The Stone Heart's Lament
Over the Vay Hills and far away

The next morningdawned with a spectacular sunrise. Rashari woke to the sound of strange birdsong as the first spear of sunlight sliced across the plain. He blinked morethan once, brain foggy and disorientated. He lay still for several secondstrying to figure out where he was and why. The ground was hard underneath himand his balled up travelling coat was not much use as a pillow. He was lying onhis back and the sky above was astounding, reflecting every colour of thespectrum and a few more besides that he had no name for. Swirling pearlescentclouds swarmed across the morning sky and the sun sent burnished ripplesoutward from the molten horizon. The light touched the edges of the clouds andthe colours within danced like they were refracted through crystal prisms;blues and greens, reds and ambers, indigo and purest silver. They reminded himof phantasma lamps. The sky itself looked like it was on fire. He watched asthose magnificent clouds stretched and contorted into fantastical shapes,ripping apart at the seams and reforming into mountainous towers.

Then the birds came.Huge blighters they were; big as turkeys but infinitely more graceful. A flockof twenty odd swooped across the glittering sky and landed with a thunder ofwings about thirty yards away. Their cawing cries rent the air; loud andobnoxious like an imperial reveille. Rashari sat up to get a better look,barely noticing the stiffness of his muscles or the low complaint runningthrough his heavily bruised body. What he did not know about ornithology couldfill an entire wing of the Orleneaux Imperial Library; therefore he didn’t tryand wrack his brain for the name of the birds. He already knew he didn’t knowit. He would remember if he’d ever come across birds like these.

They were beautiful.Large and muscular like swans with long arching necks and delicately tiny heads.A pair of pencil thin brilliant vermillion feathers rose up from each of thebirds scalps stretching outward behind their heads, almost like incredibly longeyebrows. The birds long tapered peaks were ebony black and the fine downfeathers covering their heads shaded from deepest, darkest blue to a huereminiscent of only the most flawless of summer skies as it chased down theirnecks. Their eyes were an almost alarming yellow in contrast, underlined withred. The birds bodies were marked with stripes and speckles of darkerblue-black pigmentation in random patterns across their furled wings whiletheir breasts and underbellies reflected the rainbow prisms trapped in theclouds. He saw breasts redder than arterial blood in the sunlight; others stillburned sulphur orange or flashed proud magenta. There were black bellies andscarlet, feathers of gold and cerulean, or creamy white with hints of the samehidden colours found in the very best opals, and even a few banded breastsutterly splendid in more subtle and less ostentatious tones. By far the mostimpressive appendage was the birds tails; long dragging affairs, featherssweeping the ground like opulent brooms, these tail-feathers would make apeacock weep with envy. Peacock feathers did not change colour with every shiftof the light, after all. Well aware of their own grandeur the flock strutted upand down, clawed feet scrabbling at the ground, heads thrown back giving voiceto more loud and taunting cries. They moved with a sort of regimentedformation, weaving in and out of each other’s lines, while light and colourflowed like water down each foot long tail-feather.

“Empyrean,” MadameChimera spoke softly from just behind him. Dragging his eyes from the flockRashari turned toward the sound of her voice, but his cheerful good morningdied unspoken on his lips.

“Bloody hell woman;did you sleep at all last night?”

The Madame hadclearly been up for some time before him. She was dressed in her coat andcarried in her arms more Nasri stems (presumably just harvested from thesurrounding bushes). Her sharply angular face looked drawn, golden skin draggedtaut and thin across her cheek bones and the razor sharp point of her chin. Hereyes looked hollow, sunken in deep bruised shadow, and her cropped white hairwas limp and lack-lustre. It was quite a shock. Throughout their misadventures MadameChimera had managed to maintain an air of unruffled tranquillity. Underneaththe blood and the dirt she had remained flawless – until now.

“Yes.” She glared athim but the attempt was tepid at best. She moved arthritically dropping herbundle of stems and lowering herself down to the ground like an old woman. Sheeven rubbed her lower back as she did so. Rashari did not even try to keep hisincredulity from showing on his face.

“Are you feelingquite alright?” He asked, aiming to sound solicitous and knowing that he failedeven before Madame Chimera shot him another lukewarm glower.

“I am fine.” She toldhim, sounding waspish and stung.

Rashari decided thatretreat was the best part of valour and swiftly backed away from thisparticular conversational precipice. “Glad to hear it.” A little desperately hesought about for a new conversational gambit (because the gods only knew he’dnever pick silence, no matter how far he ended up cramming his foot in hismouth). His gaze found the Empyrean birds once more. They had gathered in arough semi-circle around something lying in the grass. As he watched one of thebirds nipped and bit at another, squabbling for a place closer to the thing inthe grass. It was then that he realised the birds had gathered around thecarcass of the Yammik’a’lim (Madame had dragged it away some twenty yards ormore from their camping spot once darkness fell the night before. She said thatit would not be wise to keep carrion too close by where they slept).

He heaved a longsigh, “Of course they’re carrion eaters. I should have known.” One of thebeautiful birds wrenched free a gobbet of decomposing flesh, threw back itshead, and gobbled the morsel down with a series of undulating movements of itsthroat. “Is there anything out here that isn’t a blood thirsty fiend?”

“It is the way of thenatural world,” Madame Chimera told him distantly, understanding what he meantwithout really understanding the sentiment behind his words. “Predators andprey, death and decay; all form part of the Mother’s realm.”

“Hm,” Rashari hummednoncommittally. He had a feeling this was another potentially disastrous avenueof conversation and wisely decided to abandon it in favour of some covert (orat least quiet) observation of his travelling companion.

He knew relativelylittle about the sum and substance of Madame Chimera’s life before they hadmet, and generally he was not especially interested in prodding her intotalking when it was abundantly clear she did not want to. This was not to sayhe wasn’t curious, only that he had realised almost immediately that behind thenear impregnable wall of Madame Chimera’s impassivity lay a welter of uglysecrets waiting to be exposed to the light.

Much in the way ofany good theft a full frontal assault on Madame Chimera’s vaulted solitude wasalmost destined to fail, therefore Rashari had decided to play the long game. Madame’ssecrets, and the pain she did not hide anywhere near as well as she thought shedid, were not the sort of secrets meant to be kept. They were too big, theirmagnitude too great a burden to be carried alone. Rashari did not especiallyhold to the notion that a problem shared was a problem halved, and certainly hehad little time for the trite belief that confession was good for the soul (heknew damn well it wasn’t good for the body -not unless one had an elastic neck). Still he did know that somesecrets, the ones that left shadows in the eyes and wounds on the soul, thesort he had in droves and strongly suspected Madame Chimera did as well, werethe sort that found a way of coming out all on their own. They were likepriceless heirlooms or chests full of jewels. You could hide them away from thelight for decades, but you couldn’t silence the rumours or erase all trace thatthey existed. There was always someone who remembered, or someone who possesseda piece of the story you couldn’t silence, even a sly thief with the means todig out their location and steal them away no matter how well you thought youhad hid them.

Madame tried toprotect her sorrow, her secret shame, through enforced isolation. She builtwalls of stoic coolness and feigned indifference; walls that Rashari had had notrouble scaling. He would like to claim this was all a consequence of hisblinding charisma, fantastic good looks and undeniable brilliance. He wasn’tquite that conceited however. He knew the real reason was far more prosaic. Hewas simply the first person to make the effort. The first person to reach out,seize her hand (literally and metaphorically speaking) and drag Madame out ofher self-imposed hibernation and back into the screaming chaos of real living.It had been a gamble. The Madame was far from weak willed or easily manipulated.She could have rebuked him and walked away. He certainly hadn’t wished tocoerce her (nor would he have the means to do so) but in the end, and much ashe had hoped, Madame Chimera hadn’t left him. In fact he thought that in someway she had rather enjoyed their adventure so far (constant threat of a painfuldemise notwithstanding). Certainly she had pried into his secrets without anythought to how unfair that was, given the lengths he was prepared to go tosafeguard her privacy.

But now something hadchanged. The nature of the game had altered. Madame Chimera was hidingsomething new; a secret freshly acquired. Every instinct he had for this sortof thing screamed out that this was a secret he could not allow her to hidefrom him. The rest of her secrets, the ones he would like to know if only inexchange for all the secrets he had shared with her, and the ones that wereless secrets than they were pieces of her very nature – those could wait. Timealone would reveal them. This new secret felt more urgent and infinitely moredangerous. It felt like something that could hurt them both, severely. Theproblem was he didn’t know what to do about it. He’d already started playingthis game one way and changing tack now would be disastrous, especially as ithad become evidently clear that Madame Chimera didn’t trust him yet. He wasstuck. There was nothing for it. He’d just have to keep his trap shut, wait,and hope that this particular secret wouldn’t blow up in their faces until after they’d managed to deal with theHeart of Anoush and get back to civilisation. Cynic that he was Rashari knew thosewere some pretty long odds.

*******

“Y’know, hideous beastiesand plant-monster contagion aside; it’s really quite lovely out here.” Rasharisaid (or, more accurately, panted) dropping down on a worn, flat stone lookingout over a beautiful promontory half way up one of the hills beyond which theogdegre resided (allegedly – he’d believe it when he was face to face with oneof the green skinned, horned giants –and not a moment before). His vantagepoint gave him a fantastic view down into a secluded valley carved out of anatural basin between hills. The valley was thickly wooded, the dark green topsof the trees shining in the bright sunlight. Occasionally he caught the whiteflash of circling birds dipping in and out of the canopy many feet below.They’d been climbing for hours. The ascent had begun gently enough, butRashari, who had wiled away his early childhood in the Adran province of Iona –a land with more than its fair share of hills and valleys – had rememberedenough of his childhood spent clambering up great escarpments of land, to knowthat soon enough the real climbing would begin. And it had, with a vengeance.The air got thinner, the biting bugs nastier, and the sun impossibly hotter.All the while the ground continued to slope upward, the angle increasing inacute severity with every laboured step.

Had he not beenbattered, bruised and struggling to compartmentalise a battalion ofinter-related worries (Was it just his imagination, or was the throbbing in hisleft hand getting worse? Did his fingers look greener this morning?) He mightalmost have enjoyed this. There was something pure and strangely satisfyingabout simple physical exertion, stretching his legs and breathing in clear,unpolluted air under a radiant sky on a glorious sunlit day.

“The day is fine,”Madame conceded coming to sit down beside him on the sun warmed stone. Shehanded him a fistful of nasri berries to chew on and for a few moments they satside by side in silence. Smith, who still disdained using his multiple legs forwalking more than a half mile in one stretch, jumped lightly off her shoulderand skittered off to investigate a batch of wild brambles growing near theedge. Silently Rashari warned Smith that if he fell down into the valley thatwas it, he was not climbing down to pick up all the shattered pieces. Smith, withthe utmost dignity, did not deign to reply.

“There is not muchMiasma here.” Madame said her quiet voice immediately hooking his attention.She was looking out over the edge, gaze opaque, following the rambunctiousflight of a couple of energetic hunting birds wheeling and swooping above thevalley. “The land here repels it.”

“Why?” Rashari wasgenuinely curious about this. Madame had told him a little about the GreatWound and the series of low mountain ranges stretching out from the canyon. He’dheard of the canyon before, of course, but he’d always heard it referred to asthe Battlan Canyon, or the Phantasma Cleft. The canyon was supposed to containa vast and untapped vein of purest phantasma ore, enough to dwarf the entiretyof the stores found under the Bhuvam Isles. Both the Adran Empire and Dushkulandhad sent expeditions to build mining rigs out there over the years and withoutfail every expedition had ended up in abject failure (not to mention horrible,bloody death for the poor buggers sent to do the mining). The native Djinn whoclaimed the site as their holy land took the credit for most of those failures,but the canyon itself had stolen the lives of many, or so he’d heard.Eventually even the great Imperial powers of Aldlis had been forced to give itup as a bad job and go home. It seemed fitting to him that the Chimeri believedthe canyon to be a scabrous wound on the face of Aldlis and a thoroughlyaccursed place to boot.

“My – the Chimeri,” Madame Chimera began andimmediately corrected herself – Rashari had noted that she seemed to do thatoften when she spoke of her native people – “believe that these hills are partof the original injury to Mother Aldlis, and until she heals the land willproduce no anima –no raw magic – and without anima there can be no miasma.”

“I take it from yourtone that you are not completely at one with this view?”

A frown touchedMadame’s features, not upset, but more thoughtful. He sensed that she wasconsidering his question and her answer carefully. Irrespective of his privatepromises to patiently abstain from conjecturing about her secrets, it was clearto him that many of Madame Chimera’s private fears and ill-concealed sorrow hadits origin in whatever set of circumstances had led her to leave her home.There was always conflict in her when she thought or spoke about the Chimeri.This was one area where he was completely sincere in his promise not to pry. Heunderstood only too well the pain that came from running away from one’s homeand loved ones. He’d been a prisoner in his old life and his decision to leavehad been a matter of survival – he would always believe that – but that did notmean he didn’t look back and wonder aboutthe road not taken. He doubted Madame Chimera had run away for the same reasonshe had (obviously) and she seemed to have much more anger andself-recrimination in her about her so-called ‘exile’ than he did about hisescape, but all the same, the sense of loss was one he knew all too well.Leaving behind an entire way of life, even one that was in every way untenable wasstill a feeling akin to tearing oneself in half. The bleeding continued longafter the scars had set in.

“I used to believecompletely,” Madame Chimera said now, contemplatively, “there was much that wassaid that I believed without question. Chimera do not question that which isknown. The Great Wound is full of poison, that poison you humans callPhantasma. Phantasma dispels miasma which is full of anima. These hills alsocontain veins of phantasma deep within, ergo the miasma is thin here.” Sheturned to meet his eyes, her gaze oddly challenging. “You humans use science toexplain things, stripping away all poetry and beauty from the world, yet in theend the Chimeri and the scientists say the same things, do they not? Anima andphantasma do not mix.”

“Well, not without acatalyst,” He smiled a little wanly. He’d been raised by a great scientist andMadame Chimera’s veiled contempt could have been meant precisely for hisfather, except that in his own way, Matthias Trelawn had always had a romanticimagination. A purely logical mind could not, would not, justify the things hehad done in the grandiose and self-aggrandising manner his father had. Perhapsif Matthias had been less a visionary and more staid in his passions a lot ofthings would have been better all round. “Whatever the reason,” He saidstoutly, “I, for one, am pleased that the ground under my feet shows no sign ofshifting.”

“Indeed,” the Madameagreed, although she still sounded only half present. Shaking her head a littleas if to clear it she stood from the rock. “We should keep moving. The daygrows long and we have yet to reach the other side. I do not relish the thoughtof making camp up here.”