Dream Storm Sea
Authors: A.E. Marling
by
Copyright © 2013 A.E. Marling
Cover illustration by Valentina Remenar
Internal illustration by Bartosz Milewski
Graphic design by Raymond Chun
Editor: Kelcy Perry
First electronic publication: December, 2013
Second Edition
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Contents
:
Chapter 2: Battle of Wits and Gems
Chapter 3: Three Heads, One Mind
Chapter 5: Stone of the Sleepless
Illustration of Dream Laboratory
Chapter 11: Escape on the Wind
Chapter 20: Walls of Wind and Storm
For my
Reading Vanguard:
M.J. Scott
Christina K.
Stephanie N.
Robin Lythgoe
Jack & Nancy M.
1
The Diamond Insult
The crystal could have choked a cobra, and the absence of so large a gemstone left a bald patch amid the trinkets. Enchantress Hiresha whirled her focus around the rest of the merchant’s carpet, over a sculpture of keys melted together, past a necklace decorated with a rodent’s backbone, desperate to believe her prize had only been shifted to another spot.
The gemstone miracle was gone.
Hiresha had abandoned her palanquin to duck through alleyways, to squeeze between stalls selling melons and papyrus paper, and she still had arrived too late. She felt poisoned.
“You sold it.” She swayed with a nausea of disappointment and sleepiness. Her finger listed as she pointed to the emptiness on the threadbare rug. “Did you know that gem’s value?”
The young merchant pursed her lips into a pink smudge. “It was just sky quartz. Too big to be worth anything.”
A paragon blue diamond,
Hiresha thought,
a once-in-a-lifetime find.
“My art brings beauty to the overlooked.” The merchant fidgeted with a finger scrawling along her neck, then pointed to her other wares. “Madam Enchantress, perhaps you—”
“My dear girl, you weren’t paid anything for the gem, were you?” Hiresha took the young woman’s hand between her own purple gloves. “What is your name?”
“Chesa. And I was paid.”
“Not a fair price, unless your calmness is a state of shock. The crystal possessed octahedron substructure and refracted light in a manner no quartz could.”
Hiresha’s words made no impression on the merchant. A reply came not from her but a man who must have overheard. His voice burst over their shoulders.
“Enchantress Hiresha, how could you tell the degree light bent through this gem? You never even held it for study. If you had, you never would’ve let it go.”
Hiresha dragged one foot around at a time to look. The market was a celebration of color. Baskets burst with orange, purple, and green. Carpets hung in mazes of reds, browns, and teals. Hiresha’s eyes narrowed at a heart-sized chunk of blue ice. Or so the diamond appeared, uncut and raw.
A merchant lord clutched it, the same man who had spoken. She recognized him by his cape of gilt beads, which clattered as he stepped closer. Above his face-splitting smile his nostrils gaped as hairless pits.
“Jibade.” She said his name like a grunt of pain. “And what will you do with your swindled gem? Throw it to a butcher to cut?”
“This stone deserves the best jewel carver in the Lands of Loam. Yourself.” Jibade pried loose a copper-wire setting from the gemstone. The eight strands had been wrapped to resemble a long-legged orb weaver. Jibade tossed the metalwork to the plaza tiles. “The golden-eared god of fortune has given you the opportunity to make this gemstone your own.”
All Hiresha’s life she had desired to carve such a paragon, to unlock its inner beauty, to transform it from a glassy rock to a faceted beacon of mathematical triumph. Generations would marvel at it.
And what wonders might I enchant in such a jewel?
I must rescue it.
Her dry throat pained her. “Your price?”
Jibade named a sum in gold. It was everything she hoped it wouldn’t be.
Hiresha could not countenance paying Jibade more coin than Chesa, the trinket merchant, would earn in twenty lifetimes. The young woman stared at the tangle of copper discarded on the street, the remains of the spider setting she had crafted for the gemstone. Her throat clenched, and she looked like she had swallowed a thorn.
“Why should you profit so?” Hiresha asked him. “You’ve done no more than elevate the gem above the ground for a few minutes.”
“Ah, but you’d have the satisfaction of buying this jewel from Jibade the Magnificent.”
Hiresha suspected he coveted more than coin.
He wants to boast of this windfall. To be called the greatest merchant in the empire, the pet of the gods, he who plundered a king’s ransom in minutes.
“I’ll never pay that price,” Hiresha said. “Nor any other you name.”
“The legendary Enchantress Hiresha will give up her stake in the gem find of the century?”
“I didn’t say that.” Hiresha rested her brow against her palm, trying to herd her sleepy thoughts into order.
Jibade’s smile crystallized across his face. He looked behind Hiresha, toward her bodyguard, Fos. The hilt of Fos’s greatsword angled forward over his shoulder as he peered at the gemstone.
“The way I see it,” Fos said, “Hiresha doesn’t need your name on that stone. Not when hers is the Lady of Gems.”
Jibade clamped the diamond against his chest. “An enchantress once seized my property. ‘For the good of the empire,’ she claimed. I petitioned Pharaoh, and your Academy was forced to return the jewels plus grievance fees.”
“As I am not a brigand, the point is moot,” Hiresha said. She grinned, having thought of a better way than brutishness to acquire the diamond. “Jibade, you have insulted Chesa, slighted me, and belittled the diamond by purchasing it with a pittance. For redress, I challenge you to a contest of jewels.”
Jibade’s splinter-thin eyebrows curved upward. “A duel?”
“Of gem craft. If I master you, you must sell the diamond back to Chesa. For no profit.”
He winced.
“And then I’ll buy it from her for a fair price,” Hiresha said.
Chesa did a triple blink.
Jibade balanced the diamond in front of his face. “My stake would be this gem rough. What could you wager that approaches its value?”
Hiresha considered the sash draped over her shoulder. Folds of tiny pockets along its length each held a gem. Without her jewels, she could not practice enchantment.
Would they be enough to tempt Jibade?
If he were wise, he would walk away from the duel. The lords of the empire respected profits over posturing. Hiresha needed to risk a treasure so monumental that Jibade’s peers would ridicule him for leaving it on the balance.
Her earrings would tempt him. Diamond constellations dangled on either side of her face, and they shone with the dreaming soul of an elder enchantress. The rest of the Academy’s administrators would castigate Hiresha if she lost such legendary jewelry to a civilian.
Not that I would.
She did not believe his greed for jewels could outmatch her love and lore.
“You have no gem to match mine?” Jibade’s grin flashed with gold-capped teeth. “So disappointing. I’d have been delighted to entertain you with a jewel puzzle.”
“I’ve no single jewel that’ll suffice,” she said, “so I’ll wager my collection entire.”