Seeklight

The words crime and punishment intrigued him. “Lady,” he spoke up—it was what he had always called her, could ever remember having called her. Not mother, although he knew that was what she was to him. “Is that part of the Descending Law?

That there’s fools?”

She stopped and looked for several seconds into the boy’s face, then sighed and went on, her steps a little slower. “No,” she said.

Daenek could barely hear her words. “No law other than what the tragedies have.” She said nothing more all the way home, and Daenek knew better than to ask questions that would go unanswered.

The Lady Marche did not turn as Daenek lagged a few paces behind, then plunged into the thick growth at one side of the path. The yellow stalks brushed over his head as he ran among them, carrying the net bag high up against his chest. A group of insects flew up in front of him, then re-united and drifted off in a lopsided O.

The field ended at the edge of a cliff overlooking the quarry, an enormous rough-sided pit chewed into the center of the hill range, a concave world all to itself. It was quiet now, no noise or motion perceptible, as Daenek looked down into its grey depths.

The quarriers had all gone into the village on their day off, to spend their wages on the street women or, with the old ones, for a few sweets to add to their bland dormitory meals. The unpainted doors of the metal-roofed buildings at one side of the quarry swung open, revealing their unlit spaces inside.

Daenek’s gaze moved away from the floor of the quarry, with its clutter of rubble and machinery, all covered with the veined stone’s dust. He looked up the sides of the chasm until he finally spotted the figure for which he had been loooking. Squatting on the far edge of the quarry, seeming more like a boulder himself than anything human, was the hulking figure of the man the Lady Marche had driven away from the house. That had happened several weeks ago, but Daenek had known for a long time before that there was someone that hid in the fields and watched them and the house—he had even caught sight of the bulky, shambling figure, squatting or moving furtively among the weeds.

But then the Lady Marche had found the watcher, sitting on his haunches at the edge of the cleared space around the house.

Daenek had watched and listened as she had stood in front of the figure, his wide face turned with an odd, mute dignity up to hers as he sat on the ground. She pointed with her stick and spoke to the watcher in a language different from what she spoke with Daenek and the villagers. The words flowed, a sternly graceful song. Her voice lost the stiff intonation with which she had always spoken before. After a few moments of her talking—at the end the strange words became gentle, a blessing—the watcher nodded slowly, his eyes cast to the dust in front of him. Then he stood up and pushed his way through the field in the direction her stick had pointed, leaving a trampled path that slowly healed as the weeds sprang back.

Over two months, and the Lady Marche had never explained who the man was or what she had said to him. Or what the language was. The buskers had their own tongue, Daenek knew, that they used only among themselves. And so did the mertzers, when they came every other year. But this had been neither of these.

The words she had spoken stayed clear and solid in Daenek’s head. It seemed as if he could turn them over and examine them, like smooth stones taken from his pocket. Or maybe they were seeds—he’d lie in his bed awake at night and hold each syllable, trying to crack its hard shell and get to the soft meat inside.

Maybe if I had more of them, he had decided, gazing out the room’s window at the night. There must be as many words as stars, a lot of them. And if I had them all…

Since then, Daenek hadn’t seen the watching man—if that was the right word; he had seemed larger than just a man—in the fields around the house. A few days later, while lying on his stomach at the edge of the cliff overlooking the quarry, watching and listening to the stonecutters at work below, he had felt a prickling sensation on the back of his neck. He had looked up and spotted the watcher’s massive shape crouched on the far, opposite rim of the quarry, gazing back at Daenek with the same mute, unreadable expression as when he had listened to the Lady Marche’s words.