Gravity's Revenge

by A. E. Marling

  Three jewel sashes draped around her like banners. Their velvet glistened with the shades of fading twilight, and Hiresha’s fingers ran down their smoothness. Relief tightened her throat as she fitted two sashes over her head, one wrapped under each arm.

  The enchantress may have been wearing only a frayed shift under her coat and no stockings to speak of, but at last she felt fully clothed. Not one to under prepare, she took a vial of enchanted diamond dust from a niche and slipped it into a pocket.

  Back in the main room of the workshop, Hiresha saw Fos’s sword connect with the Bright Palm. Fos stepped back and yanked to open a savage gash, only for the Bright Palm to heal himself in seconds.

  “Worse than a practice sword. I want something that’ll hit like a rhino.” Fos tossed the blade at his assailant to drive him back, and then the spellsword reached behind him into a wall case. He pulled out an angular post made of stone. It had a hilt on one end and was in truth a massive sword. Tendons in Fos’s neck stood out as he tried to swing the jasper weapon. The thick blade thudded into the floor. “Ahhh! I can’t Lighten it. Hiresha!”

  “And I don’t have time to replenish its magic.” Hiresha was thrilled to see Fos reach for the jasper weapon she had crafted for him. She knew he would be ferocious with it, and despite her words she wondered if after all she might have time to secure the workshop, to sleep, dream, and empower the stone sword. Her gaze flicked from the door lazing open and back to the shuttered windows.

  Tethiel appeared beside her. He no longer looked injured. His coat was undamaged and unsoiled, and twisting patterns within the fabric extended into the gloom around him. He said, “You fear a Bright Palm.”

  “Sheamab,” Hiresha said. “She must know we’re here by now. She has to have a plan.”

  “Then what is yours?”

  “I don’t have time to think of one.”

  Hiresha watched the Bright Palm dragging his fellow entwined in the snake. The constrictor and man scraped their way past the door. She thought she heard the bumping of approaching feet from the Grindstone entryway. Her eyes turned again to the window shutters, where patterns of jewel designs covered the slats.

  Tethiel followed her gaze. “You do have a plan. You merely haven’t accepted it yet.”

  The Bright Palm let down the bound tribesman to throw open the second half of the door. Five glowing figures launched out of the pit and landed upright, and they carried wide urns such as might be used for cooking oil.

  The urns were thrown, and they smashed with the burbling glop-glop sounds of liquid spreading over the workshop floor. Bright Palm Sheamab strode to the doorway, a lamp in hand with a flame flickering from its nozzle.

  “You survived ice, Enchantress. What of fire?”

  The Bright Palm hurled the lamp down. Fire crackled, sizzled, then roared into an inferno that sucked the breath from Hiresha’s lungs with its scorching malice. The Bright Palms hauled the doors shut.

  30

  Grindstone

  Hiresha had already started running to the windows. She ripped open a shutter. The crystal in the Grindstone was reinforced by enchantment. Hiresha had no doubt the Bright Palms had tried to smash it in from the outside and failed, but the enchantress now had her full arsenal of jewels.

  She patted her fingers over her left jewel sash until she found the chrysoprase she needed. Pinching the gem between thumb and forefinger, she pressed it against the crystal. She tried to shout at the men to stand back but could not hear herself over the fire.

  The gem pulsed green as its Attraction spell attuned itself to the resonance of the crystal window. The transparent surface shivered in time to the sequenced pulling of the magic.

  Fos hefted the jasper sword into the holster behind his back. He lifted a sleeve to his mouth, coughing in the greasy smoke. Beside him, Tethiel held two pairs of skate shoes, his eyes tearing, his teeth red from the nearing wall of fire.

  Cracks ran through the window. It shattered, shards plinking against Hiresha’s throat. Air whooshed through, and the flames surged around them. She was the first to crawl through the window, Fos boosting her.

  The sharp thrill of mountain coolness closed around her. She was standing on the rounded side of the Grindstone. Smoke boiled up from her feet, Tethiel climbing out of the vent. Fos pulled himself out last.

  They were rotating to the crest of the building’s circle, snowbound cliffs to their left and the Crystal Ballroom to their right. It looked like there were people inside the dome, but Hiresha did not have time for more than a glance. A Bright Palm had been waiting for them.

  He sprinted over the turning building, a sickle sword held behind him in each hand. Bamboo armor covered his chest. Fos brandished his stone sword against him but could not swing it fast enough to do more than use it as a shield.

  “Run,” Hiresha said. She was not even concerned that Fos could not yet swing his sword or Tethiel cast his illusions under the streaming clearness of the daylight. With all the jewels she carried, no single Bright Palm could frighten her again. The joy she felt from escaping Sheamab’s fires also lofted her, and her legs sprinted over the rolling building without effort.

  The Bright Palm matched her speed and gained ground on Tethiel, who ran with a bowlegged stride. His sleeve had dissolved in the daylight, once again revealing his arrow wound. His coat tails flapped inches from the Bright Palm’s curving blades.

  Hiresha tidied up that problem by dropping an Attraction jewel. The Bright Palm collapsed, and the Grindstone carried him downward and out of sight. The building picked up speed as they continued to run.

  “I’m sorry. For not making the jump in there,” Fos said. He craned his neck around so he could glance at Hiresha with his good eye. “The more I focus, the harder the timing gets.”

  “You must try to think less,” Tethiel said between huffs. “It is not your strength.”

  “And yours isn’t running. Not as easy as murdering people after dark?” Fos’s scowl curled under the bandage on his face. “Hiresha, why is he here?”

  Part of her wondered the same thing. Why would the provost of the MindvaultAcademy and the Lord of the Feast be running side by side on the Grindstone? She thought Fos deserved an honest answer. “Lord Tethiel and I rescued MorimoundCity together. In a way, he saved Alyla’s life.”

  “Please, my heart, I wish you wouldn’t spread distasteful rumors about my heroism.”

  “Alyla...” Fos ran ahead on the building’s curve for a better look down at the crystal ballroom. “…is she in there?”

  “Doubtless so,” Hiresha said. “Sheamab must’ve stolen my idea—May the Fate Weaver cut her life’s strand.”

  “Nothing is more upsetting than the obvious,” Tethiel said, “but I must mention we’re running in circles. Even if the scenery is lovely.”

  He nodded down to the splattered remains of the Bright Palm that was circling upward. The Grindstone grazed the plateau at its lowest point, and the downturn had not treated the Bright Palm gently. Hiresha and the men had to jump over the grisly results. She took this to mean that the magic of light could not save them from overwhelming compression. A fall from any respectable cliff would do them a world of good.

  “Even after their light fades, their blood is clear,” she said. “Most fascinating.”

  Fos asked, “Shouldn’t we head down to the Ballroom? I’m not going to let them force Alyla onto the Skyway.”

  “Sheamab will be waiting for us there. She’ll see the smoke from the broken window and know we’ve escaped.” Hiresha’s hand strayed to a pocket weighing down one side of her coat. She touched the angled hardness of the rector’s dagger. “We need a safe place to rest, so I can have your sword empowered. See to plucking that arrow from Tethiel. Perhaps an hour of sleep.”

  “And my eye,” Fos said, “I feel like I’m looking at the world through the bottom of a broken jug.”

  “Eyes take time, but I can tend to any infection.” Her fingers traced the contour of the key d
agger in her pocket. “I might know where we should go, but I’m less than certain.”

  Tethiel said, “I trust your uncertainty over any other woman’s firmest belief.”

  Veins of quartz sped by in the rock under their feet. To their right, the RecurveTower appeared even more peaceful than normal with fewer of its chimneys smoking.

  Hiresha said, “Tradition forced me to run on the Grindstone with my graduating class. I find the present company far more invigorating, but alas, we must disembark. Keep a tight grip on a window frame.”

  The enchantress turned around and reclined on the stone that whisked her downward. From this side she had a view of the frozen WaterflyRiver wrapping upward through the air to rest atop a pillar in a spherical lake. It looked like a frozen snowball on top of a post. Hiresha was thankful the Attraction enchantments at the center of the sphere still functioned because she intended to put the frozen lake to use.

  When she felt in danger of sliding forward, Hiresha rolled facedown and pressed either palm into the window frame. The crystal reflected the jagged peaks of the mountains. The Grindstone turned her to the vertical point, then past it to an overhang. Her legs dangled, and she caught a wicked draft up her coat.

  The trick, she remembered from years back, is holding onto the window long enough that you don’t break a leg on the fall, but not so long that you’re dragged under the snow pile and crushed beneath the Grindstone.

  31

  The Great Globe

  Hiresha thought it a long fall. Long enough that she had time to consider how endless the plummet must have felt to the warden, Enchantress Miatha, and even the chancellor, who had a longer distance to descend and no snow piled from the turning Grindstone waiting to cushion her.

  The enchantress landed on her backside with an “Oof!” She tumbled over twice and rose to her feet dripping with white. Glancing about for Bright Palms, she saw that one had spotted the enchantress and was jogging away. Likely for reinforcements.

  Tethiel hissed when he tried to break his fall using his wounded arm. Fos landed upright but sank past his waist. Powder sprayed as he kicked his legs free.

  “Not fair,” Fos said. “I’m the only one the snow wants to drown. Or is it that I have fifty pounds of jasper strapped to my back?”

  “You carry it as if it were only forty-five.” Hiresha checked her pockets, her right hand pushing a few loose jewels deeper into her sash. The rector’s dagger key was secure, but she found the pocket where she had stashed her red diamond unbuttoned.

  Her fingers dug inside. Every moment she rummaged between the layers of leather was an agony. If I lost the diamond I won’t have a chance of using walkways, of opening doors, or protecting myself. Did the jewel-duper steal it? No, but if it’s missing I’ll have lost the most precious jewel in the Lands of Loam.

  She had to admit it was gone. Her empty hand slid out of her pocket. She bent over, combing the snow with her fingers. “I dropped a gem somewhere. A red gem. Do either of you see it?”

  Fos shielded his eyes from the sun with a hand, though he did not look down. “I see three Bright Palms coming this way. You have lots of gems, don’t you?”

  “This one is important.” Hiresha had not realized she had shouted until she saw the surprise in Fos’s eye.

  Tethiel lifted something and blew snow from between his creatively angled fingers. He held a triangular gemstone between his thumb and palm, its size close to that of a raspberry. Hiresha breathed out air that had burned in her lungs for what felt like a week.

  Fos said, “I’d hate to see the storm that dropped that snowflake.”

  The diamond cast red sparks over Tethiel’s hand. He peered from the jewel to Hiresha. She met his eyes and felt a heat of blood rising up the skin of her neck. Tethiel had once given her this same jewel, and she wondered if he recognized it. His was not an expressive face, but over the years she had grown used to reading him. The lines around his sky-tinted eyes lifted in a hint of a smile, but then his forehead began to wrinkle around the corners of his tattoo in what Hiresha could only guess was sorrow.

  “My heart, was this the stone colored red by the crushing hand of your eight-armed goddess?”

  “The Fate Weaver.” Her words came as a whisper. Hiresha’s eyes flickered to Fos, who was looking at the jewel with new respect.

  “I feared you might have kept it,” Tethiel said, “even if you never wore it on your sleeve.”

  He pressed the diamond into her hand. A fierce sensitivity spread over her skin, as if cold droplets rolled upward from her wrist along her arm.

  “You were right to hide it,” Tethiel said. “Share the truest part of yourself with others and they’ll call you false. Only lies can be widely believed.”

  Hiresha was not so certain of that. She had often thought the diamond would have contrasted well with her purple dresses, but she had always worn it underneath. The enchantress had worried someone might see it and discover she had been given it by the Lord of the Feast. Now it seemed a small danger. What have I to fear? I who survived fire, freezing, and falling from a bridge?

  Fos was pulling her away. From Tethiel? She sifted through her fatigue to collect some strong words for the spellsword, but then she sensed the nearing light of Bright Palms. Hiresha took the lead, running toward the pillar with a lake balanced on top.

  Black and white tiles ringed the column. Hiresha hopped upward to them, her feet landing flush on the side. She felt the same giddy excitement she had so often seen on the faces of novices and enchantresses alike walking up the pillar on what passed for a summer day here, to swim in the Great Globe. Their laughs had mostly outnumbered their shrieks at the temperature. Hiresha had rarely joined them. She preferred the sport of dreaming.

  Hiresha had plans of greater moment than swimming, or even skating. A bridge of ice and enchantment connected the Great Globe to the RecurveTower.

  Fos nodded to the levitating span of frozen water. “Always wondered if there was a secret entrance from it to the bath hall.”

  “The pipe is too small for a person,” Hiresha said. “My new jewels should be able to open a forceful way, if not a secret one.”

  She stopped dead, close to the top of the column and near the spherical lake. A sense of clawing dread told her that if she rested her foot on the next white tile, she would fall.

  Her arm held Fos from passing her. “Wait.”

  “Then you’ll have to say the same to the Bright Palms,” he said.

  The enchantress turned to toss three yellow spinels down at them. The Bright Palms fell back to avoid the gems, one leaping off the column and landing upright in the snow.

  Hiresha eyed the white stretch of stone between herself and the Great Globe. Even the thought of stepping over it sent wrinkles of tension over her abdomen. “This might not be safe.”

  Fos asked, “Is there another way?”

  “No better.” Hiresha pressed her red diamond deep into her pocket, buttoning it with care. “Maybe we should risk it. No magical theory exists of how I could sense a failing enchantment before touching it.”

  Tethiel brushed her arm with two fingers, and she felt more than if someone else had grasped her about the waist with both hands. “You have years of enchantment training to back up your hunches,” he said. “May your fears be our guide.”

  Hiresha said, “I dislike the thought of submitting myself to vaporous impulse and fancies like some flower-petal-plucking youth.”

  Tethiel said, “The emotions of fools are indeed foolish. Yours would be quite intelligent.”

  “I’m not certain that could be universally true.” Hiresha’s eyes darted away from Tethiel, and she felt a swirl of tickling pain.

  “No truth is ever true. That’s philosophy for you,” Tethiel said. “In life, good instincts are the most valuable thing you can learn.”

  Hiresha cast the trio of Bright Palms another warning eye. Sheamab was not among them. The enchantress turned back to creep along the edge of the peculiar
ly unwholesome white tile. It went all the way around the column, shaded by what looked like a frosty blue hill above them.

  The muscles over her stomach relaxed, and her hands unclamped. She halted, one boot shifting to point at a stretch of tile. “This spot feels less worrisome. But why would the enchantment have more power here? It makes no sense.”

  “Then it has to be true,” Tethiel said.

  Fos scratched around his banded eye. “I only feel the same hot itching.”

  Hiresha supposed some sections of enchantment could have had their dream power depleted faster than others. Slight irregularities in magic scripts could over time result in dangerous deficiencies when strained with unforeseen conditions, such as the theft of the keystones. She still hated the idea of trusting life-and-death decisions to hunches, to anything she could not measure and document.

  Her foot slid onto the white tile. The enchantment held. She exhaled and said, “Step where I step.”

  They all reached the relative safety of the elevated ice lake. Tethiel strode onto it, so he stood upside down while Hiresha remained sideways on the column. He said, “We’ve never been more at odds.”

  Hiresha was peering down at the pillar, wondering if she had only imagined the weakness in the enchantments. Perhaps we could have walked up on any side without mishap. At the base of the column, the Bright Palms had connected themselves with ropes in preparation for the ascent. They stared up at Hiresha, and she guessed they were hesitant to approach her and her gemstones head-on.

  “A test is in order,” she said. “We will provoke them by making ourselves appear vulnerable. Tethiel, hand me a pair of skates.”

  He unstrapped two of the bladed shoes from his belt. “Do you mean to say you can use these for something besides stabbing?”