Gravity's Revenge (26 page)

33

Rector’s Armory

Fos was charging straight for the archer, blocking Hiresha from the Bright Palm’s line of fire.
But Fos’s protective enchantments are exhausted.
Each moment Hiresha endured the skin-tearing worry that she would see the spellsword’s head jerk back, an arrow through his forehead. The archer would hear where to aim from all Fos’s shouting.

“The Fate Weaver must’ve made this day your last!”

Tethiel said to her, “Fear not. I’ll distract the archer.”

The hall filled with the sound of stomping feet as if an army marched through the
Mindvault
Academy
. The cacophony of illusion silenced to nothing when daylight fell on the Lord of the Feast from the open armory. Fos’s shouting was once again exposed.

“No use begging. The goddess won’t respin your fate!”

An arrow flicked to the side, and Hiresha saw that Fos had held his sword in front of his face to deflect it. She lifted to her tiptoes out of happiness and would have stabbed herself with the dagger she had forgotten was in her hand. The thickness of her fur coat protected her.

As far as Hiresha could see, the archer was jogging backward and fitting another arrow to his bow. Soon he would run out of hallway, but Hiresha worried about how far Fos had chased after him. The enchantress was not one to lie on the ground in the face of danger, and she thought she should follow the spellsword.

“Sheamab may be trying to separate us.” Hiresha walked forward, glancing down to fit the dagger back into her pocket and reach for her jewel sashes.

Tethiel cried out her name, and she whipped her gaze up to see that the archer had leapt to the side of Fos. The Bright Palm’s bow was spent. His arrow spun downward toward her.

I haven’t my protection enchantments either.
The thought seared through her.

She wanted to shriek. She wanted to dive to the side, but she started too late.

Tethiel flung himself in front of her. She heard a sound like a fist striking a book. It felt like her insides turned to stone, and her knees could not support her. Tethiel fell into her, and she tumbled backward holding him.

An arrow with banded-white feathers stuck up from his chest. So much pain burst through Hiresha that she checked to make sure she too had not been pierced. After patting across her chest and finding herself unhurt, she rolled out from under him.

She lifted the lapels of his coat, watched darkness spread outward over his embroidered crimson shirt. The arrow protruded from the right side of his chest.
Through the lung,
she thought,
but likely not the heart, shrunken as his might be.
She was relieved to see his eyes focus on her.

“Tethiel, you fool! You shouldn’t have risked yourself.”

“You’re right. Self-sacrifice is far too selfish.” Three fingers of his hand clamped onto her arm. Blood foamed from his lips. His shuddered intake of breath rattled. “Think—can you heal this?”

“By opal and imagination, I’d better! Or I’ll be most upset with you.”

She dropped a Lightening jewel onto him, so she could lift him by herself. The enchantress grasped his shoulders with the same care she would show a tapestry woven of glass, and she pulled him through the air toward the open armory. His blood floated behind him in rippling globs before pattering down to the tiles. His breath spluttered in shorter and more frantic gasps.

She back-stepped between the spellsword statues, into the armory’s entrance that spiraled in a curving path from ceiling to floor. Hiresha had been upside down in the hall but now stood in normal relation to the view outside. The chamber’s far wall was of solid quartz crystal and bitter bright with the sun. The transparent surface showed the mountain range glaring with snow.

Hiresha tugged Tethiel past obsidian-faced manikins wearing suits of gold-embossed armor. Weapons sat atop velvet pillows on pedestals. Hiresha yanked one cushion out from under a four-edged sword of silver, the enchanted weapon clattering to the ground. Nudging Tethiel downward, she rested him on his side with his head on the black pillow. His eyes were pinched shut, his breaths scraping and wet.

By the time she started cutting open his vest, she heard Fos’s heavy footfall. It sounded like he was dragging something.

“Hiresha, you weren’t hurt?”

“Tethiel is the one with an arrow in his chest.”

Fos said, “Shouldn’t have let that arrow get by me, but he’s a quick one. The goddess should’ve taken more than his eyes.”

“I hope you attended to the Bright Palm in a permanent way,” she said, her eyes still on Tethiel. “Seal the armory. There should be a lever by the entrance. I think a Bright Palm is near.”

Her dagger ripped through stitching of night-blooming flowers. As the layers of Tethiel’s clothing parted, Hiresha swore she saw shadows skitter deeper into the folds.

A crashing of metal forced Hiresha to look up. A rack of weapons had toppled. They had been arranged in a circle along with decorative peacock feathers, which now glided across the floor. The blind Bright Palm had knocked them over. Fos yanked him back by the ankle, tried to wrap him in a chokehold. The smaller, glowing man thrashed and kicked, his hands groping for a grip on the spellsword’s face.

Fos angled his good eye away. “Might need one of your jewels to lock him down. He’s relentless as a roach.”

“Why ever would you bring him inside? Alive?”

Hiresha had to leave Tethiel. She stomped over to a knotted silk chord and pulled it. Outside, the giant stone swords slid back into place, and the door would begin closing soon.

A blue gemstone in hand, Hiresha stalked toward the Bright Palm. “Hold him still. This azurite should Attract all the water from his body. Then you can throw his bones outside.”

“No.” Fos’s breath heaved from the exertion of grappling with the Bright Palm. “He’s my hostage. So they won’t hurt Alyla.”

“You can’t bargain with Sheamab. And he shot Tethiel, twice. The Bright Palm has to die.”

The blind man’s hands caught on a knife on Fos’s belt. The Bright Palm yanked it free. The spellsword caught his wrists and shoved him face-down to the floor, blade spinning out of his grasp. The Bright Palm kept struggling.

“I—I need him alive,” Fos said.

Hiresha’s hands were shaking from anger. She gripped her wrist to steady the arm holding the dagger.
I know how he cares for Alyla,
she thought,
but he should trust me to free her and oust Sheamab. Someone should.
“Tethiel is dying. No one has time for this. I order you to dispose of this glowing menace.”

“Not a spellsword anymore. You can’t—”

“You are, and I’m still the provost of this Academy. He dies.”

“If he’d hurt you, then yes.” Fos bore down on the Bright Palm with a shoulder and reached for a leg. The spellsword glanced up at Tethiel. “But it was only him, and the Fate Weaver must’ve willed it. Because of his forbidden magic.”

Tethiel spat blood. “Forbidden is what you make of it.”

The armory door boomed shut.

“The Bright Palm shot at me, and his friends hurt me.” Hiresha lifted her right hand with the holes in her fingers. “If they can have friends.”

Fos looked upon her hand. His expression of resolve relented, changing into one even more grim. “If you say it must be.”

He rocked upward then rammed his stiff arms down on the Bright Palm’s neck. After a cracking sound, Fos stood and lifted from a pedestal a sword with blade that split into four curving prongs at the end.

Hiresha did not waste time watching further. The relief that Fos had at last listened bit into her chest. In her shaky grasp, the dagger still wobbled as she pointed it toward the entrance. “Fos, don’t open the armory for any reason.”

She cut away Tethiel’s sweat-caked shirt and lifted it so as not to bump the embedded arrow. Dabbing away the blood revealed a chest furrowed with scars from past burns, all aligned with the nicety and precision of a torturer’s scalding tongs.

A screeching nothingness filled Hiresha as she imagined Bright Palms leaning over Tethiel, them expressionless with voices of pitiless calm, him slick with sweat and blood. Their questions demanding he give up the names and hideouts of his Feaster children. His refusals, even when hazy with the stink of his own burning flesh.

Hiresha’s fingers searched in circles over her coat before finding the first button. She did not meet Fos’s eyes. “This will look peculiar. I am going to bring Tethiel into my dream to save his life.”

“Something tells me the Ceiling of Elders won’t be awarding you another gown for enchanting the Lord of the Feast back to health.”

“Focus on what is important. Tethiel will help us free the Academy and Alyla.” Hiresha turned away from Fos and unclasped her last button. Unwilling to lose the seconds required to take off her clothes completely, she cut her own shift down the front. She rested herself beside Tethiel, nestled the arrow shaft between her arm and chest, and closed her coat around them both.

His scarred skin scratched against hers. Violent and desperate heat pulsed into her, and when she closed her eyes, she felt as if the room were spinning downward and tilting.

If she was truthful with herself, she had imagined doing just this many times before, pulling the Lord of the Feast into her laboratory to heal him. She had wished to share her dream with him for years but had cautioned herself against opening her mind to the lord of nightmares. She was relieved that she now had no choice. This moment felt destined, right, and terrifying.

34

Dream Laboratory

The Lord of the Feast appeared in the indentation on the operations table. Gold shackles bound him to the basalt rock. Hiresha busied herself pulling spell baubles she would need from her shelves. Even when she did not look at Tethiel, she was aware of his every movement in her dream.

His eyes focused on a carnelian floating above him. Its burgundy light colored the droplets of sweat beading on his face, cheek twitching from pain. Half an arrow shaft stuck out from his arm. The white spots on the feather fletchings darkened to red when a ruby drifted by.

Tethiel’s crimson-tinted eyes shifted to Hiresha as she slipped an onyx choker over his neck. She said, “Out of respect for you, I’ve allowed you to maintain consciousness. This choker should yet sever you from the pain.”

He did not sigh out of relief as Hiresha had expected. His chin slid from side to side as he took in the mirrored room. He stared at his shackled hands, his fingers relaxed and still. “The choker also relieves me of my ability to move, I see.”

“There is that.”

“So you have me shackled and paralyzed.” He winked at her. “I should’ve known you were the type.”

“Would that be ‘the type’ who’ll heal you in the face of severe impertinence? You must hope so.”

One side of Hiresha’s face lifted in a smile, but at the same time the laboratory’s chill gnawed at her. Her nose wrinkled as if she had caught a whiff of wrongness. Her expanded consciousness was aware of more flaws in the dream jewels orbiting her, more bubbles and pockets of water, more cracks and unequal facets. Nothing seemed as it should be.

The mirror which most often held the sapphire-clawed Feaster was empty. Hiresha considered this a curious blessing, had worried about Tethiel seeing a more beautiful and fierce version of herself. In another silver-backed glass, Hiresha’s reflection wore her yellow dress right-side up this time, only now she was shivering. The frightened-looking reflection was mimicking Hiresha’s movements, for once, pretending to be no more than an image in a mirror, albeit one wearing an alternative shade of gown.

Hiresha touched Tethiel’s lips with one finger. When she withdrew her hand, the blood in his throat and lungs was Attracted out into a jiggling sphere of red. He eyed with a slanted brow the blood orb levitating at his elbow. Tendrils of red leaked from it, the trickle going in and out of a sapphire honey charge that cleansed it. The blood then returned to his left wrist and channeled inside a vein that Hiresha had opened.

She said, “I will Attract the arrowhead out through the ribs of your back then remove the shaft from the anterior position.”

“The first thing everyone wants is a cure. The last thing, to learn about the particulars required.”

Hiresha was more than a little taken aback because she always talked to her various selves in the dream. Hearing him speak felt most unnatural.

She willed herself to float above him, and lowered an arm on his chest to conceal the sight of her removing the arrow shaft. She would respect his wish and not speak further about the procedure’s details. “Once you told me that I could never heal you in my dream.”

“That was over two years ago,” he said. “People overestimate the duration of never’s and forever’s. They’re typically not longer than a few years. And sometimes, only days.”

She loosened the amulet that was constricting his arm and allowed the blood to flush out his wound. It flowed into the gemstone jar and back into his wrist. “With that philosophy, I hope you never married.”

“
Never,
” he said.

Once, hearing him jest of marriage would have upset her to distraction. Now it only smarted. To pay him back in kind, she said, “You claimed bringing you here would ‘shatter my mind.’ Perhaps we have different standards of mental balance, but I don’t feel as if my cranium has received even a light shaking.”

She had hoped he might chuckle. Instead his face firmed, worry lines etched from his brows to the triangle brand. “My heart, as soon as you’ve made me serviceable, wake. If you still can.”

“I control my dreams.” She banished the broken arrows with a touch. “Whenever I wish to wake, I need only blink.”

The jewels in the air flickered and dimmed. With a thought, Hiresha returned them to their former shine.

He squinted at the mirror with her reflection. The woman in the yellow dress tried to imitate Hiresha’s movements, but she could not help but steal glances at the bare-chested man on the black slab table. Her lips quivered into a grin, and her cheeks dimpled.

Tethiel said, “That lady in the mirror reminds me of the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met. Tell me, my heart, who is she?”

Hiresha felt full of fluttering moths, wings like silk brushing her insides, but she held her face calm. Then, she realized she was only making herself look like a Bright Palm. She allowed an expression of exasperation to cross her face as she nodded to the mirror.

“You wouldn’t be completely wrong if you thought of her as my intuition.”

“A Mistress of Intuition? Then you must set her free,” he said. “She could help you, help us both.”

“She is most distracting.”

“Maybe you could afford to lock her away before,” he said. “Not now. You need her.”

“Please!” The reflection splayed a yellow glove against her glass. “The mirrors are cracking.”

“See? She is nine parts ridiculous.” Hiresha knew that the mirrors of her dream would never fracture. For that reason, she needed some time to acknowledge the hairline cracks spreading across the silver-plated glass. She focused on repairing the mirrors, but the more she tried to dismiss the cracks, the faster they spread.

The reflection said, “As much as we want him here, we’ll have to hurry him out. Before everything breaks.”

“I suppose one part sensible is something.” Hiresha willed herself toward the mirror and reached in. Her purple glove met one of yellow, and the enchantress pulled on Intuition.

A black-clawed hand pulled Intuition back.

“Aii!” The woman in yellow squeaked. Her arms were stretched out straight, one outside the mirror and the other within. She burrowed her face through the glass and gulped the laboratory air. “Owe! Help! She won’t—”

The lady Feaster yanked Intuition back by her hair, cutting off her words as her mouth filled with glass. The Feaster spoke with a hiss.

“Open the mirror to both of us, or you’ll have neither.”

“Your first mistake was speaking to me as if to an equal. In my dream.” Hiresha drew on her power to tow Intuition into her laboratory.

The lady clung onto Intuition, but when the Feaster’s jewel-studded arm was free of the mirror to the shoulder, Hiresha willed the mirror to change. It dissolved into the basalt wall, leaving only the Feaster’s arm visible, encased in black stone. Its claws dug deeper, tendons sharp lines tracing up from a delicate wrist toward her elbow.

The arm went slack only after Hiresha pressed another onyx gem against the death-white skin. With the Feaster paralyzed and entombed in rock, Hiresha could return her attention to healing.

A second stone with red veins running through it staunched Intuition’s bleeding. Intuition did not even seem to have noticed the claw wounds. She appeared to be in shock. She pressed against the basalt as if the open space of the laboratory frightened her.

“What an original sense of decor.” Tethiel angled his chin toward the arm protruding from the wall. “I do hope it becomes a trend.”

Hiresha noted his lack of surprise at seeing a Feaster in her dream. She said, “Returning that particular flaw to her mirror will take some doing.”

She had a skin-creeping feeling that she was short on time. In the seconds spent on freeing Intuition, the silver frames of the other mirrors had melted. They had bent into half spheres of faceted glass, like giant insect eyes staring at her from every side. When she tried to speak, her voice wrinkled with a harsh note of tension.

“In—Intuition, assist me.”

The mistress in the bright gown crept forward to hand Hiresha a bloodstone and platinum clamps. Intuition even picked a ruby out of Hiresha’s sash. The real jewel glowed red as all the dream gems darkened.

“This ruby will hold the Attraction enchantments binding your tissues and blood vessels together,” Hiresha said. “Otherwise all would be undone upon waking.”

Mistress Intuition whispered in Hiresha’s ear. “We’re worried everything will come undone before the waking part.”

With the rest of the jewels dark, it was as if Hiresha and Intuition huddled in a secret meeting around a candle of one ruby. A heaviness settled over the enchantress, and her feet sank from midair to touch the cold floor. She focused on her magic, knowing now she had to hurry, fearing it was already too late.

The woman in yellow dabbed the sweat from Tethiel’s brow. When he met her eyes, she blushed in a way that embarrassed Hiresha.

“My dreams often start pleasant to lull me into complacency,” he said. “Two of you together make this the most devious lure ever.”

“A single one of you makes this our favorite dream ever.” Mistress Intuition grinned at him then peered into the gloom behind her. “Or maybe our least favorite.”

“Quiet.” Hiresha’s brows bent in concentration as she repaired Tethiel’s lung. It was a maze of veins and air caverns that she had to fit back together. “Remember, Tethiel, this is my dream, not yours.”

“Dreams can merge,” he said. “And collapse.”

Hiresha bowed over, and it felt as if someone had placed a lead weight between her shoulders. Cracks spread through the walls of her laboratory, hard to see in the black rock, but she felt the flaws burrowing through her consciousness. She fought against it, imagining the laboratory as the perfection it should be. Her efforts only caused her favorite dream jewels to splinter into brown dust.

From the darkness she heard a scratching, a “Skritch! Skritch!” It came from the direction of the wall where she had trapped the lady Feaster.

“Tethiel, what are you doing?” Hiresha took a step away from the operations table. “You must stop this.”

“They’re your fears, and it’d be wrong of me to deprive you of them.”

“Please, impoverish me of fears. I must work.”

“‘He who is without fear has no hope,’” Tethiel said. “Embrace your fears. Glory in them. Ride them like a dragon.”

With a sound of ripping stone, the dome of the laboratory fractured off. Red stars glared in from a night sky that warped and skewed. Everything was falling. Hiresha grabbed the operations table, and Mistress Intuition shrieked as she lifted into the air. Mirrors and dead jewels were flung out of the spinning laboratory.

Hiresha caught Intuition’s arm. With a wracking terror, Hiresha watched her spell baubles thrown out into the night. Between herself and Mistress Intuition, someone was screaming Tethiel’s name.

“Fight fear and be drowned. Instead skim its surface,” he said as the table split under him, racking his arms and legs in different directions.

Hiresha tried to slow her racing heart, tried to recapture focus. The laboratory broke in half. Black boulders tumbled past.

The lady Feaster swooped free of the broken wall. The night sky folded around her as a vast robe jeweled with stars. The Feaster’s laugh tinkled like wind chimes made of children’s bones.

Hiresha’s own howling matched the keening of the wind as the remains of the laboratory rolled over. The structure had been floating in the dream’s sky. She now had a clear view downward to the onrushing swath of darkness of the savannah below. A score of seconds remained before impact.

Tethiel shout over the din. “No, my heart, you’re concentrating on the fear. It’s paralyzing you. Let the sting of it invigorate you, and remember what you set out to do.”

“Heal him!” The hair of Mistress Intuition whipped about. “Heal him so we can wake!”

Veins alive with what felt like venom, Hiresha clawed her way back over Tethiel. She was not sure she could, but she slammed the two halves of the table back together with her mind. She clung to a golden shackle, and lashed the ruby back from the distance so she could resume enchanting.

His muscles wove back together. His sinew resealed. Hiresha enchanted faster than ever before with a precision born of desperation. Part of her was aware of the slab table spinning end over end. Of the tearing wind. Of the night sky whirling around them.