Ch. 133 The Weight Of Stone

Chapter 133: The Weight of Stone

Aurelia stayed long enough to hear Evelyn return.

That mattered to all of us.

My wife came down the garden path carrying her shoes.

I looked at them.

“Difficult patient?”

“A muddy shortcut.”

“And her mother?”

“Resting. Ilyen has seen her.”

Evelyn sat beside us and held out her arms for Carol.

Our daughter went to her with immediate interest in the loose strand of hair beside her cheek.

Aurelia watched them.

“Were you able to help?”

“Yes.”

My wife smiled.

“I knew where to begin this time.”

Aurelia’s hand rested over Garrick’s back.

“Good.”

She stayed a little longer.

When she finally passed him to me, she looked tired, but the edges of her sleeves were still whole.

“I would like to leave before you all start watching my hands,” she said.

I glanced away.

Evelyn laughed.

The next morning, Eleanor took the new construction golem to the lower lane.

By breakfast, six people had told me about it.

One said it was enormous.

One said it was too small.

A third wanted to know whether it could move his shed.

“What’s wrong with the shed?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

“Then why move it?”

“My wife wants it somewhere else.”

That seemed a sounder explanation than several I had heard in council.

I directed him to Eleanor.

Then wondered whether I had made an enemy.

The golem stood beside a stack of dressed stone.

Its feet had spread slightly against the earth.

Two workers attached a sling beneath a block while Eleanor watched.

Jerrit stood at the receiving end, near the new drain wall.

Castellan waited beside the frame.

“Lift,” Eleanor said.

The block rose.

Slowly.

There was no groaning timber.

No team of men leaning against ropes.

The golem turned, took three deliberate steps, and lowered the stone until Jerrit raised a hand.

“Hold there.”

It stopped.

Jerrit checked the bed beneath it.

Then stepped back.

“Down.”

The block settled.

For a moment, nobody spoke.

Eleanor crouched to inspect the join.

Then she pointed toward the next stone.

I watched three more placements before going closer.

“Does it understand everyone?”

Castellan turned toward me.

“It follows the appointed work leader. Others may give a halt command.”

“Anyone?”

“Yes.”

“That seems useful.”

“It was Eleanor’s first requirement.”

She heard her name.

“People notice things from different places.”

Jerrit nodded without looking up from his line.

The golem lowered its empty arm.

A boy standing beside his mother whispered something.

“What?” she asked.

“Does it get tired?”

Castellan answered.

“It needs to stop when its stored power falls.”

The boy considered that.

“Like Father before supper.”

His mother pressed her lips together.

Jerrit looked over.

Apparently he was Father.

The trouble came at the fifth block.

The golem lifted it.

Turned.

Then stopped with the stone hanging above the lane.

One of its knees had settled farther into the ground than the other.

“Hold,” Eleanor said.

It was already holding.

Castellan moved toward it.

I felt the weight of the suspended stone and reached instinctively.

Eleanor looked at me.

“Support the load. Don’t lift the frame.”

I obeyed.

The pressure settled into my working.

Jerrit cleared the area beneath the block.

Two laborers brought timber.

For several minutes, the entire lane became quiet and attentive.

Then Eleanor had us lower the stone onto the timbers.

The golem stood empty.

Its right foot had sunk through a crust of hard earth into something softer beneath.

An old buried ditch.

Nobody had been hurt.

That did not stop Eleanor from looking furious.

Mostly with the ground.

“We walked this.”

“Yes,” Jerrit said.

“We tested it.”

“Yes.”

Castellan knelt beside the sunken foot.

“The frame recognized the change in angle and stopped. Its ground assessment did not identify the hollow.”

“Can that be improved?” I asked.

“Yes. But I cannot promise it will detect every weakness.”

Eleanor straightened.

“Then we mark a tested path and use spreader boards beside the excavation.”

She looked toward the watching crowd.

“And everyone gives us room.”

They did.

I let my working fade.

For the first time that morning, I understood the new golem as something other than a promise.

It was a tool we would have to learn properly.

A very strong one.

Oswin came after luncheon.

He examined the damaged ground with his stick.

Then crouched and laid a hand against one of the stones exposed near the ditch.

His eyes narrowed.

“Old drain.”

Jerrit joined him.

Within an hour, they had found a buried channel running beneath the lane.

Most of it had collapsed.

Some of it had not.

Eleanor stood over the opening.

“Well,” she said.

I waited.

“This explains the wet cellar at the corner.”

The owner of the cellar, who had joined us without invitation, looked deeply vindicated.

“I told someone.”

“You told me,” Eleanor replied. “Now I know why.”

He seemed satisfied.

By evening, the golem was moving spoil from the exposed channel.

Its first day had produced less new wall than planned.

It had also found a problem we had been walking over for months.

Evelyn heard about the incident before supper.

“Did you lift anything you shouldn’t?”

“No.”

She looked at me.

“I held something exactly as instructed.”

“Eleanor’s instructions?”

“Yes.”

“That is reassuring.”

We were sitting in the nursery while Garrick attempted to move toward a wooden ring.

He had worked out that his legs were involved.

He had not yet persuaded them to cooperate.

Carol watched from beside him, apparently content to let him conduct the research.

My wife rested against my shoulder.

“Fen came back today.”

“How is his hand?”

“Healing well. Soren let me examine it first.”

“And?”

“I missed some tenderness near the edge of the wound.”

She said it calmly.

“He showed me. I found it the second time.”

I kissed her temple.

Garrick pushed hard with one foot and turned himself sideways.

Both of us leaned forward.

The ring remained where it was.

Our son looked offended.

Mary brought the Hall of Accord copies the following day.

We spread them across the small council table.

Four remaining attestations.

Aurelia had asked us to examine the sun-marked entry first.

Not because the others mattered less.

Because she recognized the way that one drew on her strength.

Castellan placed a thin sheet beside it.

“The office named here appears in three surviving records.”

I read the title.

Keeper of the Eastern Flame.

“An office of Avar’s temple?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“Originally, a sanctuary beyond Halvane’s eastern road. I cannot establish whether it remains there.”

Mary laid down a newer map.

“Sabine’s people may know the present name.”

I looked at the sun.

After Soren.

After Mara.

After Cael.

I disliked how familiar it had become.

Cael came when we asked.

He read the title.

Then sat down.

“I know the office.”

I leaned forward.

“It still exists?”

“Yes.”

“Who holds it?”

“I knew the previous keeper. I would need to ask who succeeded him.”

“What does it do?”

Cael glanced at the attestation again.

“Oversees several old foundations. Confirms certain blessings. Keeps the records of endowments made in Avar’s name.”

His eyes moved to the line describing renewal.

Then stopped.

“What have they been renewing?”

“Aurelia’s restraint.”

For a while, he did not speak.

Then he looked at me.

“I was required to send reports to that office.”

“About what?”

“Patients received. Blessings used. Whether the house remained obedient to temple instruction.”

The room seemed smaller.

Evelyn sat beside him.

“Did you ever see anything about Aurelia?”

“No.”

He answered firmly.

Then looked back at the page.

“No. But there were entries we were told to copy without alteration.”

“What sort of entries?”

“Continuance prayers. Old forms read at the beginning of the year.”

My wife’s hand tightened around her pen.

“Do you remember them?”

“Some.”

Mary turned to a clean page.

Cael began slowly.

The words meant little to me at first.

Light preserved.

Disorder restrained.

Judgment maintained.

Then he reached a phrase Castellan had translated from the attestation.

The keeping of the bound mercy.

Cael stopped.

Nobody asked him to continue.

“I thought it meant restraint in ourselves,” he said.

“The mercy kept within discipline.”

I looked at the copied seal.

A prayer could be taught long after the people teaching it had forgotten what it touched.

That did not make the thing it sustained harmless.

It did make the task ahead more difficult than finding one person to blame.

“Could reciting it renew the working?” Evelyn asked.

Castellan’s eyes dimmed slightly.

“I cannot establish that from the words alone.”

“We’ll ask Aurelia,” I said.

Cael rubbed a hand over his face.

“If I helped—”

“We don’t know what it did,” my wife said.

He looked at her.

“We find that out first.”

Soren joined us later.

He remembered the same prayer.

A shorter version.

He had read it aloud at the beginning of each year while serving Avar.

When Mary showed him the phrase Cael had recalled, he stared at it.

Then he looked toward the chapel window.

“She knew.”

I frowned.

“What?”

“She knew where I’d come from. What I’d been taught.”

He sat down.

For a long moment, his hands lay still on the table.

Then he said, “I would like to be there when you ask her.”

“So would I,” Cael said.

We sent no accusation to Halvane that afternoon.

We sent inquiries about an office.

Its keeper.

Its records.

And the oldest form of a prayer.

That night, Aurelia listened beneath the quince tree.

We told her what Cael and Soren remembered.

Her expression became grave.

“I know those words.”

“Were they used when you were bound?”

“Yes.”

Evelyn leaned forward.

“Do the people saying them know what they’re doing?”

“Some may. Most may not.”

“And does saying them give power to it?”

Aurelia looked down at her hands.

“If the prayer is received through the old consecration, it can.”

I thought of Soren sitting at our table.

Of Cael going quiet halfway through a sentence he had once spoken without fear.

“They want to ask you themselves.”

“Then they should.”

“Cael thinks he may have helped keep you there.”

Aurelia closed her eyes briefly.

When she opened them, she looked tired.

“I would like to speak to him before he spends too long alone with that.”

We arranged it for the following afternoon.

Until then, there was work.

The drain needed clearing.

The golem’s route needed marking.

Evelyn had lessons.

I had a meeting about the road to Westmere.

For once, I was grateful that none of those things could be solved by sitting at my desk and becoming angrier.

Before council, I went down to the lower lane.

The construction frame lifted a broken section of drain cover.

Jerrit guided it toward the waiting cart.

Oswin watched from a stool.

Eleanor stood on the boards she had ordered laid across the soft ground.

This time, the golem’s feet remained level.

The stone came down where it should.

I watched until the sling went slack.

Then I went back inside.

Aurelia arrived before the afternoon bell.

Soren and Cael waited beside the basin.

Evelyn stood with them.

I remained near the door.

Cael bowed.

Then tried to speak.

Aurelia crossed the space between them before he managed more than her name.

She took his hands.

I saw him look down at them.

The hands with which he had healed people.

The hands that had once held a book open at the wrong prayer.

“Tell me what you were taught,” she said.

He swallowed.

Then began.

I closed the door gently, leaving them the quiet they needed.