Gravity's Revenge (16 page)

18

Hall of Crystalline Records

Shelves glittered blue in the light of Hiresha’s earrings. If not for the plaques enumerating each hexagonal crystal formation, she could believe herself in a quartz cavern. Each crystal cluster contained enchanted records of transactions of the Academy, monies received from donors and tuitions, notations of gold and other precious materials dispensed for magical research.

Hiresha cared little for any of that and was only too happy to shove a shelf onto the Bright Palm.

Hundreds of crystals tipped, tinkling onto the tiles and exploding in shards that flared pink as their enchanted records died. Hiresha might have cackled, if not for the frozen muscles of her chest.

The Bright Palm stood in the wreckage of the shelf. He tugged two bronze nails from his belt, the spikes jutting downward from his fists. Silver wires embedded in his flesh shifted direction as his muscles flexed, and he lunged at her.

Hiresha scrambled away, weaving between the shelves.
He means to kill me.
Hot fear thumped out from her heart only to burn against the numbness in her limbs. Her knees wobbled, and she realized that she could barely move, that he would catch her in moments.

A sense of doom hit her a second before the Academy’s enchantment gave out. Her feet lifted from the floor. She fell toward the ceiling along with a rain of crystals.

Tumbling upward, she flung her arms above her head. She wondered if the ceiling’s stone would be any gentler than the Bright Palm’s spikes. Her eyes pinched closed.

Her shoulder smashed into tile, and she felt herself scooting across a slope. She slid to the center of a dome then halfway up the far side of the ceiling. She came to rest at the middle of concentric sphere designs, amid the crunching remains of crystals.

Glancing up, she saw the fennec barking at her on the floor. The Bright Palm was unwinding a rope from his belt and wrapping it around a spike.

Transparent pieces of crystal were levitating around her, and with a shock she realized the Academy was reasserting itself to counter gravity once again. Soon she would tumble back to the floor, and it lacked any sort of slope to break her fall.

If the enchantress could have spoken with the Academy then, her words would have been stern.
Make up your mind, would you? Fail or don’t.

A darker piece of crystal caught her eye as it floated past her face. It was triangular and faceted.
My diamond!
She caught it as her hair drifted upward. Placing the gem in her mouth, beneath her tongue, seemed safer than trying to hold it in her numb fingers.

She pushed herself off the ceiling, drifting toward the nearest column. Wrapping her arms around it, she started sliding head-first toward the ground.

The yips of alarm from the fennec made her all too certain the Bright Palm waited for her at the base of the pillar. She pushed off the marble, rolled on top of the nearest shelf.

“Where is Bright Palm Choen?” The man below shoved at the shelf, tipping her.

Arms flailing, she caught hold of the next shelf and scrambled on top.

Amid the crashing of crystal, the Bright Palm said, “What have you done with Choen?”

“Choen? Was he—He was the one who chased me up the tower?” She hopped to the next shelf, almost fell, leaned backward for balance.

“Yes.”

She dashed across two more shelves, toward a window. “I stuck him to the top of the
Recurve
Tower
. Maybe he’ll freeze into an ice sculpture. It w-won’t be the first time an oddity was left up there as a jest.”

Dropping in front of the window, she slapped it open. Looking back, she saw she had a moment before the Bright Palm could see her between the shelves. As she had hoped.

She swung herself outside, clinging to the window frame. The error in her plan occurred to her as her numb fingers began to tremble, sliding down the edge of the frosted sill, trailing wetness.
I might as well try to cling to an icicle.

Hiding against the side of the tower, she heard his clomping strides coming closer.
Hurry,
she thought.
What a time for a Bright Palm to be slow.

He leaped out the window after her, no doubt thinking gravity would pull him back to the side of the tower as it had before. But this stretch of tower was close to vertical, and he would track a straight course the hundreds of feet to the plateau below.

A laugh of cold phlegm crackled in Hiresha’s throat.

Her teeth clicked closed when the Bright Palm twisted about mid-air and lobbed the spike. A rope uncoiled behind the bronze missile. She thought he might have aimed at her, but the metal nail fell through the window, serving as a grapnel that pulled the Bright Palm against the wall.

Hiresha scrambled back inside. Putting both her hands beneath the spike, she flipped it upward and back out the window. With a certain satisfaction she watched the rope and bronze head snake downward, away from the tower. She craned her neck, hoping the storm would ease enough to see the Bright Palm crushed against the plateau, at last reasonable in death.

A clattering sound made her push herself even farther over the sill to see the Bright Palm, not in a state of glowing pulp and bones but against the side of the tower. He had used the time on the rope to swing to a lower window. Now he was smashing a spike through the glass. Worse than the vandalism, she believed he would enter the Elder’s Hall, where she wished to go.

The fennec fox was batting a bit of crystal about the floor. She hoisted him up, held his small warmth against her chest. She stroked the fuzz between his ears, wishing she could feel his fur.

“In the face of all p-propriety, he refuses to die. How—how will I expel t-ten of them from the Academy, f-fennec?”

His whiskers twitched as he smelled the blood caked to her abdomen.
My own blood.
Her finger moved over the divot in her chest above her lingerie, where the red diamond belonged. Her tongue shifted the jewel against her cheek.

With her next step, she swayed against a shelf. Glancing down, she saw crystal shards stuck in her feet, and she could not even feel them. Lifting a hand to her neck, she felt her pulse was slow and weak.

“I’m n-not well,” she told the fennec.

Have to reach my chambers soon, find clothes, find warmth.
Her feet clicked against the tile, the sound alarming her, and she bent down to pry out a shard of crystal from her toe. She hardly bled. She made her way through the Hall of Records, straining to peer down the passages, to listen for the approaching thump of boots—or worse—the slap of sandals. From the distance echoed the clatter of running feet and voices.

At the center of this level of tower, two quartz tubes twined about each other. Each transparent channel was wide enough to fit an elder enchantress and her gowns. Hiresha had hesitated to use the Expediency Vessels, as anyone would see her descending in them. Also, one tended to build alarming speed while circling downward in the glass slides, and if an enchantment failed along her descent, she could shoot past the Hall of Elders and be launched straight into the Ceiling.

The quartz tubes connected at one point, in front of an ebony door. She leaned against it, ten panels of the dark wood stacked lengthwise on top of each other. A depiction of the Opal Mind was carved into it as a woman with a circle of power around each hand, a third sphere as a halo, and a fourth around her torso.

Hiresha slid to the right side of the door, and in her befuddled state of mind she even pushed the red diamond to the right side of her mouth. The wood panels were drawn into separate sides of the tubes, the door opening like a sideways mouth full of square teeth. The view inside was little more inviting. The right-hand Expediency Vessel looked like nothing more than a crystal gullet, the faraway movement of air sounding as one long breath.

“H-hold on,” she said to the fennec.

By habit, she slid down the tube head-first, the more dignified position when wearing skirts that could flip upward. It felt as if she spun about in a river of air because Repulsion enchantments in the crystal reduced the friction of her skin on the tube.

Faster and faster she sped, her arms wrapped as a cage around the fennec to protect him. Her tongue pressed her diamond against the roof of her mouth. She knew if she lost hold of that, the enchantments in the Vessels would never identify her or slow her. Her end would be an embarrassing mess against a marble wall.

Stay conscious,
she told herself as the Academy Halls sped around her, the black and white designs on the tiles blurring into grey.
Stay conscious.

The spellswords all peered at the right side of Fos’s face, their expressions saying more than he wanted to hear. Disgust pulled one man’s lips apart. Another had covered his mouth with a hand, eyes blinking and tearing up, the fibers in his neck visible and tense. A trainee had paled and stumbled from the room. The salt and pepper beard of Spellsword Trakis jutted outward in a chin-forward pose of determined graveness.

“I’ll call the skin-stitcher to take out the eye.” Trakis pointed toward the darkness on the right side of Fos’s field of vision.

“It’ll heal,” Fos said.

He cupped a hand over his wounded eye. Heat pulsed there, under his fingers, within his skull. He would not call it pain. He did have to admit to being disturbed by the sensation of leaking over his cheek. The fluid was thicker than tears.

“That is, Enchantress Hiresha will heal it,” Fos said. “I won’t lose the eye.”

Snow rippled above them across the slanted roof of glass. The day was a hopeless grey, and most of the light came from candles held within crystal cabinets that opened both in this room and the ones adjacent.

Trakis frowned through his beard. In the well-groomed scruff were braided rings of gold and silver. “You’ll lose the eye, surer than frosted shit on a yak’s backside.”

Fos wanted to explain how he knew he would keep the eye. He had learned his future from the Priest of the Fate Weaver, and Fos believed his prophecy would have mentioned it if he were to be known as a one-eyed man. He also knew that Spellsword Trakis worshipped different gods. A pendent of devotion was thrust outward with each breath of Trakis’s barrel chest, the gold design of a camel balancing the sun on his back.

Strong but stooped in his robe of chain armor, gruff but with a haunted look in his eyes, the elder spellsword seemed at once full of fury and despair. At each passing moment Chandur was not certain if he would explode in wrath or shrivel into himself and crawl to his bed.

“Just bandage the eye,” Fos said. He rested a fist on the older man’s broad chest. “And don’t worry about what’s happening up top. We’ll put everything right.”

Trakis swatted Fos’s arm aside. “Did more get knocked out of your skull than an eye? We’re not going anywhere, what with the Skyway now mostly a Down-down-fast-way, and with that merry little ultimatum you brought with you.”

A man in a robe patterned after a vulture wrapped white linen over half Fos’s face. Fos kept expecting his field of vision to diminish with a bandage being wrapped over his eye, but nothing changed. The right side of his world stayed equally dark. It felt strange and off balance. Fos found himself turning his head to the right so he could get more of a forward view.

Spellsword Trakis pulled at his beard, his fingers circling the metal rings within it. “Unless, unless you think the Bright Palm was not in earnest. Would she not carry through? Bright Palms are bold, but killing the enchantresses? That’s reckless.”

Fos tapped at the bandage below his sightless eye. “She carried through fast enough with her bo staff.”

“And just why did you stand there and take it like a blind mule? No offense meant, but I hope we don’t train victims here at the Blade.”

Shrugging, Fos said, “Never expected a Bright Palm would swing me a stiff one. I’m no Feaster. And this is the one time Hiresha’s enchantment didn’t protect me.”

He pointed to the ruby circlet that wound as a segmented snake about his brow.

Trakis glanced at the enchanted jewelry. “Must’ve been a rattan staff. Not woody or metal enough for enchantments to sense it a weapon. Nasty stuff, rattan. Turns bones into elephant snot. Nothing to be done about rattan. Nothing to be done. Nothing at all.”

The old man gazed outside into the grey. One wall of the room was a sloping barrier of crystal. Through the tides of cloudbank and falling snow, Fos imagined he could see the blue streak of the Skyway. It had been clearer earlier, when they had seen an elder enchantress driven down the cliff road.

Fos first thought it had been Hiresha. The mess of gowns the elders wore all looked alike to him. The sight had been a burning horror that had sent white lines squirming through the blank half of Fos’s vision. He felt sick with relief and ashamed of his happiness when he had spotted the black mask and cane of a different elder tumbling to her end.

And if it had been her, what could I have done? Trapped in here and fussing over a scratched eye.
His chest tensed at a new thought, scale armor sighing as it shifted under his jacket.
What if it had been Alyla?

He reached down to one ring on his right hand. After the fashion of the men of his country, he wore a ring for each obligation. The band of metal pulled at the skin of his finger as he worried at it. He touched next the ring with purple stones that was his debt to Hiresha. Beside that, a diamond ring for the unborn sons that he would need to pass on the family name of Chandur. Fos completed the circuit of duties on his other hand, where rings with black gems were remembrances for his parents.

None left but me to take care of Alyla.
Fos had no intention of letting anyone push his sister down a cliff. He would not sulk in the Blade and watch, wondering which step down the Skyway would be her last.

“Send me up after them,” Fos said. “Me and the other spellswords. The Bright Palm with the staff won’t catch me again with my sword behind by back.”

“You crocodile-kicking fool! Don’t you know the meaning of an ultimatum?” Trakis slammed a fist against the crystal wall then slumped forward, rings in his beard clicking against the glassy surface. “We can’t do anything while the Bright Palms have the enchantresses.”

“Isn’t that usually the way of things before a rescue?”

“We’re charged with protecting the enchantresses. I don’t want to be recorded in history as the first Elder Spellsword to be single-handedly responsible for the massacre of everything wearing a gown above an elevation of ten-thousand feet.”

Fos’s head jerked as the skin-stitcher tending his wound tightened the bandage behind his ear. Fos said, “If you’re worried about what’ll happen if you send all the spellswords, just send me.”

“Lost half your sight but none of your courage, eh?” Trakis gazed at him with a sickened smile. “I’d sooner grease you up with fat from a camel’s hump and toss you into a pack of wolfbears.”

Fos snorted. “With a sword in hand I’d take those odds.”

“But what you won’t do is walk up the Skyway. Not now. And you’re not climbing. You’ll be blown off, or freeze into an overlarge icicle, or worse, live and be seen by a Bright Palm. Then the merry slaughter could begin.”

Fos’s gaze climbed up as much of the cliff as he could see. The top was veiled by snowfall. In summer, he could have scaled past the overhangs and chimney-clefts in under an hour.
They will have someone watching the cliff’s main face.
He wondered if his odds might improve if he edged along a narrow path leading to the far side of the cliff, away from the Blade.
Do they have enough to guard each approach to the Academy?

Something slithered beneath his armor shirt and jacket sleeve. A stubby black head, a flick of a forked tongue. Fos reached down to cup the kingsnake’s chin with a finger. His pet had lost an eye, too, from a tussle with a lizard that wished not to not end up as a decorative bulge in a snake’s side. A pink line crossed downward from the snake’s whitened eye.

“You and now me, eh, Chains?” Fos watched as the ribbon of scales flowed between his fingers. The black and white banded coils wrapped around his wrist then went up his other sleeve. “I know, I know. This is no fine weather for you. You’ll have your basket by the oven soon enough.”

Fos would not risk taking Chains out with him when he climbed into the wintry sky.
And I am going.
Fos had been given a bright fate by the priest. Once Fos would have been content to wait in the Blade for opportunity to come to him. Now he understood that to seize his fate he would have to do what no other man dared, he would have to be more bold and more careful. If the rest of the spellswords stayed in the Blade, he would be the one to make the climb.

Just thinking about it made him shiver and his hands ache. He wished he could leap to the top of the cliff using the enchantment in his greaves, but it was too far, with no good place to brace his feet inbetween.
And that timing!
He knew he needed more training with activating the Lightening enchantment then releasing it at the right moment. It was like jumping twice in the same instant—
once with the legs, twice with the mind
—then breathing out before his feet left the ground.

He scratched around his bandage as he stared at the cliff.
Might have to wait for the wind to die down.
The spellsword knew he would have to be quick, that he could not give anyone the chance to see him climbing. If a Bright Palm guarded the top against him, Fos could be forced back with as little as a soup ladle.
Won’t bother with ropes and stakes then. They’d only slow me.

“One eye or two, I know that look,” Trakis said. His armor clinked when he squared himself with Fos. “You’re not going to climb.”

“I wouldn’t fall.”

“Think losing an eye has improved you? No one’s stepping outside until I know the women will be safe. And an injured man will be the last to leave.”

“Maybe that’s for the goddess to decide.”
And the Fate Weaver has decided, has spun my future before I drew first breath.

“It’s for me to decide and to order.”

Spellsword Trakis gripped Fos’s shoulders. The elder’s hands said so much about him. Some fingers were stiff, many scarred, a few fingernails torn off but the rest glossy from the attention of servants. Handsome hands, Fos thought, with a life of trial and strength behind them.

This day, those hands shook.

“Spellsword Fosapam Chandur, I’m going to say this to you again because I know you have more roar and less reason in you than a lion with a wasp-stung rump. Sorry to say it but it’s true. You’re as moveable as a mountain of dung and about as smart. Now, if you leave the building you’ll be endangering the lives of enchantresses and defying a direct order. Try it, and you’ll lose your sword. You won’t be a spellsword anymore. Your future in the
College
of
Active Enchantment
will be gone. You’ll be a traitor and a castaway. Do you understand me?”

“I think I do.” The bandage pinched his ear as Fos shifted his jaw forward. “You can’t order a spellsword to climb. If you did, the Bright Palms would have to push off the enchantresses.”

“So an idea can thaw its way through that head of yours.” Trakis slapped Fos’s back then limped his way from the room. “And don’t wait to have that eye out. Rot wouldn’t have far to spread to your brain. If it’s not there already.”

The other spellswords petered their way after the elder. Fos was left standing, facing the frozen cliff. He gripped the sword over his shoulder, drew it from the metal tongs that held it to his back. It was a broad scimitar, patterned on one side in the step pyramids of his homeland. On the other glittered the designs of the block houses of Morimound with ladders leading up to doorways on the second floors. Fos could almost smell the rich tang of bricks baking in the city’s kilns.

Hiresha had made him this blade. Fos knew that most fighters would call it awkward and over heavy, but the more weight of a blade, the more advantage a spellsword could gain by activating Lightening enchantments then releasing them at the right moment.
Timing, it’s all in the timing. And me without an hour-glass for a brain.

The blade was not heavy enough, Fos decided. For a conflict with Bright Palms he wanted a fifty-pound wedge of jasper. More stone battering ram than sword, the weapon was far above him though, locked away for safekeeping in the Academy’s Grindstone.
Must be for the best,
he thought,
not like I’d want to carry it up the side of the cliff.
Fos intended to climb as soon as he could.

Trakis wants me to go,
Fos thought.
He just can’t give the order. He can’t send a spellsword and put the enchantresses at risk.
The Bright Palms had only vowed to execute the women if a spellsword interfered.

He pitied men who did not know of their fates. Had he not been certain of his own bright future, he expected he would have been terrified. He understood it was not fear causing the thudding of his heart, the itching of the bandage, the dampness of sweat on his back, the searing pressure of blood beating through him.