Gardens of Mist (The Traveler's Gate Chronicles: Collection #2) (3 page)

Grandmaster Ornheim’s hand rested softly on her shoulder, and she almost screamed in frustration.

“I hope you’re not leaving quite yet.”

“No, I’m not,” Chloe said, in the most unconvincing tone possible.

“You need to—”

“Yes, I know. You tell me every time.”

The Grandmaster stroked his beard, always playing the venerable old teacher. “You do? Then tell me, what must you do before leaving?”

Chloe briefly wondered if she could just start running. How far would she make it before her grandfather brought her back? It was an unfair thought, of course, since Grandmaster Ornheim would never physically stop her from leaving. His disapproval, along with the inevitable lecture when she returned, was enough to keep her in place.

Besides, she owed him more than that. Even if he sometimes made her want to slam her face into the side of a boulder.

“An Ornheim Traveler must always stay and watch the Cycle,” she recited. “It is by the flow of the Maelstrom that our lives are guided, and we must respect that flow.”

“Lest we be crushed beneath it,” her grandfather finished. “Sit. Watch the Cycle. The City Beneath has existed for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. It will still be there in an hour.”

An
hour?
In her estimation, she could learn the Cycle safely in one look. It wasn’t that much different from glancing at a clock, after all. Not in principle, anyway.

Chloe walked up to the edge of the cliff outside their house and leaned on the railing. Her home—like everyone’s home, here in Ornheim—was carved into the side of one of the more stable mountains. A path three or four paces wide stretched out from the front of the house like a porch, terminating in a seemingly endless drop down to Ornheim’s dark surface. Only Master-level Ornheim Travelers were allowed to descend that far.

Master Ornheim Travelers, or those few who fell through the thin wooden safety railing. Chloe didn’t spare much thought for the drop, though. She had lived with that threat for most of her life. And she had better things to worry about.

Above her whirled a Maelstrom of Stone, flying and dancing in an endless cycle.

Rivers of shining golden
iridian
drifted by, twisting like giant ribbons on an invisible breeze. A star-shaped chunk of rose quartz the size of a barn rolled in a lazy orbit around an inverted mountain with a flat top. It looked like it had been torn up from the ground by the roots. As Chloe watched, she saw specks of blue flickering toward the bottom of the floating island. It was kept aloft by veins of skystone, then.

A stone titan plodded by, looking like a craggy face the size of Chloe’s mountain. Its dull eyes were fixed on some invisible point in the distance. Some people built villages on stone titans; they avoided great danger, and tended to visit water sources quite often. Chloe could never imagine living on a mountain that wasn’t stationary, herself.

The sky of Ornheim remained in constant motion. There was no backdrop of sun or stars, as there might have been in the World Above, but layer after layer of spinning, walking, shifting, dancing,
moving
stone in every shape, size, and color. Legend had it that Ornheim was nothing more than an unimaginably vast cavern, with a ceiling out there in the distance, but Chloe didn’t place too much faith in that theory. For one thing, how would a roof that big stay up?

After only a few minutes of staring out at the Cycle, Chloe began to grow bored. The ribbons of
iridian
were circling her mountain, making a full round once every eight or nine minutes. The chunk of rose quartz, on the other hand, only took twenty-eight seconds to encircle its island, and was getting a little closer each time. The island itself seemed to drift randomly, though it looked mostly stable. The rose quartz star and its inverted island would crash together eventually, though that was hardly remarkable. Rocks the size of small towns slammed into each other all the time here, with a noise like thunder.
 

Nothing else even remotely interesting was happening nearby. She had a good grasp on the Cycle, or at least the part of it that affected her. What was she going to gain by standing here waiting? The Cycle took more than a few minutes to change.

Chloe had almost turned away when she noticed a flash of green on the surface of the floating island, maybe fifty paces away.

She spun back to look, since anything that deviated from the Cycle was worth investigation. But the island’s rose quartz “moon” quickly rose, blocking her view.

She waited the next fourteen seconds in utter impatience, mentally begging the chunk of rock to hurry up and cross over to the other side, so that she could see what was happening on the island’s surface.

After the most agonizing quarter of a minute she could remember, Chloe almost cheered when the chunk of pink quartz floated to the other side.

That was when she recognized what she had failed to notice before. The speck of green was not a rock formation, but a girl. A dark-haired, tan-skinned girl in a green dress.

Chloe let out an involuntary gasp. There was a girl, who looked to be less than Chloe’s own age, out in the Maelstrom itself. Alone. Even Grandmaster Ornheim would not have traveled beyond the mountain without a good reason and extensive preparation, and he likely would have brought help.

The spiky ball of rose quartz floated by on another orbit, reminding Chloe: it was going to crash into the island. It might take minutes, hours, or even a day, but when it eventually happened, that girl would die.

Saints above, what am I supposed to do?
 

“Grandfather!” Chloe screamed. She seemed unable to tear her eyes away from the girl in the green dress.
No, I can’t call him that, he won’t answer to that.
“Grandmaster Ornheim!” No response. “
Grandmaster!”

He may have left. That wouldn’t be too unusual; he was a Grandmaster, after all. Ornheim was his backyard, and he could come and go as he pleased. Did she have time to go look for him? Did she have any other options?

Her grandfather, she knew, would tell her to wait. Observe.
There is always time for patience;
that was one of his favorite sayings. Another of his most common:
You must learn the board before playing your first piece.

Chloe respected her grandfather, and patience was the way of Ornheim. Carving a golem’s hearstone took weeks, and building its body could take months. Learning to read the Cycle took years; learning to navigate the Maelstrom took a lifetime. There were no shortcuts in Ornheim, and endurance always yielded results. But she simply could not justify doing nothing while a girl died in front of her eyes.

She wasn’t sure what exactly she
could
do, but surely something would be better than nothing. That, or it would result in two bodies lost on Ornheim’s surface instead of only one.

One of the giant ribbons of
iridian
floated by, and Chloe got a terrible idea. Before she could think about it too much, she vaulted over the railing and into empty space.

For a sickening instant, her stomach lurched, and she wished with all her being that she could take it back. She was going to fall into the hazy, brown distance, and—while she didn’t know exactly what waited on the ground—she was pretty sure that she would get there by means of a sudden, violent stop.

Then, in response to her mental screams, the river of
iridian
flowed down and cushioned her fall. Not that it felt much like a cushion at all, really; it felt more like slamming face-first into a beach. But she would take what she could get.

She had initially imagined using the
iridian
to form a bridge and letting the girl cross. The problem was that it was far beyond the scope of her abilities with the substance. Maybe Grandmaster Ornheim or one of his top students could do that, but Chloe certainly couldn’t. Not yet. Commanding
iridian
took great concentration and physical stamina, both of which increased exponentially when you tried to do it at a distance. Chloe’s only hope was to stick as close to the
iridian
as possible, carrying herself over to the island, and then hopefully both of them back.

Seconds in, she started to shake. It felt as though she were trying to drag a cart uphill. Soon after, she started to sweat.

It shouldn’t be this hard,
she thought.
Maybe I’m using too much power.
Experimentally, she relaxed her mental grip on the sand.

Immediately, the gritty golden cloud started to disperse, and she began to fall right through.

She tightened her grip once more before she had fallen more than a few inches. After about ten seconds of silent, terrified shaking, she got her flying carpet of sand moving once again.

She didn’t know how she made it—the
iridian
river seemed to crawl forward an inch at a time—but she eventually covered the fifty paces to the island.

She had imagined setting her floating platform down, reaching out to the girl in green, and then the both of them flying gracefully back to the mountain.

Instead, she let herself crash to the island’s surface, the glittering golden sand drifting off like smoke to spiral through the air once more. Every muscle in her body hurt, as though she had run for days while carrying a sack full of stones.

Sweaty, shaking, and lying flat against the rock, Chloe barely managed to speak. “I’m here…to…get you.”

The girl measured Chloe with dark eyes, and then looked back up at the escaping sand. “Do you have more of that?”

Between labored breaths, Chloe shook her head.

“Then it seems we’re both stuck,” the girl said. “Unless you have a golem nearby. Or some other plan I haven’t thought of.”

She didn’t seem nearly as panicked as Chloe thought she should be in this situation. Nor as grateful as she’d hoped. “I thought…you would be…scared.”

The other girl thought about that for a moment. “My mother wouldn’t be scared. She would say that was a waste of time.”

Chloe had finally started to get her breathing back under control. “Your mother would get along well with my grandfather, I think. I’m Chloe.”

“Deborah, daughter of Deborah.”

Deborah inclined her head formally, and Chloe did the same. As best she could while remaining face-to-face with the stone, anyway.

A shadow passed overhead, and Chloe knew it had to be their pink-hued moon. She raised one hand and pointed. “That’s going to crash into us at some point.”

Deborah followed Chloe’s finger up. “I had hoped I was imagining that. Well, no use waiting for it to happen. Maybe, if we work together, we can call that
iridian
back.”

“Not me,” Chloe said. “It’s too far away, and I’m too tired from making it all the way over here. It would kill me.”

In truth, Chloe would try it if she had to, but she wasn’t exaggerating when she said it would kill her. In her current condition, she was sure that the
iridian
would simply slip from her grasp and drop her.

Deborah patted the stone on which she sat. “There’s plenty of skystone here. But it’s way too deep to do us any good.”

Chloe pressed her own palm against the rock and listened to the voice of the stone. It passed through her like a wave of distant whispers.

There was indeed a vast network of skystone here, as she had expected. Deborah was right, though; there was no way to pull even a single chunk of skystone up through such solid rock.

“We don’t need a piece of skystone,” Chloe said. “We just need to use what’s already here. We can fly the whole island.”

Deborah glanced over at the mountain, which seemed much farther away from this side. Skepticism was evident on her face. “Even if we can activate that much skystone, I can’t steer it.”

“I can.”
Probably.

“Really?” Deborah’s eyebrows raised. “Are you sure?”

“Absolutely,” Chloe said.
Assuming it’s exactly like a theoretical
iridian
bird.

In true Ornheim fashion, the two Travelers didn’t act immediately. They sat there, waiting, for over half an hour. Partially, Chloe wanted to regain her strength before she tried activating and controlling whole veins of skystone. She also wanted to give her grandfather time to show up and stage a miraculously timed rescue.

After half an hour, though, neither of them could deny it any longer: the chunk of quartz was getting closer. Even now, if they timed the activation badly and lifted the island too quickly, they would slam themselves against the quartz prematurely.

“Seems like this is the time,” Deborah said, as though she had simply checked a clock. She knelt, placing both palms flat against the rock.

Chloe didn’t have to imitate the other girl’s pose, but she did so anyway. It seemed like a good position for speaking with the stone. “Ready when you are,” she said, hoping it was true.

She let her mind drift down into the jagged roots of the floating island, seeking skystone. The blue stone webbed the inside of the inverted mountain, filling the ordinary rock like a bright blue skeleton.

When the quartz passed by overhead once more, Deborah flared the skystone. The veins flashed blue in Chloe’s mind, and the island jerked upwards.

No, not like that,
Chloe thought.
More like…

She sent herself down, into the rock, and activated the skystone on the far side of the island. It flared to life, pushing them forward and slightly up. They drifted closer to the mountain on their own momentum, now; they might come in a little high, but Chloe would be more than willing to risk a broken leg by jumping down rather than a broken spine by falling.

“Above!” Deborah shouted. Chloe jerked her head up to see the barn-sized star of rose quartz flying down at them like a colossal hammer.

Together, the two young Travelers flared the skystone so hard that they blasted toward the mountain, barely scraping by the quartz in time to avoid a titanic collision.

And they were headed straight for the side of the mountain.

Desperately, Chloe flared the skystone closest to the mountain, trying to slow them to a safe speed. Deborah, on the other hand, had a different idea: she was trying to bring them higher, apparently so that they could float safely over the peak.