Gravity's Revenge (30 page)

Hiresha stared at Tethiel. She was not certain whether to be relived at seeing him or suspicious that had been listening hidden for minutes.

“Why are you both standing about?” Tethiel motioned them forward with a flap of feather blades. “We have Bright Palms to snuff.”

“I can’t see anything, now,” Fos said. “Except you.”

“Perfection,” Tethiel said. “Now you can follow my bright star to….”

“The Crystal Ballroom,” Hiresha said. She let go of Fos’s hand.

As they jogged after Tethiel, Fos muttered. “Don’t think I’ve met a star before that so needed to be seen.”

“The star that burns twice as bright is remembered thrice as long.” Tethiel appeared to fly ahead of them in a void, his wings rippling sheets of molten copper. “But the point is that at this juncture the Bright Palms cannot see us. Not yet. Ready your sword and gems.”

A blob of light pierced Tethiel’s darkness moments before a Bright Palm appeared. The glowing man with the round face and short nose lacked the ability to look surprised. His brows never lifted in shock. His hand never darted to the scimitar at his back. His eyes did lock on Tethiel, but it was Fos’s sword that cut him in half.

The stone blade circled overhead, and Fos brought it down again.

“Four.” He wiped droplets of light from his face. “Four of them left.”

Hiresha asked, “How close is the Ballroom?”

Tethiel breathed in as if smelling freshly baked bread. “The women inside are quite close. Most sleepless with worry.”

Hiresha had a sense that Fos and she ran over nothingness, under a sky of shadows. Her world was restricted to Tethiel, burning in flight like the sun god worshipped in the western continent.
In truth, I suspect he walks.

Tethiel angled his wings forward then sliced downward. The blackness around them tore apart, revealing the starlit dome of the Ballroom.

38

Crystal Ballroom

One Bright Palm stood at the entrance hall with his spear, another just within, key in her glowing hand.

A servant in grey was walking out the doors carrying chamber pots. She started, her arms twitching to disastrous results. In that same first instant, the Bright Palms did nothing.

Tethiel spoke to them. “I am the end of your days.”

The servant was screaming, Fos charging past her. The Bright Palm in the tribesman red sprang to the side of the greatsword, right into the path of Hiresha’s jewels. He floated upward with Lightening gem shining blue on his chest.

He waved his arms as if trying to push his feet back to the ground. He stayed stuck in the air. The tribesman flung his cudgel at Tethiel with such apparent force that his body turned sideways, but after the polished club left his hand it slowed to a standstill. It dropped to the snow. His robes shifted direction in a breeze, and as he was being carried away he shouted in even tones.

“Grongara, lock them out.”

The other Bright Palm ran down the entrance hall to the crystal door. She fitted in a key, while on the other side, enchantresses stood, rubbing their eyes and peering out.

“Stop her!” Hiresha lifted a clenched hand.

The door rolled open in front of the Bright Palm. She stepped through.

The Feaster flew in a spiral of fire. The spellsword raced. And the enchantress’s boots pounded from snowbank onto the building’s tiles.

As the Bright Palm shoved on the door to close it, Hiresha recognized her.
The woman who held me at sword point, with enough moles for a village.
She scraped the key against the inside lock.

The door shut on a molten wing. Tethiel had whipped his arm forward, smoking blades sticking between slabs of quartz. Twisting his wing, he opened the door a crack, and Fos heaved it aside.

Hiresha felt as relieved as if a waterfall of diamonds flowed over her. Sheamab was nowhere in sight, and once they secured the enchantresses and novices, every advantage would be theirs.

Her happiness was ripped away as the mole-infested Bright Palm drew her sword. She rushed at the nearest enchantresses.

Later, Hiresha could not say why the Bright Palm attacked the defenseless women. Perhaps she understood she could not win out against three, or she saw herself as fulfilling Sheamab’s promises of execution, should a spellsword climb to the plateau.

Hiresha knew only then that each of her footsteps seemed to last a lifetime. She pushed through the entrance of crystal but a thudding foresight tortured her that she would be too late, that someone would be stabbed.

The first enchantresses flung themselves to the ground, their arms crossed over their heads, and the Bright Palm had to run by them to avoid the jasper sword and searing wings that chased her. Women and girls scattered from her upraised sword. Their screams echoed in the ballroom into an endless sound of terror.

The fleeing women stumbled into Fos’s path, slowing him. Novices and an enchantress in a plum-shaded gown tripped over each other in fright of Tethiel. He wrapped his razor wings close around him, and instead of trying to force a way through the confusion toward the Bright Palm, he stepped onto one of the inscribed circles that lofted dancers into the air. He swept across the Ballroom.

The rector followed him with wide eyes, her beehive of hair tipping back, back, and she shouted something that Hiresha could not hear. His wings left whitish-yellow after-images in her eyes.

A woman dropped through the air, arms flailing. She had fled to the top of the dome only to fall from the weakened enchantment. Hiresha scattered several Lightening jewels to try to save her. One hit, and she drifted upward in a slow summersault along with two other enchantresses who had been struck by the stray jewels.

From Hiresha’s position in the bowl of the room, she had a painfully clear view to the Bright Palm on the curving wall. Ahead of her waving sword, a pair of fuzzy ears scurried out from under a blanket, and Hiresha’s soul leapt at the sight of the fennec. The girl who scrambled out of the covers after him was Minna. Her veil hung loose on the side of her face, exposing perfect features free of a birthmark. Her gaping mouth was a black dot at the sight of the Bright Palm’s sword.

Other novices and women fled, but Minna stood trembling, holding the fennec. A glance showed Fos and Tethiel still too far to save the Feaster girl.
A charging Bright Palm has to be her greatest fear.
Hiresha threw a Lightening jewel, which of course missed at that range. A bolt of certainty crashed through her that saving the Academy would feel like defeat if she had to witness Minna and the fennec hacked to pieces.

The Minister of Orbiting Bodies had been shoved close to the Bright Palm, but instead of hustling away, the elder enchantress picked up her skirts and threw herself in front of Minna. The minister attempted to ward away sword thrusts with no more than long sleeves stitched with constellations of gold thread.

Hiresha felt a sickening gratefulness as well as surprise at the minister’s heroism.

By the time the minister fell—her scarves cut and stained—Tethiel had reached Minna and shielded her and the fennec with his wings. A leaping Fos passed over them both to land sword-first on the Bright Palm. The jasper blade did not slice so much as sunder, not cut so much as demolish.

“Two left,” Fos said.
          

Hiresha knelt over the minister and felt her neck for a pulse. It was fading.

The minister’s voice was faint but loud in the Ballroom’s sudden silence. “Hiresha, can you have it…would you name the next comet after me?”

“You can manage your own celestial accounting.” Hiresha pried free the Bright Palm’s sword and began cutting open the minister’s clothes. “I’m going to save your life.”

“No.” The minister fluttered her fingers against Hiresha’s hand. One of the minister’s eyes had closed, the other unfocused. “Let me die, with my decorum intact.”

Hiresha had already seen the deaths of more elders in the last days than she could tolerate.
I’ll heal Taren now, and later when she’s thinking clearly she can end her life if she so pleases with a step off the cliff.

“Tethiel, a veil of privacy, if you please.”

With a wave of his wing, the Feaster summoned curtains of opal beads that enclosed the two enchantresses in a gemstone tent. Hiresha finished opening the minister’s gowns, and a possible reason for her reluctance became obvious. Minister Taren had not been born a woman. The details of figure did not much distract Hiresha, since she had long suspected the discrepancy.
Merely further proof that men should be allowed to study enchantment.

A turquoise stone from the minister’s gowns provided a perfect medium for Hiresha to enchant in the dream laboratory. She Attracted the wounds closed and left the minister in a healing sleep. Hiresha did not linger in dream, though rousing herself took the better part of an hour. She had to dig her way out of exhaustion as if she had been buried in an avalanche.

Have to tell the spellswords we have everyone secure.
Hiresha wanted it done before dawn, when Tethiel would lose his power. Once the spellswords regained the plateau, all would be won.
I wish Sheamab had the capacity to feel crushing embarrassment. She said she knew she’d master me after my first move.

Only after a replacement dress had been found for the minister did Tethiel dissipate his opal veil. Several students of the observatory rushed to the minister’s side. Hiresha reassured them, and they thanked her with tearful eyes for healing their mentor. Hiresha left them only to be approached by two more elders. The Rector of Rarified Armament had her ears bandaged and a bruised eye.
They must not have been gentle to her after she helped me escape.

“You are bravery incarnate, Hiresha.” Gold shone between the rector’s lips as she spoke. “But whoever is that spellsword? I must say he does the Copper Raptor credit. I assume that’s a fire tincture of your design.”

“He is no spellsword,” the Dean of Somnarium Exploration said, twisting her gaze away from Tethiel. The loose skin under her neck swayed with her displeasure. “Hiresha, you’ll have him removed from the Ballroom at once. The vibrations here have grown far too discordant. The remains of the Bright Palm must also be collected and disposed of.”

The dean waved a green glove holding the Ballroom’s crystal key, directing a few novices. Hiresha was gathering her own alertness to try to say that they would indeed be leaving to finish saving them all and their gowns, too, thank you very much, when another novice spoke in a voice that carried to her friends.

“This is the worst rescue ever,” the princess said. “The provost almost had us all killed with that Bright Palm.”

Hiresha patted the princess on her shoulder. “I’m most relived that the recent tribulations have not been so severe as to alter your temperament in the least.”

Fos barged to Hiresha’s side and gripped her arm. “Do you have a moment? I mean, I have to talk to you. It’s about Alyla.”

“Your tone is frightening me. Was she injured, too?”

“No, it’s not that. Or maybe it is.” Fos’s breath was ragged, his face ashen. “Alyla isn’t here.”

A squeak drew Hiresha’s eyes to the fennec. His ears jutted upward from Minna’s grasp. The girl looked away as she whispered. “The Bright Palm took her. The one with the staff.”

39

Mind’s Gate

The crystal door shut behind them with a pinging sound. Hiresha led Tethiel and Fos down the entrance hall.

“It’s of the utmost importance that we contact the spellswords in the Blade,” Hiresha said.

Fos jogged in front, slinging his sword out. He spoke as if he had not heard her. “You don’t think they’d kill Alyla? Do you? She’s only a novice. The Bright Palm with the bo staff doesn’t have reason to hurt her. She couldn’t.”

Leave Sheamab to me.
Hiresha said the words, but the wind stole them. The night had turned blustery, and Hiresha’s hair thrashed, her face stung from cold. Tumbling snow misted at their feet, and at the cliff edge, tendrils of white were coiled about in the violent air like pale cobras.

Hiresha gestured them to the brink. Wind howled up at their faces, and the enchantress and Feaster squinted down at the angular building of glass below, the Blade. Several rooms were lit in the
College
of
Active Enchantment
, making it appear even more like a sword reflecting points of light.

She had to shout her question. “Could you fly down to it?”

Tethiel rocked in time to the gusts, and even with his wings folded around him, his Lightened body slid backward in the snow. He said, “I fear if I tried, I’d fail you.”

“If you miss the Blade, the wind will likely carry you back upward.”

“Or crashing into the cliff.”

Hiresha said, “Very well. Fos must leap down. Fos? Fos!”

The spellsword was hustling along the plateau, toward the arch of stone above the Skyway. Figures stood there, and Hiresha caught the shimmer of magic.

“They have her,” he shouted over his shoulder. His sword pumped up and down as he rushed forward.

To Hiresha’s left, a darkness of storm cloud crept over the stars. “Wait! Spellsword Fosapam Chandur, I order you to….”

Her words died as she saw something under the arch. In place of the goddess’s ice statue was a hulk of shaggy fur.
Abominable!
Patches of grey and white stood out in the creature’s mismatched coat of brown and black. Even a few locks of yellow fluttered in the wind. A length of bronze was spiked through the thing’s chest.
Someone has defiled the Opal Mind.

Hiresha wondered if she should hate the Bright Palms even more, or the thief and Emesea. An acid of loathing burned through Hiresha at the thought of a person vandalizing a beacon of imagination.
What sort of reckless ignoramus would so risk offending the goddess of creativity?

She swayed with a throat-clenching nausea as she threw an Attraction jewel at the feet of the abomination. With a cracking sound, the figure collapsed forward. The sculpture of hair squirmed down to the enchanted gem. Then the statue’s opals broke free and returned to hover in the air. Snow billowed upward to the floating gemstones, compacting into a floating head of white and building downward to form a new goddess.

Hiresha was relieved but still feeling sick with tension. She glanced again at the serene brow of the Opal Mind and thought she heard a whisper, a murmur of an idea she could not yet grasp. No time was given her to think.

“Murderers!” Fos whipped his sword around himself, stumbled back. Straightening, he stomped toward three figures near the edge. “Why—What’re you—You put her down and get up your weapons.”

Bright Palm Sheamab held Alyla by her shoulder and her hand. On the other side, the prodigiously jawed man with jewels in his skin held her in the same fashion. Light pulsed down their arms and up the girl’s, and her lean body shone through her clothes. Then Hiresha saw it was that she wore nothing, her ribs curving shadows within glowing flesh. Dark hair fell over her chest from a slumped head. Her locks clawed around something over her heart, and only when Hiresha noticed the dropped mallet at their feet could she force herself to see the truth. Like the statue, a nail was driven through Alyla’s heart.

Terror split the enchantress, a cold severing.

The tip of Fos’s sword sagged into the snow. He bent over, hand on his knees, gasping.

“Her own hand struck the blow.” Sheamab nodded from Alyla to the mallet in the snow. “One nail to drive out weakness. One nail to break the shackles of shyness….”

“Liars!” Fos swung his sword up and took a step toward them. “She was the sweetest, kindest—”

“…One nail for freedom.” Sheamab and the other Bright Palm guided the corpse’s hands to the spike in her chest. “One nail for new life. One for the innocent.”

The dead girl’s hands closed on the spike. At first Hiresha thought the others still guided her fingers, but the Bright Palms had let go. Face shrouded by her black hair, Alyla’s body twisted the nail back and forth, inch by inch pulling it out.

Fos staggered to a stop.

“Strike them,” Tethiel said at the enchantress’s side. “With jewels, while they’re standing together.”

Hiresha found that she could not move, could do nothing but watch as the nail dropped between the girl’s bare feet. A star of power burst in Alyla’s chest, a heart that beat light, a wound that closed, eyes that shone white through a veil of hair.

Alyla looked up. Fos fell to his knees.

Sheamab locked gazes with Hiresha. The cold, voiceless confidence of that stare pushed the enchantress back a step.
Focus, Hiresha. Focus. There are only two left. Or three, now. You don’t even have to defeat them yourself. You only need take the Skyway to rally the spellswords.
Hiresha’s fingers searched her sash for jewels, but she could feel nothing.

Alyla bent her knees to pick up a cotton shift. Her voice was unfamiliar to Hiresha: strong in the keen of the wind, calm as the mountains, and dreadful to the ear.

“You shall attire yourself with discarded garments and be ever clothed before the eyes of the innocent. Twenty-sixth tenet.”

Fos ground a hand into his temple.

Sheamab asked Alyla, “Are any here innocent?”

A trembling hurt crossed up and down Hiresha when Alyla gazed at the enchantress, judged her.
Alyla never could meet eyes without blinking away.
When the girl turned her stare on Fos, the enchantress looked for any hint of the past timid smile, the pressing of the hands together in happiness at seeing her brother, the joy in her eyes. Now her arms hung at her sides, and the light in her dead eyes was no more than magic.

“An innocent will not intend to harm others,” Alyla said, turning back to Sheamab. “They have harmed Bright Palms.”

Fos propped his forehead against the hilt of his greatsword. His voice was wet with sorrow. “If this was your choice, then why? Alyla, why do this to yourself?”

“I wished to stop feeling like speaking was suffocating me,” she said. “I learned the youngest Bright Palm chooses the direction of all. I wanted to help.”

Sheamab said, “Tell us, Bright Palm Alyla, what must be done?”

Hiresha’s chest stung with hope.
Could Alyla sway Sheamab?
If Alyla told the older Bright Palm to stand down, Hiresha could walk past to the Skyway and gather the spellswords.

Alyla crouched to lift the bronze spike that she had pulled from her own heart. She held the metal across her palms and looked to Tethiel. “You shall seek out Feasters and abolish them. This is your purpose.”

Sheamab gripped Alyla’s shoulder, holding her back. “Those trained to it will fight. Your task must be to ask the spellsword to lay down his sword. Do not allow him to stray farther from innocence.”

Alyla said, “I ask you to lay down your sword. I will not let you stray farther from innocence.”

Spasms sent shivers over the armor scales on Fos’s chest. His jaw shuddered as he turned to ask, “Is—is there a way for her to go back? Will she ever be herself again?”

Hiresha had never heard of it, and her stomach cramped and was cold as if stuffed with snow.

“No,” Tethiel said. “Your sister was stolen from you.”

Fos’s face turned jagged with lines and taut skin, and he screamed at Tethiel. The spellsword charged the Feaster, weapon pumping up and down.

Hiresha stepped between them and cried out for Fos to stop. She lifted a Lightening jewel but knew that using it against her loyal spellsword would be the ruin of them all.

Fos collapsed at the sight. He sobbed with knees and hands in the snow, his dropped jasper sword a red wound on the white plateau.

“You have done well,” Sheamab said to Alyla.

The Bright Palm with purple and green jewels embedded in his knuckles yanked two more spikes from his belt. He stalked toward Tethiel.

Hiresha’s fingers twitched to motion the Lord of the Feast. Her voice was hoarse. “Get us past them.”

His wings burned, leeching away the light and concealing them with darkness. Hiresha took two steps around toward the Skyway when the illusions were ripped apart by a five-fingered sun. Sheamab charged in. Her staff whirred through the air like angry hornets.

“I challenge you to a game of….” Hiresha could not finish the thought, scrambling backward under the gateway arch. Sheamab was ignoring her words anyway, though she jumped around Hiresha’s first three jewels. Tethiel was dashing away, Mister Jewel Pox pursuing him with nails. When Hiresha stepped back again, she crunched into the goddess’s statue.

Retreating around it, she allowed her hand to reach up to the Opal Mind’s face with a vague idea of throwing the snow into Sheamab’s eyes.
No, that’s not what I want to do.
She felt as if her intuition was speaking to her.
Remember the novice who was expelled for dragging an opal from the statue? When she let the gem go it flew into another girl’s head so fast that she lay bedridden for a month.
Hiresha believed a cracked skull was exactly what Sheamab needed.

Hiresha’s fingers touched the hardness of the gems in the goddess’s skull. As she pulled out an opal and fistful of snow, uncertainty stabbed her.
Is this blasphemy?
She had to hope the Opal Mind would respect the innovative tactic.
Maybe the goddess inspired me to think of this trick, to defend her Academy.

The enchantress hurled the snow at Sheamab. It did not come close to hitting her in the eyes, but Hiresha hoped it distracted the Bright Palm from seeing the opal. The enchantress hid it behind her. When she let go, the gem stayed pressed against the small of her back. To divert Sheamab’s attention further, Hiresha forced herself to say something.

“You kidnap and convert girls when they’re most vulnerable. You heal jewel-duping poisoners. Have you considered renaming yourselves the Order of the Hypocrites?”

“Those who lie and steal are never innocent. Eighteenth tenet, stanza nine, which I interpret to mean men who do one but not both may still be healed.” Sheamab dashed around the statue and the discarded pile of hair, then to the right when Hiresha tossed a jewel. “Inannis never lies, and he discovered when the Lord of the Feast would arrive here. This thief will have saved the Lands of Loam.”

The opal punched against Hiresha’s back harder for each footstep she retreated. Within the enchantress, an energy of purpose crackled and warmed her. She had listened to her intuition, and in a few seconds she would step aside and allow a gem to launch from behind her at a speed not even the agile Bright Palm could dodge. She aligned the Bright Palm in front of the statue.
Keep her talking.

Hiresha asked, “The poisoner was waiting and watching for Lord Tethiel in the town? He saw him take the Skyway?”

Sheamab shifted a pace to the right, her staff loose in her hand and swaying back and forth like a snake-charmer’s flute. “Inannis knew when the Lord of the Feast would arrive months in advance.”

How could the jewel duper have known?
The enchantress had no time to think of an answer, but she felt as if someone had hammered a spike through the bottom of her stomach, a sweltering line of pain.

Another pressure on her back made her worry the opal would rip through her coat. The gem was sliding her forward, against the wind.
It’s time.
Hiresha stepped to the right and in front of the Bright Palm again then reached back for the gem. It yanked at her fingers as she tried to aim it, the piece of a goddess’s mind blasting out of her grip and whizzing forward.

Sheamab had started moving before the enchantress had even reached for the jewel. The Bright Palm sprang out of the path of the gem’s streak of red and white. Her staff thrummed around in a circle of black to slam against Hiresha’s leg.