Gravity's Revenge (14 page)

“There won’t be, if you stay the year.” It shocked Hiresha to think that there would be no living enchantresses in just that length of time.
“One could wish that you had channeled your energies into perfecting your Sands game.”

“I train at staff instead. It is the thinking woman’s weapon.”

“Words are the thinking woman’s weapon.”

“Elder Enchantress, give me your hands.” Sheamab tucked her staff in her elbow and held up a length of rope.

Hiresha considered running.
Even if my gowns would not trip me, I could never outpace a Bright Palm.

She held her arms in front of her, promising herself she would find a better time to escape.
Once I sleep I’ll have power.
The fennec scrambled onto her shoulder, and chirped distress into her ear. He started trying to dig a way through the tresses of her headdress with his furry paws.

“True greatness is only found in the common man who triumphs,” Sheamab said while constricting Hiresha’s hands with rope. “The One-Armed Smith, who shod fifty horses in an hour before sunset, so the platoon could escape the Feasters. The Planter of the Scablands, who grew enough potatoes for his family even in the wasteland’s red dust. The Never Bride, who prepared her whole life for marriage but became a Bright Palm instead to save her family.”

“Enchantresses accomplish great deeds,” Hiresha said. “We design plans for irrigation waterways. Cosima solves disputes. I cure—ah—people in my laboratory, and smiths down at the asylum.”

“Bright Palms do not boast of the feats of endurance their magic grants them,” Sheamab said. “Far more impressive when a sickly thief invades the Mindvault, without magic of his own, and steals the jewels of power from the most inaccessible crypt in the Lands of Loam.”

“A sickly thief, you say?” Hiresha worried her arms within the ropes, trying to loosen them enough for blood to flow to her fingers. Her thoughts again turned to a man who had stolen the fennec in
Oasis
City
. The enchantress remembered he had given gold to the poor under the care of the Bright Palms, which she approved of, and crafted fake gemstones, which she did not. She thought it only suitable the gods had cursed him with the Blood Judgment disease. “Is this thief named Inannis?”

After a muffled cough came a man’s voice. “At your service, Enchantress.”

15

Owl’s Hall

A man leaned against the tower door in a study of nonchalance. He wore thick clothes embroidered with black silk on grey. His hands were hidden, huddled under his arms. The light from Hiresha’s earrings gave his pale face a frozen cast, except for two splotches on his cheeks from burst veins.

Hiresha shifted to shield the fennec as best she could from him. The fox might have unpleasant memories of being held hostage at this man’s hands.

She said, “You couldn’t have climbed your way here, jewel duper.”

“A sleigh carried me, as the honored but tragically distraught Lord Yunderdones. I made certain someone thought she saw me leap, but it is ever my tendency to outlive the estimation of others.” He pulled his lips back from teeth stained with blood. His grin was collapsed by a wracking spasm, and his body shook as he suppressed a coughing fit.

An urge swept through Hiresha to club the thief to the ground with her rope-bound arms. The violence of the thought surprised Hiresha.
But he must have stolen the keystones.
He looked brittle as glass shards and far more dangerous.

Sheamab offered him her hand. When he touched her palm, the brightness soaked up his arm.
Worms
of light traced through his veins, and after a gasp, he took his first deep breath. His teeth stopped chattering.

So he serves them for their healing magic,
Hiresha thought as the Bright Palm pushed her into the tower. The thief Inannis fell into step beside Sheamab.

“I found a room for Enchantress Hiresha,” he said, “high up and secluded from the other women.”

“Windowless? Secure?” The Bright Palm walked with her staff folded under one arm, the shaft bobbing up and down above her head.

“More to the measure of well-lit and comfortable,” he said. “The enchantress escaped a very windowless and very secure tomb in
Oasis
City
. If you want to keep her, you’ll have to guard her. And you’ll want more than my knife at her throat.”

Hiresha disliked this. They knew her too well, and she worried she would not be given a chance to escape.
First I’ll need an opportunity to sleep. I can remove jewels from my gowns and enchant them with something useful.

She spoke to the thief out of frustration. “Jewel duper, you do realize that taking the keystones has killed at least three women. It wasn’t theft. It was murder.”

His foot scuffed against the tile, and Hiresha realized it was the first time she had heard him move. Apart from the one misstep, his walk flowed like oil.

He said, “I have no quarrel with any enchantress, only your goddess.”

They stopped in front of the striped wallway. Sheamab slung a rope around Hiresha’s waist. Two Bright Palms also paired up, and another attached a safety rope between himself and the thief. Two by two they ascended the wallway. The Bright Palms now all wore amulets, loose around their necks, and Hiresha hoped they had persuaded the enchantresses to remove them in their sleep rather than ripping them loose with violence. Hiresha walked alongside the thief between two tapestries of interlocking geometric shapes.

“So you attacked the
Mindvault
Academy
?” Hiresha asked. “Out of some petty vendetta?”

His large, dark eyes stared straight ahead. “When you wake each night gasping in terror that you’ll drown in your own blood, it doesn’t seem so petty.”

Hiresha could understand bearing the weight of disease, one that did not feel deserved. Her fatigue had turned into pain, a throbbing nothingness digging into her mind. Even so, she had to think that Inannis’s Blood Judgment had come in punishment.
He does forge false jewels
.

They passed through the archway of the next floor. The walls sloped from the turning of the tower. While walking, Hiresha tried to focus her thoughts. Fatigue crashed over her, washing away any plans for escape. At the same time, the shock of having seen the warden descend the cliff to her death jolted Hiresha with bursts of alertness.

In one gasp of lucidity, she remembered the thief’s misstep.
The idea of women dying discomforted him.
She could hope to entreat him to mercy, to return the keystones for the sake of the enchantress who would have to descend the Skyway next week.

“Executing enchantresses will hardly endear you to the empire.” Though Hiresha spoke to Sheamab, she did not expect to sway the Bright Palm. The enchantress did wish to give the thief another worry. “The vizier most often drowns anyone in sand who harms an enchantress. In your case he might have to resort to a burning.”

Inannis said, “Treaties have been signed after worse atrocities.”

Sheamab gripped her rope and slid a few feet as an enchantment failed beneath her. After righting herself again on the black and white tiles, she said, “I suggested a different strategy, but the final say among Bright Palms goes to the youngest present. Twenty-fourth tenet.”

Hiresha had not heard of that. “And who is the youngest in your party?”

Sheamab ignored the question as if it were never spoken.

The enchantress did not know how she felt about hearing that even Sheamab would have wished to avoid attacking the Academy. “Granting the last word to some young bumpkin who happens to have glowing fingers only further proves your order is flawed. There’s a reason why the child Pharaoh rules only in name.”

“A Bright Palm’s place is sacrifice,” Sheamab said. “I have always seen a better way, but in keeping myself alive through so many years, my judgment in the order is suspect.”

Without inflection in the voice, Hiresha had no way of knowing if Sheamab agreed with the idea or not. Then the enchantress remembered the Bright Palm would not even have the power to agree or disagree with the tenet, having lost all emotion. Hiresha’s chest clenched, but she could not tell if it was sorrow for Sheamab or an aftershock from another of the recent tragedies
.

A carving of a swooping owl stretched its stone wings over the next archway. The hall’s stained-glass windows were of gold, brown, and white and patterned in heart shapes after the face of the masked owl. A stormy gloom outside cast the hall in shadows.

Inannis opened a door full of orange light. A fire crackled in a brazier, sparks Attracted through enchantment back into the copper bowl rather than onto the jungle-patterned rug. The panes of the latched window were full of the white of snow.

“A more pleasant prison you could not ask for.” The thief unfolded his delicate hands from his sleeves, turning them over the brazier and rubbing his fingertips.

Part of him wants to please me. The human part. He’s no Bright Palm.
Hiresha dared to hope she could sway him.
The Bright Palms pay him in healing magic. I can offer him a cure.

Bright Palm Sheamab was gazing between Hiresha and Inannis in a way that tickled Hiresha with anxiety.
She can’t have anticipated my plan, yet, can she?
Her magic doesn’t grant her the power to read thoughts.

Another Bright Palm jogged into the room, holding his spear and cudgel. “I have found you, Bright Palm Sheamab—”

“Where is your safety rope, Bright Palm Gio? Falling would only waste your magic.”

“I had to come alone,” the tribesman said. “The kitchen folk have locked themselves away from us and are threatening to spoil the food.”

Hiresha blinked her eyes open and closed two times before she understood.
The servants are protesting?
She suspected Maid Janny had arranged it.

“The threat is empty,” Sheamab said. “If the food runs out, they will starve, and we will live. Did you explain this to them?”

Inannis started to say something but was talked over.

“We did not, Bright Palm Sheamab.”

Sheamab threw the thief a rope. “You will descend with me.”

His fingers pattered up and down the cord, and he cast a longing look at the brazier’s fire. “I would be best suited watching Enchantress Hiresha. My eyes combined with a Bright Palm’s forceful persuasion. Besides, the enchantress still owes me a garnet from
Oasis
City
.”

“You’ll have your trifle.” Sheamab lifted Hiresha’s bound hands and pointed at the purple jewels embedded in her fingers. “Pluck these out. Then her earrings. Shred her gowns and throw them from window. Leave her with not one jewel. The enchantress must be disarmed.”

Inannis pulled away from the brazier. “This room has become too cold for me.”

Hiresha’s eyes were huge as she watched him leave with Sheamab.
She has thought of everything, has left me with no chance.
Three Bright Palms advanced on her, unsheathing knives from belts. Two bronze blades flashed orange, and facets glinted on a third obsidian edge.

Burning, molten panic seeped through Hiresha. It felt as if her insides smoldered and blackened, and she could have cried out for Inannis of all people, for mercy, for anything. Instead of letting her sanity escape her mouth in a scream, she held it in.
I must think. I must escape.

The neutral expressions on the three Bright Palms frightened her as much as their knives.
As immovable as cliffs.
Her head rang, and every pore of her body leaked a cold sweat as their knives swept in.

The diamond in her chest flashed, its redness faint through her layers of gowns. Its enchantment had awakened from the approaching weapons, and two of the knives were Burdened to the floor and broken. Hiresha wished she could have made the enchantment strong enough to repulse a third blade, but she had not expected to be attacked so often in one sitting.

The last bronze razor cut at the gowns draped over her shoulders. It scraped against the gilt and silver embroidery. After sawing at the same stretch of fabric for a few moments, the Bright Palm lifted the blade to his eyes.

“Dull as a stone now.” He spoke in the level tone of an observation. The stubble on his broad jaw was a similar length to his short-cropped hair, as if he shaved his head and chin at the same time.

The tribesman Bright Palm tore at her gowns, but the embroidery only cut his hands. Light leaked from the wounds, but they closed in seconds. The third Bright Palm, whose mouth was so small he had a fish’s expression, picked at the buttons on her back. How long it took the Bright Palms to undress her, Hiresha could not say. Even the deft Maid Janny needed an hour for the task. The men yanked and pinched, conferring with each other about the puzzle of each layer as if she were not there.

Little of Hiresha’s consciousness was. She plunged and whirled in crosswinds of terror, nausea, and fatigue. At one point she felt she was buried in snow, frigid on the outside but blazing within from the embers that filled her.
A vessel of smoldering worry and ash.
She entertained the strange thought that her clay skin would shatter.

Her senses returned in a flash of pain when something stung her finger. Her teeth ground against each other as the tip of a bronze knife dug a garnet out from her thumb. The jewel dropped onto the rug, and her blood dripped in dark stains.

Hiresha was naked except for her red silk undergarments. Light from the brazier reflected off the diamond embedded between her breasts. The Bright Palm with enough jaw for two men held her next finger in the vice of his hand.

They mustn’t take my jewels.
When her next garnet was cut out, she also lost another measure of hope.
With nothing to enchant, I’ll have nothing left.

For one moment, she thought she might be saved. Spellsword Fos might charge into the room, his greatsword held high. Or Tethiel might even barge in and distract the Bright Palms.
But Fos fell off the plateau, and if he’s alive he’s lost an eye. And I told Tethiel to hide in the Grindstone workshop.

Waiting will be the death of me. I must act. Now.

She thrashed. She was held by the Bright Palm with the small mouth and the tribesman. The touch of their skin was at once too cold and too hot. Hiresha did not waste her time begging or pleading. Instead she clung to the thread of her focus and realized that she had but one chance left.

I must go to sleep. I must enter my dream laboratory before they plunder the last of my jewels.

She gasped and spoke through her clenched teeth. “I must sit. Or I’ll faint.”

“It’d be better if she was sitting,” the man with the knife said.

They shoved her into a chair painted with garden plants intertwining in torturous patterns. The wooden back dug into her spine. The fennec sprinted in circles around her. Between yips pitched as high as a bird’s whistle, he barked with such force that his small body twitched backward.

She lowered her head forward and closed her eyes, hoping the Bright Palms thought her in a daze of pain. Using the discipline of an enchantress, she imagined herself on a stairway leading down, away from the room where strangers carved out pieces of her.

The stairs shivered under her feet, rock scraping against rock, but she ran down them.
Have to hurry. Have to be careful. I won’t have time for a second attempt.

Forty steps separated her from the blissful darkness of dream below. To either side of the stair waited the blackness of dreamless unconsciousness, which would ruin her. With the granite sliding back and forth under her feet, she had to keep her arms out to either side to maintain her balance.