Gravity's Revenge (19 page)

22

Recurve
Tower

Hiresha hoped her winter-bear coat would hide her among the snow drifts. Her black hair had been tucked in. She squinted through an old skyscope, counting the Bright Palms around the Grindstone.

One hiding beside the stairs…the blind archer below the bridge…there’s Mister Jewel Pox, that’s three…and Sheamab herself. Four then, with a fifth patrolling the cliff.
Hiresha thought they were waiting for Tethiel to try to leave with the coming dusk. She could only hope he heeded her and waited until she arrived to open the door with her red diamond. Thankfully, she had only swallowed the jewel.

When she had been able to, she had descended the Spire of Magical History and rested inside. She had retrieved the diamond with what some might call an indelicate use of magic and now kept it in a more conventional place, her coat pocket. She had considered implanting it once again in her chest, but she could not say she felt well enough about Tethiel just then to commit his gift to her skeletal structure.

In the Spire she had also acquired the skyscope contraption of lenses and brass. By her count, only five Bright Palms remained in the
Recurve
Tower
to guard the hostages, along with possibly the thief Inannis as the eleventh. She started to crawl that way. One Bright Palm had mentioned something about a twelfth invader, but Hiresha had counted in her laboratory mirrors.
Only ten Bright Palms, and one thieving jewel duper.

Hiresha tended to think the twelfth had to have been the chancellor. She must have played a role in their coming, though Hiresha doubted Ringwold had known the extent of the invasion. Neither could she be certain of the chancellor’s motive and involvement. Hiresha decided to take the cautious approach. She had enchanted more jewels to be safe.

“This may be our best chance to extract the novices and enchantresses.” Hiresha whispered it in the fennec’s ear. He made cooing bird noises.

To reassure herself, she ran a finger over her jewel sash. She had split the heliodor in her dream into four gemstones then taken another dozen from the Spire of Magical History. Some of the jewels she had borrowed had been unenchanted. In other cases, she had needed to annihilate the records to replace them with impact enchantments. No longer could an enchantress see the wealth of their information flowing about her in a cascade of ideas.

The pain of having to destroy knowledge hurt as if she had swallowed splinters of crystal. The Bright Palms had scarred the Academy, and Hiresha worried that even if she could drive them out, this sanctuary of thought and magic would never feel the same.

For that reason Hiresha felt not a morsel of remorse when she hurled three Lightening gemstones at the pair of Bright Palms guarding the tower entrance. The heliodor hit the one who looked like an adolescent boy, and he began drifting away. The other, the woman with the face speckled with moles, caught his ankle, but that gave Hiresha the opening to dash past them.

Standing to the left of the portal caused the diamond to flare red through her pocket. The door descended from the ceiling and closed. The enchantress knew that Sheamab could use the chancellor’s amulet to open it, so Hiresha dropped two orange sapphires of Attraction against the base of the door then jumped away. The back of her coat flipped up as she ran, and the door made a grinding noise from the enchantments sealing it shut.

Her magic would bind the door closed for half an hour. Hiresha suspected she had even less time than that.
Sheamab might try to cross the Lofty Bridge, or enter the tower through the Somnarium passage, if she knows the way.

Down one corridor, a shadow stooped over a smoking brazier.
The jewel duper, Inannis?
When she neared, she saw no one, but from then on she took to looking over her shoulder.

The Bright Palms in the Hall of Visitation seemed to have had warning. They had their weapons in hand, a scimitar that glinted yellow, and rods of bronze lashed to a stick as a flail. She dealt with them as readily as the first pair.

A white smear clouded her vision to the right, like an aura before a migraine. Hiresha knew something was wrong, but she did not react before a Bright Palm leapt out of a doorway with a whirling kick.

The red diamond shone through her coat, activating from the onrush of metal in his belt. The reactive enchantment Burdened him to smash against the floor. She tossed another jewel of Attraction to keep him there. He was the tight-mouthed man she had bound hours before on top of the
Recurve
Tower
.

“The view isn’t as sweeping here,” she told him, “but you should’ve learned your lesson the first time.”

Her red diamond activated again, and a dart plinked onto the tile. The next second she felt a sting on her neck, and she pulled out another dart. Jewel in hand, she whirled but still saw no sign of Inannis. The fennec squeaked at one column, and she thought the thief must be behind it. When she approached, a figure did indeed sprint away down a passage.

She flung his needle to the tiles in distaste. Muscles in her face and neck twitched, but her red diamond pulsed again, its enchantment protecting her from the poison. She had to feel a little smug, having predicted Inannis would use strychnine, a paralytic and an antidote to the toxin he had dispensed with such generosity in
Oasis
City
. One poison cured the other, and she had deduced he would have both at his disposal.
Proper preparation is paramount.

Opening the guest rooms, Hiresha found enchantresses and novices cramped together. A few women with haggard expressions played Sands, the board between them a profusion of colorful streaks. The musty smell of unwashed bodies prickled Hiresha’s nose. The enchantresses cast her looks of confused hope.

“Hiresha?” The Rector of Rarified Armament squinted toward the light of Hiresha’s earrings. “Wherever are your gowns? Did they force you to wear that coat?”

Adjusting her winter-bear coat, Hiresha noted with some indignation that the Bright Palms had allowed the rector to keep her ornamental daggers. Hiresha ran her left hand over the notches of wounds in her fingers.

Perhaps Sheamab judged the last thing the rector would wish to do with her precious weapons is tarnish them in combat.
The rector’s smile was broad, almost as much so as the curving blades on her chest and arms.

“The coat is immaterial,” Hiresha said. “Assist me in gathering everyone. We have little time to escape.”

“You took your time coming,” the princess novice said. She curled herself up from her blanket with a yawn. “Do you know what a perfect hardship it’s been to stay six to a room? Six!”

“I couldn’t imagine such an ordeal,” Hiresha said.

The enchantresses stumbled out of their confines, looking about the hall with suspicion. When the rector saw the Bright Palms pinned to the ground, she clenched her hands over the moon-shaped dagger on her chest.

“By the spheres! Did you kill them? Is there blood?”

“Not as such,” Hiresha said. “Don’t touch them or the enchantment will trap you, too.”

In one room, Hiresha found both Alyla and Minna, though they crouched against opposite walls, turned away from each other. Alyla’s novice wrappings had unwound to the elbow, and she shivered with arms pressed between legs.

Hiresha helped Alyla to her feet. “Are you well?”

Rather than answering, the young woman asked, “Did you come with the spellswords? Is Fosapam here?”

“I regret that it’s exclusively me,” Hiresha said. “Come, help Minna along.”

Alyla recoiled from the younger girl. “Shouldn’t you tell the Bright Palms about her? She’s…she’s—”

“She is Janny’s daughter. Attend to yourself, then, and go with the rector.”

 
Hiresha’s stomach clenched at the thought of Alyla betraying the girl to the Bright Palms. Hiresha clasped Minna’s hand, her skin sticky and feverish.

The girl tucked her veil tighter behind her ears. “I—I can’t face
them.
”

“The Bright Palms are in no position to be facing anyone.” Hiresha coaxed the girl to her feet and out into the hall.

An enchantress lifted her rumpled pink skirt as she ran toward Hiresha. “May the Opal Mind color your dreams with wonder! You’ve saved us.”

Hiresha was about to wave away the gratitude, when the enchantress ran past her to hug the dean. The frizzy-haired elder was holding a chest full of Academy amulets. She seemed to have taken them from the room guarded by the Bright Palm who had leaped without apology to kick Hiresha minutes ago. The Bright Palms must have forced the enchantresses to remove their own amulets, to render them helpless.

“Dean Wysteras, you saved us!” The enchantresses gathered around the dean, who smiled as she handed out the amulets with her mismatched gloves.

“Everyone put on your amulets and your confidence hats,” the dean said, touching her dreadlocks as if donning an invisible hat, “because we’re going skyward and we’re not stopping until we’re safe in the Somnarium.”

Hiresha allowed the dean to pass out the amulets. In sight of the immobilized Bright Palms, she would pretend escaping to the Somnarium was a reasonable plan and not at all a slathering of ridiculous rot.
The Somnarium is the opposite of safe. Sheamab may already be making her way into that Pink Monster of a building.
Hiresha did not even care that not one enchantress had thanked her. She even located some rope that the enchantresses might use while on the wallways for added security. Once the women had advanced out of earshot of the prone Bright Palms, Hiresha cleared her throat.

“We are, in fact, not going to the Somnarium. Instead, I’ll disenchant the jewels holding the tower door shut, and we’ll run to the safety of the Crystal Ballroom.”

“No, no, no.” The flap of skin hanging below the dean’s chin swayed from side to side. “There are bound to be more Bright Palms outside than snowflakes in the blizzard.”

“I can fend them off with my impact enchantments. If a few of you merely snip off the jewels from your gowns….”

“We will do no such thing,” the dean said. “What would the chancellor have said about using good jewels for your perversions?”

Her words struck Hiresha like a hornet’s bite. “If not for my
innovations,
you’d still be trapped in those rooms. And retreating to the Crystal Ballroom will be less expected.”

Dean Wysteras adjusted her imaginary hat. “I had a dream last night that everyone would be safe in the Somnarium.”

“Of course you’d dream of the Somnarium. You go there every day,” Hiresha said. “In my dream I calculated the relative probability of—”

“Your confidence hat is very droopy,” Dean Wysteras said. “If you only allow yourself to believe we’ll reach the Somnarium, your knowing will transform into becoming.”

Hiresha thought the dean fortunate that reality was not so easily sculpted by wishes, as otherwise her skull would have exploded from Hiresha’s scowling resentment. “We don’t have time to argue. You must give me your jewels and follow me to the Ballroom. It has but one entrance and one key. We’ll be safe there.”

“There’s no food and no beds in the Ballroom,” the dean said.

“Irrelevant.” Hiresha’s brows rose as she heard her own shout echoing down the hall. She lowered her voice. “Once we’re secure, the spellswords can advance on the plateau. The Bright Palms could be apprehended and the Academy secured before sunrise.”

The women looked between Hiresha and Dean Wysteras. One novice’s eyes flashed the golden color of aragonite gemstones before she turned away and fidgeted by laying one hand over another in rapid succession.

The dean glanced to the white and black pathway up the wall behind her. “As you said, we haven’t the time for bickering. We must reach a compromise.”

“You want a compromise?” Hiresha could not believe the dean would jeopardize the safety of the women with her foolishness. Hiresha worried the heat of wearing her fur coat would now smother her. The fennec was snarling. “The compromise is that you follow me to the Ballroom, and I won’t call you a jelly-brained buffoon.”

The dean pressed her blue and orange gloves together then turned on her heel. “If that is how the provost will have it, then those who want the safety of the Somnarium will go with me. The rest can risk themselves following her.”