by Kay L. Ling
“Book! Who owned you before your mistress?” Jules asked.
“Why should I tell you, even if I remembered, which perhaps I do not,” the book replied in a venomous tone.
Jules opened his mouth, but Lana waved him to silence. She had been rude to the book yesterday, so it seemed hypocritical to be nice now, but she wanted to see how it responded to flattery. “I bet a powerful Gem Master owned you. I’ve never seen such an ornate cover, or one with gems. You’re in remarkable condition.”
“I am a rare and valuable book. Naturally, I have been well cared for.”
Jules rolled his eyes but didn’t say anything.
“Your mistress must have been proud to own you, and I bet you taught her a lot.”
“Not so! I was nothing when the gnome owned me. Mistress said the gnome was a weak old fool. Thankfully, even though I was weak and lifeless, Mistress kept me and filled me with powerful spells.”
Lana glanced at Elias who looked totally baffled.
“What was a gnome doing with a spell book?” Jules asked, mostly to himself.
“I shall say no more, worthless humans.”
Elias snatched his hand away as the book slammed shut.
“Hmmm. We have a few mysteries to solve,” Lana said. “Maybe we’ll find the answers in S’s library.” She gave Elias a hopeful look.
“I have examined some of her books. Many are written in runes.”
“Oh, great,” Lana said, frowning. “What good are answers if we can’t read them?”
“Runes are an inconvenience, but not an insurmountable obstacle,” Elias replied. “A Shadow gem called cyanistone translates runes by using thoughts and mental images to convey the meaning. It’s not as reliable as a printed translation, but it works well enough.”
“You have cyanistones?
“I do. And I believe there are some in S’s library.”
Jules shook his head slowly. “It will take forever just to translate the titles.”
“It sounds like a lot of work,” Lana agreed. “But look at the bright side. We won’t be bored. We’ll have a big ugly beetle to keep us company, and think how annoyed she’ll be.”
The group arrived at Shadowglade midafternoon, and Jules, Elias, and a couple guards went to deal with the dead pythanium while Lana went to the library.
Two armed guards stood in the passageway by the library. The older of the two, a portly fellow with a scraggly gray beard, gave Lana a pained look and angled his head toward the door. “After visiting S, they asked for you. They claim to be friends.”
Friends? She looked inside. Two male breghlin stood near S’s cage, but their backs were to Lana. Breghlin were allowed to visit S, but no more than two at a time. According to Elias and Jules, most came out of malice rather than kindness.
Hearing voices, the breghlin turned and waved when they saw her.
“Thanks. I recognize them,” she told the guards, trying to smother a grin.
“Shall we come in with you?”
“No thanks. I’ll be fine. They are friends . . . sort of,” she said, ignoring the gnomes’ disapproving frowns.
As soon as she stepped inside, she could smell their filthy gray uniforms and unwashed bodies. She’d never get used to breghlin lack of grooming and hygiene. Somebody ought to hose them down and give them clean clothes. Her welcoming smile became more of a grimace, but she couldn’t help it.
The first time she’d seen breghlin, she’d been so scared she’d babbled like an idiot, but she was getting used to their looks now, if not their smell. They were four feet tall and surprisingly muscular. Their heads seemed too large for their bodies, and their features were grotesque: deep-set eyes, bulbous, pocked noses, and wide mouths with thick, protruding lips. Most wore short beards. Their skin was lumpy, giving the appearance of something festering underneath.
Grace and Wally, weren’t exactly friends, but she had renamed them during her brief stay in the dungeon. Wally, simply known as “W” at the time, was the ugliest. He had no beard since his face was too pitted and scarred to grow one. A cut along his jawline had healed badly, leaving a pink bulge of scar tissue, like a worm attached to his face. His nose was huge. Skin hung from his chin in cascading folds. By comparison “G,” whom Lana had named Grace, was almost attractive.
The breghlin puffed out their chests and grinned at Lana. She had always found their smiles disturbing—something about the yellowed stumps of broken teeth.
“Good t’see ya, Lana,” Grace said in his low, gravelly voice, and Wally nodded.
“So, you came to visit S.” Lana still enjoyed the irony of renaming Sheamathan with a breghlin-like one-letter “name.” She noticed Grace and Wally kept their distance from the cage, as if worried that even in beetle form S could hurt them.
Grace chuckled unpleasantly. “That’s right.”
Wally said, “I’s a useless oaf, but I’s free . . . and she’s in a cage.”
Useless? No. Grace and Wally—and a few other breghlin Lana had met—would be perfect staff members for her Ministry of Breghlin affairs, but she didn’t want to discuss that in front of S. Motioning for them to follow, she went right up to the cage. “Hey, S! Isn’t it nice? A couple of your former subjects came to visit you. I hope you had a nice chat.”
The beetle flicked her feelers—a rude gesture for all Lana knew.
Grace said in an undertone, “We talked to her, but she didn’t say nuthin.’” Edging closer, he and Wally looked through the scrollwork, eyes wide and mouths hanging open. “Hullo there,” Grace said. “It’s G. Dontcha know me?” His fetid breath rolled over the captive beetle.
“Go away,” cried S in a shrill voice. They stumbled backward in surprise.
“Well, that’s rude,” Lana said. “You’re down one admirer with your pet pythanium dead. You should be nice to these guys.”
The beetle’s legs wobbled. “What?”
“No one told you?” Lana asked in mock horror.
“Dead! I do not believe you!”
Lana smiled. S’s whole existence had revolved around others’ misery, and it was satisfying to see the tables turned. “Oh, and the ommort mirkstone? Hidden on a band around its leg? Found it! Smashed it to powder.”
Silence.
“Dead? You’s sure?” Grace asked, clearly awed by the thought.
“Positive. I was there. At first I was planning to make a pair of shoes from the skin, but that’s thinking too small, so now I’m thinking shoes, a purse, and luggage.”
The beetle was silent, motionless. Could bugs faint? Maybe.
“Well, if you’re through visiting,” Lana said to the breghlin, “let’s talk somewhere else. If I remember right, I owe you guys a beer.”
Chapter 7
That evening, when Lana left Shadowglade, both men accompanied her. This time Jules drove the cart, and she and Elias sat on the bench behind the driver’s box. As the cart rattled over the trail, Lana asked, “Did you guys save me some pythanium skin?”
“We certainly did,” Elias replied. “Jules saved a piece for himself, and I kept a section to use as a wall hanging.”
Jules glanced back. “I heard you had some interesting visitors.”
Lana laughed. “Two guards I met during my stay in the dungeon. They came to see S and then hung around when they heard I was coming.”
“Were they the ones you named?” Elias asked with a twinkle in his eye.
“Yeah, Grace and Wally. I saw them again in the mining camp—the night we carried off the alamaria.”
Jules said in a teasing tone, “You remember, Elias—the two breghlin who captured Lana, and then invited her in for a beer.”
“Ah yes,” Elias said, chuckling. “I remember it well. We were quite worried.”
They’d be ribbing her about that for years. “I’d like to recruit Grace and Wally for the Ministry of Breghlin Affairs. They’d be the perfect liaisons between us and the more savage breghlin.”
“Can you trust them?” Ju
les asked. “Will they be loyal to you?”
“I think so. They saw S for what she was—a bully with gem powers. I think they’ll convince others they’re better off without her.” She thought back to her mission in the mining camp. “You know, it’s sad. Breghlin expect anyone with gem powers to hurt them. They were shocked to see I was different.”
“Even though the staff resented the way S treated them, they tried their best to please her,” Jules said.
Lana snorted in disgust. “For all the good it did them. She insulted them, beat them, and even killed some. She deserves to rot in a cage.”
The cart beast let out a bellow, as if agreeing with her.
Elias said, “It’s hard for us to understand, but no matter how badly she treated them, some will miss her.”
“The more savage ones prefer chaos over kindness,” Jules said.
“I suppose you’re right,” Lana said, “and if the savage ones start trouble, we’ll have to step in. But we need to give them a chance.”
“The gnomes want to come out of hiding and build settlements, and that will never happen until the breghlin stop hunting them,” Elias said.
Lana thought back to the map in the spell book. “The towns we saw on the map . . . do you think any of them still exist?”
Elias shook his head. “I doubt it. Knowing the breghlin, they looted and dismantled any structures they found long ago.”
Jules said, “If we find maps with place names, we can ask the gnomes if they’ve heard of them.”
“I doubt they’ll know anything,” Elias said. “S destroyed most of their books and written records.”
“That’s terrible,” Lana said bitterly. “That sounds like something she’d do. So, the gnomes rely on oral history?”
Elias sighed. “Yes, and it’s probably a mixture of history and legends. Their clans are too isolated to compile a reliable, unified history.”
The cart hit a deep rut and Lana grabbed the side to steady herself. “You know, when I first met the gnomes they told me they had to live in hiding or they’d be captured and turned into slaves. It’s hard to believe this has been going on for generations.”
“And they’re still not safe, even with S gone, if the breghlin continue to attack them,” Jules said.
Elias frowned. “The gnomes are more intelligent than the breghlin and outnumber them. Once they’re better armed and start fighting back, I think the breghlin will give up and leave them alone.”
“If we had to, we could give the gnomes weapons from our world,” Lana said. “Then they’d have a definite advantage.”
“You can’t be serious!” Jules cried. “The breghlin would be furious with us.”
“You’re right,” Lana said, shaking her head. “What was I thinking? My Ministry of Breghlin Affairs would be a joke.”
“Besides, weren’t you worried about dangerous objects coming into Shadow?”
“Yeah, it would be pretty hypocritical for me to bring weapons here.”
“Arming the gnomes for self-defense is fine,” Elias said, “but they must have weapons from Shadow.”
“If only we could find some,” Jules said heavily.
Elias told Lana, “S must have had an armory, but we haven’t found it yet.”
“I’d like to help you look, but I can’t get back here until the weekend.” She hated missing out on the fun parts, like hunting for weapons and treasure, but on the bright side, she also missed many of the problems.
“Are we still meeting on Thursday as planned?” Jules asked.
“Yes, I’ll meet you on my side of the portal just before sunset.”
“You have a date?” Elias asked, raising a brow.
Lana smiled. “Not exactly. I’m having friends over for pizza—Greg and Jordy, the rats you turned back into boys. I invited Jules since he’s the only other person they can talk to about Shadow.”
“Good idea,” Elias said.
“It wasn’t easy to arrange, believe me. Greg and Jordy explained their year-long absence by saying they ran away from home together. Naturally both their parents claimed the other kid was the bad influence and objected to them seeing each other, but that’s impossible to enforce while they’re in school. The boys went for professional counseling, and after a while their parents eased up, but they can only see each other under adult supervision.”
“How did you get permission to chaperone them?” Elias asked.
“They told their parents we met in New York City. They said I talked them into going home and paid their bus fares. So, I guess that makes me trustworthy.”
“You met runaways who just happened to live in your town? That seems like an unlikely coincidence,” Elias said.
“I know, but it made as much sense as anything they could think of, and the parents didn’t question it. We couldn’t say I found them in another world, and they were giant talking rats.”
“True,” Elias said, laughing.
“Greg and Jordy are dying to hear how S is coping as a beetle.”
“Wait till they hear about her dead pythanium,” Jules said, sounding a bit smug.
“One less pythanium to worry about,” Lana said. “I wonder what happened to the one Raenihel killed.”
“Raenihel killed a pythanium?” Elias asked, eyes widening. “When was this?”
“On the way to Shadowglade, the first time I came here. It rose up from behind a rock, and it’s a wonder I didn’t die of fright. Good thing Raenihel was carrying Jules’s knife. The blade glowed, started to pulse, and after a minute the pythanium seemed hypnotized. He stabbed and killed it just like Jules did the other day.”
Jules brought the cart to a halt and turned around on the driver’s box. His eyes bored into hers. “He used my knife? It glowed and pulsed?”
“Yeah, what’s the big deal about that?”
“Raenihel doesn’t have gem powers,” Jules said as if stating the obvious.
“The knife should have behaved like any ordinary knife,” Elias explained. “No glow and certainly no pulsing light.”
“Oh.” Lana thought for a moment. “I guess I should have found it odd since Raenihel told me gnomes love gems but can’t use their powers like we do.”
Elias said, “Even humans who don’t have gem powers receive some benefit from holding or wearing gems, but can’t draw their powers. It’s the same for gnomes.”
“Okay, so I see why you’re shocked. I figured anyone who could touch Fair Lands gems could make the knife work.”
Jules and Elias fell silent. After a moment, Jules said, “I can think of two occasions when a gnome held my knife, and it didn’t glow either time. Elias, what do you make of this?”
“I don’t know. It’s fascinating.” His brow furrowed in thought. “Lana, did Raenihel seem surprised when the blade began to glow?”
“Not really. And after he killed the pythanium he walked away as if nothing had happened. Maybe he was in shock. I know I was. When we reached Shadowglade, he said he didn’t know much about the knife or how it worked, but S would be afraid of it.”
“So, like you, he may not have questioned the knife’s behavior,” Elias concluded.
“He didn’t know he activated it,” Jules said.
Lana nodded. “That’s what I’m thinking.”
“Elias, I think we should pay Raenihel a visit this week,” Jules said.
“My thoughts exactly. We’ll see what happens when he holds the knife, and a few other gnomes should try it as well.”
“Couldn’t you experiment with gnomes at Shadowglade? The guards wouldn’t mind,” Lana suggested.
“Yes, I suppose we could,” Jules said. He turned around and cracked the reins. The cart beast started forward.
Lana spent the rest of the drive deep in thought. The list of things she didn’t understand about the gnomes and their world kept growing.
Chapter 8
Mondays at Grayson Jewelers were always slow, and today was no exception. Lana waited on three
customers, soldered the links on two damaged sterling bracelets, and then puttered at her workbench, trying to look busy. Arlene, enjoying the perks of management as always, spent the day in the office reading and talking on the phone. She finally emerging at four-thirty, buttoning her coat. “I’m leaving early,” she said, which was rather obvious. She jammed a red knitted hat onto her head. “Don’t lock up until five.”
“Right,” Lana muttered and went back to sorting melee diamonds. She was glad to hear the bells on the door jangle behind Arlene’s retreating form.
Lana enjoyed these quiet moments alone. Sometimes she imagined the store as it was during Elias’s time, and she could picture him behind this very showcase, dressed in a suit, his hair and beard neatly trimmed, looking like a prominent member of the community. And he had been. Until he’d thrown it all away to pursue gem powers in Shadow. He’d made a mess of his life, but he was a changed man now, and in some ways, she was thankful his life had taken such a bizarre course. Otherwise, she would never have met him. How many people could say they’d met their great-great grandfather?
Shortly before five, Lana tidied her bench, cleaned the showcase counters, and carried jewelry to the office to be stored in the safe overnight. Only a few more minutes and she could leave. She took her coat from the coat tree and locked the office door behind her. Bells jangled, and she turned to see the front door open. A thin man with graying hair walked in.
“Franklin!” she cried in surprise. A week ago, Franklin had phoned his brother to say he was back in town. They hadn’t spoken in twenty-five years, and after Franklin’s disappearance and lengthy absence, everyone assumed he was dead.
“I didn’t want to bother you, so I waited till closing time.”
Stepping behind the showcase, she dropped onto a stool. “How’s it going?” Judging by the dejected slope of his shoulders and the haunted look in his eyes, she could guess the answer.
A muscle in his jaw twitched. “I’m headed to the diner to have dinner with Mark and Hannah, but I wanted to see you first.” He shifted uncomfortably, not meeting her eyes. Finally, he said, “This isn’t working out. I want to go back to Shadow.”
