The Burning Stone (Crown of Stars #3)

“What are you?” said Hugh, more command than question.

It had a humanlike form, but perhaps it was only imitating Hugh’s figure or the form of the soldiers it had destroyed. It cried out again, a dissonant lament, and now Rosvita saw that it writhed against the threads woven through the stones, as if they trapped it. “Lost, lost,” sang the creature in a vibrant bass tone that had the resonance of a bell.

It danced and leaped like flame within the pattern, its aetherical shape growing and shrinking according to an unseen tide, and Rosvita felt a chill boiling off it so deep that the backwash made her fingers and cheeks burn with cold. She could actually see through its figure into the sky and the stones.

“The path is closed behind me and before me. I only stepped down to see what had opened when the earth exhaled, oh, that was not a moment ago, or has it not happened yet?” The creature sang more than spoke in such a melange of language that Rosvita thought she was hearing Wendish and then Dariyan and then Aostan and then Arethousan, or all of them together or none of them, as if the human speech it drew over its utterances was a cloak patched together from many scraps of wool.

“What are you?” said Hugh. “From whence do you come?”

“Lost, lost,” it wailed. “The road is closed before me and behind me. The air lies heavy here. It breathes with a foul wind full of dying things. Why have I been trapped below the moon? I should have followed them upward for they escaped this place, they above us, and I am below and lost here.”

“I can only help you if you can speak sense to me,” said Hugh coaxingly.

The creature flared suddenly, as if in anger, and Rosvita threw up a hand to protect her eyes from the blinding light. As the glare faded, she peered out between her fingers to see clearly the cage of insubstantial architecture that surrounded the daimone: lines and angles and intersections lancing up from the earth toward the heavens, each one glittering as if a thousand thousand dewdrops of pure and brilliant aether clung to it, delineating its length in the same way a line of lit candles delineates a path in a garden sunk in night. Each scintillant thread shot as straight as an arrow’s flight up into the dome of heaven, and each thread pulled taut against a star. Two threads, thicker than the others, more powerful, had hooked planets: the hard flood-red glare of Jedu, the Angel of War, and the honey gleam of wise Aturna. A thread as gauzy as uncombed wool touched the moon as if its substance had been grabbed and pulled and tretched.

This was sorcery, the art of the mathematici who could bind the heavens to their will and weave its power to alter earth. Or so she had heard whispered. Even the most lenient of the church mothers had condemned it, and a hundred years ago as powerful a churchwoman as Emperor Taillefer’s daughter, Biscop Tallia, had been censured for studying it.

But it was beautiful.

“What are you?” said Hugh again, still patient, still sweet. From whence do you come?”

“Lost, lost,” sang the creature in its bell voice, and then it curled and shifted and writhed closer, imitating the coaxing lilt of his voice, thrown back at him. “Unbind me, and I will give you all that you desire.”

Hugh laughed. “You cannot give me what I desire, for you cannot control that whose genesis lies above your own.”

It writhed and wailed and moaned in thrumming, agonized tones. “Lost, lost. Open the road.”

“I do not know how to open the road, fair one,” he said reasonably. “But you will serve me because I have bound you.”

He withdrew from his sleeve the red ribbon he had used to bind closed the chest in which he kept The Book of Secrets. Dangling that ribbon over the pale patch of ground, he lowered it until one end brushed the central point of the small oval, where all the lines converged. Then he let go, and it slithered down to land in an oddly elegant spiral, twined around that center point. He clapped his hands once, clapped them twice sharply, and then three times clapped. The sound reverberated like the crack of rock splitting, and the daimone vanished from the stone circle.

He bent to pick up the ribbon. It seemed to writhe and curl in his hand like a snake as he tucked it back into his sleeve The daimone had vanished. Then he stood in silence for a moment, studying the gleaming threads woven through the stones Had Hugh’s sorcery made manifest the invisible structure that overlay the cosmos, that vast heavenly architecture created by God?

He began again to sing softly; the wind had come up, and she could not make out the words. But she could see him in the moon’s light as he took his staff and used it almost like a shuttle, actually used it to reweave the threads into new patterns ones that made the lines begin to pulse and thrum as if down their spun length she could hear the distant music of the spheres.