Asimov's SF, February 2010 Read Online Free PDF Page A

shaped but fit together so seamlessly that there was no need for mortar. According to Talib, the wall had once enclosed the entire nation of the Ancients. The fragments that remained were laid roughly in a circle, with the capital in the center.
    "The stone wall,” Yafeu said. “It's more impressive than the pitiful fragment in Zwibe. Though neither looks anything like stone."
    Odion showed no reaction to the mention of his home village. Instead, he answered the unasked question in Yafeu's comment. “They call it the stone wall because people used to throw stones at the condemned while they hung. You can see the cracks where rocks flew wide of their targets."
    "The practice was discarded centuries ago,” Njeri added, before Yafeu got any ideas. “You can see how damaging it was to the wall."
    Njeri did not mention that it also damaged the people that hung on the wall, making it impossible to sew them back together. General Yafeu shrugged, then waved his hand at the guardsmen. The two prisoners were marched out to stand before the wall. Njeri pressed her palm to the forehead of each man in a silent blessing. It was ironic that Bahtir, who had once feared the ghosts of the valley, now received a blessing that asked those same ghosts to protect him.
    "Don't do this,” Bahtir pleaded. She had heard such pleas before, many times, but never from a man who had ordered others onto the wall. The former general had always seemed so brave, but that had been an illusion of his power. Now that he had no power, he had no courage.
    Njeri brushed her fingertips against the icy surface of the two mindstones in her pocket. She wondered if she would be brave, in Bahtir's place. She liked to think that she would be, knowing that the wall revealed only the truth—nothing more and nothing less. Kanika had been brave. The thought of her called back her assertion that Njeri had been wrong to put people on the wall. Did these men deserve such punishment? It wasn't her place to decide, it couldn't be. Her job was to cut and to sew.
    Odion paced in the periphery of her vision.
    She put a mindstone into the mouth of the older man first, and left him on the ground at the base of the wall. She moved on to Bahtir. Two guardsmen held him in place, one gripping each of his arms. She slid the glassy stone between his lips, and the life flowed out of his body. The guardsmen held him against the wall, and she pinned him there, driving shards of amethyst through the nine sacred points—palms and feet, hips and shoulders, and the final point through the nook at the base of his throat. The amethyst penetrated through his flesh, just until the tips touched the wall, and yet the attraction between the lavender shards and the clear stone held Bahtir firmly. His head drooped as though he bowed it in remorse, but once he was opened, smaller amethyst pins would hold the muscles of his face, and his head would no longer hang.
    Odion handed her the obsidian blade. Like the wall itself, the blade came from an older time. Mbenu, who made tools for the village, could knap a blade from obsidian, but his tools did not have the power of the Ancients in them. This blade slipped between the cells, and Njeri had learned through many years of training to trace the exact paths that would peel a man open without spilling a drop of blood.
    Her first cut sliced only skin, beginning at the top of Bahtir's forehead and moving down the midline, over his nose, and to his lips. There she paused and traced the outline of his mouth with the blade before picking up the midline once more. Chin, neck, chest, groin, all without a drop of blood. The only loss was a strand of his hair that grew exactly on the midline. Sliced away by her blade, it fell to the base of the wall.
    She sliced down the inner edge of each leg to the ankle, then drew the blade around to the front of each foot and into a gentle curve to the tip of the middle toe, completing the first vertical sequence. After that