第17章 The Eighth Stone

Dawn found them in the dry cellars under the fortress, in a room that had once held grain and now held three people, a stolen map, and the beginning of an answer. Zeyla worked by the last of the lamp oil, and Kulin sat with his back against the wall and read over her shoulder, and the room was cold in the way that stone is cold, which is to say that it did not care what the morning was doing outside. Zeydan's map was better than she had expected and worse than it needed to be. His surveyors had found all nine stone sites, and had excavated five, and had recorded each one in a neat, professional hand, in kilometers, with a conversion table at the bottom that was wrong in every line. But the raw observations were there: the characters, the numbers, the hours, copied faithfully from faces that Zeyla would never see. Zeydan had bought himself nine witnesses and then thrown away their testimony by insisting on measuring the wrong thing. "Number one," she said, running her finger down the page. "Same hand as the ridge at Kirmil. Number four, taken from Nekhab, matches the chip we found in the shaft. Number six, this is the one you photographed. Numbers seven and eight are recorded as sites, unmoved." She sat back. "Seven is in the flats, where the consortium believes the road ends. Eight is here. On the ridge above us, at the cliff shrine. They never touched it because they could not make the numbers work, and they decided it was decoration." "Can you solve without it?" "I can solve without all of them, if the observations are honest. But the map gives me eight, and eight is not nine, and I have learned this week not to trust a surveyor's copy when the original is a twenty-minute climb away." She folded the map. "We go up at first light and read the eighth stone with our own eyes. Then we have everything, and the fortress stops being a hiding place and starts being the last station on the road." They climbed the ridge in the gray before sunrise, and the cliff shrine announced itself the way the others had, by being the one place on a bare hillside where someone had taken trouble. A wall of dressed stone no higher than a man's chest, a flight of shallow steps cut into the rock, and at the top, set into the face of the cliff, the eighth marker, cut to one measure, its characters sharp because it had spent four hundred years under an overhang and out of the reach of rain. Zeyla was halfway up the steps when Tufan came out of the rocks on the ridge's far side and walked toward them without hurrying, and she stopped and looked at him and did not know, for a moment, what to say. "They let me go," he said, before she could ask. "Sundur, when the shooting started at Zerabet. He did not need a guide anymore, because he had the notebook and the map's coordinates and a man who could read them aloud." He stopped a few steps below her. "He also told me something on the way out. He said the notebook had a page torn from the front, and he wanted to know what was on it. I told him I did not know. That was true. But I thought about it all night, and I think I do know, now." "What?" "The page with the list. The nine places, the directions, the numbers. He found it, and he read it, and he tried to match it to the map, and the numbers did not agree with Zeydan's." Tufan looked at her steadily. "It means the list in the front of your grandmother's notebook was never the road. It was her own working copy. She had already solved it, Zeyla. Forty years ago. And then she crossed out the answer and wrote the warning and put the whole thing under her bed." Zeyla stood on the steps of the shrine with the cold wind coming down off the cliff and understood, at last, the shape of the debt she had inherited. Mehve had solved the road and then chosen not to walk it. She had spent forty years making sure that nobody else could walk it either, and in the end she had sent the notebook to the one person who would walk it anyway. "Read the stone," she said. "Then we decide what she was protecting." She climbed the last steps and put her hands on the eighth marker, and the characters were sharp under her fingers, and she began at the top and worked down, and by the third line she knew that the map had lied, because the eighth stone's season was not the season Zeydan's surveyors had recorded, and the correction changed everything. She was still reading when the first stone came over the cliff's edge and rattled down the shrine steps. Sundur's men came from both ends of the ridge, four of them, and they had learned from Kavil and from Zerabet, and this time they did not waste words. The first shot went into the shrine wall between Zeyla and the cliff. The second went over the head of the man beside the eighth stone, and that man, who had been given a rope and a pry bar and instructions, did the thing he had been brought to do. He levered the marker out of its seat in the cliff face and pushed it over the edge. Zeyla watched it fall. It turned twice in the air, a dressed stone the size of a saddlebag, and then it struck the slope below and broke into three pieces that slid out of sight into the scree. She did not need it. She had read it. She had read it twice, once aloud to Tufan and once inside her own head, and the numbers were already arranging themselves against the eight others, and the arithmetic was running whether she wanted it to or not. "Down," Tufan said. "Now." They went down the far side of the ridge, away from the shrine, into the folds of ground that fall toward the fortress, and Kulin came after them with his hand pressed against his side and blood coming through his fingers, and did not complain, and did not slow them down, and behind them the men on the ridge fired twice more and then stopped, because there was nothing left on the ridge worth shooting at. ---