Dream Storm Sea

by A. E. Marling

A bell tinkled in the room behind her.

  A spellsword with rings woven into his grey beard clapped a hand on Fos’s shoulder. The elder spellsword said, “Fosapam Chandur, I arrest you for disobeying my direct order and endangering all the enchantresses in a time of crisis. Yield up your sword.”

  “My sword?”

  In Fos’s moment of surprise, three men seized him and bore him to the ground. Too late Hiresha realized that they must have planned his capture as well.

  “He was only protecting me.” Hiresha stomped toward them. “Fos must retain his sword and title. I overrule his sentence as the….”

  Her words caught in her throat. The silence was filled by a woman’s voice from the parlor.

  “Hiresha has retired from her post and no longer has authority in the Mindvault Academy.”

  “Then I’ll make my own authority,” Hiresha said.

  She strode toward those who pinned Fos, whisking her hand over her jewel sash. She needed gems that would Lighten the spellswords, so Fos could throw them off.

  A hand with a vine tattoo seized her wrist. In her fog of fatigue, she had not even noticed Spellsword Sagai standing beside her. She swung her blue diamond around to crush his nose.

  It never landed. Sagai whipped himself around her, twisting her arm. By the time her gasp cleared her mouth, he had her other arm in a lock as well. The wiry strength of his fingers scraped the spinel jewels in her hand against her tendons. She wished their enchantment would hurl him into sleep. Only an impact of sufficient force would trigger their magic.

  The other men tore Fos’s massive wedge sword from its holster. They grappled him into a headlock. The elder spellsword stooped over him and spoke with raspy sorrow.

  “I warned you. Trying to rescue the enchantresses from our position was riskier than swimming nude with sea monsters. Now I haven’t a choice, curse you. I have to sentence you to three nights chained to the Stone of the Sleepless.”

  A spellsword in the hall groaned at that, but not Fos. His jaw shifted forward. The men who held him looked shocked, and their eyes shied away from his gaze.

  “Three nights thrown to the Feasters?” Hiresha asked. She tried to kick backward at Sagai but could not land a heel on him. “Only one spellsword was brave enough to climb to the Academy, and now you’re executing him.”

  “I’ll survive it,” Fos said. “Three nights, that’s only a day of hours if you think about it.”

  Hiresha did, and she did not like his odds of surviving so long against the deadly illusionists. One particular Feaster had killed men in seconds, to protect her.

  The bell tinkled from the parlor again. “Bring Hiresha back and fetch the skin-stitcher.”

  A man in a white kilt and a black cape stepped from a hall archway. He wore a vulture mask with red rings around the eyes.

  Hiresha feared she knew why the skin-stitcher had been summoned. She tried to jerk her arms free, but Sagai’s grip fastened like manacles.

  “My deepest regrets,” Spellsword Sagai whispered in Hiresha’s ear. “Neither of you deserve this.”

  “Do more than regret. Free us.”

  His brow furrowed, and tattooed tree branches crept forward on his scalp.

  Hiresha said, “All you have to do is let your grip slip.”

  Sagai’s handholds on her tightened. He spoke to the elder spellsword. “Why not sentence Fos to one night? The Feasters always kill at the end of the sentence, and this way death would come quicker.”

  The elder spellsword stooped further under the weight of his blade. He turned a scowl on them. “Spellsword Sagai, bring your charge to the skin-stitcher.”

  Hiresha cried out to Fos as they dragged him away. Sagai forced her to walk into the parlor.

  The skin-stitcher lifted the table’s shroud. Surgery knives gleamed on the marble surface like shards of a fractured mirror. The skin-stitcher adjusted the position of the calipers and a short-nosed saw.

  “Extract all her jewels,” an elder said. A mound of silks embroidered with stars rose from the couch.

  Sagai and another spellsword yanked off Hiresha’s coat, sash, and gown, leaving her shivering in only her lingerie. She slapped at one man with the jeweled moon on her hand, and she might have had him if not for the drag of her lethargy.

  Belts were slung under the table and around Hiresha, strapping her down. The skin-stitcher lifted one of her fingers, touched a garnet embedded in her skin. The grime caked beneath his fingernails looked suspiciously like dried blood.

  The vulture mask muffled his voice. “Your skin should have rejected the jewels, but I feel no anger of swelling. How did you manage it?”

  “Magic, you idiot,” Hiresha said. “I hope you cleaned your tools in something other than camel spit.”

  “No purer animal walks the Lands of Loam.”

  A darkness of kohl paint surrounded his eyes, making them appear suspended in the mask holes. He loomed over her, reached between her breasts to tap a triangular facet. His finger left a smear on the red diamond encased in her chest. She shuddered.

  An elder enchantress trundled by, her buttresses of fabric decorated with dagger blades. “No one should be forced to see blood. Do close your eyes, Hiresha.”

  Hiresha shouted after her. “I’ll dedicate the first pint I bleed to you, Seesha.”

  The man in the mask knelt to the procession of embroidered silks.

  The cold of the marble table bit into Hiresha. She trembled, her muscles aching and twitching. They all owe me so much, and they repay with dirty knives.

  The next elder handed the skin-stitcher a sapphire tiara. “Secure this to Hiresha’s brow. If she tries to work her magic, she will be swept into a most breathtaking lecture on the formation of stars in nebulae.”

  Hiresha recognized the tiara. It would force the elder’s dream upon her, one of galaxies, infinite voids, and despair. The silver crown clamped over Hiresha’s head.

  The skin-stitcher lifted a knife to cut her. The diamond in her chest glared red, and its enchantment Burdened the blade. The talon of bronze shot out of his hand and snapped on the tabletop.

  Spellsword Sagai winced. “That was bound to happen. Try again.”

  The skin-stitcher did. His next curved razor met the same sudden fate. Hiresha knew that her enchantment would not protect her a third time, so she said, “Very well. I’ll allow it, if only to escape the tedium.”

  A silken train of greens, oranges, and yellows snaked behind the last elder. She said, “I’ll dream of you finding joy among the singing flowers in a Nagra garden.”

  “I shan’t think of you in my sleep because even in dreams I don’t condone nonsense.”

  The last elder departed, and the skin-stitcher plied his trade. As he cut back and forth along her sternum she did not try to hide her cries. Rather, she took pride in the volume of her screams.

  Let them know they’re hurting me. Let them know they’re wrong. A shattering life should make a sound.

  Hiresha only interrupted her treatise on screeching when a pair of tongs plinked something red onto a tray. A drop of blood oozed down the diamond’s largest facet.

  Blessed by two gods, the red diamond glinted with a brooding reverence. Hiresha had hesitated to recut it, to try to improve upon something so divine, to change what Tethiel had given her. She regretted that now. Her technique could have made it shine like a red star. She had owned none rarer. Now it has a rival.

  The raw paragon lay beside it, a bead of her blood between the gems. We are all three of us unfinished. Hiresha knew she could never allow the jewels to be imprisoned in some princess’s cabinet, nor on a dusty shelf in the Academy’s Spire of Magical History. Neither will I be trapped.

  She would get her jewels back. She would never be caught helpless again.

  This is not the end. It’s only the beginning.

  5

  Stone of the Sleepless

  Twenty men strained to lift the slab above Fos. Poles creaked, each a spoke around a block of d
ark granite. The wood bent under the weight. The men stooped with the poles braced on their shoulders, their legs twitching, their teeth on edge.

  Chains bound Fos’s hands to the block. Links rattled as Spellsword Trakis clamped another shackle around Fos’s neck, noosing him into a sitting position. The chill of the bronze was an invigorating kiss, and excitement rippled down the muscles of his chest and back. They had stripped Fos of his sword and enchanted greaves. He wore his walking boots.

  “Put your feet there.” Spellsword Trakis pointed to a pair of indentations in the flagstone, shadowed by the block.

  Another chained man massaged his own ankles and feet. Fos knew he might want to do the same himself after a few days with his legs pinned beneath granite. He had met this foot-sore prisoner before. To put a finer point on it, the man had once poisoned Fos, and Hiresha, too. This sneak had stolen from the Academy, and he had only yielded the antidote after Hiresha had promised to let him go free.

  She had not kept her word. Fos had felt uncomfortable about that betrayal but not half so much as he did now, chained beside the thief.

  Fos remembered the man’s name now. Inannis. Hiresha had spoken it with a hiss.

  Inannis had a fragile beauty to him, a birdlike fineness to his bones. Dark hair hid his face except for sunken cheeks, bloodless skin pale as pure sand, and lips raw and red. Inannis’s boots looked tiny to Fos.

  “Does this block fit feet of all sizes?” Fos wiggled his toes.

  “It crushes all sizes into one,” a woman in chains said.

  The third person bound to the block, this woman had the appearance of a stocky villager but the presence of a lioness. Her smile stretched to display all the teeth in her mouth, and her laugh startled the men bearing the poles. She was to Fos’s right, and the skin on that side of his face and neck burned and tingled. Fos had faced her in battle and would not soon forget her name. Emesea.

  One man squirmed under the weight of the pole. He grimaced up at the sun, which would soon set behind the mountains.

  “Can’t hold this much longer,” he said. “Or the Feasters will have more of a meal than these three.”

  Another said, “My wife will have a kettle-throwing fit if I come home after sunset.”

  “Blue-bellied cowards,” Emesea said. “You’ll be scuttling home to wash the piss from your pants, and the man you’re leaving behind doesn’t look half so scared.”

  She smiled at Fos. Her crooked teeth reminded him of a crocodile’s maw gaping before the strike. He still found himself grinning back at her.

  She and Inannis survived, chained here for weeks. I will last three nights. Then he would help Hiresha escape whatever trouble she had run into at the Academy.

  Emesea lunged at the men holding the poles. The chains held her, but the men still flinched. Her laugh rang high over the plaza. They cursed.

  “Crazy she-beast!”

  “Heard she was from the Dominion of the Sun. Bet she flays the men she beds.”

  She winked. “Only the disappointing ones.”

  “You’re a squint-eyed toad. No wonder the Feasters won’t touch you.”

  “Come closer,” she said and banged her shackles together, “and I’ll pop your head like the pimple you are.”

  “Enough.” Spellsword Trakis motioned to the men. “On my say, lower the Stone of the Sleepless.”

  While the elder counted off, another spellsword crouched behind Fos. His words itched Fos’s ear.

  “Some condemned men throw their head beneath the block. The chains allow for it, and it’s a quick end.”

  “A priest has read me my fate,” Fos said. “And it’s not to end here.”

  The spellsword sighed and backed away without meeting Fos’s eyes.

  A smarting ache had settled into Fos’s chest ever since they had taken his sword. I did their jobs for them. I climbed the cliff in winter. And they put me here.

  The black granite thudded down, scraping his legs. He had to curl his toes under the pressure of stone. By reflex, he pushed out with his mind into the rock to see if he could Lighten its weight. It felt like reaching into a jug of water only to find it frozen.

  “It’s not enchanted.” Spellsword Trakis brushed some stray ash off the top of the block. “You’re not the first spellsword brought here. May buzzards string my innards over schoolyards, I hope you’ll be the last!”

  Fos wanted to laugh in the faces of his captors, as Emesea had, but his chest clenched. He had noticed scuff marks on the stone in front of him. A tuft of hair was snagged in a chink as if someone had banged their head against the block.

  Fos asked, “You aren’t going to lock Hiresha here, are you?”

  “No,” the bearded spellsword said. “She’ll long outlive you, if that’s a comfort.”

  One knot in Fos’s belly unwound. He had never heard Hiresha talk of her fate, and he often worried that meant the priest had prophesied her early death. Have to reach her. He flexed his legs, but they were locked beneath the stone.

  The men slid their poles out of holes in the block. In unison they raised bronze axes and chopped the poles to kindling.

  “Try to get up now.” People laughed in the crowd. “C’mon, try to lift the block.”

  The men threw the pieces of wood on top of the slab along with some yak droppings and set them afire. After that, the men could not shuffle away fast enough.

  Fos decided the ritual was far less fun from this side of the shackles. He nodded to the burning poles. “Think they’re trying to tell us something?”

  “They light fires to keep us from freezing.” Emesea lifted her hands toward the heat. Blood oozed from beneath her shackles. “They lack the courage to kill us to our faces. That honor they’ll leave to the Feasters.”

  Most of the market had cleared, and the shadows of an animal-headed statues loomed over deserted stalls. The gods of the desert empire kept watch even over this remote town. Wares remained unattended, as few thieves would brave the night streets to take them. Only a few merchants who had not yet fled indoors pointed to Fos and the Stone of the Sleepless, conferring among themselves then dropping coins into urns. The market’s flagstones darkened as the sun dipped behind the mountain range. The sky above still shone blue, though Fos knew the light would not last.

  A merchant in green and white robes led a camel to the granite block. He and a boy lowered furs from the pack animal.

  Emesea said, “Bright stars and thick shutters to you, Talrand. How do our odds stand for tonight?”

  “Wonderfully bad, my friends,” the merchant said. He wrapped shaggy grey furs over her shoulders. “Five to one for you both living. Two to one for you surviving.”

  “I hope you put all you own on both of us again,” Emesea said.

  “Yes, and by tomorrow morning I’ll be a rich man.” The merchant covered Inannis with furs as well. “Jhessie, serve the curry.”

  A boy wearing a fez spooned green-tinted rice into Inannis’s mouth.

  “Many speculate the Feasters will tire of you. That they’ll move on to the new man.” The merchant nodded to Fos. “My deepest respects to you and your lineage, but my coin is on the veterans.”

  Fos shrugged with a rattling of chains.

  Another merchant in blue robes heaped carpets over Fos.

  “My thanks,” Fos said. “Guess the cold kills on these nights as sure as the Feasters.”

  “I’ve staked a fortune on you,” the merchant in blue said. “Live through two nights and I’ll buy you a woman.”

  Fos shifted but the sitting position remained uncomfortable. “I think living could be its own reward.”

  “Jhessie, the red curry for the new man,” the first merchant said.

  “Harder to choke on fear with a good meal in you.” The merchant in blue squeezed Fos’s shoulder.

  The boy lifted a spoon filled with orange and livid speckles. The aroma of spice and cooked meat made Fos lean forward.

  “Don’t eat it.” Inannis’s voice was
faint.

  Fos’s cheeks bulged with the food. The curry had a bitter, loamy taste, and he guessed it some herb he wasn’t used to.

  “It’s poisoned.” Inannis clanged his shackles against the rock. “I can smell the tigersbane from here.”

  Fos spat the curry onto the fire. It fumed with an eye-smarting smoke.

  “Poison?” The merchant in blue grabbed the boy by the neck, and the fez fell from his head. “You sabotaging my wager? I’ll break your legs and leave you for the Feasters.”

  “The boy had nothing to do with it.” Inannis rested his head ear-down on the block, as if speaking exhausted him. “Merchant Talrand chopped the tigersbane himself. The yellow of it still stains his sleeves.”

  “What stain? There is no stain.” The Merchant Talrand backed away, hands raised. The uncertain light made the green and white patterns on his robe hard enough to see. “I’m your friend. Why would you say this of me?”

  “You thought you could profit longer off our suffering,” Inannis said. “Save your investment by killing the newcomer, but finding him dead on the block could send the Feasters into a killing frenzy.”

  The other merchants followed Talrand, demanding to see his sleeves. They began to beat him. He ran. He almost made it off the plaza.

  Fos shuddered and turned back to see Inannis and Emesea exchange a look. He shook his head once. She turned to Fos.

  Her laugh covered the sounds of the man being bludgeoned. “So, here the three of us are again. Together in chains.”

  Fos frowned. “Again?”

  A drop of blood fell from the corner of Inannis’s lips. His breath rattled. “In Bleak Wells Prison. You were locked beside Emesea. I freed her.”

  “That was you two? I remember your kiss.”

  In corridors stained by smoke, a diseased man and a lice-ridden woman had embraced. Their love in that place of despair had astounded Fos. Its pureness had pained him, and he had wondered if he would ever have something so powerful.

  Inannis had worn a wig and kohl paint around his eyes, and Fos had not recognized him. Of the woman prisoner, Fos remembered only one thing.

  “That’s right. Your snake tattoo.”