It would that. Luap shivered, wondering if she were right in thinking he could do “more” when he had never imagined even so much. He shivered again, as the thought crossed his mind of what such use of power might say, to those with the ability to sense its use. As the smoke of a city could rise above it, reveal it, before its towers came in sight, could their magery make obvious their location?
“I wouldn’t suggest it,” the Rosemage went on, “if this were not empty land, unpeopled. The rockfolk never accepted human magic applied to stone; that was one of the quarrels the gnomes had with us.” Luap had not known that; he wondered if she knew it as fact or legend. He wondered if the dwarven king he had seen would object; he wondered why he had been given no specific warning prohibition about that. The Rosemage continued. “If the rockfolk lived in these mountains, we would have to have their permission.”
“What about elves?”
The Rosemage shrugged. “They would not care, why should they? They work their magery with living things, not lifeless stone.”
“Gird told me once of the blackcloaks, who seem elves but are not.”
“Legends.” The Rosemage stared not quite through him, and he shrugged.
“Some are true.”
“Yes, and some horses fly. No one will argue that Torre’s magic horse did not fly, or that the gods could not turn mountains on their heads if they wished, but we never see a mountain balanced on its peak. Elves are strange enough without making them into two kinds of folk—”
She shook her head as he would have answered. “No—I have heard the tales, too. Bright elves that come by day, and dark elves that come by night, good elves living in trees and wicked ones living in holes of the ground and poisoning the roots of trees: children’s tales. These people see duality everywhere, in everything, balancing a water hero against a sky hero, stone against tree: night and day, storm and calm. That alone shows it can’t be true . . . it’s too neat, a dance instead of war.”
Luap drew a long breath, which tasted of nothing more dire than pine. The way Arranha had explained the original Aarean beliefs, the Rosemage’s ancestors and his own had also believed in a duality, but one soon fragmented into a great arch of deities and powers, from the vicious to the benign. He had never really believed in any of them, until Gird. He was sure Gird had not lied about the dangerous being that had cursed him one dawn—Gird would not bother to make up something like that, assuming he had the imagination. But he had not seen it himself; Gird could have been mistaken. He had been, after all, only a peasant . . . he would not have known what it was, only what it told him. It might have lied, if it had been as evil as Gird thought. And he did not want the Rosemage’s scorn.
“You have more knowledge, lady.” Even as he said that, he wondered why his tongue chose knowledge over wisdom, which would have made the compliment stronger. He drew another long breath of air as clean and cold and empty of human scent as any he had ever taken. “An empty land . . . a fine refuge.”
“Good morning!” That was Arranha, moving far more briskly than a man his age should, Luap always thought. Since Aris and Seri had healed him, Arranha might have been ten years younger. “A fine day. So, lady, you have the skill of stonework?”
The Rosemage smiled at him. “In a small way, Arranha.” From her tone, she did not think it that small. He peered at the hole. Luap pointed out.
“Ahh. Fine work, indeed; you have a straight eye. But you’ve done it the hard way; we don’t need that precision in moving large blocks. We’re going to need to move a lot of stone; best use the quicker ways.”
“Quicker ways?” She was rarely flustered, but she looked flustered now. Luap took a guilty pleasure in that.
“With your permission.” Not that anyone would refuse Arranha permission here, whatever Gird’s folk might have said. Luap smiled and nodded; the Rosemage waved her hand. “There, then,” said Arranha, pointing out the opposing rockface, a little distance down canyon. “Block the flow there, and we’ll have a sizeable terrace to work with, once we have soil for it.”
Arranha’s mild expression did not change; the rock buzzed, then screamed like some dire creature mortally wounded. A dark line scored it, visibly darker and deeper with every heartbeat. Finally light flashed out from it, as if someone had poured boiling oil into its wound, and a chunk of red stone the size of a cottage leaned out from the cliff and fell gracelessly into the gorge. When it struck, Luap felt the shock in his boots and knees; a cloud of dust rose above the noise and every bird in the canyon took to the air. He had no time to watch that cloud vanish in the morning wind; the old priest had begun carving another chunk, and as it fell another. By the time Arranha quit, the low end of the gorge had a pile of broken rock chockablock in its neck, and the little stream had already backed up into a muddy pond. The Rosemage stood silent, arms folded, her brows drawn together.
“There now,” Arranha said, a little breathlessly. “Yes, you can learn, lady. So can he.” With his thumb he indicated Luap.
Not all could. Luap found it easy, and the Rosemage difficult, but not more so than her finer carving. But some could not sense the stone’s inner grain, and wore out their power on cuts that led nowhere, mere slits in the stone, while others could not score even a nail’s path in the stone by magery. Aris, whose skill in healing no one matched, could do nothing with stone but carry the smaller chunks to be stacked somewhere.
Luap admitted to himself that he liked that. He, the king’s bastard, had that power in full measure; he could carve his own castle, depending on his own abilities. Day after day he labored, never letting his growing excitement affect his concentration on the task. As Arranha had taught, he felt for the rock’s own internal structure, the grain and interleaving of its substance, and concentrated his power so that it fell away as he wanted, and left sound walls behind. He learned to anticipate even the shattering that followed those falls, so that the very blocks fell readily to hand, for the builders to raise into terraces.
Others of his people had other magery; man-long blocks rose at their will, and eased into place. Sooner than he had expected, the framework in the small canyon had been done, and the lowest dam laid in the large one. The Rosemage had found a passable route to the lower lands southward, a matter of one low pass and a twisted canyon outlet where the little river ran knee deep from wall to wall. Next year they would smooth that route for horse travel. No one knew what lay beyond, but the Rosemage and Arranha both insisted some humans lived there.
As nights chilled, and frost starred the pools of still water at dawn, Luap felt well content. He had made a good beginning, it was going to work. They could not plant the next spring, but the one after that he was sure they’d have enough level land for some grain. Gird’s successor had promised food for four growing seasons, he should make it with one to spare. His careful planning seemed to lock into place like the blocks of stone forming the terraces; he took comfort in the evidence that his leadership was working.
Deep under stone the blackrobed exiles had long exhausted their own powers. Nothing they could do from within would free them, and through the ages the land around their prison lay vacant—a tangle of narrow canyons surrounded by deserts. Above, the battle scars of their defeat weathered away in winter snow and spring rain; grass and sedge, bush and tree, grew once more free of blight, until the few wanderers who came that way had no reason to suspect what lay imprisoned in one red mass of stone more than another.