The Pearl Diver

by Jeffrey Quyle

  Mata turned bright red, from her face down along her neck to her shoulders. “Oh!” she squeaked again, more softly, then she fled back into the bedroom.

  “Leave her alone!” Silas shouted, suddenly filled with rage and embarrassment for Mata. “Go out the window yourself!” the words emerged from his mouth mixed with spittle as he found energy instantaneously awakened within himself. The words carried his power, he could feel.

  Cover rose from the floor and started to drift towards the window.

  An apple suddenly rose from the breakfast platter and pelted Silas in the side of the head. Another started to rise, as did a small breakfast loaf.

  “Stay down,” Silas ordered the objects, focusing his attention on both the food weapons and Cover as well.

  Cover hovered in place, no longer being overwhelmed by Silas’s power, as the small teacher fought back with a portion of his own ability.

  Silas furrowed his brow as he focused his attention more intently. “Fly out,” he commanded Cover, “and stay put!” he pointed at the breakfast items without looking.

  The food stuffs in the air quivered in place abruptly, then dropped precipitously in a rain of goods that landed on the platter and the tabletop and the floor, while Cover was briskly forced out through the open window and then hovered in empty air beyond the walls of the tower.

  “Bravo!” Cover applauded. “This is much better. You have so much raw talent; if you focused it and refined it – not to mention learned how to initiate it! – you would be the strongest Mover in generations.

  “Now, bring me into the apartment, so that we can proceed,” he spoke off-handedly.

  “Why should I bring you in?” Silas asked. “You ought to apologize to Mata first. And you need to be punished yourself,” he added, and he made the man’s pants rip apart, the strips of cloth drifting downward as they were shredded away.

  “That seems over the top,” Cover spoke mildly, “but creative.

  “Dear creature,” he spoke loudly, “please accept my apologies for any momentary embarrassment I caused.”

  “Mata, come out here,” Silas summoned his lover. “Cover wants to apologize.”

  “Silas!” Mata protested, as she suddenly skidded out of the bedroom, her blouse only halfway over her head as she pulled it down. “Stop pulling me!”

  “I am sorry, so sorry!” Silas apologized, realizing that he had inadvertently applied his telekinesis to Mata when he called upon her.

  He deliberately closed his eyes and inhaled, forcing himself out of the use of the power.

  “Whoops!” he heard Cover’s voice. Silas opened his eyes and saw the gnome of a man rising upwards, having descended when Silas’s powers had abruptly ceased to hold him in place. Cover drifted forward and entered the window, before he set himself upon the floor, shook his shirt and briskly adjusted it so that it fell below his waist as if it were a skirt, covering his undergarments.

  “My apologies, Miss Mata,” he spoke with excessive civility, then bowed. “I hope I did no harm when I used you to demonstrate to your husband that he must use his powers for many things, including your defense.”

  Mata smiled at the old man’s roguish charm. “Your apology is accepted, my lord,” she inclined her head.

  “However,” she corrected him, “Silas is not my husband. We are only,” she paused for a fraction of a second, “paramours, I believe you call us?” she looked at Silas.

  “But you asked me to marry you,” Silas pointed out.

  “And you never said ‘yes’,” Mata responded with a hint of heat in her voice.

  Cover made an apple rise from the floor and strike Silas in the back of the head.

  “How could you treat this lovely young woman so badly?” he asked rhetorically.

  “Did you mean it? Were you serious?” Silas asked as one hand rubbed the spot where the apple had made contact with his skull.

  “What do you think? Didn’t we just spend all night making love? Do you think I would have done that with someone I didn’t love?” she asked with sadness in her voice.

  “If you feel that way, then, yes, of course! Of course, I’ll marry you. Mata, you would make me so happy!” he gushed, then stepped over to her, embraced her, and began to kiss her passionately.

  “Save this for the evening,” Cover’s voice spoke mildly.

  Silas opened his eyes, and saw that Mata’s eyes were open also, looking at him as their lips parted. She smiled at him.

  “We have a beginning to start now,” Cover said. “We need to start the beginning of your lessons. We don’t have a great deal of time. You’ll be with me for the rest of the day,” he told Silas.

  “And you, young lady, are free to go about the city,” he spoke to Mata. “Do as you please as a guest of the Guild.”

  “I’d like to go back to the armory, to practice sword work,” Mata mentioned. “Will I be allowed back there after the big scene when we were taken away?” she asked.

  “There’s an armory just around the corner from the main gate of the Guild. Why don’t you go there to practice?” Cover suggested in a kindly manner. “I don’t know that there would be a problem at the other place, but this one is easier to visit. I’ll send a guide to lead you there in a little while.

  “Now, if you’re ready, we need to start our work,” Cover turned to Silas. “Good bye, Miss Mata,” he said, before he used his powers to unexpectedly propel himself and Silas out the window and upward through the air.

  “Good bye Silas,” Mata’s voice trailed out the window after them.

  “I didn’t know we were going to fly away,” Silas said breathlessly as they rose along the side of the tower. Cover deposited them on a balcony on the second-highest floor of the tower, then the old man grabbed the railing and breathed deeply.

  “This has been quite an active morning already; I’m a bit worn,” he told Silas. “Step inside the class room.”

  They ventured off the balcony, and into an empty room, where a half dozen desks were arranged in a circle in the center of a room with curved walls. The walls were lined with cabinets and with a peculiar cabinet arrangement where a chair was built into the surrounding shelves and crannies. All the shelves and counters held books and objects, jars, beakers, and crystals.

  “Have a seat over there,” Cover pointed at the singular chair.

  “What is it?” Silas asked without moving.

  “It is where we judge the strength and the flavor of the powers of our new Guild members when they return from the caves of Mount Inegalee,” Cover answered.

  “What does flavor mean?” Silas’s attention to the chair was distracted by the unusual word.

  “It’s a curious term, isn’t it?” Cover asked. “I thought it up myself.

  “No one had really noticed that different Movers can apply their powers to different types of materials in different ways,” Cover began to explain. “Not until I began to notice that different projects went faster or slower, depending on who was working on them.

  “We began to study and test and compare, and we found that some Movers can transport things up and down very well, but not so well going side to side. Others are the opposite. Some can move very large things, but not too many times in a day; others can move a hundred small things in a day, time after time after time. And then finally,” Cover explained, as Silas came to realize that they were walking slowly towards the chair, while he listened raptly to Cover’s explanation, “we even found that some Movers are adept at moving living material while others only move non-living things.

  “And by living material, I don’t just mean people and animals, but plants, and materials that come from living things, like leather and cloth,” the instructors said.

  “And everyone excels in one thing or another. Everyone can do all things in moderation, but we all do one thing well, and some can even do two things well, the good ones. Maybe they can move things up and down and side to side well, although they can’t move people better than iron or
stone.

  “And then there’s Riesta, who has three strengths, the only one of us who is so blessed. She excels at up and down, and living materials, and heavy objects; she has three flavors, like some of the wilder dishes that young people can eat without upsetting their stomachs!” Cover grinned.

  “And now,” Cover’s voice grew softer, “there’s you.

  “And I’d like to test you to see what flavors you bring. If you’ll sit in the chair,” he motioned to the piece of furniture, which they had come to stand next to, “We’ll spend a few minutes testing you.

  “It will be unpleasant, but not painful, and there will be no lasting harm done. As soon as you step out of the chair, it will be completely over,” Cover stated.

  “How does it work?” Silas asked cautiously.

  “We place a hood over your head, which contains a small portion of the residue of the gasses from the caves inside Mount Inegalee. It temporarily boosts the strength of our usual students, and I hope it will bring out your powers for testing, though I could be mistaken. Then we ask you to hold onto several crystals that come from the mountain,” Cover went through his testing procedure step by step.

  “After that, we ask you to show us how well you can lift and move samples that we keep here for testing, until we think we have your flavors figured out. It takes some time, and the hood is unpleasant, but not terrible. The crystals spark the power that you generate, and so there is some discomfort from making the connection with them,” Cover continued.

  “But you can release your hold on them if you feel too much pain; that’s usually a sign that the flavor we’re testing is your strength – the flow of power is greater, and generates more heat in the crystal,” Cover seemed eager to let Silas know how the test worked.

  “Alright, I’ll do it,” Silas quickly agreed. He was actually eager to try the test, to learn about himself, to simply find out if the elements from Mount Inegalee would even have an effect on him. He stepped in front of the chair, then sat firmly on the hard wooden slab, and rested his arms on the side rails.

  Cover stepped in front of him holding a misshapen piece of dark leather. The Mover instructor opened it up, revealing a trio of holes cut in one side.

  “Here it comes,” Cover said. He made Silas laugh as the small man climbed upon a stool, then leaned over and pulled the leather down over Silas’s head.

  The student’s view of the world went black, then lightened as Cover spun the leather around to align its holes with the front of Silas’s face, allowing the boy to see a narrow field of vision straight ahead through the holes. Silas breathed in, then coughed. There was a pungency to the hood, one that made him wrinkle his nose in dismay.

  “Breathe deeply,” he heard Cover’s muffled voice through the leather hood and rolled his eyes in dismay at the thought of breathing deeply with the noisome covering over his face. Then he did as commanded, and coughed repeatedly.

  “Do it again, and hold the air in your lungs this time,” Cover directed.

  Silas produced a hidden grimace under the leather then did as directed, inhaling and choking back his coughs as he tried to keep the mountain fumes inside himself.

  And he suddenly felt both lightheaded, and on the cusp of exercising his telekinetic powers once again. His lungs and diaphragm and throat all swelled with the release of his energy.

  “Are you ready?” Cover distracted him from his self-examination. Silas nodded his assent.

  Although he couldn’t easily look down through his hooded eyeholes, Silas felt his hands being placed on two hard, cool, lumpy objects. He craned his neck to see that there were two large crystalline objects resting on the armrests, with his hand upon the crystals, both the green one and the brownish one. As he looked at them, he felt them grow warm beneath his palms, and he thought he saw a momentary glow within each as well.

  “Now, look over here,” Cover regained his attention as the small instructor rolled a cart in front of the chair. Three boxes sat atop the cart.

  “Watch what I do,” Cover reached out and lifted the first box, revealing that it had covered a glass and metal inkstand. The object was not large by any means, and Silas wondered what challenge it might possess.

  “Lift the object, Silas, up to the ceiling, and hold it there,” the veteran instructor directed.

  Silas looked at the inkwell and let loose a single word. “Rise,” he commanded quietly. The object left the surface of the cart and calmly lifted itself up five feet into the air, then hovered without a quiver or wobble. Silas felt the crystals grow warmer beneath his hands; not unpleasant, but warmer.

  “Now, make it move left and right and left and right,” Cover instructed.

  “Sideways,” Silas murmured calmly. It was a pleasure to be able to exercise his energy in such a regular, rational manner, he thought to himself, feeling slightly more heat in the crystals. The process of telekinesis seemed as simple as using his Speaker voice itself while he wore the hood and grasped the crystals.

  The inkwell sedately moved left, almost to the far wall, then returned to the right, crossing the entire room, before moving once more to the left.

  “Now, return the inkwell. That was a good warm up,” Cover lifted the box and waited for the inkwell to settle onto the cart before putting the box over it. The instructor raised the next box, revealing a small canary in a wooden cage. The bird gave a chirp upon being exposed to light.

  Silas repeated the same exercises with the bird. Cover next presented a large, shallow bowl of water, which Silas moved without spilling.

  The instructor rolled in new carts, with new items, test subjects that grew larger and more complex, while Silas continued to enjoy the easy access to his power that the hood provided, and he moved them all without challenge as the morning proceeded.

  “When are the crystals hottest?” Cover asked repeatedly.

  “They never get very hot,” Silas replied, drawing a puzzled look from Cover, who even took to placing his own hands on the crystals to test their warmth during many points in the exercise.

  “Can you lift this whole cart?” the perplexed instructor asked at one point, as he proceeded to make Silas repeated lift and lower and lift and lower an entire cart with its contents. Silas performed several tests, then proceeded to lift two carts, then three, as Cover pushed the test boundaries higher and higher.

  “Take a break,” Cover finally instructed. “You can remove the hood and leave the chair.”

  Silas sighed in relief, glad to be done with the confining hood. He stripped it off as he stood up, then walked over to the windows and looked outside. He could see that the day was bright, and the sun had moved far across the sky from the east. A great deal of time had passed while he’d sat in the chair. It had been vaguely interesting, but grown to be boring as the testing had stretched on and on and on.

  “See that cloud up there?” Cover had come to stand beside Silas at the window.

  Silas looked at the small, lonely fluffy intruder in the otherwise blue sky, and he nodded.

  “Do you think you could move it?” Cover asked.

  Silas’s brow furrowed, and he looked down at the instructor to see if the man was serious.

  “Can you make it move back to the west?” Cover asked.

  Silas looked at the small cloud thoughtfully. It didn’t have much substance; it might be easy to move. Yet he could feel the aftereffects of the hood starting to fade from his physical body. The longer he was away from the hood, the less of his telekinesis he was going to be able to grasp so easily.

  “Fly west,” the boy stared at the cloud and focused on it, while trying to find every scrape of the power within himself, so that his voice could direct it all up towards the target in the sky. He felt weakened from the release of the energy and grabbed the window sill to support himself.

  He and Cover stood at the window and watched with their breath held, waiting to see any reaction.

  There was no sense of wind blowing. No shadows formed. And the
cloud continued to slowly amble towards the east.

  “It was worth the question,” Cover said after a long, silent minute of observation. “No one has ever done anything like that before. You just seem to be able to do everything else so well, I thought it was worth a question.”

  Silas shrugged. It had been a quixotic quest, and he felt regret only in that it had used the last of the traces of the ability that the hood and crystals had instilled in him. He felt no further ability to easily call his telekinesis into action.

  “Hold on a minute!” Cover said suddenly, as Silas turned to look up at the cloud once more.

  The front of the cloud seemed to still be moving to the east, but the tail of the vaporous mass was growing attenuated, stretching out to the west. The back of the cloud was actually starting to move to the west, Silas realized.

  “Look at that!” he said excitedly.

  As Silas watched, the front of the cloud slowed its movement, came to a complete stop, and a minute later, began to trail after its own western edge, moving in a long line of vapor that grew thinner as it was driven against the air currents in the upper atmosphere.

  “That was stupendous!” Cover enthused. “Can you do something else? What about that building? Could you lift that building, just an inch?” he pointed down at a warehouse.

  “I can’t do anything now,” Silas answered. “The power from the hood is all gone already.”

  Cover pursed his lips as he studied Silas.

  “We’ve done enough for today,” he decided. “You go back down to your lover and have fun. I’ll see you tomorrow, and we’ll work on how to stimulate your access to the power.” The instructor led the way out onto the balcony, then lowered them both through the air to a balcony on the floor where Silas was staying.

  A momentary breeze seemed to blow. Silas felt something more than the movement of air; he felt something indistinct, something that seemed to actually change within himself. There was a momentary impression of the color blue, oddly enough, and then whatever happened was over.

  “Farewell,” the old man smiled impishly, then lowered himself down through the air and out of sight, while Silas went back to his apartment, eager to see Mata.