepened.
As abruptly as it bubbled up, the desire to laugh died out in her.
Datu had been rising later and later these days, ever since that morning after the high holy fire feast of Midsummer, when Lanie broke the news that Datu would not be returning to school. Now that Hatchet Scratch (and presumably, therefore, the whole Scratch clan, as well as their patroness, the Blackbird Bride) knew of Lanie’s association with Waystation Thirteen, none of them would be able to visit that place again, nor drop by or work at the Lover’s Complaint. Not even to bid their friends farewell. It was best, Lanie advised, to avoid Seventh Circle entirely.
The first thing Datu did, of course, was appeal to her didyi. But Lanie and Mak had already reached a unified decision on that front.
Or rather, Lanie had reached a decision, one which Mak had argued vehemently against in the dawn hours before Lanie broached the subject with Datu. He’d proposed that instead of abandoning their friends and disappearing from their lives, they take their tale to gyrlady Tanaliín. They ought, he said, to beg counsel of her and Duantri and Havoc, all of them, together, and strategize about their next move. That was the reason community existed, he’d told Lanie. Perhaps the best reason. So that, when disaster struck, they would not be alone.
Mak had spoken with a passionate earnestness that Lanie would have found convincing on any other morning—when she was not used up, bled out, wrung of magic, bereft of Goody, and at her wit’s end.
Disaster had struck. They were alone.
And alone they should remain, for the safety of all concerned. Even the thought of appealing to Canon Lir for help horrified Lanie: in part, because it was due to their lovemaking that Lanie had come to Goody too late; in part because whatever protection was afforded to Canon Lir due to their status as a fire priest and a Brackenwild, it would not be enough if ever the Blackbird Bride got wind of Lanie’s intimacy with them. Bran Fiakhna would not hesitate to use Lanie’s lover as a lever to gain Datu. She would take Canon Lir apart, if it suited her ends.
So it did Mak no good to speak coaxingly of friendships and alliances, of strategies and the future. It was not an act of friendship to keep friends with a Stones. Lanie wouldn’t wish her enemies on her enemies, much less upon her best friends.
When Mak seemed inclined to argue further, Lanie’s temper—or something inside her, perhaps despair—snapped. Starting six generations back with Marrowcrack Stones25, and moving down through Pannikel26, Dowzabel27, Irradiant28, Rouke29, and Unnatural30, she reminded him, in excruciating detail, how each and every one of these august and storied Stoneses had died31.
She then, perhaps unnecessarily, began to disinter Amanita Muscaria from the burial mound of their mutual memory. If she could make him remember the wreck Bran Fiakhna had made of her—that too-still body in its faded dressing gown, that eyeless face, that halo of black feathers—then he might subsequently begin to imagine (as she did, constantly) Duantri in Nita’s place.
Or Tan, or Havoc, or Eidie, or Canon Lir. Or anyone whom they held dear.
But by the time she got to Nita, Lanie had worked her own allergies into a frothing frenzy. Rashes welted her neck and chest. Her numb right leg was buckling beneath her. Her nose was bleeding. Her whole body ached. Both eyes burned like fiery glass balls inside her skull. Before she could quite finish depicting her sister’s death bed, Lanie began vomiting.
And then she fainted.
When she came to, Mak was silently cleaning her up. He said no more on the subject. Nor did he contradict Lanie when she dragged herself to Datu’s bedside and told her the news. No more school. No more friends. No more long walks in the city. It was the chapel, the tomb, the catacombs. This was their world. This was their life.
In answer to Datu’s protestations, all her father said was: “I am sorry, my plumula. But it will not be for long. I think it is time—yes, beyond time—that we left Liriat behind us. I have been saving up for the journey: just a little more and we shall have enough to go far from here. Perhaps it is best we cut ties now.”
At which point, Datu smashed her cavaquinho.
The following scene was so fraught that Lanie did not have time to tell Mak that his idea of leaving Liriat Proper was ridiculous. Not just that—absurd! How could they leave now, with Goody enthralled to the Scratches, and Lanie honor-bound to rescue her?
But ever since that morning, Mak was gone more than he was at home. He sought day labor in the outer circles, places like Butcher’s Circle and Fishmonger Alley, taking any work that paid a wage and asked no questions. Most nights, he contracted himself out to more nefarious jobs, crewing with a rough bunch of Twelfth Circle smugglers who made their monies on the margins of the law, transporting goods in and out of the city through the catacombs or on the dark banks of the Poxbarge and Whistlebelly rivers: goods that would never pay duties to the Revenues Office of Liriat Proper.
Lanie herself was busy minding Datu (mostly just watching the child drill herself in various target practices until she collapsed from exhaustion), not sleeping, pacing, and plotting how best to free Goody. So, what with one thing and another, she never found the time to tell Mak that of course they could not leave Liriat. Not soon. They would just have to lie low in the catacombs a while longer.
Lie, quite literally, low. At least in Datu’s case.
Lanie didn’t think the child meant to leave her pallet today. Well, perhaps she would join her niece in slumber. A few hours of sleep might clear the cobwebs from the catacombs of her brain. Suddenly, sleep was all she wanted, with the fierceness of thirst.
Mak’s voice snapped her awake again. “Take Datu outdoors today. Go for a walk. You both need”—his hands lifted helplessly—“air. Light.”
Lanie bristled. Or thought about bristling. It wanted too much energy. She concentrated on her gruel instead. It had gone cold and gluey. Even the lumps of dried fruit couldn’t liven the taste.
“Well, you know,” she replied, “that whole ‘outdoors’ part might present a problem.”
Multiple problems. Chivvying Datu out of bed. Getting her dressed. Prodding her outside. Boosting her into the sorkhadari tree and over the wall. Such prolonged and sustained activities required motivation, energy, will—none of which virtues Lanie possessed in large quantities at present.
Even if she could conjure a little resolve for Datu’s sake, what was resolve when set against the perils of travel? Resolve could not protect against exposure to unfriendly eyes, egress and ingress through the circular streets of the city, or magical murderbirds.
The next moment, Mak’s scarred face was all but an inch from hers. He said, very softly, “You need to go outside.”
Lanie stared. She had only ever heard him direct that particular tone of voice at Datu. A fatherly tone.
“You need to rest from… from this task you have set yourself. You need fresh air. Exercise. Even more so than Datu.”
Startled by this solicitude, Lanie offered without thinking, “I could take her to the quarry lake at Sinistral Park.”
For the first time in a long time, Mak smiled at her. She almost had to shade her eyes.
“Can you make it so far?” he asked.
“We can keep exposure to a minimum if we go underground,” Lanie countered, as if bargaining.
The idea of strolling through the catacombs as opposed to the stinking city streets began, cautiously, to buoy her enthusiasm. She was sure she could get Datu to Midnight Gate via the bone roads, thus mitigating their risk of being spotted out of doors.
Mak hated the catacombs, had forbidden Datu to venture down into them without his presence (not trusting Lanie, perhaps, to keep her focus around so many of her beloved dead), but now he only shrugged unhappily.
“Yes, the catacombs are safest, naturally. So long as you spend your entire day down there… digging tunnels with femurs. Or whatever it is you do.”
Lanie grimaced at his aggrieved tone. She much preferred his fatherly voice to his disparaging one: the one that hated her death magic as much as enclosed spaces.
Although… Mak’s notion of digging tunnels with bones did put an idea into her head. Something had to be done about that tunnel—Gallowsdance’s tunnel—that Grandpa Rad had made Goody collapse at Midsummer. It was not something Lanie could accomplish with her bare hands. But with enough bones...
She made a mental note to make an actual note to remind herself about this. Easy, these days, to forget.
“When I asked can you make it,” Mak continued, gentling again, “what I meant was—can you make it that far on your own two legs?” When she frowned in confusion, he added, “It is a long walk.”
“Oh.” Lanie thought for a moment. “We’ll take it in easy stages. Pack a picnic. We have all day, you said. And most of the night—not,” she added quickly, “that I’ll keep Datu out all night. Speaking of which, where will you be?”
“Trading with some flaskers up the Whistlebelly,” Mak said. His gaze was steady, but she felt his shame. He hated smuggling, or any illicit work. “It is my last run. In a few days, we will all leave Liriat Proper.”
Lanie dropped her eyes first. “We’ll talk about that tomorrow.”
Mak beamed, sunny with relief. “Good, Mizka,” he said encouragingly. “That is good. Thank you. The quarry lake is a fine idea. You will enjoy yourselves.”
Lanie returned a weak reflection of his smile, but felt oddly better because of it. “We will make every attempt.”
Next, Mak went to squat beside Datu’s pallet. In soft, coaxing Quadic, he sang to her: “Awake, my plumula! Arise and see: the summer grass and web-bespangled tree. Bestir thee all thy senses, limbs, and voice—and in this hopeful dawn, let us rejoice!”
Datu remained limp on her pallet, as broken as her cavaquinho—which her didyi, every night, worked to glue back together, piece by splintered piece. Lanie did not think it would ever be functional again, even if he did manage to rebuild the whole. But Mak needed to try. And Datu needed to see him trying.
“I love you, my plumula,” he whispered. “I will be back tomorrow dawn.”
“Tomorrow?” Datu’s eyes bleared open at this, just in time for her father to kiss her forehead and both cheeks.
“Tomorrow,” he promised, and left Doédenna’s chapel for the graveyard garden.
When he was gone, Lanie marched up to her niece’s pallet. Datu registered her presence, dismissed her as unworthy of interest, and shut her eyes again.
Lanie’s eyes narrowed. She grunted, squatted, and then whisked away every blanket and stockpiled weapon on the pallet until there was nothing left but Datu.
“Up and at ’em, Slug-a-Bed Stones,” she said. “We’re going on a picnic.”
Thunk-thunk-thunk.
Three of Datu’s throwing knives thwacked in quick succession into the mossy side of a fallen tree trunk. The knives were small and light, with blades shaped like leaves that wanted to be diamonds, and metal hilts wrapped in simple black cord. The tree was a titanwood giant, which, having come at last to the end of its primordially long life, was gently decaying into a nurse log for the tender young saplings growing up all around it.
Dourly, Datu wrenched loose her knives of that fecund monument. Dourly, she shook them free of moss and spiders and splinters. Dourly, she marched off to a proper distance, and flipped her knives right-side ready, and began again.
Thunk! Thunk-thunk!
Fetch. Wrench. Shake. March. Flip.
Thunk-thunk! THUNK!
From her perch on a fat-bottomed, flat-topped boulder near the quarry lake’s edge, Lanie watched her niece with both admiration and alarm.
Never did Datu remind her so much of Nita as when she practiced her sharp arts. That hypnotic focus. That quick, almost casual toss. That little kick of the back leg. The predatory flight of steel. Blue moss, micronizing. Wood chips, exploding.
How the knives always landed barber’s shave close to each other. How Datu moved back further for each throw, or found rocks or logs to launch herself from to make her targets harder, or took her aim from a weaving run.
Datu was far more accurate with her knives than she’d ever been with her cavaquinho chords. But then, she’d been set to this sort of drill since before she could speak.
Thunk! Thunk! Thunk!
And again.
Sinistral Park was bounded on its northwest edge by a handsome stand of old-growth titanwoods, forming the dark and dense surrounds of an ancient granite quarry. Prized loose of its last usefulness years ago, it had abandoned itself to a quiet afterlife. Centuries of seeping groundwaters had decanted a lake into the gouged earth that was as deep and still as Doédenna’s scrutiny. The surface of the water was preternaturally calm, webbed with delicate old-woman wrinkles interrupted by drifts of dragonfly, clumps of leaf, the balletic dance of water striders.
Were it not for Datu’s incessant debasement of her nurse log via throwing knife, Lanie might have thought the whole scene serene. As it was, a small vein ticked uneasily at the corner of her right eye.
Datu’s tongue was between her teeth. She was eyeing her target. Her shoulders relaxed as she concentrated.
Sultry as it was that afternoon, it was still rather cool for late Stews, notoriously the hottest month of the year. But this near the woods and water, the hard edge of heat was worn smooth, as if autumn had crept early to these shadowed places. The sun corralled the clouds like a bright dog her recalcitrant goats, and a flirty-skirted wind whisked up the smells of spruce and sedge, mint, marigold, and wild onion. Far distant in the welkin, a swirl of birds flew together, burst apart, and flew together again in never-repeating kaleidoscopic patterns.
Automatically, Lanie removed her battered spectacles and unfocused her eyes to behold those birds more deeply: to detect some flash of fulminating gold or other uncanny color-play of magic; to ascertain, in short, if any of those swarming dots were Rookish wizards, spying from the heights.
They were not.
Her breath puffing out in relief, she jammed her spectacles back on and looked around to locate Datu. Her niece was staring back at her across the rocky beach with fearful eyes, her whole face a question she did not ask.
Lanie forced a smile and a nonchalant shrug, and called, “Just swallows, Datu!”
Datu’s expression shut like a bear trap. Betraying no sign of relief or anything else, she turned away and picked up her throwing knives again.
Sighing, Lanie continued her vigil, slipping down from the warm boulder to lean against it, arms folded.
The thunking started again.
This time, Lanie’s allergies prickled. Datu was no longer seeing the titanwood as her target. In its place she was likely imagining a column of blackbirds—or perhaps the recumbent form of Bran Fiakhna herself. Waves of ill intent rose off her body with each toss of the knife, wrapping Lanie like a miasma. At every impact of Datu’s blades hitting the tree-meat, Lanie felt a tap at her own breastbone.
THUNK-tap. THUNK-tap. THUNK-tap. Datu, knocking at Saint Death’s door.
But the breeze soon brisked a new sound Lanie’s way. Her ears pricked and she almost smiled. Datu was singing.
It was twelve days since Datu had done anything remotely musical, and Lanie couldn’t help hoping that Mak’s remedy of ‘fresh air and exercise’ was finally exerting its benisons upon his daughter.
But her heart sank again when she recognized the tune.
Not the sorkhadari song. Not any melody Datu had learned at Waystation Thirteen.
Four-and-Twenty blackbirds
Shorn for their pelt
Four-and-Twenty wizards
For the Harrier’s belt!
Datu’s voice was at its harshest, flattest: a voice that had rejected all erophain training, all of Duantri’s merry melodic hints, her encouragements and adjurations to ‘listen, in this symphony of sound: and hear the cadence of thy perfect voice.’
Datu’s song meant business. Nothing more.
You hear a Stones sing like that, Lanie thought dolefully, it’s probably the last thing you’ll ever hear.
“First she killed the Kingbird…”
Thunk!
“Magpie was next…”
Thunk!
“House Martin, Starling
Marked with an—”
Something crackled in the underbrush beyond the fallen titanwood. Faster than an orblin under orders—so fast Lanie saw only the blur of her body—Datu sprinted forward, lifting her arm and hurling her last knife in the direction of the rustling.
It sliced through the green veil like silk. It landed wetly. A high, sharp cry answered.
“I got it!” Datu screamed. “I got it, Auntie Lanie! I saved you!”
25 Devoured by undead squirrels.
26 Defenestrated, and when that didn’t work, refenestrated to death.
27 Strangled by necropants, see footnote 6.
28 Self-sacrificed to the Sarcophagus of Souls.
29 Had a live badger sewn into his belly.
30 Bladed baton through the eye, courtesy of a Rookish wizard.
31 And that was just the spear side of the family, always remembering there were Stoneses in the distaff line as well, albeit of a cadet branch.