Gemworld

by Jeremy Bullard

  It galled him that he only knew his part of the plan. Sure, he saw the wisdom in having no one man but Reit himself know the entirety of the operation, but it irked him nonetheless. He liked to know why he was doing what he was doing, especially when the task seemed as asinine as this. But all the assassin really knew was that he was supposed to drop the bag down the flue and run. Fast. Whatever it was in the bag, it definitely wasn’t dirt.

  Sighing, he tossed the bag up in the air and caught it, then hunkered down next to the chimney and waited, his eyes trained on the harbor.

  ***

  Reit and Keth made their way slowly through the dark tunnel that had been burrowed from the alleyway to the cellars of the Archive. The way was long and cramped and apparently pitch-black with a low ceiling, so Reit was relieved to finally make out a dim light in the distance. None of that mattered much to Keth. He couldn’t see the light. Even if he’d had a water source readily at hand, he could not clear his primary sight. Reit had given him explicit instructions not to wield, for fear that the resulting aura would attract the wrong kind of attention. He couldn’t argue that point with him, but he didn’t have to like it.

  Besides, he felt perfectly at home within the bowels of the earth. And thanks to his granite sight, he’d seen the end of the tunnel as soon as they’d entered. But he was too busy studying the materials in the walls to worry about when they’d reach the end. It was fascinating! The tunnel had to have been made magically. The cut was too perfect, the dimensions too precise to be otherwise. The walls were smooth to the point of being glassy. He could see no imperfections whatsoever in the tunnel wall... wait a minute. There was one break in the tunnel. He could see the jagged edges of some sort of spell showing through the walls. That must have been where the mages had dispelled a ward in order to continue down the passage. Interesting. But even more interesting were the patterns within the walls themselves. The minerals seemed to run together, merging, mutating, almost as if—

  “Remember,” Reit admonished, breaking Keth’s line of thought. “No magic. It’s likely those few granites that stayed behind in the Spire would detect it. And with most of the others gone, they might get curious as to whom the odd granite signature coming from the city could belong to.”

  Keth nodded shortly, as he had a hundred times before. How could he forget? They’d drilled him often enough that he could recite the warning in his sleep. He understood that Reit was just being cautious, but after so many similar warnings, Keth probably couldn’t have thought straight enough to wield right then if he had to.

  But, oh, how he wanted to! The restraint absolutely galled him. Only fifteen weeks and a Festival had gone by—not even two months!—and already he’d gained a mastery over his gifts that he’d have never thought possible. He was acquiring new skills almost daily, and those he’d already picked up, he honed to katana-sharp perfection. So much effort. So much time. So much power! And he was forced to rein it in, just when it could be of the most use. How utterly pointless!

  He could feel his temper boiling hotter and hotter, the more he thought about it. His head started to throb. He could feel his pulse hammering behind his eyes. Retzu had called his temper his “chief stumbling block on the road to true power,” and he could easily see why. He could barely see straight when he got mad. Even now, knowing full well what was happening to him, it was still difficult to focus, which just served to make him hotter.

  He grit his teeth and breathed in a deep cleansing breath, running through his hilts as if by rote. Focus on the goal, he told himself in the space between hilts. Shut all else out. He let his breath out slowly, deliberately, and with it, the tension and disappointment. This is the most logical course of action, he reminded himself, his hilts repeating in the back of his mind. Magic is power, but only when used with wisdom. You’re no good to the Cause—Reit, Retzu, Sal, nobody—in prison, or in the grave. He thought these things purposefully, methodically. Soon, he began to believe them. His temper cooled, and his temples stopped pounding. Finally the last of the tension left him, and all that was left was resolve.

  Keth saw an orange-yellow figure move into the doorway, peering blindly into the darkness toward him. “We got company,” the granite whispered.

  “Who goes there?” called an elderly voice softly.

  “ el’Yatza,” Reit answered. “I’ve brought a friend, I hope you don’t mind.” The Archivist obviously did mind, for he backed away from the tunnel mouth, suddenly unsure of himself. “Protection,” Reit clarified. “Against unforeseen circumstances.”

  The Archivist relaxed visibly, though not by much. He tensed again when the pair breasted the tunnel and came full into the cellar—and apparently, the torchlight.

  “A granite!” the old man hissed, half in contempt, half in terror.

  “Learned,” Reit pled anxiously. “Learned, this is Keth. He’s the granite that was found on the farm southwest of Scholar’s Ford.”

  “The Ford?” the old man asked vaguely, as if consulting some inner voice. “Ah yes, the Ford! The one who struck down his recru—oh dear me, I’m so terribly sorry, my boy. Please forgive my thoughtlessness. I meant no offense. It’s just that I have such limited contact with outsiders, and when they do come to the Archives, they’re only interested in those things in my keeping, you see!” He chuckled pitifully in embarrassment.

  Keth had dropped his eyes to the floor at the mention of his crime, but he looked up at the apology, accepting it meekly. He’d long since forgiven himself for the things he had done, but it still pained him to hear them mentioned. All of which was completely lost on the Archivist, who continued to sputter his remorse.

  The old man was small and thin, but what muscles he had were dense. He wore only a linen wrap, wound about his torso to cover him like a robe. One end of the wrap hung loosely over his left shoulder. His head was bald and pockmarked with tiny cuts and scars, evidencing many years of having shaved his head. His nose had the sloping, rounded bridge that was the hallmark of the Ysrean race.

  And he was bowing profusely.

  “Alright, alright, I think he gets the point,” Reit finally said, straightening the old man. “We don’t have much time, remember?”

  “Yes, of course. The scrolls. They are packed and ready. Err, you do have a plan for getting them out of the city, don’t you?”

  “Well, hopefully, Keth and I can just sneak out in the chaos. But we do have an alternative plan in motion, just in case.”

  Chaos? What did Reit have in mind?

  “Excellent! Because if you had no alternative routes out of the city, the Learned brothers and I had compiled a list of escape routes, each logged and labeled in order of distance from—”

  “We need to get started, Learned,” Reit prompted gently.

  “Yes, quite right,” the old man said. “The packs are stacked in the northern library, just up the stairs and through the kitchen.” He turned, indicating a set of rickety steps that led up out of the cellar.

  Keth, started forward, but Reit restrained him. The granite gave Reit a puzzled look.

  “The guards,” Reit explained. “With the constabulary on holiday, the Earthen Rank are guarding the city. That means amethysts, who can see through all but the most dense materials.” He indicated the wall with a nod.

  Curious, Keth inspected the walls. He noticed the minerals right off, the same as were in the walls of the tunnel. Only here, it was much more concentrated. And again, they ran together, creating simple alloys.

  Alloys?

  “Lead,” he stated in revelation. “The walls are laced with molten lead, which would make it proof against amethyst sight.”

  “Yes,” the old man affirmed proudly. “It was Learned Yakov’s idea, actually. The soil here is rich with lead, so when some—umm, we’ll call them ‘valued friends’—constructed the tunnel for us, they extracted the mineral as they went. It slowed their progress dramatically, took them over a month to complete the passage. But when our ‘friends’ sm
elted the lead into the cellar walls, proofing them against unwelcome observers, we decided that the end result was well worth the delay.”

  “So, why not just store the scrolls down here?” Keth asked, his practical nature getting the better of him.

  “Because we could not afford to draw attention to this room. The constabulary regularly employs amethyst mages, for obvious reasons. Should one of them have spotted us disappearing into a hidden room with an armful of scrolls...”

  Keth nodded, conceding to the wisdom of the Archivist. Still, he wasn’t satisfied. “So then, what do we do now?”

  ***

  Nestor tromped through the underbrush, pushing steadily toward the opalescent aura along the overgrown game trail. The path he cut ran almost parallel to the river, and he’d thought more than once to veer off the trail and follow the shoreline directly, but if what lay ahead was indeed man-made, then it was only sensible to find out what exactly he was dealing with before he pressed into the open.

  “Should I scout the area ahead?” Jaeda half-whispered behind him.

  “No. There’s no telling if there are any defenses in place, or what type. They may be triggered by magical aura.”

  “You don’t even know what’s there,” she protested, but obediently kept a rein on her magic.

  “I should probably be thankful for the shackle,” he said after a time. “If not for this cursed thing, I would never be here.”

  “No, you’d be safe in the arms of the Highest,” Jaeda said, not bothering to hide the sarcasm. Still, there was a note of probing in her voice, as if she hadn’t completely given up hope that she could turn him from the Highest to follow this el’Yatza, this “hand of the Crafter”.

  “You’re right, of course,” he replied with barely a pause. But there had been a pause. As much as he’d considered over the past few weeks since his capture, as often as he’d prayed, he was still no closer to finding peace within himself concerning the Highest.

  Was he indeed the Vicar of the Crafter? If so, why would the Crafter allow His Vicar—His very representative—to be flawed? More than once, Nestor had seen the Highest’s imperfection. Uncertainty. Errors in judgment Anger, as if he hadn’t expected a particular outcome. Surprise.

  That one was the clincher, the one that “flooded the deh’lt,” as his dear Bralla would have said. There was another flaw in the Highest. When Bralla had passed into the next life, the Vicar of the Crafter had offered no words of hope, no encouragement, so sign that his servant’s pain had touched him in the slightest. Wouldn’t messac’el—the Heart of the Crafter, the Chosen One—have done at least that? And if the Heart, why not the Crafter’s Vicar as well?

  That thought, among others, drove him into Aeden’s Lost Garden. Thoughts of finding transport back to Veylin were furthest from his mind, regardless of what he’d told Jaeda. “I would never have dreamed of finding my way into the heart of the Garden,” he continued. “The traditions concerning this forest are particularly thick in my family. Tales of dragons, of rogue mages, even of vi’zrith, the watermen, living in the lake here—the traditions mark this forest as cursed. Such a thing as we’re doing now would have been unthinkable for me even a few short weeks ago. And yet, here I am, bereft of my magic and completely defenseless, save of course for my beautiful companion,”—this with a friendly nod toward Jaeda—”and my own wits. Truly, this is a quest born of the Crafter Himself, to find the ancient camp of the Highest...”

  Whatever else he might have said was lost to him as he entered the clearing at the end of the game trail. The clearing wasn’t very large, barely fifty paces in any direction, but it offered a brief respite from the endless forest. The grasses grew tall in the rough semicircle, and the game trail turned to the east, cutting a short, straight path down to the river.

  The flowing red-patterned water had widened since they first started along the trail, more than doubling the distance between the shores. The far shore grew more distant still, the further north Nestor looked. Just beyond the edge of the clearing, the river exploded into a rather large lake. And at the center of the lake...

  “Blessed Crafter,” both he and Jaeda breathed in unison, staring in awe at the squat pyramid of stone, the shattered peak of its black edifice poking up through the water like a ruined tombstone. And though they were still too far away to say for certain, Nestor could almost swear that the pyramid was made of sapphire.

  ***

  Sal barked at his subordinates, ordering them to stay sharp. They instantly snapped to attention, though not without a twinkle of suppressed mirth in their eyes. A sharp look from Sal smothered even that. He had to admit that he felt a little like laughing himself, amused at the act they had to maintain. But there was too much at stake. Tonight of all nights, they had to be ready for anything.

  He turned his back to the magically sealed main doors, and glowered over the courtyard, seeking out passersby who might have an unhealthy curiosity about the Archives. And his look assured them, one and all, that a one-eyed mage could indeed see everything.

  ***

  Yakov motioned the two rebels to stay put, and walked over to a nearby furnace. The fire flickered low in the glass window, putting off just enough heat to take the edge off the not-too-warm autumn night.

  But the old man was not interested in the fire. Picking up a small coal shovel, he tapped the heating duct above the furnace. The tap resounded loudly, the vibrations moving up the duct and out along its branches.

  It traveled past the cellar door and into the kitchen, where one startled Archivist accidentally added too much cinnamon to the evening repast.

  It traveled out into the main body of the library, where it passed one Learned brother who was reorganizing the Herbal Remedies section. The robed man pointedly ignored a certain bundle of scrolls that lay at his feet.

  The rap traveled through the duct work, reaching two Archivists on the first floor landing where they were discussing the importance of the soybean in Post-Rending agriculture. As the tap reached them, their conversation fell flat, empirical evidence on both sides completely forgotten.

  The sound continued on, echoing up to the second floor, past the bathing room, where one old scholar dropped his soap, squirting from his suddenly nerveless fingers.

  Finally, the tap reached the room of Learned Stella. She leapt in her chair at the sound, dropping to the floor the book she’d been reading. Her pulse quickened, her breath came short.

  She argued with herself anxiously for a moment. Perhaps I was mistaken? Perhaps I heard only my own nervousness. Perhaps someone stumbled into—

  The tap came a second time, then a third, firmly debunking her dread-filled musings. There was no mistake, no accident.

  It was time.

  ***

  Sal strode around the courtyard, taking in the grounds, the metal picket fence, and the festival celebrants beyond. He tried to look menacing, but after almost eighteen hours of patrolling the city streets, he was afraid he looked more bored than anything else.

  He turned his head to stifle a yawn, and noticed something odd. As usual, the windows of the Archives were dim or completely dark, the inhabitants all moving and working deep within the building’s vast libraries. All windows were dark, that is, except for one. On the second floor, someone had placed a lamp in the window. He could see a woman there, reading by its light. As he watched, the woman bent to place a second lamp in the window, then settled back to continue reading.

  By itself, it didn’t seem all that odd. Barely noteworthy, and yet he stood there, staring at the Archivist. An unsettled, anxious feeling spread through him, from his churning gut to his suddenly sweaty palms, though he had no idea why he should feel that way. There was just something about the light that niggled the back of Sal’s mind. Something familiar...

  ***

  Nestor rushed headlong down the hill to the shoreline, no longer caring whether or not he would be spotted by some ancient defender. A mountain of sapphire! A pyramid!
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  As he drew closer to the river, he realized that he’d been mistaken. The mountain wasn’t a true pyramid, as it had only three sides, not four. No matter. It was man-made. He was close, so close!

  “Look at how the tip has been shattered,” Jaeda breathed. “It’s as if the structure exploded, leaving only the base. What could have done that?” Nestor had no answer, was barely conscious of her speaking to him at all. He was close! The Highest’s camp must be within his grasp!

  He stumbled along the river’s edge, heedlessly splashing in and out of the water. None of it mattered. He was here! The answers to his questions, the answers that would finally bring him peace, were just beyond the treeline to the north, within the—

  Nestor stopped dead in his tracks, his breath catching in his chest as his view panned past the sapphire mountain. In a detached sort of way, he realized that he was goggling, and that Jaeda would likely see the shock and awe as some sort of weakness unbecoming the man who had once been her Chief General, but he didn’t care.

  It no longer mattered. None of it mattered. He never could have imagined how small and insignificant he would one day find himself, as he found himself now, staring out across the vast expanse of valley on the far side of the lake. Five pyramids—not just the one, but five—surrounded the valley like a ring of sentries, each constructed from a different soulgem. Most were broken like the sapphire pyramid they’d found in the midst of the lake, though one—a granite structure, judging by the aura it gave off—still appeared whole.

  But all this had been afterthought, for he stood in awe not of the monolithic gemstone sentries, nor even of the strange flying creatures that he could barely make out at this distance, hovering in the open air between the peaks. Rather, his attention was riveted to the massive black structure in the center, enshrouded by the opalescent aura that they’d been seeing for miles. Even at this distance, Nestor could see the distinct patterns of a diamond.