by Rance » Mon Apr 28, 2014 12:50 pm
Though Cherny's fist lashed out in warning, a seemingly useless maneuver, the frantic swing caught Stone-Eyes against the side of his ear. The withered man flinched back, his shoes scuffing marks through the loose dust on the floor. He turned a shoulder to protect himself, then balled one of his hands, his index and muddle knuckle protruding slightly from the bunch. He bent his knees and wrenched back his arm, quite prepared to maul the boy in return.
S-stop it - no c-closer!
Words thought in Common, spoken in Common, shaped like Common. But when they met the humming air, their sound was altered, less gallant, foreign.
The glass sculpture in Cherny's readied hands caught a gleam of Sunlight in its angles and creases. "No," Nereius said. Her head was turned to the side, the point of her chin a perfect complement to her sharpened nose. "No," she told her assistant, whose heels flattened back to the floor. They kept their meager distance. Stone-Eyes turned away. He ambled toward the stone slab and put his palms against it, letting his head hang low between his shoulders. His fingernails scraped against the uneven rock. An attempt at composure, at calm.
"Cherny," Nereius said, returning her gaze to the boy. When she said the name, a gust of breath slithered its way between the first and second syllables, a strong huff of air blown out of her lungs. "Stone-Eyes performs tireless work to shape the glass and liquify the silver. And he spends even more time attuning it. Throw that container in your hands, and you threaten damaging something very precious to him. To me. To someone who once owned it. That sort of mindlessness is a spark for starting wars. Seven," Nereius said over her shoulder. "Stone-Eyes, who was seven?"
"Hed'er," he said. "Hed'er Coretch."
"And six?"
"Glour'eya Asbon," he said.
"And eight," Nereius asked, as though identifying the bracketing victims was important in the least.
"Mitz'on Far-Reach."
Th-that, that's her r-real hand. The one you c-cut off.
With a dry-lipped smile, Nereius said, "He remembers all their names. He recalls distinctly what children bear the silver. Stone-Eyes, who was thirty-seven?"
"Glour'eya Wynsee."
Nereius turned her attention down to the decrepit limb clasped between her forearm and her stomach. "It's no longer hers, Cherny. It was surrendered and dutifully replaced."
Stone-Eyes muttered again, "I can feel his bones. I can hear his bones, clacking and rattling, performing a dance, giving him dreaming-eyes. I called him not; I want no boy, I want no boy, not unless he's one of us."
Still crouched several arm-lengths away from Cherny, Nereius fell silent for several long moments. This place was a quiet one, this spire-shaped room like a miniature chapel. Every time they spoke the glass receptacles set into the walls vibrated like teeth with old, unanswered aches. The huddled woman plucked her spectacles off her nose and furiously wiped their lenses against the threads of her sleeve. Upon it was stitched a swirling arabesque, a thousand miniature hands with interlocked fingers. At even intervals around the hem, the dots of the sun and the moon waxed and waned through their swelling and diminishing phases.
"Surely the silvered hand is in your employ," Nereius said. "Else, whatever mechanism of interference you possess wouldn't have landed you here, of all the better places in this world you might decide to chance in your sleep. And yet this hand--" she lifted the seamstress' preserved limb between them, "--is no adolescent boy's. Thus, we're faced with an inconsistency, a tangle, a problem to be solved. An anomaly -- a'arob'lth."
Several seconds passed, fat and tedious. The wrinkles etching Nereius' hard-leather face softened.
"Have you ever committed a sin, Cherny? A blasphemy, an irrevocable deed? An act you so disdain that it threatens to mutate that intangible essence in your chest that whispers to you, This is who I am, this is what I've been born to do?" A hiss of metal at her hip. From a small leather sheath, Nereius dislodged a rough trowel with an angled edge. She scraped it across the floor between her feet, gathering up flecks of rusty sand. "Tell me," she said.
Behind her, Stone-Eyes repeated, "Tell her, boy. You must."