Gardens of Mist (The Traveler's Gate Chronicles: Collection #2) (2 page)

He stuck out one hand, and I took it. His huge hand had a set of calluses to rival my own.

After that, he left. As he walked off, I would have bet money that I saw a wave of Mist following him.

I know, it was probably my imagination. A dozen people have already heard this story, and they all said the same thing. But I can’t forget the Mist, slithering after Adrian’s footsteps like a snake. Outside of a mist-binder’s control, I’ve never seen it act like that.

But, like you said. Probably my imagination.

I managed to scrape up a couple more hours of sleep before the next knock came. This time, I wasn’t nearly so irritated. I knew what was coming. I’ve always had a sense for bad news.

The foreman of my harvest crew—my boss—stood outside, holding a glowing cluster of pink night-roses like a lantern. She was one of the few bald women I knew, and she had tiny black eyes like a pair of beetles.

She was also a Gardener, a Traveler with the power to call on the plants of Asphodel. Despite my exhaustion, I straightened my back and bowed my head in respect.

“I beg your pardon for waking you,” she said. She wasn’t really sorry, but good manners were a matter of survival here. Provoking someone else can be just as bad as letting yourself get provoked.

“No pardon necessary,” I said. “Is there a problem in the Fields?”

The foreman lowered her bundle of glowing flowers, shifting the pale pink light away from her face. “Phelia Corydon is dead. We need you to help find Adrian.”

Her words stunned me, but a tendril of Mist was creeping in my door, so I let the cold swallow my reaction. “Of course. Let me get my coat.”

Perhaps luckily, we weren’t the ones to find him. We wandered around in the cold and the dark for only an hour before we came across a small crowd, maybe ten or twelve people. I knew most of the faces. They were gathered around a tree, all talking at once. Some of them held bundles of night-roses, like the foreman; others lit their way with more traditional lamps, or even wickwood torches.

The crowd stood in a mass, facing a bloody mess at the foot of a tree.

Despite all my years of training and conditioning, I almost lost control of myself when I saw what lay there on the Mist-shrouded ground.

Adrian Corydon sat with his back propped against the tree. He was just as wet as the last time I had seen him, but this time his clothes were soaked in blood. Adrian didn’t have a scratch on him, but his wife lay in a heap next to him. Her once-white nightgown had been stained dark red.

I didn’t stop to look for further details. The ground lurched, my stomach twisted, and I had to look away before I called the Mist to me.

The foreman demanded answers in a calm, reasonable tone. As though there was no corpse at her feet. Rule number one in Asphodel: stay calm.

I’m still not sure if Adrian heard her or not, but he spoke anyway. His voice quaked with emotion released: fear, anger, horror, relief, I’m not sure.

“It was the Mist. It got me. It got me at last. I told you it would. It set a trap for me, do you see? It’s just a trap.”

By the end he was pleading, reasonable. At his feet lay a bloody hunting knife, of the sort we used to skin bulls or peel the bark off shellvines.

When he said all that, we knew what had happened. We’d all seen it before. He’d panicked in the Mist, let it get to him. It had eaten him from the inside out, twisted him, turned him into something that couldn’t tell the difference between reality and nightmare. It was best to put such people out of their misery.

So we did. They did, I mean. I was with them, but I wasn’t
with
them, do you know what I mean? I think, even as dark as it got, part of me knew something was wrong. I didn’t do anything.

I didn’t say anything either. I didn’t tell them what Adrian had told me, or beg them to stop. I put all my effort into keeping myself absolutely calm.
 

I wouldn’t want to let the Mist in.

They were a quiet mob. Quiet, and efficient. They had a rope up and over a tree before the sun’s first rays crept over the forest.

Adrian kept repeating, over and over, “It was the Mist, you understand? It got me. It wasn’t me, it was the Mist!”

At first, he was as calm as usual, but as they dragged him closer to the rope he got more and more frantic. Which, of course, just made them drag him faster. Excited by his emotion, the Mist pooled closer, twisting toward him in questing tendrils as it looked for a gap in his mind.

On its own, the Mist is harmless. We live in it, work in it. But when it senses prey, it’s more deadly than a wildfire. Everyone around is in danger.

The foreman was the one who finally got Adrian’s head in the noose. Her beetle-black eyes were cold when she ordered the drop.

They lifted him up, pulled the rope tight, and dropped him short.

He kicked a few times, the Mist surged up, and then they both went quiet.

“Well,” the foreman said, “that’s that. I’ll expect to see you all at work in two hours.”

Without another word, everyone went home. Even me. I couldn’t sleep, but I tried; I knew I would need my strength for today’s work. Besides, disposing of madmen was familiar work for anyone who stayed in Asphodel any length of time.

Not that it was usually quite so…graphic. Or personal. But I repeated that to myself until the sun rose higher and the bell chimed, letting all the harvest crews know to report to their fields.

As I did every morning, I picked up my equipment: hoe, gloves, hat, spade, shears. I made sure it was all in place, and I made the usual hike down to the Fields.

When I got to the edge of town, a little collection of propped-up wooden shacks next to the tangled rainbows of the Midnight Fields, I noticed two things. First, no one was working. Everyone on my crew was gathered up in the town, silent, tools hanging forgotten at their sides.

Second, a woman with loose, stringy hair was walking from worker to worker, asking a question that I couldn’t quite make out. A woman in a white nightgown.

Eventually, as I knew she would, she made her way over to me.

“Have you seen Adrian?” Phelia Corydon asked. She had panic in her eyes, but none made it into her voice. “I woke up, and he wasn’t there.”

Later, the foreman made it very clear that I should not have told her. She almost had me brought up on charges before the Overlord. By telling Phelia what happened to her husband, I might have made her vulnerable to the Mist, and thus endangered all of us.

But as it happens, Phelia Corydon acquitted herself well. I told her the story that I’ve just told you, and she didn’t scream. She didn’t attack me, or break down into tears, as I might have in her place.

Like a true woman of Asphodel, she made a mask of her face. Then she spat at my feet.

Without looking at anyone else, she walked into town. I don’t know where she was going, but I heard later that she had reclaimed Adrian’s body and was taking the case to the Overlord. It’s probably true.

So I’ve told you the whole story, even the parts that I should probably leave out, for my reputation’s sake. But as I said already, I don’t have much of a reputation.

I know, I should have realized immediately what the Mist had done to us. I should have insisted that we take Adrian inside, wait for morning, and examine the evidence.

It hasn’t been long. I’m still shaken by the whole thing. I’ve had enough practice staying calm that you’d think I’d be able to keep my head in any situation, but I’ll tell you what: this one gnaws at me.
 

But, given time, I’ll pack it away. Shove it down. I’ll bury the memory so deep that I don’t feel anything, so it can’t be used against me. As much as I can, I will forget Adrian Corydon.

I have to.

In their attempts at self-preservation, Travelers of Asphodel often throw away the only parts of themselves worth protecting.

-Elysian Book of Virtues, Chapter 4: Rose

M
AELSTROM
OF
S
TONE

There is always time for patience…

-Elysian Book of Virtues, Chapter 5: Green

When Chloe etched the final rune into her knuckle-sized sapphire, it felt like being let out of prison.

She dropped the sapphire—cut into two dozen facets, all covered in fresh, blocky runes—on her workbench, next to a sprawling collection of her tools.

 
“That’s one sapphire heartstone done!” she called into the swirling tunnels of her house. “In record time! You should go ahead and retire, I’ll take over for you.”

She always tried to make jokes when she needed to leave the house in a hurry. Sometimes she could slip away while her grandfather chuckled.

Chloe pulled her padded leather jacket on with one hand and opened the door with the other. Maybe, if she were only quick enough, she could make it outside.
 

The scuff of her grandfather’s slippers behind her warned Chloe that she had been too slow.

She spun around, favoring him with a bright smile. “I was just heading out, grandfather…I mean, ah, Grandmaster Ornheim. Can I get you anything while I’m out? Something to eat, or…”

Chloe’s grandfather, whose name was once Deiman Uracius, looked like nothing more than a village child’s idea of a wizard. He sported a white beard long enough to reach his belt, had he worn one. But of course he didn’t, because that would mean forgoing his traditional thick, brown robes. Rings of precious metals and gems flashed on each of his fingers: plain halfsilver bands; gold rings set with sunstone; rune-etched rubies; obsidian bands with small caps of
iridian
sand. On his face, as always, he wore that small, infuriating, invincible half-smile.

Nothing will ever disturb me,
that expression said.
Nothing ever could. If gold coins rained from the sky I would not laugh, and if the sun failed to rise I would not weep.

Grandmaster Ornheim laced his ring-speckled fingers together and fixed his granddaughter with that same not-quite-smile. “I am proud to be your grandfather, Chloe, you know that. But it is important you not call me that.”

Chloe would be lucky to get out of this without a twenty-minute sermon on Enosh cultural propriety. “I know that, Grandmaster, I apologize.”

The Grandmaster took no more notice of her words than a golem would have. Less, if the golem were well made. “Not even in private. Our habits in private never fail to carry over into the public sphere.”

“Perhaps the reverse is true as well.” Chloe snapped her fingers as though she had just realized something. “That would explain all the lectures! You don’t give enough of them to your students, so all the undelivered speeches bubbling up within you must carry over into the private sphere.”

Her grandfather’s patient smile didn’t flicker. “Your tolerance is nearly inhuman. You absorb every word of my wisdom with the patience of a mountain, and yet you still find time to put every one of your tools up in its proper place. How do you do it?”

She was becoming too predictable; he hadn’t even glanced over at the workbench. Chloe let her shoulders slump—she needed to show him that she wasn’t happy about this—and marched over to the workbench, hurriedly scooping up her tools and dumping them into the appropriate rack, drawer, or box.

Grandmaster Ornheim strolled over to stand beside her, plucking her carved sapphire up from the surface of the workbench. “This is functional. Clean. I can see how this might work quite well, actually.”

“Of course,” Chloe said, but she couldn’t help a little spark of pride. She had worked for hours on that heartstone, after all, even if she hadn’t done it willingly.

“Have you any thoughts on the golem?”

“Oh! Yes, hang on…” after a moment she found it: a glass jar of sparkling golden sand.
Iridian.

She poured a handful of
iridian
into her hand, and then willed it into the air. A tendril of sand rose, following her thoughts, spreading out into a gleaming sheet of tiny stars.

“I was thinking something like a bird, you see.” The sand condensed into a glittering model of a stationary bird. She wasn’t sure what kind of bird it was—there were no birds native to Ornheim, so she had only ever seen them on trips outside—but this model looked like a bird to her. “I’d like a light rock for the body, maybe something volcanic, I’m not sure.”

“And the skystones?”

“Here, here, and here.” At each word, a hole appeared in the
iridian
bird: one each at the tip of the tail and at the end of both wings. “Before you say anything, I know it will be a little unbalanced, so I’d plan to put the heartstone here, in the middle of its back.” Some of the spare
iridian
floated around the bird’s back, encircling where the heartstone would go.

This was the one part of the process to which Chloe had actually invested time and effort. Anyone could carve the runes of a heartstone; the process was mostly tedious memorization and hours of mindless drudgery. She would rather spend her time in the mines
.
Designing the golem itself, on the other hand, actually took a degree of creativity, even artistry.

Plus, in her personal opinion, skystones were
amazing.
With only a little mental effort, an Ornheim Traveler could make those little blue stones rise and hover in midair. She had begun practicing with skystones since she had first felt her bond to Ornheim’s vast earth.

Grandmaster Ornheim waved his hand, and the
iridian
wrenched itself from Chloe’s control, flowing back into the jar in a sparkling golden river. One tendril of sand even reached back out and pulled the lid back on. “Very good. You’ll be ready to assemble your golem soon, but don’t get ahead of yourself. You’ve got plenty of time.”

This from the man who would spend six weeks studying a block of marble before he first touched it with his chisel. “Yes, Grandmaster.”

Before her grandfather could say anything else, Chloe turned and pulled open the door. Some of her friends were going Beneath today, and if she was lucky, she might get there in time to join them...