Gemworld (13 page)

And then it hit him. “I got just the thing,” he chuckled, digging the runebook out of his pant pocket. “Is there a rune for ‘timepiece’?”

***

Thus began a daily routine for Sal. In the mornings, he would train with Retzu. In the afternoons, he would hone his skill at gemsmithing. In the evenings, he would dine with Jaren, who most often took bread with Reit and Delana. “Benefits of being a bachelor in this outfit,” the emerald often joked. Of course, the meal was never free. Delana was always trying to fix Jaren up with this woman or that—”oh, you’d
love
her, she’s such a sweet girl!”—but he just shrugged it off. It was a small price to pay for not having to cook. Strangely, Delana had stopped trying to play matchmaker with Sal. Just as well, as far as Sal was concerned. He couldn’t think of any woman beyond Marissa.

“Your concentration is slipping,” Retzu noted as he deflected Sal’s half-hearted chop, tapping him atop his head once to emphasize the point. Sal grumbled under his panted breath and shoved all thoughts of flaming red hair out of his mind, driving at the assassin with a renewed effort.

“Good, good,” Retzu said, bringing his bokuto up to block Sal’s thrust. Sal twisted the parry into another strike, the newly wrapped rawhide hilt cutting into the palms of his hands as the wooden blade swept down. Again, Retzu blocked his strike almost effortlessly.

Sal dropped low and swung his leg around in a wide circle, hoping to catch Retzu off guard. No such luck; the assassin jumped the foot sweep with ease as slashed for Sal’s shoulder as he came back down. Sal dodged the blow at the last second, the breeze from the near miss ruffling his hair as the sword passed.

Blunted as the bokuto swords were, they still packed enough of a wallop to shower a man’s vision with sparks if he wasn’t fast enough to evade them. Sal’s body bore the evidence of that. But it was a small price to pay. More and more often, he noticed Retzu walking away from these training sessions with a knot or a limp of his own.

“Excellent,” Retzu praised. He gave a grudging nod of his head as he raised his hand, signaling the end of the session. For the second time that week, Sal had fought him to a draw. He cracked a weary smile as both men lowered their swords, and then his smile faltered. Retzu hadn’t broken a sweat, was barely even breathing hard!
Frikkin
’
punk
, Sal thought, seething behind his grin.

Sal drew himself up haltingly, his many bumps and bruises crying out for attention. He was eager to get to Jaren’s tent for his daily healing, but he stayed put, refusing to leave the village green before Retzu. But the assassin didn’t move. Instead, he cast a steady gaze over Sal’s shoulder. Turning to follow Retzu’s line of sight, Sal found the real reason they’d stop. Another sparring match awaited him, but one decidedly more pleasant.

Marissa stood on the far side of the green, beaming as she watched the pair train. She was ragged and filthy from her latest rock hunting expedition—and utterly beautiful in Sal’s eyes. And by the look on her face, Sal guessed that she’d found something interesting.

“Have you talked to her yet?” Retzu asked, as Marissa started towards them.

“I’m working up to it.”

This brought a hoarse chuckle from his friend. “You’ve been ‘working up to it’ since we talked about this last week. At this rate, I’ll be a husband
and
a father before you so much as kiss the woman.”

Sal had to admit he had a point. Since first meeting the mistress artisan, he’d made little attempt to “declare his intentions” with Marissa, as Retzu put it. Not that he hadn’t want to desperately.

He didn’t know what his problem was. They were both adults, and obviously interested in each other. The way they tripped and bumbled when they were around each other was proof positive of that.

And after two weeks of the tripping and bumbling, Sal’s reluctance to declare intentions had the whole town talking. Reit scoffed at comments of Sal’s cowardice. Retzu had even gone so far as draw his sword in defense of Sal’s honor when someone had suggested that he might “prefer the company of a man.” It was just the assassin’s bokuto, but in the safety and apparent brotherhood of Caravan, the threat of a popknot on someone’s forehead was just as effective a deterrent as the appearance of drawn steel.

Marissa was no help, either. For some strange reason, the womenfolk of the culture refused to make the first move. He didn’t understand it, and rather resented it—it would make this a heck of a lot easier! They could hold jobs, elevating themselves to the very top of their profession if they so desired. They could fight alongside or even command men in combat. But when it came to declaring romantic intentions, the responsibility always fell to the man. And Marissa was playing her part to the hilt. The only sign that she’d even noticed the local gossip was the near constant look of stifled amusement on her face. It wasn’t that custom absolutely demanded her patience per se. She, like every other woman in the culture, simply chose to wait on the man. But if she was disappointed by Sal’s reticence, it didn’t show.

As she drew near, radiant beneath the dust and grime that caked her face, Sal vowed under his breath that he’d talk to her soon.
No, not
‘
soon
’. Tonight, he thought emphatically. There was no way he was going to pass up even one more opportunity to tell Marissa how he felt. He swore it by God and all creation! But as she came close enough for him to smell the fading hints of the lavender soap she used—and was currently in dire need of—he felt his resolve crumble beneath a schoolboy giddiness.

“Retzu, would you mind if I stole Sal away from you?” Marissa asked, her eyes not even wavering in the assassin’s general direction.

“Not at all, Mistress Artisan.” He bowed as he left, already forgotten by the star struck pair.

“So, your scavenger hunt obviously went well,” Sal started, first to break the oddly comfortable silence. “Let’s see what you got.”

Eagerly, Marissa reached into the pocket of her dirt streaked linen trousers and handed him the contents with a flourish. It was a smallish chip of obsidian, not much bigger than a thumbnail.

It was the first one that he’d actually held, and for a moment its dark beauty captivated him. So struck was he that it didn’t register immediately. He’d been taught its magical qualities, but he didn’t feel the telltale itch in his left eye that he’d come to expect whenever he touched the gemstones of the artisan’s trade. He studied the glittering black shard intensely, wondering what was so different about this soulgem.

Apparently, Marissa sensed his growing perplexity. “You’d told me that you had a few ideas you’d like to try out using obsidian. I’m sorry… I thought you’d be pleased.”

“Oh, I am,” he reassured her. “It’s just... well, it’s a long story.”

“Well, good! You can tell me over dinner. If you’d like,” she added quickly, remembering herself.

“I’d like that, but I’d hate to subject you to my cooking,” he confided with a sheepish grin. Marissa’s smile faltered, and he groaned inwardly, cursing himself for a fool. “Would you mind terribly if I asked you to cook?” he added—quite smoothly, much to his surprise—in an attempt to salvage the situation.

If Marissa had radiated enthusiasm before, she was positively blinding now. “Come over about sundown, and bring an appetite,” she said eagerly. She dashed down the path leading back to her wagon, leaving Sal to admire her as she faded from view.

It wasn’t until she was actually out of sight that he remembered the obsidian shard she’d given him. He held it up to check it for flaws, the sunlight cutting a feeble swath through the semi-translucent gem. Still his left eye felt normal. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. If the other soulgems caused his eye to twitch, why not the obsidian?

He spent the better part of an hour putting a spit-shine to his appearance, and arrived at the artisan’s wagon early, so eager was he to see Marissa again. To his surprise, everything seemed in order for once. The workshop wasn’t in its usual state of disarray. The tools were all hanging on their pegs neatly. And dinner...

The heavenly smell of roasted chicken wafted up from a fire that blazed near the wagon door. Two birds hung spitted over the fire, juices dripping into the sputtering flame. An iron tripod stood near the fire pit, holding a blackened kettle aloft to cool. He was just about to inspect the contents of the kettle when all thoughts of food went right out of his head.

Marissa stepped out of her wagon an absolute vision. Her hair was washed and brushed, flowing over her shoulders in auburn waves. She wore a soft velvet dress, a vibrant green to compliment her eyes, and cut to accentuate her full figure in all the right places. Granted, all the necessary body parts were covered, but the
way
they were covered… Sal reflexively ran a hand across his mouth, attempting to stem the flow of drool that threatened to spill from his mouth. He stammered a greeting that went unnoticed by the other. Marissa was having a hard enough time getting her own mouth to work right.

That set the pace for the early part of the evening. Conversation was halting at first, if not altogether awkward, but soon began to flow. Before they knew it, the moon was high in the sky and the fire had died down, their half eaten dinner long forgotten. But the tension between them had finally broken, and food was the furthest thing from their minds.

Testing the boundaries of this new comfort zone, Sal commented off-handedly, “The women of this world are not exactly what I expected.”

“How so?” Marissa asked, quirking an amused eyebrow.

“Well… please don’t take this the wrong way, but in my world, women were once thought to be inferior to men. We could chalk it up to misunderstanding what our religions taught us of the relationship between man and woman, or maybe it’s because women are physically weaker than men, but whatever it was, the man was thought to be the protector and the woman was thought to be the helper. Long story short, our world has moved on from that, and men and women generally see each other as equals.”

Sal paused for a moment to gather his nerve, then pressed on. “I see a lot of our earlier culture in yours. Almost all of the fighters I’ve seen in this village are men. Delana cooks and cleans for Reit. And if I may be so bold, even you caught yourself when you asked me to dinner. But at the same time, Delana is the head of her Order here in Caravan, and you’re… umm…”

“Head of the Artisan Guild,” Marissa finished for him, her expression neutral, volunteering nothing.

“Yeah,” Sal said. “How does something like that happen?”

Marissa pursed her lips to hide some feature, though Sal couldn’t tell if it was a smile or a frown. Not knowing made him feel more than a little self-conscious. He silently prayed he hadn’t stepped all over some line he hadn’t known was there.

When she finally spoke, her face was carefully schooled. “The relationship between man and woman has a long and involved story in my world, but to sum it up, it was always about unity. When men and women were equal, they both had their own way but there was no unity and nobody was happy. When men were in charge, there was unity but the women weren’t happy. And when women were in charge, there was unity but the men weren’t happy. We’re more… wise today than we were then.” A smile tugged at Marissa’s lips, but she said no more.

Now completely on the hook, Sal dared just a bit further. “So who’s in charge now?”

“We are, of course,” she replied innocently. “But we allow the men to think they are, so everybody’s happy.”

Sal chuckled a bit sheepishly. “Unity first, huh?” he said, bringing Marissa’s playful smirk to the full.

So it
’
s your move
, Sal thought to himself, his nervousness snaking its way past his mirth.
It
’
s not that she can
’
t make a move, but that she won
’
t. Amounts to the same thing though, don
’
t it? You gotta cowboy up. Well, what are you waiting for? You want her, she wants you. You won
’
t get a better opportunity to talk to her, so just suck it up and do it. It
’
s now or nev
—

“So what’s this long story about you and that obsidian chip?” Marissa asked, deftly changing the subject and completely throwing Sal’s train of thought. He groaned inwardly as his courage flagged yet again.

Sal pursed his lips as he thought of the best way to approach the question. “Remember a little while ago when I was telling you how I got here? Yeah, I know. Kinda weird, huh? Well, it gets weirder. The night of the strike on Merrick’s laboratory in Laos, I was shot like three or four times, and even had a computer moni—umm, big... glass... thing... explode in my face, putting this eye out,” he said, pointing with his left hand. “Tore my face to ribbons. Anyway, when I arrived at the prison in Schel Veylin, I was half dead. The prison emeralds made a passing attempt at healing me. Jaren had to come back behind and redo what the emeralds had already done, but there was only so much he could do with flesh that was already healed. I think they really botched my eye up, because now it tingles every time I touch a piece of magical gemstone. Well, except for this.” He drew the obsidian shard from his pocket and held it out.

“And you’re eye isn’t tingling now?”

Sal shook his head.

Marissa frowned. “How odd. It sounds a bit like what happens when a potential mage ascends—when he first touches his soulgem. I’m not certain. I only know that much because I’ve crafted the Tiled Hand so many times. I’ve even seen it used once or twice, though I can’t say I understand everything about what it does. From what I’ve seen, a newly ascended mage finds that he is more sensitive to the flows of mana, and can feel all forms of magic, not just that of his own gemstone. But this... I just don’t know. I’m not a mage, so I wouldn’t know where to start,” she shrugged apologetically.

Sal glanced at his wrist at the timepiece he’d created. It was an absolute marvel to Marissa, who’d never conceived of such a thing. It was silver backed, and held to his wrist by a wide leather strap. The faceplate was made of emerald, with four rubies quartering it and a fifth ruby in the center. As a final touch, he’d cut notches into the emerald faceplate at regular intervals to mark the hours. The runes took a bit of effort to work out, as the current form of timekeeping was based on the movements of the sun. But a sundial would quit at dusk, and that left too much of the day unaccounted for, so Sal went a different route. He etched runes onto the silver backing that would cause the emerald to reflect the ebb and flow of life as the day progresses, and the rubies to reflect the movement of the sun around the earth as a whole. He found the end result to be quite satisfactory. A glowing green line shot from the central ruby toward a point just left of the top of the timepiece, marking the hour.

“Well, it’s about thirty minutes to midnight... err, third watch,” Sal estimated. “Jaren may still be up. I can head over there and ask him. Wanna come with?”

Marissa was on her feet before he was even done speaking.
Curiosity, that
’
s all,
Sal thought, letting his insecurities bind him to silence once more.

They found Jaren sitting on the stoop of his wagon, clothed in his bed garments but wide awake and pouring over one of his many books. If Jaren was surprised to have visitors so late at night, he didn’t let it show. “To what do I owe the pleasure?” he asked cheerfully, as if it was perfectly normal for him to entertain guests when the rest of the world was in bed.

“I needed to talk to you about something,” Sal answered. At this, Jaren flicked his eyes to Marissa, then back to Sal, who answered the unspoken question with a minute shake of his head. No, he hadn’t “declared his intentions” yet. Jaren’s eyebrows arched slightly, a silent rebuke. Sal’s first impulse was to get defensive about it, but he stopped just short. This was neither the time nor the place. He flicked a quick glance at Marissa, who’d missed the entire exchange. No. Definitely not the time. Instead, he produced the obsidian shard and held it out to Jaren. The emerald took the shard and inspected it briefly, then turned expectantly back to Sal.

“Back when I started working with Marissa, I noticed that my eye—the messed up one—would start itching for no apparent reason. At first, I thought it was allergies, or dust, or something. But then I realized that it only happened when I was working with the gems. I thought it might have been some sort of aftereffect of the healing, so I ignored it. That is, until I touched that obsidian chip.”

Jaren listened in silence as Sal talked, rubbing his chin thoughtfully throughout. At this last, he frowned, but remained silent for a while longer.

“Which gems cause your eye to react?” Jaren asked slowly.

“Ruby, emerald, sapphire, amethyst... All of them except obsidian.”

“What about granite?”

Sal paused, considering. “Now that you mention it, I’m not sure. We’ve never worked with granite before.”

Jaren thought for a moment more, then nodded. “Marissa, would you be so kind as to gather up the other Heads of Order, and bring them to my tent? Thank you. Just tell them I’ll explain when they arrive. No, Sal, you wait here with me. I want to try something.”

He ducked into his wagon as Marissa left on her errand. Sal heard the crash and thunk of clutter being rearranged. Finally, Jaren emerged with a plaque. The plaque was made of rich lacquered wood, intricately carved with arcane symbols. Pointless symbols, Sal realized. Since they were not etched into a silver backing, whatever power the runes held wouldn’t be released. They were merely for decoration. On the front was the shape of a hand made entirely of gemstones, divided up into tiles. Each finger was crafted of a different stone—amethyst, sapphire, emerald, ruby, and granite. The palm was tiled in obsidian.

“The Tiled Hand,” Sal said, somewhat confused.

“Yes. When a mage completes his training in Bastion, he is commissioned, as part of his continued service to the Academy and the Ranks, to act as a recruiter of sorts, seeking out others who were similarly born with the potential to become a mage. When the recruiter comes into contact with such an individual, he introduces the would be mage to his soulgem using this.” He paused, extending the plaque to Sal. “Thankfully, the soulgems, while somewhat plentiful, are precious and come at great price, so rarely does someone come in contact with his soulgem prior to having touched the Tiled Hand. Regardless of how it happens, when it
does
happen, the potential mage is... changed,” he finished lamely, for lack of a better word. Sal took his meaning, though, and he wasn’t buying it.

“If that’s the case and I’m a potential mage, then why didn’t I change when I first picked up a gemstone? And why would I react to nearly all of the gemstones instead of just the one?”

“I don’t have all the answers,” Jaren admitted. “But the Tiled Hand is where all mages start. If we are to find the answers, we must begin with what we know.” Again, he offered the Hand to Sal.

Can
’
t fight the logic there
, Sal thought ruefully. Slowly, he raised his hand over the plaque.

Suddenly, he was taken by a wave of panic. What would happen if he
was
a mage, somehow? Would it kill him, because he wasn’t from this world? Would it drive him insane?

“If I’m not completely satisfied, can I return the unused portion for a full refund?”

“Pardon?” Jaren asked, confused.

“Never mind. Poor attempt at humor.”

Reaching out, he tentatively stroked each tile. He felt the familiar tickling sensation from the four fingers. Touching the obsidian palm, he felt nothing, as with the shard. Then he touched the thumb, which he assumed was the granite tile. Strangely, the stone brought no more reaction than the obsidian did.

Well, that
’
s all of them, and I
’
m still the same,
he thought. Licking his dry lips, he extended his hand over the plaque, matching the position of his hand with the position of its gemstone counterpart. Sal hesitated a moment longer then, holding his breath, he pressed his hand into the design.

Expecting a flash of pain, or whatever it was that mages felt when they changed, Sal sighed his relief when he was greeted with nothing more than the telltale twitch in his left eye.

Apparently, Jaren expected something as well, for his face was unreadable. Returning to his stoop, Jaren lapsed into grave silence, a puzzled frown etched on his face. For long moments, Sal watched his gemstone eyes flash back and forth as the emerald mentally attacked the situation from different angles.

Marissa soon returned, her mission successful. The other three Heads of Order arrived on her heels, in varying stages of undress. Delana was the worst off, with only a light house robe to cover a sheer silken gown. Sal looked at her apologetically, but the look was lost on her. Her violet eyes flicked from Sal to Jaren and back again, curiosity burning within. Senosh and Menkal seemed equally interested in the night’s events.