by James Duvall
The Historian and his son conversed in quiet for a moment before speaking to Timothy again.
"The circumstance and depth of your removal from the island are not relevant in this case. What is relevant, bridger, is that this land was abandoned by Forrander University for the requisite number of forgings to fall back under the sovereignty of King Gabligar's line."
"I assure you, sir, my presence here is by no means intended to impugn the sovereignty of the kingdom under Idon. If I have erred in not first making my intentions known to His Majesty, then I must beg forgiveness and humbly ask that I am allowed to continue my work here." Timothy lowered his head a little at the end, but glanced up at the king in hope of better judging the man's reaction by his face.
The king grumbled disconsolately. "You are a man of renown among your people, bridger. Likened to one of our master craftsmen. We are a people of justice and honor. Were one of my esteemed craftsmen to travel to your capitol, he would surely announce himself to your king. He would come bearing ingots, and forge a fine hammer as tribute. So do not tell me that you mean no disrespect, when you feel your time is not worth making yourself known to me. I would have greeted you with a feast befitting your station. Instead my soldiers find you skulking about like a thief. Since this seems as though it may indeed be a misunderstanding, you have my forgiveness, but you do not have my blessing to continue your expedition into Idon lands."
The king had spoken. He rose from his throne, causing several attendants to hurriedly remove Timothy and Christopher from his presence.
* * *
Back at the ship Aebyn waited on the quarterdeck, fuming. He paced in broad circles while sailors carried on with their daily chores and tried to stay out of his way. One particularly intrepid cabin boy approached with a bowl of water. He froze in his tracks when Aebyn stopped to look at him. He lowered it slowly to the ground, never breaking eye contact with the gryphon and then raced to take shelter behind one of the starboard cannons to watch. Aebyn could see him peeking over every now and then. The eyes always disappeared behind the curve of the cannon's barrel whenever Aebyn turned that direction.
"You're certain they haven't been back?" Aebyn asked. He gave Willoughby a desperate look, but the aged first mate could only shrug helplessly back at him. This was worse than when soldiers might be coming to arrest Timothy. Timothy had been taken while he could only watch, spirited away through an iron door into the dark beneath the mountain where even a lighthound could not go.
Aebyn sighed miserably and flopped onto his belly at his customary spot on the quarterdeck. Here the railing was lower, little more than a lip in the wood where a bridge could be extended between airships if they needed to move crew between the ships and did not have the luxury of landing. The airmen all stayed away from it. They did not have the luxury of wings were they to make a careless step and fall over the shortened wall. The effect was a spot where Aebyn could be out of the way and see out while prone. From here he could spot Timothy halfway down Main Street.
To the north, light flared up like a struck match, roaring into the air for a few seconds before it faded away, leaving a faint shadow of purple and black on Aebyn's vision. He blinked it away, squinting at the distant lighthouse. He did not like the idea of another mage on the island, a real one, but the lighthouse project seemed to have Donovan Skalde wholly occupied.
The little light left burning served as a votive for the young gryphon. He hoped Timothy understood that he could not follow into Mt. Idon. He had hoped to at least provide the book, but had failed also in this. Now the luminarian had it and she was gone. By the time the ice melted the sun had set and the dark hour had begun. Aebyn had searched through the night for the little white luminarian with the bright blue mane, but she had evaded him.
Aebyn reasoned out that if the white luminarian knew so much magic, she had to be much smarter than the average of her kind, but this intelligence did little to ameliorate his discontent. Luminarians lived in the streets. He had seen them huddled in the mud beneath houses or timidly peering out of disused lofts. One memory came back louder than the rest, vivid and terrifying in its violence.
Aebyn had been left outside while Raimes visited with his tailor. He had come for a new jacket, the old one was beginning to become threadbare and, among the bridgers, appearance was important. That meant a nice jacket, clean trousers, and a laundered, well-pressed shirt. Raimes often took it a step further and sported a hat, whatever was in style, and a nice pocketwatch with a golden chain that hung from his belt so that everyone could see.
From a safe perch atop the tailor's shop, Aebyn spied a luminarian digging through a garbage bin in the alleyway between the barber and the baker's shop across the street. It produced a stale hunk of bread and clutched it tight against its chest as though it were a precious jewel. The luminarian was too far away for Aebyn to discern whether it was male or female. The difference was usually apparent in size, though now that he was older he had begun to notice the females were wider in the hips and more slender through the waist. He thought maybe it was a male; males were more likely to be alone.
The barber came outside with a pipe and a tin of smoking supplies. He stuffed a thumbful of tobacco into his pipe and puffed against the match until the cherry glowed soft red. Then he went around into the alley to keep the smoke from lingering in front of his shop. The luminarian was there and the man shouted at him. The roofs sloped down over the alley, boxing the dragon in. He dashed past the man and out into the street. He barely avoided the horse's hooves, but lunged back to the walk for safety a second too late.
The carriage heaved on one side, causing the passenger to grab the side to steady himself. His other hand gripped his hat. The sound of breaking bone reached Aebyn's ears atop the tailor's on the other side of the street, making his wings shudder as they shrugged up around him. Then came the luminarian's wail. The carriage did not stop or even slow down. The man in the back turned his head to look for a moment and urged his female companion to cover her ears to the pained cries. The luminarian lay in the muck, his precious bread loaf now muddy on the sidewalk a few feet in front of him. He reached for the safety of the sidewalk, but his strength had left him and he laid down in the filthy street in surrender to his fate.
Aebyn felt his wings unfolding as he started toward the edge of the roof. A second carriage would be along any moment and the creature would not survive another blow. Then something happened that he had not expected. Colorful wings appeared from windows and alleyways, three dragons answering the call. They pulled the wounded dragon from the street and disappeared into the dark alleyways with their brother and his treasure.
The memory made Aebyn shudder. The passing of time had done little to dim his recollection of the creature's piteous wail, or the way it laid down to die. No one had stopped or even taken notice of the unlucky beast's pain. These were the castoffs of the world, and they lived and died like dogs.
Although, that wasn't entirely true, now that he thought about it. Someone had noticed. The other three had come to the sound and they had taken him to safety and there was nothing lowly about that. Lowly creatures would have left the one to die, fleeing the sound of their own in pain. To pursue it was to risk one's self for the other.
When Aebyn found the white luminarian, and he would, he would take Faralon's journal back without harming her. These, he decided, were creatures to be pitied and not reviled. It felt perverse of logic that he would want to protect her after she had stolen Timothy's book, but something about the little creatures brought out the protective instincts in the young lighthound. It was his nature to protect, and he would serve this duty before all other things.
At some point the twilight hour had ended. Vague silhouettes walked between the closing shops and taverns along Main Street. The luminarian had asked if he could see in the dark yet. In the moment the lights went out Aebyn felt like he was adrift in an endless void, but the luminarian had escaped in only seconds. The only rational explanatio
n was that she could, in fact, see in the dark. Aebyn wondered if he would develop the ability as the alchemist implied. He squinted into the dark streets, willing them to brighten, but the night had settled into its lazy slumber over the town, and the shadows would not yield.
Two lonely figures marched up the road, tired and ragged. Aebyn paid them little mind, at first thinking they were revelers leaving one of the many public houses near the skyport, but they strode past all the turns and alleys and entered the gloomy skyport where airships cast shadows as tall as mountains. Through the dim, he could make out Timothy's yellow hair and his long blue coat. His eyes brightened and he soared down to meet the tired men.
"Aebyn," Timothy said with a tired smile. He reached out and stroked between the gryphon's ears. Aebyn made a quiet thrum of appreciation.
"I am sorry I could not follow you into the mountain," he blurted out, looking more ashamed than the statement deserved. Timothy looked confused, as though the words had come out in the wrong language.
"It's quite alright," he said when he had processed the lighthound's concerns. "We are unharmed, and now we know what we're up against."
Christopher pointed up Stormbreaker's gangplank. "Bed..." he mumbled, and stumbled onward.
In the morning, Aebyn told them about losing the book to the luminarian. He went to great lengths to explain the luminarian's magical prowess to the utmost without seeming to be stretching the truth. Even so, her existence defied reason. While nearly all luminarians exhibited some small degree of magical ability, this was limited to the most basic of enchantments. A luminarian that could transform a few drops of water into a thick wall of ice or banish the light itself from a room was unheard of. Aebyn could sense the skepticism in his audience long before it began to show on their faces.
"Why would I fabricate such a preposterous story?" he asked, having finished with little more than a non-committal nod from Timothy and overt disapproval from Christopher.
Timothy shook his head, as though clearing cobwebs from his mind. "No, no of course not," he said. He went over to the railing and looked out toward the foothills where the book was lost. "Why shouldn't there be a luminarian alchemist on this island? It has everything else that is backwards and strange."
"The dwarves did not hurt you, did they?" Aebyn asked, feeling very wary of the answer. Both of the men seemed in order, haggard but unharmed. It would only serve to further his guilt if they had been injured, and he could find little solace in the knowledge that they were not. He had abandoned them to pursue the book. It would have done him no good had they failed to emerge. Perhaps he would have traded it for their lives.
"We are unharmed," Timothy repeated. Aebyn realized the question had already been answered but in his haste to inspect the returned men, he had failed to hear the answer.
"The dwarves are going to be a problem," Timothy said.
Christopher nodded in agreement. He was slouched into a chair behind his desk, rubbing his temples and facing skyward with his eyes closed.
"They believed Timothy was a bridger," Christopher said, "but they have not extended us right of travel. That will be a problem if they run into us again on their land."
Aebyn cocked his head, gazing into the man's eyes. Christopher always looked like he was thinking. Even when he spoke to Timothy or members of the crew his mind seemed elsewhere. He was a thin man, and had the lean strength of someone who had lived much of his life outdoors. Though in the corners of his eyes Aebyn could pick out the telltale signs of a hard life, heavy with worry. This was one of those rare occasions when Christopher addressed him directly. Perhaps in his exhaustion after the three day hike back he had forgotten that he was supposed to find his presence disturbing.
"We will go to the Mistwood," Christopher announced. "The second treasure is there, and it is not part of Idon lands."
"What about the book?" Aebyn asked. He was itching to go back into the foothills to search for the thief. Surely they had not forgotten it already...
"I have taken thorough notes on the location of the treasures," Christopher said, patting his own leather-bound journal.
Aebyn scowled. His fixed beak did not afford him the complex range of facial expressions that the humans had. He often wondered if his problems communicating with Christopher stemmed from this shortcoming of gryphon physiology. When Timothy smiled, the expression played out in the tightening of his cheeks that drew his mouth into the easily recognizable shape. When Aebyn smiled, his eyes would brighten, brow lift, and his ears would prick forward to show his comfort. It was not written so clearly upon him as the human equivalent. But when Aebyn scowled, the sharpness of his avian eyes and the wicked curve of his beak all came together in savage harmony.
"That luminarian took it from us," he said, frustrated that Christopher already had failed to see the depth of the problem.
"We don't need it," he heard Timothy say. His eyes widened.
"What?" Aebyn gulped out as he turned to face the man that was supposed to be backing him. Timothy looked a little alarmed at the wild-eyed look he was being given.
"We don't need it?" he offered, this time sounding more like a question than an answer. "Christopher's notes have all of the information we need."
"But... but..." Aebyn stammered. His head felt like it had managed to get free of his body and was without wings, tumbling through a void of confusing thoughts and conflicting ideas. "But she stole it from us!" he protested. This was not justice!
Timothy reached out and patted him between his feather-tipped ears. "I can see that it bothers you, but we cannot jeopardize our aims here for the sake of exacting revenge against a luminarian that made off with an old book. If we were to find her, we would certainly get it back, but the treasures come first. Don't you agree?"
Aebyn looked away. The treasures were nice. They would finance a long voyage away from all of the bad memories of Samuel Raimes and the people that might want to take him from Timothy's side. The thought of the lowly creature absconding with his book, though. "Alright..." he said, somewhat reluctantly. "If that is what you think is best, Timothy."
"It is," he said. "After all, the highest concern over losing the book is that someone else might also seek Faralon's treasures, and the luminarian is unlikely to pose a great threat to our success in that, even if she were to understand what she had found."
Aebyn winced visibly at this comment. The luminarian had found something more than the book. Several hours trapped inside the old classroom building had afforded him plenty of time to see what she had been up to and he had found the open hole beneath the stove and the emptied bruskwood chest. In his indignation over her taking the book, he had neglected to mention that she had found the treasure. That, after all, was a lesser crime, as it was not yet his when the little dragon had stumbled across it.
The young lighthound grinned sheepishly up at Timothy. He was going to get to go after the luminarian after all.
Chapter 10
Moon Flower (Sapphire Nightsong)
Mountains over Arden Forest, Isla Merindi, Pendric Shard
The peculiar impact of proximity to Firevane Falls on the alchemical properties of the common mountainside Firecrown Flower, stands out as a rare incident in which ingredients that behave in a particular manner when harvested from one region do not behave in a manner similar to the same ingredients harvested elsewhere. It should be noted that the theory that this observation was the result of flowers harvested from similar, but distinct, species of plant has since been debunked in a study conducted at Bendrin University under Professor Hilon Markiss.
A Treatise on Alchemy, page 84
Every shard experienced the phenomena of the twilight hour, but no two seemed quite the same to Sapphire. As the sun dipped low in the sky, it sank behind the thicker parts of the shard walls and became filtered as though through plates of colored glass all set in a row. Shard walls varied in color from red to purple to blue, and so the result was a predictably different behavior in eac
h shard. In Pendric shard, the sky turned a vibrant red, heralding the end of the day for a few minutes before shifting to a dark purple that deepened into near black as the light waned.
The sky had just turned red when Dawn spotted a moon flower, protected from the wind in the leeward cradle of a tall aspen. The trunk was wide enough that Sapphire could not reach around it, and she was grateful to be sheltered from the biting wind. It numbed the soreness in her injured wing, replacing it with an altogether different pain that seemed to distribute itself across her form.
The moon flower had somehow sensed the coming of the night and the plant's bud forced up through the pervasive snow. The luminarians watched with patient wonder as the leafy pod opened, revealing soft petals of blue and silver, like moonlight streaming through the arching shardwalls high overhead.
"If it isn't too much trouble," Dawn said, nosing at the flower. "Bring me back some seeds?"
"Of course," Sapphire said. She didn't pick the flower right away. It had taken three days to find, and she was satisfied with enjoying its beauty with Dawn. When the twilight hour reached its culmination, more moon flowers made their presence known, opening up in the leeward shelters of the aspen trees, just below the treeline. Shrouded in snow, the buds popped open, and little pinpoints of soft blue and silver light floated up out of them like little hot air balloons, born up by the wind and scattered across the valley below.
"I didn't know they did that..." Sapphire said quietly. Dawn moved to her side. His form was made of mist and light, so he glowed a little, and moved without making a sound. Though he was absent in body, she could feel his presence in the warmth radiating into her chest from the jewel hanging about her soft shoulders.
Dawn made a quiet, happy sound as he watched the seeds of light float around like moonlit fireflies. He followed after one that came particularly close to his muzzle, squinting at it as though trying to will it to be still so that the could see if it was indeed a seed or some captive insect released and imbued with light.