Gravity's Revenge (17 page)

No, not fear but the stinging thrill of standing at the edge of the chasm that separated his fate from that of other men. He would take that leap. He would climb.

After he slammed his scimitar behind his back, Fos noticed Chains. The snake was wobbling his scaled head back and forth up from Fos’s collar. Fos gave the snake a firm nod.

“Know you like it here, at least in the summer’s sun. But it’ll be new horizons for the both of us.”

Chains whisked a dash of red in and out of his mouth.

Yes, I’ll climb
.
Not as a spellsword. Just a man with a blade and a fate burning hot as sunfire.

19

Hiresha’s Chambers

With a stiff hand pressed over the fox’s eyes, Hiresha sped toward a spiraling knot of crystal tubes. The Expediency Vessels branched in the Hall of Elders to separate apartments, and Hiresha had grown confident in the enchantment that would sort her into the correct circular passage.

Today, that confidence was gone.

She held her breath, uncertain, her chest hammering with desperation as she plunged into the confusion of crystal. Tubing contorted around her, and she heard the “whoosh” of crystal plating shifting ahead of her. Her body stopped, insides wrinkling as she was crushed into a suspended state of Lightness, then yanked in a new direction. Twice more she changed course, then was whisked down the hall. She glimpsed the Bright Palm with the jewel-studded skin walking beneath her between the line of doors. Then the Vessel shunted her into a wall.

Within the watery light of her earrings, she was flipped. Pain blazed out from her shoulder as she hit the tubing wrong.
Please,
she thought,
may the enchantment have the power to stop me.
Somehow she knew the magic would fail.

The door to her chambers slatted open then flew by her.
Noo!
She felt herself being pulled back upward, away from her rooms and along the cold length of the Vessels. An image flashed across her mind of her frozen body traveling for years in the circuit of the tubing, the Academy abandoned, every last enchantress thrown off the cliff.

Turning herself sideways in the shimmering blue darkness, she arched her back across the side of the Vessel. Her shoulder blade grazed the surface. She continued to slide upward. The crystal was slick as if water flowed over it. Fingers and toes splayed, she jammed her limbs against the glass. She slowed to a stop.

The fennec had also tumbled from her grasp, and his squeaks rose above her then began falling again.
He doesn’t have his collar,
she remembered.
The Vessel’s enchantments won’t affect him.

She tried to catch the fennec one-handed as he fell past her in the gloom. Tried and failed. In the light leaking from the open door below, she saw the big-eared creature spring off the side of the Vessel and tumble into her chambers.

Blinking tears of relief, she crept down the tube, one shaky handhold at a time. She felt like a spider scratching its way down a wall. The fennec yipped encouragement up at her, and she heaved herself at the top of the doorframe, crawled into her chambers, and thudded down onto the carpet. The door slats closed behind her.

Ceremonial gowns hung on display above overstuffed furniture perfect for sleeping in at all hours of the day. The upholstery and carpet varied in color from purple to purple, the hue even darker in the blue shine of her earrings.
 

Part of Hiresha had hoped for the welcome of a crackling hearth, for the scent of jasmine tea simmering in a kettle, and for Maid Janny waiting ready with bandages.
But Janny is captive, along with the rest.
The hearth contained only ashes. The elder enchantress had no power to light a spark.

She still knelt before the dark hearth like an altar, hoping the ashes hid embers with a hint of warmth. When she felt nothing, she pushed her fingers into the soot.

 
Still nothing.
She withdrew her hands, shaking her head.
What woman shoves her fingers into the hearth ashes?

She saw just who when she crossed in front of a full-length mirror. A tangle-haired creature stared back with eyes fierce as diamond splinters, her fingers black, her lingerie bleeding stray red threads. Dark flakes stuck to her belly and right arm. Snow and crystal shards speckled her toes. Shoulder swollen, knees scraped.

Hiresha felt the weight of impossibility.
How could such a bedraggled waif cast ten Bright Palms out from her Academy?
Not to mention one resourceful thief.

The canopy of her four-post bed waited for her in the next room, and she took a step for it.
I could sleep, regenerate, rest for an hour until I have strength enough. Or eight hours. Or a day. Or until my last breath.

The fennec sprang in front of her, chasing a hopping toy she had enchanted for him, a cricket of silver antennae and cedar legs. A flicker of warmth passed through Hiresha, and she stuck out a defiant tongue at the mirror, the triangle-cut diamond cupped on top.

To the cliff with the odds! I’m saving the Academy.

She almost swallowed the jewel when the door thumped. The hall door shuddered as something slammed into it.
Did the Bright Palm see me enter from above? Or did he recognize the portrait above my door?
Hiresha had known no good would come of wasting all that time sitting for the painter.

She shuffled past display cases holding gemstones, cut and uncut, along with jewel-carving instruments of historical significance. The sound of the thudding against wood followed her, but the door was reinforced by gold enchantments.
Bright Palms may have a bull’s endurance,
she told herself,
but they’re no stronger than a normal man.

Her fingers scrabbled against a rice-paper partition showing two step-pyramids rising above a city. When she had the barrier pushed aside, she walked into her closet. First she lifted a purple sash from a post. A hundred pockets lined it, all empty now, but she intended to place jewels in them with her most influential and unforgiving enchantments.

Only after slipping on the sash did she realize she wore nothing else.
Confound and contagion! My fuddled thinking will get me killed.
She took off the sash and pulled a silk shift from a drawer. Next she squeezed her swollen feet into a pair of hare-skin boots. She had wanted to bandage her toes, but the thudding on the door goaded her to haste.

Her hands lifted a full-length coat from a wooden manikin. Ghostly fur covered it, the long strands transparent but tinted in shifting blue tones from her earrings. Hiresha had inherited the coat but never worn it, both because of her obligation to other gowns and out of respect for whatever massive creature the pelt came from.
Did not Enchantress Lelay call it the coat of the winter bear?

The garment was the thickest she owned, and when she shouldered it on, the fur of the collar tufted past her ears.
Warmth will help my thoughts flow.
Wearing it, Hiresha felt armored against the cold.

Now the jewels.
Slipping on the sash and crossing through the parlor, she noticed the thumping had stopped. More than that, the hall door swung open, pushed by a black staff.

Hiresha jerked in surprise and stumbled a step forward.
No!
The door to her personal vault was on the far side of the parlor, too close to that staff lacquered the shade of deepest bruise. She backed toward her bedroom.

Sheamab stood in the doorway. Behind her, the Bright Palm with the jewel pockmarks looked on blankly.

“So you do have some resource,” Sheamab said then nodded to the man beside her. “But as you can see, Bright Palms are resistant to the perils of wealth.”

“Was that a j-jest, from you?”

“If words were sufficient weapons, Enchantress, you’d already be reeling.”

“And to open that d-door you must’ve been b-brave enough to steal an amulet from my maid.”

“This is from the dead chancellor, not your living maid.” Sheamab tucked a platinum disk below her tunic. “Otherwise, your guess was sound.”

“Better than your m-manners for—” Instead of finishing the sentence, Hiresha dove backward, kicking at the bedroom door to close it.

A staff thrust into the opening before it would shut. Hiresha scooted to the bed, reaching behind one of the posts. She had always felt foolish stashing a few jewels there for her defense, within the safety of the Academy and atop a plateau guarded by spellswords. Now she felt all too grateful to push aside a drape of velvet, reach into a hidden niche, and pull out a sapphire that left an orange after-trail in her vision.

She threw the gem at the opening door. Sheamab saw it, and she leaped back. The Bright Palm’s dark hair pulled forward into the following sinkhole of gravity. The man had been less quick. He was hurled onto the floor. Cabinets tipped on top of him, their glass cases breaking. Curtains ripped from the bedroom window, and the fennec fox was sent sliding over the rug toward the imploding enchantment until Hiresha scooped him into her arms. The door slammed shut, buckling, boards cracking.

“That one was a notch above p-potent,” Hiresha said to the fennec.

After only a few moments wearing the coat, she was aching with warmth. Granted, the ferocious beat of her heart may have stoked the flames. Her toes and fingers were stinging, which she trusted to mean they had not frozen off. Less enjoyable was the tearing sensation from knowing that Sheamab had been a step ahead of her again, blocking Hiresha from her jewel stash.

Have to move,
she thought.
In another ten seconds, the sapphire’s enchantment will have contracted enough to step around.

She pocketed a six-sided crystal of uncut heliodor from her nightstand, left there for when the urge to carve jewels had struck her. Two more enchanted jewels were secreted about the room, a blue aquamarine of Lightening, in case of an emergency necessitating a jump out a window. Also, a ruby that would paralyze an assailant’s heart. Again, just to be safe.

Opening the window, she saw Sheamab climbing out onto the side of the tower.
Ahead of me again.
Hiresha threw the heart-stop jewel, only realizing after the ruby left her fingers that it would probably not even hurt Sheamab.
Piercing the other Bright Palm’s organs with jewels only accessorized him.

Sheamab leaped over the jewel, skidding on her knees on the side of the tower toward Hiresha’s window. The Bright Palm’s brows formed hooks of black that were bent in an expression of perfect concentration and focus, her staff angling to block any attempt by Hiresha to close the window. To the enchantress, the sight of that calm determination on what looked like a young woman on the side of a tower hundreds of feet above a cliff was more terrifying than any Feaster, any monster.

Hiresha pulled her head out of the window, rolled off the bed, ran shoulder-first through the fractured door and into the parlor. She avoided the debris and the Bright Palm pinned to the floor. She considered the door to the personal vault but heard the thump of Sheamab landing on her bed, close behind.
Don’t even have time for the Expediency Vessels.

The enchantress limped into the hall, heading for the nearest wallway. She dared not look back but heard a threshing sound of what she had to think was Sheamab’s staff moving back and forth in time to the Bright Palm’s long stride.

Hiresha’s foot landed wrong on the first black tile of the wallway, and bolts of pain stormed in her leg as she forced herself to continue running upward. Her vision was fogging. The part of her remaining rational mind understood that Sheamab would catch her. The Bright Palm had to be already on the wallway.

Hiresha’s fingers reached for her single jewel of Lightening.
I’ll only have one throw.

A cracking noise sounded far below. Through the thudding in her ears, Hiresha realized she no longer heard the pursuit. Resting against the arch in the floor of the next level, she risked a glance back.

Sheamab kneeled at the base of the wallway, her staff rolling away from her. The Bright Palm gripped her leg with two hands, and Hiresha had the disturbing suspicion that Sheamab was resetting her own broken bone.
Did the Academy drop her this time?
Hiresha took some measure of satisfaction in knowing the failing enchantments picked no favorites.

“You s-should have taken your own advice,” Hiresha said, “and come with a f-friend and a safety rope.”

“I did. And I left her up one floor, lest you try to escape this way.” Sheamab looked up at the enchantress and past her. “Bright Palm Grongara, take care that the enchantress handles no jewels.”

A cold edge of bronze rested against Hiresha’s throat. A woman’s even voice came from behind the enchantress. “Open your hands, and turn about.”

Hiresha did so while fighting against a swirling terror.
I’m not letting them capture me. Not again.

20

Lofty Bridge

The woman would have looked homely, with her rough-spun vest and skirt, and not at all threatening if it were not for the detail of the dagger she held to Hiresha’s throat. The Academy amulet lying atop her breast seemed out of place. It hung loose about a neck spotted with moles, some appearing like grains stuck into the skin, others splashes of mud, and one like brown sugar crystallized in her ear.

The Bright Palm’s eyes locked on Hiresha’s left hand. “Drop those jewels.”

“Can’t,” Hiresha said. “They’re i-in my skin. Most useful when losing an enchantment c-can be so unfortunate.”

With the hand the Bright Palm was not paying any attention to, Hiresha ripped off the woman’s amulet. The Bright Palm’s shoes lifted off the white tile, and she let go of the dagger as she fell.

“Sheamab,” the plummeting woman said in tones of disinterest.

The named Bright Palm stood, angling herself to catch the falling woman. Hiresha did not wait to see the result but ran. She liked to think of the fennec’s yips as meant for encouragement. He was tucked under her winter-bear coat.

She decided she had to hazard the Expediency Vessels. As much as she distrusted them, their risk seemed preferable to the certainty of Sheamab catching her on foot. While spinning in upward spirals within a crystal tube and dreading every moment to feel the shifting upward crush of her intestines that would mean she had started falling, Hiresha had time to think. After a fashion.

The halls she sped through seemed deserted, without a Bright Palm in sight.
The rest must be on the ground floor, guarding their hostages.
Hiresha wanted to free Alyla, Minna, Janny, and the rest. Once she had deprived the Bright Palms of their captives, the spellswords could climb to the plateau.
If they can manage it in this storm.

With only a single Lightening jewel and poor aim, Hiresha doubted she would be of much use in the escape attempt.
And my colleagues would be even less.
When it came to lobbing enchantments in battle, she favored the scattershot approach, and for that she needed more jewels.

Doubling back to her room seemed reckless.
Sheamab is too intelligent to leave it unguarded now.
Hiresha’s second trove of jewels was kept safe in her workshop in the Grindstone, the same place she had told Tethiel to flee.
And if there’s anyone who’d know how to defeat Bright Palms, it’s the Lord of the Feast.

Hiresha stumbled out of the Expediency Vessels dizzy, into the Hall of Tactile Records. Bookshelves had toppled from shifts in gravity, and the wreckage of tomes upset her in no small measure. Hiresha stepped over books with the somber air of a woman treading over a graveyard. Feeling had returned to her fingers and toes, and the sensation of itching pained her so that it felt as if insects were eating away her flesh.

The enchantress walked from the hall and onto a tower balcony. Between the white gusts, she glimpsed the Grindstone. The seashell spiral painted on it in yellow and green seemed to move inward as the building rolled.

A more or less straight route led from the balcony to the Grindstone. To reach her workshop and Tethiel, Hiresha need only cross the
Lofty
Bridge
.

The path of stone twisted through the air like a stone ribbon, patterned on one side with black and white diamonds. Without a handrail, the
Lofty
Bridge
was the epitome of elegance and design that required courage in students wishing to reach the Grindstone. Pupils needed complete confidence in the power of applied enchantment.

Most days, Hiresha crossed the
Lofty
Bridge
without a second thought. Even if she stumbled and fell off the unguarded side, an enchantment would whisk her around and set her back on the bridge. True, the journey was less than pleasant during winter, and Hiresha had avoided the sky path for some months after her students had taken it upon themselves to carry her sleeping form in a chair and leave her on the downturn of the
Lofty
Bridge
as a prank.

“Perhaps,” Hiresha said to the fennec, “this is the wrong day for crossing the
Lofty
Bridge
.”

A story came to mind. An older novice had told it to her when Hiresha first came to the Academy. The frightening tale went that any novice who used her power to remove her amulet, even for a moment, would be forced to walk without it across the
Lofty
Bridge
. And the bridge would Lighten anyone without an amulet, so she would fly up into the mountains, where no one could find her, and she would be forced to eat her own frozen feet.

The tale had given Hiresha many a nightmare, though she had later found it to be less than true. Anyone foolish enough to attempt crossing the
Lofty
Bridge
without an amulet would not be Lightened. She would simply fall to her death where the bridge turned upside down.

A grim certainty shackled Hiresha that the bridge’s enchantment would fail, that it would drop her when her head was pointing downward to the plateau’s rock.

Maybe descending to the ground floor would be safer.
Hiresha lowered herself to her hands and knees and crawled to the side of the bridge. Snow streamed past her, the flakes spinning upward and in sideways blasts. The fennec rested his paws on the edge, also peering down, but she kept a tight grip on him.

A lone figure stood below, a dark cloak in a shifting field of white. Hiresha thought a glowing hand grasped a curving staff, but no, it had to be a bow. She remembered the blind archer, how he had tracked her, stolen after her into the Hall of Visitation, how he had been said to have shot Tethiel. She still wondered at his ability to aim, but after these last hours she would not underestimate any Bright Palm.

At the least, he calls for help. At worst, his arrow encounters my chest. If he hears me.
Hiresha listened to the wind, at times shrieking as it scraped up over the cliff, at times silent. She tried to imagine herself floundering through the fresh powder below her without snowshoes.
Not promising, and I’d still have to pass through the ground floor. With a certainty of guards at the entrance. And hardly of the helpful spellsword persuasion.

The enchantress stood, faced the
Lofty
Bridge
. She told herself not to allow fear to hold her back from the best course.
Many of the Academy enchantments still function, much of the time.
What right do I have to let an unfounded hunch hold me back, when the lives of others are in the balance?

“It is the only unguarded way,” she said. “Would you forgive me the attempt?”

From the depths of her coat, the fennec made a sighing squeak, with the hint of a purr.

“Thank you.” The enchantress started across the bridge.

Snow flurried around the limestone, slipping over it but never finding purchase. Ahead where the bridge flipped, the snowfall veered sideways. Hiresha found herself straying to the left edge, pushed at every step by the wind. She corrected her path, but she could not help but wonder. Before she had always felt as if enchantment had latched her feet to the bridge with each step. Today, the bridge’s traction on her boots felt flimsy.

You’re imagining it
, she told herself.
Or even if it is so, this is safer than trying to run past Bright Palms.

“Elder Enchantress Hiresha…”

Hiresha twitched around to try to see whoever was shouting. Her left boot squeaked as it slipped, but it found purchase again after a triple-heartbeat.

Bright Palm Sheamab stood on the tower balcony, her staff a black line above the bridge. Her words rang out. “…you are condemned by the Order of the Innocent. You are a danger to the innocent. By the hand that shields the innocent, you shall be struck down.”

When Sheamab stayed on the balcony, Hiresha grew teeth-chattering nervous.
Why does she not follow? Does she know the bridge isn’t safe? Is she too cautious?

Hiresha knew only that a staff barred her retreat now. She shouted back, “Does condemning always come so easily to kidnappers? Or is no guilt another advantage of your magic?”

The enchantress stepped on the bridge where it began to twist downward. Snow sifted past her feet, but she felt as if she walked on level ground.

The enchantment will hold.
Even as she thought it, creeping sensations ran up her legs and across her belly. Her shift rippled in the wind, and the cold clawed its way to her chest.

Hiresha now walked sideways on the bridge, and below, a cloaked figure nocked an arrow to a bow. He aimed straight up, at the bridge. At her.

He can’t
.
The wind, the distance. The gem-bashing blindness! He can’t make this shot.
She did not speak it aloud. She feared he might hear.

The wind fell to silence. The quiet gritted Hiresha’s teeth. It tore at her. It choked her. She wanted to gasp, to run, to dash to the far side of the bridge and into the safety of the Grindstone.

Patience, Hiresha. Wait for the wind. It’ll return and muffle your footsteps. Hold on, even if the bridge might drop you at any moment. You simply must
—

The wind screamed, and Hiresha ran.

Her heart thudded in her chest.
At least he can’t hear that.
The world turned sideways around her along with the spiral of the bridge, the tower now pointing up, a sea of storm cloud below, the snow soaring.

I’ll make it. I’ll reach the workshop and Tethiel.
Hiresha felt free and weightless. Moving her feet took no effort, and running felt like flying.

Because she was falling.