The Waters Rising Read Free

slab they stood upon.
    “I was told about this,” Abasio remarked, striding toward the cut, horse and wagon following. “It’s called the Stoneway. It seems to have acquired a few more stones along the way, fallen from the mountain.” He went ahead, kicking small rocks away from the wheels and protecting various items of the wagon’s paraphernalia that threatened to be brushed off by the uneven walls on either side. “The woman who first built Woldsgard had it built. Her name was Lythany. She was Huold’s daughter.”
    “That would be Huold the Heroic.”
    “Very probably.” Abasio stopped for a moment, looking at the tool marks on the sides of the cut, following their lines upward to the sky, considering the work involved, the years it must have taken. The shadowed, stony pipe itself would be well lit only when the sun was directly above, though it rose steeply into sunlight at the far end. Several hundred paces later they rattled across the last of the rock and emerged onto a gravel road.
    “Grim in there,” said Abasio, not looking back.
    “Blood in there,” replied the horse. “People died making that cut.”
    “Dwarves, do you think?”
    The horse shrugged and rested his chin on the man’s shoulder when Abasio came forward to assess the view. Mountains closed from either side behind them. They stood at the narrow end of a widening green valley that fell away into the distant, hazy south. With Abasio walking beside him, the horse tugged the wagon into easy, downslope movement. Several chattering streamlets trickled toward them, joining at either side of the road into brooks plunging away to the south. Before the sun had sunk much farther the right-hand stream had found a rocky culvert and ducked under the road to join the left-hand stream, which gradually became a modest and rather talkative river. The great hand they had seen earlier, somewhat less forbidding when seen from the side, was surrounded by greenery and its fingertips were identifiable as the conical roofs of five separate towers. Within another hour, as the sun dipped behind the mountains, they approached a rustling crowd of fruit trees behind a low stone wall, the tree shadows mottling the roadway before them.
    “Apples,” said the horse, breathing deeply and approvingly. “I smell apples!”
    Directly before them a particularly old and massive tree leaned across the wall, and Abasio pulled gently on the reins as they approached it.
    “Hello,” he said to the tree. “What are you doing there?”
    A brown branch uncurled itself and peered at him between two lower limbs. “Watching.”
    “Not for me,” Abasio said. “I didn’t even know I was coming.”
    “I was watching for what I was waiting for.” The small brown person uncoiled herself further and stepped onto the wall. “Your horse talks.”
    “Ah, yes,” said Abasio. “Strictly speaking he is not my horse, though we do travel together. And though it’s true that he speaks, I’d prefer that you not mention it to anyone. Talking animals are more or less customary where I come from, but I don’t notice many of them around here.” He blinked. He saw a child. But he also saw something . . . as though the child stood within some larger, older embodiment, crystalline, barely visible . . . invisible. He blinked again. It was gone. One of those temporal twists that sometimes proved true? Or not?
    The child murmured, “I wouldn’t talk about it. People would just laugh at me.”
    “Do they do that a lot?” he asked, rubbing his eyes. He wasn’t in the habit of seeing things, but he had definitely seen something.
    “No,” she replied after a moment’s consideration. “Mostly they don’t talk to me at all. My teacher, the Great Bear of Zol, says you have to be very careful of some horses, especially their back ends, but yours seems nice.”
    “His name is Big Blue, or just Blue. My name is Abasio.”
    “Abasio. I’m called Shoo-lye,” she said. “It’s