The Ventifact Colossus (The Heroes of Spira Book 1) (24 page)

CHAPTER NINETEEN

IT WAS A pleasant enough week’s walk from Tal Hae to the Seven Mirrors, but Kibi usually fell behind. That didn’t surprise him any; he was always a slow hiker, slow but steady, rolling along like a boulder. The long hours didn’t bother him, and he enjoyed the lush countryside, greening peacefully in the spring sunshine. The road was muddy in places, enough that it was quicker to walk instead through the damp grass beside it.

On the fourth day out from the city, when Kibi was lagging a bit after lunch, Ernie slowed his own pace and dropped back to walk next to him. Good lad, that Ernest Roundhill. The boy had a good heart and worried whenever one of his companions suffered. Not that Kibi was suffering, but each time the others got too far ahead, Ernie would check on him, making sure he wasn’t cramping and reminding him to drink every few minutes.

“I’m fine, son,” he said as Ernie fell into stride with him. “Jus’ walkin’ an’ thinkin, like usual. Always had heavy legs, my ma would say, but I’ll get as far as the rest a’ ya ’fore the day’s out.”

Kibi never went out of his way to seek company. It wasn’t that he disliked people, but he couldn’t ever think of what to say to them. Other folk moved through life too quickly, not just when they walked, but in how they acted toward one another or in seeking to meet their own needs and desires. It was hard to be social with folk hurrying past on either side. Life would always come to you, he found. No need to rush out and grab it.

“Strange, isn’t it?” said Ernie. “About our gold circles. Did you really never find out where your mother came from?”

Ah, there it was. Kibi had wondered when Ernie would get around to starting this conversation. Between the boy’s natural shyness and his own reticence, they hadn’t talked much about their newfound connection.

Kibi smiled a little to let Ernie know he was being sociable. “Nope.”

“Why do you think she has a matching ring to the one they found buried on a statue of me?”

That was a stumper all right. Kibi had let himself be convinced that they were two different rings, but that just raised a different set of questions.

“Suppose they must’ve been made by the same person, long time ago. My ma got hold a’ one, and the other got put on your statue.”

“And do you really think your mom would…that she needs to wear hers all the time? To keep her alive?”

Kibi shrugged. “She certainly seems to think so.” He always found it odd that his father, Bim, a man ordinarily disdainful of Godless superstition, never challenged his mother about the gold circlet. His mother Gela had insisted, with a terrified urgency, that her bracelet needed to stay on her wrist every minute of her life. She could never explain why but said it was just as important to her as breathing.

“Kibi,” said Ernie, “that night we were all summoned to Abernathy’s tower, you said you had some kind of trick you could do with stone, that was kind of like magic but wasn’t. What did you mean?”

Kibi’s face flushed beneath his beard. Had he really said that? He must have been flustered by being in such a strange circumstance. What he did with stone was personal, a secret he had long kept. And it wasn’t really a trick, anyways.

“Not sure I can explain it. Jus’…me and the rock, we got an understandin’. Ain’t nothin’ too special, I guess.”

Ernie smiled. “I think you’re being modest, Kibi. Is it something you can show me?”

He opened his mouth to tell Ernie he’d rather not, that it wasn’t something he did in front of other people. But Mrs. Horn would have told him not to be so closed up about it. And besides, Ernie was so inoffensive, and now they had a strange connection, and surely it wouldn’t harm anything. Everything was different now. He was on a team, had to work with people instead of stone.

“I guess. Ain’t much, but I can show ya.”

He bent and pried a rock from the mud at the side of the road, a chunk of brown chert the size of a plum. It had been in the ground here a long, long time, and had only worked its way up to the surface in the past fifty years or so. No one had ever picked it up before now.

Gently he kneaded the stone, and it became soft beneath his fingers. He pressed and squeezed it, shaping it like a sculptor, knowing by instinct where to apply pressure so as not to break it apart. Over the course of a minute he transformed the many-faceted, asymmetric piece of rock into a round flat disc. Then he ran his finger over its newly smooth surface, tracing the letter E, and the letter was carved upon the stone from just the lightest touch. When he was done, the rock was pleased with its new shape, and Kibi thanked it silently for its cooperation. He couldn’t change a rock without its approval, after all.

He handed it to Ernie, who stood with his mouth agape.

“Ain’t nothin’ really,” Kibi said. “And it ain’t magic, not like what Aravia does, or Abernathy. It’s jus’ me and the rock reachin’ an agreement a’ sorts. Can’t explain any better’n that.”

“I think it’s incredible!” said Ernie. “Can I keep this?”

“Wouldn’t a’ put your initial on it otherwise.”

* * *

The Seven Mirrors rose like upthrust fingers out of the grass, jet-black obelisks reaching for the afternoon sun. They formed a perfect seven-pointed ring nearly a hundred feet across, and each massive plinth towered a hundred feet in the air, a dark giant casting a long shadow over the plains.

Kibi worked his way through the crowds to get a better look at them; after walking a week to see this place, he had built up some high expectations. Ernie said the nearest town was over ten miles away, but Flashing Day attracted throngs of commoners from all the regional villages: Tal Inniston, White Ferry, Greentree, even from Tal Werek over thirty miles distant. It was a tradition hundreds of years old according to Ernie; men, women, and children gathered at the circle of stones, pitched tents, made picnics, danced and sang songs, and treated the whole thing like a festival holiday.

“My father used to bring a cart from White Ferry and sell bread,” Ernie said, “though we haven’t been back in several years. It got to be too much of a bother, coming all this way.”

As Kibi came closer, he felt a hum, a resonant vibration almost too faint to discern, coming from the ring of standing stones.

“You feel that?” he asked Ernie, who walked beside him.

“Feel what?”

“Feel that deep thrummin’ from the Mirrors.”

Ernie stopped and made a show of listening. “No.”

That didn’t surprise him. Nobody else felt the things Kibi felt, or heard the things he heard.

Back in Eggoggin, the village of his birth and all his life until this strange wizard business, he had done his best to downplay his odd affinity for stone. The masons and architects he worked with knew something was amiss, but Kibi had been careful not to do his…oh, he hated to call it magic. It wasn’t magic. It was too natural for that. Beneath his fingers, stone melted, became malleable, workable like clay. He could suggest a new shape, and if the stone had no objection, it became what he wanted. As far as he knew, no one had ever witnessed him plying his unique skill until he had shown it to Ernie on the journey here.

If it were only that, he might have explained it to someone, even showed it off before now. But it was also deeply personal. The earth was like a friend who was cripplingly shy around anyone but him, but who trusted him implicitly. It
wanted
to be worked, shaped, but it was nobody’s business but his own. And Kibilhathur knew that because, in their own lugubrious way, the stones spoke to him.

That had first happened when Kibi was seven, as he toiled in the fields beside his father. They were clearing away rocks from a new half-acre intended for rye, and Kibi had been tasked with carrying out the biggest ones he could lift. As he struggled to flip over a wide slab of granite a feeling had come to him, seeping into his fingers through the stone.
Too heavy.
Not words, exactly, but he understood.

He had stood quickly and looked around. There was his father, ten feet off, smashing up a boulder.

“Father, can the stones speak?”

Bim, grunting with the effort of his labor, brought down his pick. “’Course they can. This one here’s sayin’, ‘I give up!’”

“No, I mean it,” Kibi had insisted.

His father had puffed a few breaths, leaning on his pick handle and smiling at his son. “Get yer head out a’ th’ clouds, boy. No, rocks don’t say nothin’. And if they did, what would they say? They’re jus’ rocks.”

Kibi had nodded and looked back down at the granite slab.
I’m sorry,
he thought to it.
Father’s going to break you up to get you out of this field.

But the stone didn’t mind.

In the intervening years, the stones had spoken to him many times over, in their vague, doleful way. And the bond held in both directions; the earth trusted him, trusted him to treat it with respect, to understand its watchful, solitary existence.

As an apprentice stonecutter, he had refined the ability to knead and shape stone with his hands, always in small ways, improving his work, strengthening it. By laying his hands upon a slab, he knew exactly how it should be cut, how it
wanted
to be cut, where to place the chisel, how hard to strike, so he never lost so much as a flake. On his off days he collected rocks the size of his fist and carved them cunningly using his gifts (but never so well that others would suspect how he achieved such fine detail). He sold these to a peddler, who said there was great demand for such ornaments in the city of Hae Kalkas.

And so he continued for another decade, absorbed in his work, keeping largely to himself, knowing that his reputation as a solitary eccentric was well deserved. He just went on about his business, until the day it became a wizard’s business.

* * *

Kibi stopped when he reached the perimeter of the circle formed by the Mirrors. It was clear how they got their name; though the outward-facing surfaces of the obelisks were rough-hewn, their inward-facing sides were flat and polished to a reflective black shine. Kibi walked clockwise until he stood immediately beside one. The deep rumbling in his innards grew stronger. There was strength in these stones; they were ancient, forbidding, and yet anticipatory, as if they were built for a purpose that had not yet been realized.

Though the cautious part of his nature warned against it, Kibi reached out and placed his palm against the rough plinth. A jolt of energy shot through him, not painful, but it set his arm to trembling. An overwhelming power resided here, a power that thrilled and terrified him, a power that was his, or that could be his, though these towering menhirs were not meant for him.

Kibilhathur. Your time is long past, but it has not yet come. Abide, and return.

He pulled his hand away. The voices of stones had always been heavy in his mind, but the words of the Mirror had been like deep-rumbling boulders rolling through his soul, shaking him nearly senseless. And they were words! Not just feelings and moods that his mind interpreted, but speech, true speech. Kibi stumbled; Ernie held him up.

“Are you okay, Kibi?”

“I think I might ought a’ sit m’self down,” he said dizzily.

The others had dispersed soon after arriving at the Flashing Day fair. Dranko and Tor were now haggling at a cluster of little carts, out of which some enterprising craftsmen and farmers were selling foodstuffs and souvenirs. Morningstar was sitting in the lengthening shadow of the easternmost Mirror, talking animatedly with Aravia. Grey Wolf was moving casually through the crowd, looking for anyone or anything suspicious; he had admonished the rest of them to do the same, though Flashing Day’s big moment wasn’t until noon tomorrow.

Kibi and Ernie walked to a stretch of grass a little ways removed from the bulk of the crowd and well outside the area circumscribed by the Seven Mirrors. Kibi took a long pull from his water skin and waited for his quivering bones to quiet. The skull-rattling subsonic vibrations eased the farther he removed himself from the huge obsidian standing-stones.

A cluster of children appeared nearby, tussling and jostling one another, all staring at him, some with poor enough manners to point. The oldest, a girl of thirteen years or so, took a few steps toward him.