Gravity's Revenge (32 page)

Sheamab gripped her with cold inevitability.

Fos’s howling was a buzz in Hiresha’s ears.

In front of them, the dean lowered her arm, and three colors of sleeves flowed down over her hand with the key and hid it. She said something and started to turn away. The rector spun her back, pointed at Hiresha then gestured with her thumb to the interior of the Ballroom. A cutting motion from the dean seemed to silence the bigger woman.

At last,
Hiresha thought,
that pillow-brained nitwit’s disregard has come to some good.

The rector’s shoulders sagged, and her tower of white hair bowed forward. She stole a glance at Hiresha then looked away.

She relaxed in the Bright Palm’s chokehold and reflected that there were worse ways to die than suffocation.
Slower, lingering ways.
Hiresha waited for blackness to bleed up over her consciousness.

Perhaps my soul will outlive my sleepiness.

As her eyelids rolled open for what she hoped was the last time, Hiresha saw a girl on the other side of the glass running toward her. A girl with a fox. And the crystal key in her other hand.

Minna! What’re you doing?

The dean waddled after the girl, her lips bending in ugly words that Hiresha could not hear. The elder fell to the side, cushioned by her mass of gowns. A few other enchantresses reached for Minna, but she dodged around them. The fennec’s ears flapped as they ducked under a pair of grasping gloves. The fox’s yipping penetrated the door.

Minna, stop!
Hiresha tried to kick at the crystal door. It was a mistake, and her punishment was pain.

The girl swung the key toward its hole.

Can’t she see the Bright Palm on the other side? She’s a Feaster. She’ll never open the door.

The crystal key fit in and turned.

Sheamab dropped Hiresha and heaved her way into the Ballroom. The high-pitched yells of enchantresses flowed into the hall. Hiresha felt blood rushing back into her head like hammer blows.

The touch of whiskers on her cheek made Hiresha look up. She saw the fennec as well as Minna trembling on her knees. Her veil shrouded her face, her eyes blinking away sweat and terror.

Hiresha spoke in a rasp. “Foolish girl. Why let them in?”

“Father says you have to live.” Her words were quiet but close, puffs against her veil. “You have to live.”

“Your father?”
Did the Lord of the Feast cheat death with his wings?
“When did he tell you this?”

The Feaster girl stiffened, saw something past Hiresha that must have terrified her even more than Sheamab. Hiresha followed her gaze, the illogical thought flitting through her mind that she would see the Lord of the Feast.
Why would he return when the Bright Palms would only exterminate him? We could not defeat Sheamab all together and when I had my jewels. To return alone, the Lord of the Feast would only be suicidal.

The girl Feaster had seen Alyla.
Alyla, who knows Minna’s secret.
The newly minted Bright Palm was preventing Fos from struggling in his bonds with but a touch of her fingers.

Hiresha considered if it would be for the best for the Bright Palms to find Minna, to remove one threat to the other women, but a glance at the fennec in the girl’s arms decided her against it. The enchantress reached to stroke the fennec’s whiskered cheek, and he licked her finger.

“Run,” Hiresha told Minna. “Out into the night.”

“Alyla—she’ll see me,” Minna said. “She’ll outrun me.”

“Then hide in the Ballroom.”

“But she’ll remember me. There’s nowhere to run in there. It’s a glass prison.”

“Die however you please then, but let the fennec go.”

The girl tensed then bolted as only a twelve-year-old with a taste of mortality can. The fennec hopped out of her arms to make cautious chirping noises by Hiresha’s ear. He seemed to be trying to tell her a secret. The enchantress glanced up to see if Sheamab had noticed Minna’s sprint.

The Bright Palm was removing the crystal key from the door. Two enchantresses stepped forward, and Hiresha recognized them as her students.

“We’ll take the provost,” one said.

“Provost Hiresha, can you stand?”

Hiresha knew she would not be allowed to live. “Never mind me, take the fennec.”

Sheamab prodded the women back with her staff and pulled the door closed, locking all the other enchantresses inside and leaving herself in the hall with Hiresha and the fennec. The Bright Palm gestured to Hiresha with the crystal key but looked up when Alyla shouted.

“A Feaster.” Alyla pointed at Minna, who was slipping out of the hall into the stormy night. “She made me see a falsehood of myself.”

“Then you must track her.” Sheamab flipped the crystal key to Mister Jewel Pox. “We must stay. These two are too dangerous to leave.”

The Bright Palm with the crag for a jaw caught the key then tossed a bronze spike to Alyla. He said, “Don’t you let the Feaster run you off the cliff.”

Alyla sprinted barefoot into the snowing night.

“Careful, Alyla,” Fos called after her.

Hiresha shook her head. She felt something as hard as metal clamp her left hand, and she looked up to see Sheamab holding her. The Bright Palm angled a knife over the enchantress’s broken fingers. It was over before she realized it had begun.

Garnets fell to the floor, purple stones on a carpet stained black. Sheamab had cut them out.
The last of my jewels, gone.
The sting in her fingertips was paltry next to that scalding thought.

By reflex, Hiresha reached for the garnets. She knew it was a mistake. Sheamab proved her right by stomping her hand with a crunch. The Bright Palm spooled rope around the enchantress’s arms then tightened it into knotted shackles.

The enchantress was dragged by rope past display cases bearing elaborate dresses and plaques commemorating past dancers. The gowns spun about in her eyes in a dance of ghosts. The torment in her leg and mind goaded her heart into irregular beats.

Her bound hands banged on the floor when Sheamab dropped them to help move Fos. His wrists were tied to his ankles, trapping him in something close to the fetal position. Mister Jewel Pox gripped him under his arms, Sheamab his legs. While being hefted between them, the spellsword asked if they thought Alyla would be safe hunting the Feaster by herself. They did not answer.

Hiresha declined to waste her breath questioning the Bright Palms when they returned for her. She was pulled outside and over snow, and she said nothing when iciness dug its way under her collar and chilled her back. She did not struggle, spit, or curse. She did nothing because she could not believe anything she did would ever matter again.

I should sleep, try to piece myself back together.
Hiresha ignored the voice inside her. A dozen reasons popped into her mind why trying was hopeless, and they all involved a black staff.
I’m like Minna, with no good choices left to her. How do I wish to die?

The fennec padded beside her with ears down. She wanted to reach out to him again but could not gather the will.

“Go back,” she told him. “Go where it’s warm. With ears the size of yours, you ought to listen to me.”

He sneezed with a twitch of whiskers.

Gazing upward, she saw only a world of darkness with flecks of blue floating downward. The wind tugged the snow this way and that.
Each snowflake is an exemplar of mathematical beauty. And they have no power, no choice, not even as to whether they end up crushed or melted.

She had decided.
I’ll spend my last hours in dream. I can do nothing now but ease my own pain. I’ll not go weeping to meet the Fate Weaver in the grand tapestry of souls.

41

Desolation

The rubble of her laboratory littered her dream. Only the operations table remained recognizable, split in half and embedded in the savannah.
As I left it in the nightmare.
Grasses squirmed around the rest of the black rocks.
Scarcely more broken than I.

She still had the power to Attract her spell baubles, though she had to wait for them to come to her from wherever they had fallen. Above, the gemstones that littered the night sky of her dream seemed gaudy in their coloring. She had not populated this land with animals, not so much as cicadas, and at that moment her isolation surrounded her in a stifling silence.

Smokey redness on the horizons promised fire. New flames erupted closer in a spark-spitting, hissing, gout of heat. Near and far, on every side, Hiresha’s dream burned.

“Our pain is scattering the sparks,” Intuition said. She had appeared sitting on one half of the operations table. She bounced her legs once then winced and stopped.

“I refuse to think of you as my intuition so much as the Mistress of Distraction.” Hiresha gestured, and the two halves of the table were Attracted together. She could mend herself by operating on her look-alike. “Lie down.”

“When we have to rest on our own table, it’s never good.” The fingers of her yellow glove had darkened from the cuts beneath, the same spots on Hiresha’s hand where Sheamab had pried out the gems. After the Mistress of Distraction fitted herself into the depression of the table, she lifted her gown to reveal the injuries to her legs.

In the dream, Hiresha bore no wounds herself. That was as expected. Less so were her tangled hair, chipped nails, and stained fur coat.
My control is crumbling
.

The baubles had arrived to orbit around Hiresha. The magic scripts in the bloodstone stopped the bleeding in the replica’s fingers and beneath the skin around her splintered bones.

The Mistress of Distraction hid the sight of her legs from herself with her skirt. “It’s frightening to have lost all our jewels, isn’t it?”

“It feels most unnatural. This is the first time in twelve years, two hundred and eleven days.”

Hiresha did not count her earrings, as she could not enchant them. Those jewels belonged to the deceased Enchantress Planterra more than Hiresha, and she knew herself to be in no fit state to contest their magic. Neither did she feel worthy to disturb the elder enchantress’s soul on account of her own blunders.

Hiresha used another set of blue diamonds to peer inside the Mistress of Distraction’s leg, to the puzzle of her broken bones. Hiresha had her platinum clamp to rearrange the chalky pieces to their preferred accommodations. First, she touched the woman in yellow with the onyx choker to numb her.

“Whether or not you deserve pain, I can’t have you squirming and wasting time.”

“We didn’t do anything wrong. Oh! That tingles.”

“Your idea concerning the goddess’s opal was abysmal.”

“We never said we could be right all the time.” She peeled off her glove to reveal two fingers still broken though no longer bleeding “And we didn’t say you were stupid for believing in that diamond-sands trick.”

“Actually, you just did.” Hiresha took her replica’s twisted fingers, pressing them straight and rearranging the bones.

“We need to be faster.” The Mistress of Distraction flexed her hand. “Sheamab can think her way through everything if she has time, but we’ll come up with something.”

“As if I would listen to you. Had I another life, I would spend all of it ignoring your blathering.”

“‘Blather’ sounds like washing yourself in bubbles. We never do that.”

“The only suitable punishment would be to force you to listen to yourself.”

The smoke had converged above them to choke out the jeweled stars. The heat of the flashfires pressed in around Hiresha as if she were trapped in a kiln.

She said, “In the fight on the plateau I was distracted when you blurted out the Lord of the Feast’s guilt. Your blathering led me straight into a bludgeoning.”

“That’s unfair. We knew not to go after Mister Jewel Pox, not to turn from Sheamab. Knew she’d catch us, but then we over-thought it.”

Hiresha passed a hand underneath the replica’s leg to Attract a few shards of bone together. “I do believe I’m healing out of habit. No possible use remains for this intact body.”

The Mistress of Distraction burst into opalescent tears, her face turning slick with colliding colors of blue, red, and green. “We’re so sorry. We couldn’t help thinking about Tethiel. It was like seeing one facet of a new gem, bright as sunshine. How could we just look at the first part? It—it wasn’t even our idea.”

“Not yours?”

The woman in yellow nodded toward a nearing wall of flames. The smoke parted around a leaping woman, and the Feaster landed on a boulder in a crouch. Her black claws splayed over her knees, though her gown was burnt, her hair curled and melted in places. Her wild-violet eyes darted between the fire and Hiresha.

“You should snuff out the flames,” the Feaster said.

“Even if I could at present, I see little point. I suspect Sheamab intends to drag my body to the cliff, but not back again.”

She had channeled her awareness down to a narrow point of magical focus on the operations table. The blue diamonds made part of the Mistress of Distraction transparent, like quartz, and Hiresha could peer into the woman’s knee. The white tendons had all but been torn off the pebble-shaped bone. Hiresha Attracted the split pieces together and waved to the onyx choker.

“With the pain deadened, no new fires will start. That is the best I should expect.”

“You should expect to live,” the Feaster said.

The Mistress of Distraction wiped pinkish green tears from her eyes. “We don’t want to die.”

“I had thought to have more time. So many experiments unfinished. But I must be reasonable, in death at least,” Hiresha said. “I have no means, not one jewel for holding enchantments. Waking would only return me to my injuries.”

The Mistress of Distraction hopped from the operations table on her newly healed legs. When she bent over to pick something up from the ground, a line of evenly spaced bumps ran down her spine from the pressure of her vertebrae. Her yellow gown was backless.

“She’s right,” the Feaster said. “You have to repair a mirror. Use it to find one of your dropped jewels. If it’s close enough—”

Hiresha turned away from the Feaster. “Your approval hardly endears me to the scheme.”

“True, I’m never right.” The Feaster sprang an unnaturally long distance away. She landed on another boulder farther from the flames. “Especially about the Lord of the Feast and how you should’ve killed him days ago.”

“The man you would’ve had me kill was the one to free you from the mirror. You’re as traitorous as he and hardly a reputable advisor.”

“Freedom is no prize when you’re about to be murdered by Bright Palms.” The Feaster’s voice shrilled with a brittle edge of desperation. “Recreate the mirror. Find a gem. Now.”

“Perhaps if I locate a suitable jewel I could bind my soul into it.” A crumpled silver frame was Attracted from the wreckage and straightened. With a wave of her hand, shards sprouted from the ground. “The plan would entice me more if I could be sure my deathless dreams would exclude both of you. I’m hardly keen on dooming myself to the insufferable.”

“Hurry!” The Feaster rolled stones into a footwall in the path of a nearing tide of flame. “Look for the red diamond.”

Arranging the shattered glass on the mirror frame was easier than repairing bones and veins. A swarm of shards fitted themselves into a view of the stormy plateau. It appeared empty of life and dark. Hiresha rested a hand against the cracked surface of the mirror, searching with her mind for jewels.

“We should find something near.” The Mistress of Distraction stood beside Hiresha on her tiptoes.

“You wasted enough of them,” the Feaster said. “Scattered them like salt.”

“My greatest connection was with the red diamond.” Hiresha’s hand balled into a fist on the mirror. “And I can’t detect it.”

“Tethiel must’ve taken it.” The Feaster kicked dirt into the flames.

“There!” A yellow glove pointed through the mesh of fracture lines in the mirror to an orange-tinted stone in the snow. “A fire opal! It’s a sign.”

“It is a hardened gel of minerals and water.” Hiresha beckoned, and the gem shot through the powder and into the mirror. Shards parted around it then clicked back into place. The enchantress picked the bead-shaped gem out of the air and lifted the hem of her coat to place the fire opal against her thigh. “Less likely for Sheamab to see it there.”

“We have to hope she wasn’t looking at us just then.”

Hiresha said, “The stone may be a beautiful shade of orange, but it’s not a paragon gem and won’t hold my soul. Neither are there any other jewels close enough to Attract. Given that their locations aren’t changing relative to me, Sheamab must have dragged me to whatever unwholesome place she had in mind.”

“We hear someone calling our name. We should wake. Enchant the fire opal and see who it is.”

“It could be Tethiel,” the Feaster said. “He spited you by living.”

“You can tell he escaped?” Hiresha asked.

The fires around the three women roared, spat sparks, and blazed brighter to what looked like flames of gold. The Feaster scanned the converging inferno with wild eyes and arms racking about each other.

“Fos is likely calling to me to free him from his bindings,” Hiresha said. “Or it is Sheamab.”

“We can free him. Or ourselves anyway, and him, too, if he’s alone.”

“If not, Sheamab will tend to notice any ropes torn asunder. Then she will cripple me again and may take away my fire opal.” Hiresha stored the magic of healing in the orange-colored stone, mostly for a sense of spell completion. “I will have accomplished nothing.”

“Ouch!” The Mistress of Distraction flinched, and redness spread over one side of her face then the other. “Someone is slapping us. And—Mmmhmmm!”

“Now clamping my mouth and nose shut, apparently,” Hiresha said. “Sheamab must want me awake for some reason, and I have a mind to thwart her.”

The Mistress of Distraction tossed her head from side to side in a wash of sleek hair. She made opening eye motions with her fingers.

“Your hopefulness reflects poorly on your intelligence.”

“Don’t you dare let yourself die.” The Feaster dug her nails into Hiresha’s arm. “I’ll track you into the afterlife and rip out your heart every day for eternity.”

“As if you could follow me into the Fate Weaver’s cavern.” Hiresha willed the basalt rubble to be Attracted to the Feaster, and rocks clung to her sides and pulled the lady to the ground. “But given that I found this fire opal, perhaps it is a goddess’s will that I wake. To endure some further punishment.”

With her body’s ability to breathe cut off, the vital essence drained from the air of the dream as well. The flashfires withered to smoldering embers. The Feaster gasped and clawed at the ground. The Mistress of Distraction clutched her throat. Hiresha stood unaffected, as of yet.

“I could replace the healing enchantment in the fire opal with one of Lightening. To try to expel whichever Bright Palm is heaping abuse on me. Yet, if it is Sheamab, the fennec’s collar will save her. If it’s Bright Palm Rommick, then I’ll be again in agony and have accomplished little. Sheamab would most likely see the gem and stop me in any event.”

Grey and black smoke curled around her, choking out everything else in the dream. Hiresha knew she stood between death and continued imprisonment.
Dying now or later tonight seems of small import.

“In all probability, this is a mistake.” Hiresha blinked awake.

Sheamab loomed over her, the Bright Palm’s hair a rippling blackness around her impassive face. Her hands unclamped from Hiresha’s nose and mouth.

The enchantress gasped in coldness and falling snow. She grunted when the Bright Palm spun her around and shoved her halfway over the edge of the cliff. A sandal dug into the small of Hiresha’s back, holding her suspended. Wind keened upward from the emptiness, and Hiresha’s locks coiled and flailed and stung her eyes.