Stonewiser (2 page)

“If I want them to.”

The hair on the man's arms stood on end. Under his companions' anxious gazes, he scooped up the stones and sidled across the deck one cautious step at a time. He lost his nerve at the last moment, broke out into a contrived trot, and ended up throwing the stones out the window with a desperate pitch. Fools. She had no taste for useless blood.

“Ready?” the chief executioner said.

“A moment, please.” Sariah stepped before the small mirror nailed to one of the shelter's posts. She made a show of straightening her tunic and fixing her hair. Even in the Domain, vanity was a commonly accepted vice, a perfect screen to take quick stock of her situation.

The Domain's brutal sun had darkened her skin and streaked her brown hair with golden highlights that matched her eyes’ caramel hue. In defiance of the Guild's laws, she wore her hair longer now, in a thick braid that hung down between her shoulder blades, a practical form of heresy. She fussed over the plait and tucked her long bangs behind her ear. The time served her well to collect her thoughts and modulate her emotions. She was as ready as she could be.

“The comely and the homely die all the same,” the chief executioner said. “Trust Petrid. I've seen many die. Conceit has no place at the nets.”

“And so it doesn't.” Sariah offered her wrists.

Petrid bound them together with a competent set of knots.

By the time Sariah walked out of her deck shelter, Ars had heard of the executioners' arrival. The decks and bridges were lined with somber people she had come to know during the last few months. A wide range of emotions played on their familiar faces: fear, relief, regret, resentment. Losing her, the stonewiser they had paid so much to bring to Ars, was a blow to the entire settlement. But they knew, just as she knew, that her fate was unavoidable and lawful.

Torana met her at the last bridge, surrounded by her brood of children, although Mia was wisely not among them. “I've sent for them,” she said when Sariah walked by. “Have courage.”

Sariah stopped dead in her tracks. “They mustn't come. Do you hear me? Tell him I said
not
to come.”

Petrid yanked at the ropes. Sariah stumbled behind him. Was Torana mad? This was Sariah's trouble and she would deal with it. She didn't want anyone else hurt or killed on her account.

They stopped only long enough for her to don a weave to protect her legs from the rot's acid brew. The Barren Flats lay before her, the vast desert of shallow, corrupted water where the Domainers made their home. The executioners plunged into the knee-high dead water and, dragging her along, trekked ahead. Their red-weave mantles trailed behind them like spilled blood.

The line of Ars's rule was clearly marked by a throng of people who waited just outside the settlement's boundaries. She didn't know exactly how Domainers knew this sort of thing. There were no markers, no signs, no warnings and yet every person in the Domain knew where a settlement ended and the free range began.

Sariah had never been to a Domainer execution before. She had not anticipated that the executioners had a large following. A rowdy crowd gathered around a sprawling flotilla of traveling decks. A trinket trader floated his wares before wading customers. Peddlers fought over shoppers and a mountebank exhorted the merits of his cure-all from the top of his shelter's roof. Compared to the clean order of Domain settlements, the site belonged among the Goodlands’ raunchy towns. Yet it was here, in the Domain, substituting decks for houses, knee-high dead water for streets, and peopled with a good number of cross-eyed varlets and slovenly wenches, some of them harlots crying out the prices of the remarkable deeds they offered to perform.

Sariah stumbled when the first blow struck her on the side of the head.

“You like that, you bloody wench?” a man yelled. “That's for messing with the New Blood.”

A strike between her shoulder blades knocked the air out of her lungs.

“Kill the witch,” someone screeched. “To the nets.”

“Tomorrow,” Petrid shouted. “Come tomorrow for the show.”

Sariah dodged the next shot. She already reeked with the dead water's mud. Clumped together, the mud made for surprisingly convincing projectiles—flammable ones—she remembered.

Someone's aim failed and hit one of the executioners instead. “It was meant for the Shield's whore.”

Meliahs help her. They had reason to claim that too.

By the time they arrived at the executioners' deck cluster, Sariah was soiled and sore. A circle of decks opened to allow her party's passage and then closed quickly behind them. They waded among the cluster, until they arrived at the center, where a sturdily built deck held a round cage divided into five slivers of cells. The executioners secured her hands and feet with locked irons. It was only after the door slammed shut that they began to smile and congratulate each other on a bloodless capture.

Sariah sat with her back to the bars and her feet wedged in the middle of the cage, where the chains had been locked to a massive center post. She didn't like small spaces, but she recognized she was safer in the cell than among the hostile crowd.

“Hey, you,” a man called from the cell opposite to hers. “Got any food? They don't feed us any here. No reason to feed the dead, is there?”

The man didn't look like he needed fare, stout and portly with a swollen belly and a double chin that veiled any attempt at a neck. “No food? My luck. Figures.”

Sariah wiped the mud from her cheek and made a show of listening to the man's protestations while she watched the executioners. They were many, a whole tribe of them, and they were cautious, taking turns guarding the prisoners. Stacked six deep, their tightly roped-together decks acted like a veritable fortress around the cage. Even if she managed the chains and the padlock, she wouldn't make it alive through those decks. The executioners had taken her weave. She couldn't very well run the water without it, not for very long anyway.

“Me? I'm innocent,” the man was saying. “A hideous misunderstanding has brought me here. I mean, what else but a malicious plot can put me in the nets with the likes of you and her?”

Her?
A cell over from the empty cell next to Sariah's, a third prisoner stirred beneath a tattered blanket.

“Hello, Sariah,” the woman said. “It gives me a measure of comfort to know that you and I will die together.”

Sariah stared, too stunned to say anything. The fair hair was a little longer now, but she recognized the woman well enough. The lively face reminded her that beauty wasn't always honest. She had once trusted that blunt mismatched gaze. Not anymore.

Enita, ex-marcher for Atica, offered a mocking grimace for a smile. “Are you surprised to see me? Don't be. You and I, we were judged at the same justice gathering. Both of our arguments proved insufficient to save our lives.”

Rage boiled in Sariah's veins. “You traitor.”

“You must mean
us
traitors. Had I known you would manage the deed so easily, I wouldn't have bothered. Word is you delivered him to the quartering block.”

“I didn't betray him.”

“Is that what he thinks?” Enita smirked. “I suppose that's his right. The justice gathering must have thought differently. I'm sure the carnage he suffered is one of the reasons you're here.”

Sariah couldn't bear to remember. Enita's treason had been too dangerous to forget, too painful and horrifying to forgive. She wouldn't mind witnessing the justice of Enita's punishment. She wouldn't mind it at all.

“It's not fair,” the man said. “The executioners get paid twice for our deaths, by the justice gathering and by the crowd. We ought to get something, for being the entertainment.”

“You're gonna die,” Enita said. “What does coin matter to you now?”

“I don't deserve to die with you two.”

“Because you're so virtuous?” Enita snickered. “You killed your mate and your brother, and when your mother came to see about the ruckus, you killed her too. Kin slayer. You die well with us.”

“She was cuckolding me,” the man said. “She deserved to die. And what's three deaths compared to the thousands of deaths you two contrived? You betrayed the Domain. She broke the wall.”

The wall. Aye. By far the most terrible of Sariah's deeds. Death would be an easy reprieve for such trespass, the easiest of all the choices she had made thus far. She couldn't argue with the man, and she had nothing to say to the likes of Enita, who watched Sariah like a gull eyeing the fish bucket. Sariah settled to think in silence. The morning would bring the easy choice for sure. The hardest set of choices, the alternatives to dying—those she would have to fashion herself.

Two

 

T
HE SUN'S BLOODIED
birth on the Barren Flats’ horizon harbored the day's festivities. The executioners' camp was in full swing. The shops were open for business. Food for sale was cooking on the grills. By the time Sariah and the other two prisoners were led from their cells, peddlers, beggars, pickpockets and harlots were already working the crowds.

Hungry, stiff and sore from her night in the cell, Sariah recognized the accents of people from a dozen different settlements. It was a chaotic gathering, like a fair or a market, where people came to chat, laugh, shop, and in this case, watch the killings. Nothing attracted the curious as surely as death.

Although the water was still calm, the nets were fully cast. They were anchored on four of the executioners' decks. The edges of the nets were marked by brightly painted buoys which floated above the water line, connecting the decks and marking the square perimeter. Sariah and the other two prisoners were poled to the nets’ center. Three tiny platforms bobbed on the dead water at equal intervals. Sariah cringed as she stepped on the creaky deck. It was small, no more than two paces on each side, flimsily built with thin twine and rotting wood, and disturbingly unsteady to the sensibilities of her inner ear. She planted her feet apart and found her balance. The little deck wasn't very reliable, but then again, it wasn't intended to be.

Strong and athletic, Enita managed well enough, but the man was less assured. He squatted on the little deck like a pig stranded after the floods. He wouldn't last very long that way. None of the prisoners wore weaves, and that bode badly for them. A brief contact with the dead water burned, but a few moments in the rot's brew meant the excruciatingly painful dissolution of skin, muscle and bone, the loss of a limb or two, and shortly thereafter, death.

Business was booming on the decks gathered around the nets. Some of the executioners were collecting the watching fees from the crowd. Others were crying out the odds and recording the wagers. A wager for death always held the better odds. Enita was the favorite to last to the end. She flashed Sariah a defying grin. Sariah gave the woman credit for her poise because at the moment, fear was rattling her knees rather violently.

But even Enita paled when the executioners pulled the nets taut. The water boiled with life. The parts of the nets sticking out of the water were piled with astonishing numbers of long contorting creatures, some brown, some black, some mottled or streaked. The larger ones were splotched with algae and encrusted with barnacles. They were as thick as Sariah's legs and as long as she was tall, with elongated snouts equipped with quivering suckers and serrated teeth.

She'd had nightmares about the giant eels, rulers of the Barren Flats. These were bred and raised for the executioners' purposes, made ready with days of hunger. Maddened by the brutal exposure to air, they flapped and slithered in the nets, convulsing and contorting around Sariah like a sinister garden.

An eel sank its teeth onto the squatting man's shoe. The man stomped and screamed. The beast bit through his shoe and tore off a chunk of his toe. The scent of blood unleashed a rave. The water boiled with a frothy surf of eels.

Sariah rode the swells as well as she could. She concentrated on keeping her balance. The crowd was laughing and clapping, pelting her and the others with chunks of refuse, egging on the eels. The executioners dropped the net, allowing the beasts additional depth to launch. Sariah slapped the things off her legs as they came, but one of them latched onto her calf. It took her several attempts to get rid of it. She finally snatched it by the tail, swung it over her head, and slammed it on the water, but not before the enterprising eel ripped off a chunk of her legging, leaving a bloody trail behind.

On his teetering deck, the man tilted from one side to the other, swinging wildly until he lost his balance to the barrage of eels fastened to his feet. The crowd cried in horrified delight. He staggered in the water, tripping on the nets, gaining his footing briefly, only to fall back into the dead water. The eels tore into his legs voraciously. At the same time, his skin began to crackle and ooze. He wailed a continuous shriek of agony. Sariah didn't know how she could help him, but she reached out for his outstretched hand anyway. That's all she grabbed, a scalded hand which she dropped in shock as soon as she realized it was no longer attached to his body.