Melting Stones

Oswin

I mounted Spark and guided her onto the road, trotting through Moharrin. I waved at the people who called out to me, but kept going. Not everyone was waiting to get out of there. Spark and I passed a stream of horses, donkeys, and carts already bound for Sustree. There were even some people on foot.

We left them all behind. When we turned off the main road, we followed the trail to the place where the river flowed out of Lake Hobin. Up here, where the river flowed from the lake, it was rapids. Once I got to the rocky bank, I found a place where Spark and me could halt. I watered her and gave her some carrots, then tethered her.

Finally, I settled myself. The river had shifted. I could see the former bed. It was marked with dried slime and dead creatures who had not been able to follow it. Rocks along the original banks had tumbled from their places. The old stones were cross. They were used to water sliding over them. They did not care for this new life in the sun.

"Luck of the circle, lads," I told them. "One day you're under water, the next you're not."

"You talk like a dedicate," Oswin said. I jumped. I hadn't even heard him ride up. "Are you a novice?"

"What are you doing? Are you following me?" I asked.

"Absolutely." Oswin swung down from his swaybacked horse and took off the saddle, like I'd removed Spark's. "You looked like you were going to do something mage-like. One more of those times when I might learn something useful. Your Rosethorn is badgering people to get packed and get their carts in line. Word got out that Luvo said we might have a few more days, so our people act as if they have forever. I've done all I can for the moment, so I followed you."

I didn't feel like arguing. He'd get bored fast enough. People always do. "Don't make any noise, then. I need to find the new line of strength and draw all of it I can."

"Why?"

"Why? Because I might need it," I said, testy. "I'm not restocked from yesterday, all right? Because I'm a squirrel who stores up nuts of power for the winter. Why." I closed my eyes and sent my quivery magical self down into the ground. I searched out the fizzing rocks that showed me where the old line of power had been. Then I spread out and down, seeking the new one. Just as I thought, it was under the changed riverbed, a seam in the granite that shot straight down. It blazed white-hot with the earth's pure strength.

I soaked it up like the rays of the sun after a long winter. I bathed in it, drank it, filled my skin with it. The more I gathered, the more was offered to me. Streams of it poured through me to those things I was connected to, my stone alphabet and my mage kit. We brimmed over with power.

I let myself follow the big fault where the power flowed away from the mountain. It ran along the Makray. It made the river's bed. I flew in my magical body down to the place where the river met the sea. There I fell deeper into the earth to get away from the salt water. Down I moved through sand and basalt. The ocean's floor rose high over me. Far from Starns, fire warmed my body. I had found a vein of magma that rose into the ocean floor. It carried power with it. I followed it, curious to see where this thin pipe of molten rock and magic went. It opened into a hole in the ocean floor, at the bottom of a small crater. All around me strange, goggle-eyed creatures with rippling flaps of skin raced away. They were used to lava, it seemed, but not to magical people popping out along with it. The touch of the water made me shiver. It didn't like me. I darted back into the small lava pipe.

Back I swam into the vent and along the fault. I found other cracks like the one that opened into the crater—like the one Luvo had shown me, that day we reached Starns. There were tiny volcanoes, some no bigger than my head, all around the Battle Islands. And the faults in the sea, big ones and little ones, were roads under the skin of the earth. They could lead me to other islands, or even the shores that surrounded the Pebbled Sea. It was amazing! I could travel back to Emelan this way. I was so fast in magical form, not weighed down by my meat body and a need for a ship. No more dealing with people, no more being hungry or cold…

I was drifting, dreaming of freedom, when all the world—or at least my part of it—shuddered. The seam where I traveled squeezed. Volcano spirits from deep within the heart of the world roared. Heat rose to press my skin. Magma was moving up into the fault. If I didn't leave, it might catch me. I didn't want to be there, far below the sea, when that happened. I didn't think I could survive it.

I raced back to my body, covering dozens of miles under the earth, skidding between layers of basalt. Up I flew from under the sea, plunging into the fault that led under the Makray River with relief.

I tried to slip into my body, and stopped. It was too small! My magical self was bigger than usual, built up with all the power I had taken from the earth. I had trained myself to hold my magic in a certain way. All that romping under the sea had interfered with my control over it. Kanzan and Mohun, couldn't anything ever be simple?

I ordered myself, Evvy, stop—calm down. Be steady, drag yourself together. You're a tight little ball of you.

I pulled myself inward. I didn't want to lose any of the power I gathered, but I needed to concentrate it.

When I was packed together as tightly as I could manage, I tried once more to slip into my real skin. This time it worked.

I opened my eyes. It was trying to straighten my legs that made me groan. I was horribly stiff. Oswin offered me kibbeh patties. I grabbed one and bit down. The beef and wheat were greasy, but good, though someone had overdone the cinnamon. "Nory cooked these?" I asked.

Oswin grinned. "She always puts in too much cinnamon. Tell her, if you want your nose bitten off. She likes cinnamon." He gave me a flask. It held good, cool mint tea. I looked at him as I drank. He had made himself comfortable while I was away. He'd brought his saddlebags over. One was open. There was a pad of paper sheets stitched together, an ink brush, and an ink bottle. He must have been writing. I sniffed food in the other cloth bundles I could see in the bag. I also spotted books around the food bundles. Oswin used the other saddlebag as a backrest.

I looked around. Rocks had fallen into the riverbed from the heights across from us, making fresh changes in the rapids. A crack had opened in the riverbed. That had dropped the bottom another thirty feet. The lake was booming down into the new channel, throwing up a fine, cool spray. Moharrin had a new waterfall.

"There was a shock?" I asked. I offered the flask to him, but he shook his head.

"More like a long shiver, but a hard one. Some trees fell." There were shadows in Oswin's blue eyes. It must have been a scary shock.

"Why didn't you go? I must have been entranced for a while," I said.

"Go back to see Nory try to get the axle fixed on that cart?" he inquired. "The smith's apprentice might have done it—he's sweet on her—but he left with the smith. She'll be furious, which means she'll be bullying someone else into fixing it. I'd offer, but I doubt she'd even let me try a second time. She knows I'd probably just botch it again. I feel bad I couldn't get her and the kids a decent cart."

"You do lots of other things for them," I told him. "You give them a home."

Oswin spat on the ground beside him. "It won't do them much good if it and they get buried in ash and lava. What were you doing away from your body? I wouldn't think gathering power would take so long." He offered me some dried figs.

I ate those, too. "I was exploring the fault under the river on out to the sea." I looked over at the granite marker nearby. It had fallen over. I called to it. Slowly, pulling against the soil, it straightened. I tugged on the surrounding rocks. They rolled into place, bracing the marker until it stood firm again.

Oswin swallowed hard. "I'm used to a bit more fuss when people work magic."

I shrugged.

"Maybe you know the answer to this, since you're the stone mage," Oswin began. "What are they, these lines? Big and small? Tahar and Jayat don't know what they are, apart from the fact that they carry power. They only know they can use them." Oswin drew his knees up to his chest like a boy and wrapped his arms around them. His eyes were blazing with curiosity. "They never say where the power comes from, or why they find it in these places, and not in others. When the lines moved, Tahar and Jayat were at a complete loss. They couldn't find new ones."

"But that's silly," I told him. "Why didn't they just do a spell for feeling power, and sweep across the ground? The big faults didn't move far. They couldn't. Look. The lines—they're faults, or seams in the earth's stone cloak. The faults reach down. Miles, some of them. Way below us, the world is full of molten rock—lava. Well, Luvo and my stone mage teachers call it magma inside the world, lava when it's out in the air. It's heat, it's pressure—it would mash us flat in the blink of an eye—it's light, it's the elements that make up every stone, every mineral, every metal and every gem ever was."

"How do you know?" Oswin asked me.

"What?" I was confused.

"How do you know that's what's in it?"

I blinked. "Well, when one of my teachers was called away, I sneaked a look at the books for the advanced students. But I would have known anyway, after this. I can feel them. The—the makings of gold, and iron, and sulfur. Like healer mages would know if a woman's unborn baby is a boy or a girl or dead or a mage."

Oswin shook his head. "I'm surprised you bother with us human beings at all. You must live in a dream world, if every stone and crystal speaks to you like that."

He'd finally startled me. How could he know that, and him not a mage? "People are all right." I sounded like a liar even to myself.

Oswin smiled at me. I wondered how much he saw, and how much he missed. Suddenly what Jayat had said, that Oswin fixed things without magic, made a lot more sense. "All people, or some people?" he asked.

"I don't know. I haven't met all people," I replied. Maybe I should have let the volcano spirits squeeze me instead of escaping up to this.

I think he took pity on me. "You were telling me about what's far below the surface stone," he reminded me.

"Underneath. Um—that's right." I drank some more mint tea. "It's all amazing hot. Aside from volcanoes, the only openings to it are those faults. And they move. The faults shift. But these big ones, the earth doesn't erase them, like it might the little ones. The big ones the earth needs. They're like the belt in your breeches, to pull in tight when you lose weight, or to let out when you gain it."

Oswin looked at his stomach. "It's not that big. My belly."

I shook my head. "They say girls are vain. Every man I've ever met was just as bad. Anyway, the earth line here is one of the big faults under the island. It's part of a web of faults under the Pebbled Sea. They feed the other volcanoes around here, and the earthquakes. And the smaller faults split off from the big ones, like, I don't know, fingers from the hand."

"A network, you say," murmured Oswin. "Throughout the Pebbled Sea."

"And the lands around them. The world adjusts itself all the time." It was getting cool as the sun passed behind the mountain. I got to my knees, wincing.

Then I felt it, far in the distance. "Oswin, grab the horses. We've got another shock coming, and it's going to be bad."

The volcano spirits in the hollow chamber were moving. They were hunting for Carnelian and Flare, miles below us. Their movement sent power rolling from the chamber, out through the faults. I wasn't going to ask myself how I knew, when they were so far down. Instead I lurched to saddle my horse. Oswin did the same, then strapped his saddlebags in place.

"Let's go on the road," I told him. "But don't mount up. We have a little bit of a wait."

"Is that so?" He soothed his horse. "You can tell even though it's not right away? No one mentioned you were a seer."

I glared at him. "I can feel them moving, that's how. There's a whole lot of them. They're looking for Flare and Carnelian."

Oswin led his horse into the roadbed. The spirits were deep under the river, pressing against the armor of stone between us and them. The earth shook. Spark wrenched against her bridle. I clung to her as stones began to rattle and move. Oswin had taken off his tunic and wrapped it around his horse's eyes. Even so, he still had to cling to the animal's bridle to keep him from running. Boulders crashed in the riverbed. I heard trees toppling. My teeth clacked together so hard they hurt. The spirits smashed against the sides of the fault, calling to Flare and Carnelian. I bit my lip. Could their bellows reach all the way to the quartz trap?

Slowly the great mass of them split. Most rolled on down the fault to the sea, hoping to find Carnelian and Flare out that way. The others returned to the chamber under the mountain. The ground quieted, and settled.

I looked at Oswin. "The sooner we get everyone out of here, the safer they'll be. It's bad to expect anything with that much power to follow a timetable."