Chapter 3: The Deep Stone Sea

River had been amazing in recent months, adjusting to the big McKesson secrets and adapting to living with and among my family.

Trunk had me a little worried. The recent revelation that we might be taking a path he couldn't follow had hit him hard. He had spent too much time considering himself my right arm, and giving his own future little consideration. Perhaps something like this was a good thing.

The call of the Shar had come during a time when it would have been easy to grow complacent and content. Dad called it 'holing up for the winter', and said he did it regularly, it was in a sense, a psychic vacation from the drives and demands that moved him to act the rest of the year.

River and I were back to the Neck the next day, right after morning meal. We weren't sure where to start, so we decided to start with a little exercise. The 'drain plug' was very flat, but not perfectly so, and shaped something like a leaf, about thirty feet long and twenty feet across at its widest point. It sloped down as it ran back upriver, dropping six feet in the thirty. The upriver end was only inches above the surface of the water and the downriver end was a drop of a body length to the river.

Our sparring was nothing out of the ordinary at first, we kept things to a controlled aggression, but I knew we were going to have to go beyond this, or else find some other approach.

River made the decision for me. She suddenly flowed, and was gone! A split second later I was hit from behind by a solid whack with a staff. I spun, throwing a strike of my own, but she flowed again, and in a liquid flash, was gone. I spun, expecting to find her behind me, but she wasn't there when I did. Instead, I felt a shadow growing behind me, where she had just been, and I turned again in time to see a wall of water washing towards me. I braced myself and the water washed over me. Somewhere in the middle of it came another solid whack, and when the water flowed away, she was standing there, at the far end of the plug, a grin on her face. I let my anger rise a little. I knew how to play this game, I'd just been avoiding it. I became the rock, and quickly was rising out of it along side her, delivering a solid whack of my own to her stomach.

I tried a follow up strike, and she countered that, and suddenly we were back to a more normal bit of stick work. I drover her to her left, closer and closer to the water. Perhaps I should have remembered that for River, that wasn't a bad thing, but suddenly my last strike just splashed through her, as suddenly the River before me was a watery replica of the one I knew. It was like swinging my staff through a waterfall, there was a slight resistance, and where the stick had passed, the watery River just instantly reformed behind the stick as it passed. For a normal person, I suspected their staff would have been plucked from their hands entirely. I was so stunned by this new wrinkle I almost didn't see her counterstrike coming. I got my staff up just in time to block her blow and with a quick power-assisted back flip, I was back at the far end of the plug.

"Very good." River called, a water grin showing on her face. In a swirl of river-laden River, She was gone again and the wall of water was reforming, rising before me and slowly moving my direction.

"Not this time." I said, and reached into the rock and pulled it into me. A pillar of raw rock shot up from the plug, fifteen feet across, and it was me. I rose up thirty feet before I let myself shift into a manlike form, two thick pillars for legs and two huge rocky arms, the rocky features of my face broke into a grin of my own. "Wash me away now."

The water rose up and surrounded me, and I felt it swirling around me. I let it, and waited for the moving water to grow still and then I let myself slip back into my old flesh-and-blood self. I found a perfectly dry and warm and happy River Dambro in my arms when I did.

"That was fun!" She said when Our lips parted. "But if it wasn't so cold, I'd have you naked by now, you know that don't you?"

"Spirits take the cold!" I said, reaching for the warmth in the rock far below me and pulling it up into the stone of the plug. With the heat of the Earth for a bed, we were naked as quickly as we could be. Our lovemaking had always been of the slow and languorous type in the past. This was anything but. We were both fiercely passionate together. I needed no Transformed power to be hard as stone in the way we both needed me to be, and this River was wet and steamy as a man could hope for.

"I think we'd better bring a towel tomorrow." River said, suddenly blushing. A mist of steam was rising from the surface of the plug as we got dressed. River solved her problem with a quick dip in the cold waters of the Wind river. Cold water was not a problem for her of course. Once we were dressed I let the heat drop back into the stony depths I'd called it from.

So our days went, for several weeks. We would spend our mornings at the drain plug in the Neck, and our afternoons at the Tower. We sat in the common room one night listening to Coral practice the Cuesta. The smaller size of the instrument made it suitable for small children to learn on, and most Coral's age did, despite the current popularity of the Guitar, which has swept Arbor following Thistle and Starlight's performance at Beletara back before I was born.

"Coral?" I asked during a moment of silence.

"Sid?" She responded, cocking her head to look at me.

"How much of your future selves do you borrow, to be the precocious girl you are?"

"Its not like that, really." She answered. "Since the day I first touched a future, I became the me I met, almost. Not quite, but almost we are one person. With every new me I meet, its the same. I am now dozens and dozens of Corals, almost. My reactions, outside of being the me you know, are slightly insulated, slightly ... unconsidered might be the word." I could tell Coral was struggling to conceptualize her reality for me.

"Sid, touch your middle finger and thumb of your left hand together." She asked suddenly. I did.

"Okay." I said.

"Did you have to stop and think about the fingers, identify each one and will them to act?"

"No, I just did it." I answered.

"But until I asked, those parts of you went unconsidered, didn't they? You weren't thinking about them at all."

"No."

"But they were still completely a part of you." She said, more statement than question.

"Yes." I said, more agreement than answer. "Thank you."

"It is a two way deal, you know." She said. "I may be able to borrow the outlook and attitude of my more mature selves, but they get to borrow the little girl parts of me. I still have moments of discovery and wonder, like every young girl does. Who do you think is getting the better deal?"

Those kinds of conversations were not typical. Every night was not a metaphysical journey of some kind. But it was the Tower of the Wind. We were not exactly normal folk. Now and then we had Opal or Plank or Fleet Arral to bring us back to reality with some task or chore so utterly mundane that there was no way to not be dipped back in the pool of human normality, at least for a while.

River wound up spending a good amount of spare time helping fleet and his team of craftsmen build railings for the porches of some of the homes that were still being built, added to, or improved in the Valley. I may have lived there since I was born, but the Valley was really a relatively new settlement. River loved to sand wood, and Fleet was happy to find someone who liked to do it.

I wound up working with Plank Durmiter cutting and fitting leather covers for the latch plates in the hay barn. It was good winter work and I did like the tools and craft required for working leather. I don't think I could have made a living doing it, but it was possible to do good clean work that made Plank happy, so I was happy to do it.

It was definitely the dead of winter when the call came. It was like Dad's Light trick for letting people know he had arrived. Suddenly we just knew it was time to go to Sharhom. Getting there in the dead of winter, that was a little less certain. Mom had dropped Winter off there once, and if it had been possible, we might have just jumped directly there, but that way was blocked, even from Dad.

Mom offered to fly us there, but Grendel could only really handle one extra passenger at a time, which meant two trips.

"The pool!" Snow Hellerin said over dinner. "You can't jump to Sharhom, but you could jump to the pool in the Imhur. Its a gate of theirs. Winter came through it when the Shar sent him through the gate to the Imhur."

"If they are waiting for your arrival, then they will respond to the gate at the pool." Dad said.

We gathered our supplies, not knowing for sure how long we would be there, or what provisions would be made available to us. We wore our winter leathers, but packed our light weight gear as well. We had our staves, and our bows. River had her knives as well. We had a few bottles of wine, but that was just for form more than anything, and Mom and Dad gave us several long loaves of travel bread made from the seed of life flour, the remnant of the Sh'kxu invasion of Precipice, and an amazing food source.

"Seed of Life flour?" River asked.

"More stories to tell during those dull moments between adventures." I answered.

"Okay." She answered. "But one of these times you have to remember to tell some of these stories during the dull moments between, instead of what we usually do, or maybe after. I wouldn't want to miss out."

The Northern Imhur in winter was a study in stored heat and invading cold. The pool, buried deep in the depths of the giant forest was unfrozen, but it was cold, and you could see ribbons of ice in the high branches overhead, signs that the cold was barely being held at bay. The sound of melt water dripping slowly off of leaf and branch gave the small clearing around the pool, a hollow, somber sound.

I started to move closer to the pool and Snow put a hand on my shoulder to stop me.

"Shh!" She whispered.

<What are you listening for?> I thought.

<Shh!> she repeated mentally. Having been shushed via two different forms of communication, I shut up.

"The Rock Mote is here!" Snow said. As she did the pool pulsed, like the head of a drum and turned utterly black and still.

"Go!" She urged, and hand in hand, River and I jumped in.

There was no sensation of being in the water or being wet. One minute we were slipping through the surface of the pool, and the next we were standing on what felt like solid rock, in the middle of utter darkness. I blinked, and squeezed River's hand.

The utter blackness was not so utter after all, as our eyes began adjusting to the darkness. There were little bits of light here and there, not enough to make the area we were in truly visible, but enough to give us some idea of a large open space. Faint sounds could be heard, but their source and direction were impossible to track. Every noise was a hollow echo of some other. We stood, hand in hand and waited for someone to meet us.

And waited. The darkness remained, the noises continued, and we remained alone.

"We are being tested." I said into the darkness. It disappeared into the darkness, and only an oddly muffled echo returned.

"You think?" River answered. Her tone told me everything I needed to know. She was not happy.

I reached out to the rock and it told me what my eyes could not. This was a way of seeing I had used before, but I had used it like a spotlight, searching at a distance. Now I was trying to adjust to using it like I would my eyes. I was so intent on seeing the ground beneath my feet that it didn't register at first that the walls, near and far were rich with images and writing, a writing I had no idea how to read.

"The walls are covered with images and writing, but its written in stone and of stone." I said to River. "Even if there was enough light to see by I don't think it would be visible in the way I"m seeing it."

"Show me." River said, and I let her see through my eyes.

"I've seen something like this before, but I'm not sure where." River said.

"Some river bottom somewhere?" I asked.

"Actually, that's probably pretty close to it."

"How are you seeing all this?" River said suddenly. "Is this some function of your affinity to the stone?"

Before I could even answer, I felt River drop the contact we had. For the first since we had arrived she dropped my hand, and stepped away from me, walking a few feet towards one wall of the cavern we were in.

"Clever." She said. "Works for me too, at least as long as we stay near enough to the water for me to draw from it."

I looked through her eyes then, and what she saw through them was very similar to what I was seeing through my own.

We had some handle on the problem of our sense of vision, and no longer felt so blind perhaps, but another sense was going to be a problem, and that was our sense of time. We had been here some small amount of time so far, but how long? It had been morning in the Valley when we had began our trip. It should still be morning in this cavern. How to know?

I reached out again to the Stone of Arbor, easing my consciousness into it. I tried to drop whatever barriers were there to what I could feel, but whether anything changed or not, I didn't feel anything different.

I was sitting, cross-legged on the stone, tapping my fingers on the raw rock, thinking. I felt the vibrations of my tapping through my stone-borne senses, like a double echo, coming and going at the same time.

"Do you feel that?" River asked.

"What?"

"That drumming noise in the rock? Its stopped now."

I had stopped tapping my fingers on the stone when River spoke. She had been feeling my tapping!

"Maybe our hosts are waiting for us to ring the bell, so to speak." I said, and put the flat of my palm on the stone beneath me. I sent a pulse of power into the rock, and the entire chamber thrummed with a deep, hollow tone that I could feel move well beyond the chamber we were in. I did it again, with a little more energy, and another tone, higher and louder rang through the rock.

"Something is coming." River said. "Across the water."

It took some time for the approaching craft to reach the shore in front of us. With my stone senses I saw a boat, long and low, with a prow done in the shape of a feathered serpent. It looked like what might have been a Viking dragon boat back on Earth, except for a lack of oars or sails. As it came to rest alongside us, one side of the craft ... unfurled, is as close as I could describe it, becoming a ramp, inviting us aboard. I could sense no movement aboard her, and slipped into the wizard sight for a moment. There was magic bound into the boat, but it was a creature of some kind, but one bound in and by Magic.

"This appears to be our ride to wherever our guests wait for us." River said.

"I was just arriving at that same conclusion." I said. "Shall we climb aboard?"

There was a low bench, with just enough room for the two of us, and as we sat, our packs at our feet, the ramp collected itself back within the boat creature and we began to move. As we moved out into the middle of the vast lake, my senses began to flicker and dim a little, I was too far from the stone for what I had been doing. I pulled more power into it, and it was better, but I soon gave up in favor of borrowing River's senses.