Deepstone

She hated these walls. The way the designs on them were painted so that they never seemed to hold still, and the way the moss and soot – the traces of blood – interacted with the pattern, and then with sorcery, so that the images seem to project themselves out of the walls and reach chunky, ragged fingers into the hallway. Bladed shadows pooling on the ground. Or perhaps the walls would cave in, would seem to fall away, to be drawn backwards as if sinking into another world. And she hated the crooked pattern of tiles, and the way the roof looked as if it were stained with the hates and misdeeds of every miscreant who’d ever been led beneath them clanking and thumping with chains.

Those such as her father.

She paused for that quick, wet breath that would let her go on, that would temper her emotions and let her approximate poise, almost calm.

The guardsmen appeared to her as golems. They were fleshy men with real lives and appetites, real wives and children; but to her they could have been carved out of stone, so aloof, so unseeing.

The last one rested his halberd across the archway. The stairs were just beyond the reach of a hanging lantern, the crisscross light it cast. “Girl,” he said tersely.

“Sir,” she was practiced in bowing her head.

“Name please.”

“Taldian Vissipoth.”

“Who are you here to see?”

“Haddongart Vissipoth. My father.”

“Papers.”

“I have them. In order.” She held out the rumpled documents for his inspection.

“Proceed,” he responded. And there was a half second where she thought he might say something more, where he might raise an eyebrow, or ask a question, make some mild judgement or just warn her that she might not like what she’d see. A long way through it, that one. Not much there for you anymore. But if he’d felt such an impulse, he quashed it as fast as it could bloom and smoothed the stone mask over his face. Just this: proceed.

So, she did. Down into the Deep.

#

The stairs leading down were uneven, they were just slightly the wrong size for a human footstep, a bit too shallow or a bit too deep, and in the dark beyond the lantern they were an unnerving hazard. But beyond them there was light again. A different kind of light, the eerie blue-green of the Deepstone. In the light there were rows and rows of bars, iron, rusting, sometimes catching a little of the light. It seemed to Taldian as if sometimes the light was trying to heal them, that the stone was trying to unmake and remake them into something stronger and better.

Most of the cells were empty, and a few had occupants so stilled and calcified that they were barely more than statues, more stone than self. She wondered if they knew she passed them by, if they noticed her tiny shudder, and if they felt anything upon seeing it.

And then her father’s cell. He sat crouched near the corner, between the bars and the wall. She could see that his head moved a little as she approached, but that the stone reined his neck in so that he couldn’t turn fully to watch her approach.

“Taldi,” he spoke with the stone’s voice.

Taldian hurried to the cell. She wrapped her hands around the bars. He was deeper enmeshed than since she’d last seen him. Further given over to the stone. She stifled a sob at the sight of him, his legs already melted into the floor, scarred with the pattern of the rock, emitting its soft, unnatural light. She stifled the cry that was part-scream-part-sob as it formed in her mouth.

“Child, no.”

“It’s changing you Papa.”

“It’s supposed to.”

“The next time I come here…”

“I’ll see you; I’ll know you; even if can’t respond.”

Not enough, she thought, why would you think that could be enough? But she was here now, and there was nothing she could do to change what she saw. “I’m sorry, I can’t bring you anything.”

“I only need you to bring yourself.”

“I miss you.”

“I miss everything, but nothing more than you.”

“It’s worse out there.”

“Is it?”

“The Grandmaster’s men are on every corner now, enforcing his will. Look: they’re taking up whole families now and driving them over the desert. They don’t even spread rumours about him anymore because it’s rumoured that he hears every word said about him, and his agents fly down to snuff out the wrong ones.”

“People talk.”

“People fear to talk.”

“Another generation, and then there’ll be change.”

Twenty. Twenty-five years. “And you’ll be dead.”

“Yes and no. But you’ll live. And your children will visit you in the warmth of your home after walking freely through the streets, and practicing whatever trade they choose. And then this will be worth it.”

#

Five years ago, in a crippled hut, resting against the second wall: he’d made his case then. “Let me be arrested. I won’t be the first. Once I’m in the Deep, and the stone has its way… We can teach him, then.”

She didn’t know what to call her father, not a philosopher, and surely not a priest. But he maintained the Way of the Heart despite the outlawing, and even seeing others hanged or whipped or imprisoned in that stone vault.

“Oh, Papa…” she’d whispered.

“He’ll have my wisdom. But he may surprise himself what he does with it.”

“There’s plenty of other men…” ‘Plenty’ was an exaggeration. But she ploughed on: “How much more can one man add?” Knowing that he was old in the Way, a dedicated and disciplined study. He knew what he knew – so much lore and truth and power.

She almost said, well, you’ve taught the same to me, I’ve listened to you, maybe I’ll go along with you into the Grandmaster’s dungeon and suffer the stone just like you do. She knew it was flare of pointlessness, that Grandmaster Heresweld would never send a woman into the vaults, that he’d only treasure a man’s secrets. A woman would get nothing more than the sharp end of the whip, or a noose if she stayed stiff and defiant.

“It’ll be worth it,” was what he promised her, “for everyone.”

And she thought, as he walked boldly into the square and lay down the banner in the middle of the market: worth it for you, who will sink into the stone believing himself a hero of the people and finding something midway between death and immortality as the stone incorporates your body. A fine, fine sacrifice; but what do you think is left for the rest of us. A generation of waiting? Hope slowly dying on the streets all around us.

#

Her grandmother once said: “it’s fate that chooses you. Get used to it, child. You have no more agency than the wheel that grinds your corn. No matter how hard you tell yourself otherwise.

So, was her father pulled by his destiny and nature? A path written for him by his blood, and by the place where his flesh was born and bred?

But he could, he did choose. He wanted this martyrdom.

She said, “I don’t know how much longer I can stay.”

“Don’t then.”

“Jerrutt,” – her husband – “says we should leave before we’re forced out. While we can take what we own, and before the boys” – her twin sons, not quite four – “have to walk through the desert with their feet in iron.”

“That’s what’s happening?”

“More and more. And since I’m connected to you, and they’re connected as well, through me…”

“Go.”

“As easy as that?”

“I remember you. It’s enough.”

She didn’t know if this was true: that the Grandmaster sent men to mine the Deepstone – never minding that it drove them mad – and that he melted chunks of stone in a feisty alchemical potion, and that the drink gave him everything from immortality to great strength, to mind-reading and all the world’s knowledge. Those were bold claims; and so was the prospect of sinking one’s soul into that same Deepstone, holding onto one’s consciousness and then using it to speak to the same corrupted Grandmaster.

She believed because he’d always just told her. No other reason.

“Go now,” he said.

“But-”

“You change. You want only peace. The memory more than the reality.” She thought he would have reached out to her if his arms had the capacity, “Remember: you are etched into my soul, your pattern is carved in me. You’ll be carved into the stone. All of time will remember you.”

Taldian didn’t take comfort in it. She fled the prison, almost tripping on the stairs. And she hurried out into the city. It was a place of desecration and corruption. You could see it in the surface stone, in the bricks, in the withering of what tried to grow there. Grandmaster was brilliant by comparison – since he had plundered the land and the city to inhale that brilliance and make himself one with it.

His parades were always at sunset. And it sometimes seemed as if sunset waited for him to be ready. Taldian slid in amongst the crowd. Grandmaster Heresweld passed in a bubble of light, with bright colours swishing all around him. He was draped in silks and furs, and stood the height of a giant or stilt-walker. Men paled and shortened in his orbit. Taldian was infected with the breathlessness of the spectacle – both compulsory and compelling. And she trusted her father, she loved and believed in him. But she held that little sorcerous blade against the palm of her hand. She wouldn’t use it, not today. But she kept it, she nursed it. Because the day might yet come.

 

Picture credit/discredit: author's own work