Gravity's Revenge (24 page)

31

The Great Globe

Hiresha thought it a long fall. Long enough that she had time to consider how endless the plummet must have felt to the warden, Enchantress Miatha, and even the chancellor, who had a longer distance to descend and no snow piled from the turning Grindstone waiting to cushion her.

The enchantress landed on her backside with an “Oof!” She tumbled over twice and rose to her feet dripping with white. Glancing about for Bright Palms, she saw that one had spotted the enchantress and was jogging away.
Likely for reinforcements.

Tethiel hissed when he tried to break his fall using his wounded arm. Fos landed upright but sank past his waist. Powder sprayed as he kicked his legs free.

“Not fair,” Fos said. “I’m the only one the snow wants to drown. Or is it that I have fifty pounds of jasper strapped to my back?”

“You carry it as if it were only forty-five.” Hiresha checked her pockets, her right hand pushing a few loose jewels deeper into her sash. The rector’s dagger key was secure, but she found the pocket where she had stashed her red diamond unbuttoned.

Her fingers dug inside. Every moment she rummaged between the layers of leather was an agony.
If I lost the diamond I won’t have a chance of using walkways, of opening doors, or protecting myself. Did the jewel-duper steal it? No, but if it’s missing I’ll have lost the most precious jewel in the Lands of Loam.

She had to admit it was gone. Her empty hand slid out of her pocket. She bent over, combing the snow with her fingers. “I dropped a gem somewhere. A red gem. Do either of you see it?”

Fos shielded his eyes from the sun with a hand, though he did not look down. “I see three Bright Palms coming this way. You have lots of gems, don’t you?”

“This one is important.” Hiresha had not realized she had shouted until she saw the surprise in Fos’s eye.

Tethiel lifted something and blew snow from between his creatively angled fingers. He held a triangular gemstone between his thumb and palm, its size close to that of a raspberry. Hiresha breathed out air that had burned in her lungs for what felt like a week.

Fos said, “I’d hate to see the storm that dropped that snowflake.”

The diamond cast red sparks over Tethiel’s hand. He peered from the jewel to Hiresha. She met his eyes and felt a heat of blood rising up the skin of her neck. Tethiel had once given her this same jewel, and she wondered if he recognized it. His was not an expressive face, but over the years she had grown used to reading him. The lines around his sky-tinted eyes lifted in a hint of a smile, but then his forehead began to wrinkle around the corners of his tattoo in what Hiresha could only guess was sorrow.

“My heart, was this the stone colored red by the crushing hand of your eight-armed goddess?”

“The Fate Weaver.” Her words came as a whisper. Hiresha’s eyes flickered to Fos, who was looking at the jewel with new respect.

“I feared you might have kept it,” Tethiel said, “even if you never wore it on your sleeve.”

He pressed the diamond into her hand. A fierce sensitivity spread over her skin, as if cold droplets rolled upward from her wrist along her arm.

“You were right to hide it,” Tethiel said. “Share the truest part of yourself with others and they’ll call you false. Only lies can be widely believed.”

Hiresha was not so certain of that. She had often thought the diamond would have contrasted well with her purple dresses, but she had always worn it underneath. The enchantress had worried someone might see it and discover she had been given it by the Lord of the Feast. Now it seemed a small danger.
What have I to fear? I who survived fire, freezing, and falling from a bridge?

Fos was pulling her away.
From Tethiel?
She sifted through her fatigue to collect some strong words for the spellsword, but then she sensed the nearing light of Bright Palms. Hiresha took the lead, running toward the pillar with a lake balanced on top.

Black and white tiles ringed the column. Hiresha hopped upward to them, her feet landing flush on the side. She felt the same giddy excitement she had so often seen on the faces of novices and enchantresses alike walking up the pillar on what passed for a summer day here, to swim in the Great Globe. Their laughs had mostly outnumbered their shrieks at the temperature. Hiresha had rarely joined them. She preferred the sport of dreaming.

Hiresha had plans of greater moment than swimming, or even skating. A bridge of ice and enchantment connected the Great Globe to the
Recurve
Tower
.

Fos nodded to the levitating span of frozen water. “Always wondered if there was a secret entrance from it to the bath hall.”

“The pipe is too small for a person,” Hiresha said. “My new jewels should be able to open a forceful way, if not a secret one.”

She stopped dead, close to the top of the column and near the spherical lake. A sense of clawing dread told her that if she rested her foot on the next white tile, she would fall.

Her arm held Fos from passing her. “Wait.”

“Then you’ll have to say the same to the Bright Palms,” he said.

The enchantress turned to toss three yellow spinels down at them. The Bright Palms fell back to avoid the gems, one leaping off the column and landing upright in the snow.

Hiresha eyed the white stretch of stone between herself and the Great Globe. Even the thought of stepping over it sent wrinkles of tension over her abdomen. “This might not be safe.”

Fos asked, “Is there another way?”

“No better.” Hiresha pressed her red diamond deep into her pocket, buttoning it with care. “Maybe we should risk it. No magical theory exists of how I could sense a failing enchantment before touching it.”

Tethiel brushed her arm with two fingers, and she felt more than if someone else had grasped her about the waist with both hands. “You have years of enchantment training to back up your hunches,” he said. “May your fears be our guide.”

Hiresha said, “I dislike the thought of submitting myself to vaporous impulse and fancies like some flower-petal-plucking youth.”

Tethiel said, “The emotions of fools are indeed foolish. Yours would be quite intelligent.”

“I’m not certain that could be universally true.” Hiresha’s eyes darted away from Tethiel, and she felt a swirl of tickling pain.

“No truth is ever true. That’s philosophy for you,” Tethiel said. “In life, good instincts are the most valuable thing you can learn.”

Hiresha cast the trio of Bright Palms another warning eye. Sheamab was not among them. The enchantress turned back to creep along the edge of the peculiarly unwholesome white tile. It went all the way around the column, shaded by what looked like a frosty blue hill above them.

The muscles over her stomach relaxed, and her hands unclamped. She halted, one boot shifting to point at a stretch of tile. “This spot feels less worrisome. But why would the enchantment have more power here? It makes no sense.”

“Then it has to be true,” Tethiel said.

Fos scratched around his banded eye. “I only feel the same hot itching.”

Hiresha supposed some sections of enchantment could have had their dream power depleted faster than others.
Slight irregularities in magic scripts could over time result in dangerous deficiencies when strained with unforeseen conditions, such as the theft of the keystones.
She still hated the idea of trusting life-and-death decisions to hunches, to anything she could not measure and document.

Her foot slid onto the white tile. The enchantment held. She exhaled and said, “Step where I step.”

They all reached the relative safety of the elevated ice lake. Tethiel strode onto it, so he stood upside down while Hiresha remained sideways on the column. He said, “We’ve never been more at odds.”

Hiresha was peering down at the pillar, wondering if she had only imagined the weakness in the enchantments.
Perhaps we could have walked up on any side without mishap.
At the base of the column, the Bright Palms had connected themselves with ropes in preparation for the ascent. They stared up at Hiresha, and she guessed they were hesitant to approach her and her gemstones head-on.

“A test is in order,” she said. “We will provoke them by making ourselves appear vulnerable. Tethiel, hand me a pair of skates.”

He unstrapped two of the bladed shoes from his belt. “Do you mean to say you can use these for something besides stabbing?”

The air nipped Hiresha’s feet as she put on the skates. They were close to the right size, and she realized they were the pair her student had made for her. While adjusting the straps, she kept half an eye on the Bright Palms as they rushed forward to attack.

The trio included a man with a scimitar, the woman with a wealth of moles—who now wore a helmet—and the Bright Palm with the fish-shaped mouth and fast fists. When they rushed over the suspicious white tile, two of them flipped backward in the air. They began to fall, to Hiresha’s diamond-studded delight.

“See?” Tethiel said. “Your fears are wise.”

“I prefer to call it intuition,” Hiresha said.

The man with the small mouth had crossed the treacherous stretch of tile, and he lowered himself against the pillar and hugged it. Even so, when the weight of the other two Bright Palms pulled on his ropes, he slid downward. He crossed over the white tile again, and this time he too fell.

Hiresha fluttered her fists above her shoulders in happiness. The small-mouthed man had slowed the fall of the other two enough for the one with the scimitar to reconnect with the column’s enchantment, and none of them dropped far enough to break more than a leg. They could attempt the ascent again in minutes, which would be a longer stretch of peace than Hiresha had possessed in days.

The enchantress considered if she should rest now. In her dream laboratory, she could replenish the jasper sword from a near distance since she had a connection to the enchantment. Curing Tethiel’s wound would require pulling him into the laboratory, which would necessitate an indelicate amount of skin contact. She decided she had already run naked through the frigid air enough for one year, and she had less inclination to expose herself again with Fos watching. Using what time remained to gain more of a lead seemed best, at least as far as her fatigue would allow her to think.

The ice creaked under Tethiel’s skates. “I hope this isn’t more than passably dangerous. One might accuse me of being irresponsible if I died in a frozen lake in the sky.”

“The ice can’t be thick enough to hold me,” Fos said. In spite of his words, he jumped from the pillar over the frozen lake. “But I’ll Lighten myself and—”

The spellsword drifted down to land on the ice like a feather, but then Hiresha felt the Lightening expire. As deathly water slurped around Fos’s feet, he threw himself to the side.

Hiresha expected the dream power in his greaves had exhausted itself over the last few days, and her hands slapped over her sashes in search of a jewel that would Lighten him. Her skates slipped forward and back on the ice.

More ice cracked, but Fos rolled until he came to a rest with arms and legs splayed over the frozen lake. His jasper sword had tumbled from its holster, and it lay beside a fissure of water.

“You have the right idea,” Hiresha said. “Disperse your weight evenly and—Mind your sword!”

Ice crumbled under the hilted slab of red stone, and the sword tipped into the water. The thought of seeing the blade she had crafted for Fos dropping to the center of the lake made Hiresha feel as cold as if she were diving herself wearing only chains. Gooseflesh raced down her back in rippling tingles. She scooted forward, skidding on her knees to reach for the weapon.

Hiresha’s fingers closed over the jasper hilt. Fos’s hand engulfed her own with a crushing warmth, and his heat seeped up her wrist as he lifted the sword. Ice flakes slid down the blade, their white the same color as veins of lighter stone within the jasper’s redness and clusters of black crystal.

The enchantress looked up and met Fos’s eye. Tendrils of inflamed skin crossed over the bridge of his nose from under the bandage.
His wound has contaminated.
Hiresha resolved she would not only cure him and eventually regenerate the eye, but she would also make his vision better.
Perfect sight, he deserves no less.
He had risked everything to return to the plateau, to save Hiresha, his sister, and the Academy they loved.
I’d need to replace both eyes anyway for an assured color match.