Gemworld (16 page)

Fire, ice, and lightning showered the ridge as the carriage leapt to the escape, evoking an almost immediate magical response from the raiders. The result was… captivating. Massive salvos of color and energy flew from ridge to road and back again, and souls flew into eternity with each impact, yet for all the carnage, the sight itself was breathtakingly beautiful. So awestricken was he that he didn’t see the ice ball streaking toward his head until it burst into powder a foot from his nose, showering him with its snowy remnants.

A hand grasped his collar and yanked—hard—dragging him roughly to the ground. “Have you lost your mind?” Tavin shouted breathlessly.

“I... I’ve never seen anything like this!”

“Aye, and you never will again, if you don’t have a care! It’s not easy to wither a spell in mid-flight, you know.”

“To do
what
?”

“Never mind. Just know that you may not be so fortunate next time. Now, let’s move.”

The two low-crawled their way through the trees—and spells—making for a drainage ditch on their side of the road. The twang of a bowstring drew Sal’s attention, and he turned in time to catch a nearby archer drawing a second arrow from his quiver. No sooner was it nocked that it sped toward its target, sparking with electricity as it flew. Its aim was true, and it caught a blue-eyed mage high in the chest, the metal tip easily piercing the leather breastplate. The electricity apparently found a medium in the sapphire’s magic, for sparks leapt from the mage to any soul unlucky enough to be standing nearby, severely wounding those few that weren’t killed outright.

“Sal. That way?” Tavin pointed, indicating the ditch at the bottom of the hill which was conspicuously lacking two raiders laying in wait for the prison carriage. Sal nodded sheepishly.

When they got there, they noticed a huge crater in the middle of the road just before the prison carriage. The horses were missing as well. Absently, Sal hoped they were taken by a few escort mages smart enough to get outta Dodge. But as close as that crater was to the carriage, he doubted it. Magic bolts exploded dangerously close to Sal, forcing him to duck down in the ditch beside Tavin and wait for a break in the action. Then it came.

It was a small window, barely enough time to sidestep the crater, but it was likely all they’d get. Sal bolted from the ditch with Tavin in tow, spells raining down around them. The two ducked around the front of the coach just as lightning struck at their feet, turning the road to glass behind them. The concussion blew them off their feet, and sent them scrambling back to the shelter of the carriage.

Tavin rounded the carriage and moved to the door, grasping the lock. His eyes flashed brilliantly as the mana flowed. Sal had seen that look of concentration once before, when Jaren and Laryn had magically aged the prison bars the night of their escape. But before Tavin could finish whatever he was doing, a stray chunk of flying ice glanced off his temple, dropping him in a nerveless heap at Sal’s feet.

Sal ducked under the front of the carriage and reached out to the emerald from behind the wheel. The mage groaned, looked around dazedly, disoriented. “Tavin? Are you okay? Can you hear me?” Sal asked, gently shaking him.

“Aye, I can hear you,” Tavin answered vaguely. “There’s this loud... booming in my ears.”

“Yeah, mine too. That’s the raiders attacking the prisoner escort,” Sal said patiently.

“Raiders? Prisoner escort?”

“Never mind.”

Sal took a moment to pull Tavin completely under the coach and the meager shelter it offered. “Stay put till this is ov—”

An explosion rocked the carriage, rattling Sal’s teeth in his mouth.
Ain
’
t gonna last too much longer! Gotta get the package and bug out
. He gave Tavin a quick once-over, made sure that he wasn’t injured further, then scrambled out from under the coach.

In all the ruckus, Sal hadn’t heard the newly-rusted snap of the lock, so he was surprised to find the door standing wide open, and the coach empty of its passenger. He stood for a moment, gaping, until a barrage of hailstones threatened to shatter the door. He dove reflexively into the carriage as the remains of the door flew from its hinges. He could hear myriad pings and thunks as the tiny missiles peppered the back of the coach, but for the moment the thick wooden frame was holding. Gathering his breath, he unsheathed his sword and bunched his muscles to spring back into the fray.

Then he saw the treasure box, lying open on its side.

The contents of the box had spilled, making a sparkling pile in an undamaged corner of the carriage. Sal crouched there, transfixed by the glittering mound of wealth, the fight outside all but forgotten.
Wouldn
’
t hurt to fill my pockets since I
’
m already here
, Sal thought. After all, his part of the mission had been accomplished. The granite was free. Just one or two handfuls on the way out the door wouldn’t hurt anybody.

Greed threatened to provide any excuse Sal needed, but he wretched his eyes away from the riches. People were risking their lives outside, and there he was, already counting his winnings. After the fight was over, he could come back and loot to his heart’s content, he promised himself. Sighing, he half-crawled toward the door and the raging battle beyond, idly sweeping back the gems that littered the coach floor.

As his fingers brushed a particularly large diamond, his head exploded in pain. His left eye blazed in an agony reminiscent of the night in the Laotian laboratory. A grinding sound filled his head, though in his panicked state he would only remember much later that he didn’t hear the sound in his ears. He heard it radiating through the very bones of his skull, stretching outward from his left orbit. As the crunching sound continued, growing louder, he felt his eye crystallize in its socket, growing hard and cold and dry in moments. Sal lost his balance, tumbling out of the coach with his hands clawing at his face.

Black blobs swam in his vision as he wrestled with his fleeing consciousness. Amidst the blobs, a fuzzy form appeared. Sal’s eye cleared long enough to see the form for a guard, dressed in some sort of armored uniform. Whoever he was, he definitely wasn’t one of the villagers. And judging by the sneer of contempt and the wicked looking axe, chances were that he wasn’t friendly, either. But crippled with pain as Sal was, he couldn’t lift his hands from his head... not that he’d have the strength to defend himself anyway.

So he waited patiently for the bite of the axe, almost welcoming it, but it never came. The axe fighter froze where he was, his face taking on a pained look of surprise. Sal’s vision wavered as consciousness slipped away, but not before seeing the guard turn grey and crumble to the ground in a pile of dust and rubble, revealing a young man—with eyes of polished rock—behind him, a brown nimbus surrounding him like a dirty halo.

Pain.

Sharp, stabbing pain lanced through his left eye, radiating in all directions and echoing back off the insides of his skull.

He remembered this. He felt just like this just before he woke up in that prison...

Prison!

Sal swam toward the dim light of the waking world, sitting bolt upright before he’d given himself a chance to catch his bearings. He half expected to find himself back within the chiseled stone confines of Schel Veylin prison, surrounded by the filthy, overripe bodies of society’s outcasts lying scattered across the dirt floor. Instead he was rewarded with spots in his vision and a wave of dizziness, along with the most peculiar urge to heave up everything he’d ever eaten.

His sight cleared slowly, and he found himself not a recaptured prisoner, but rather back in his tent in Caravan. It was dark, but slowly getting lighter.
Someone must have dragged me back here from the road
, he thought blearily, still tasting a hint of bile in his throat. His eyes were crusted over, and his mouth felt like it had been packed in cotton. He wondered groggily how the rest of the raid went, if everyone got out alright.
Somebody
had to have, anyway, for him to be back in camp and in one piece. He ran a quick hand over his body to make sure that everything was indeed in its proper place, then looked around to try and gain a sense of what had happened.

Twilight crept through the flap—the early hours of the morning, if Sal was any judge—and the only other light in the tent aside from a single candle, burnt clear down to the nub. As Sal’s eyes adjusted to the light, brilliant in the darkness, he caught sight of a figure, nodding in a chair just a few feet away. Even in his present state, he could never mistake that mass of red-gold curls. It was Marissa.

She jerked her head back up and shook it, seemingly determined to finish her watch more or less in one piece. She forced her sleepy eyes wide—and screamed!

“Sal! Blessed Crafter, Sal!” she gushed as she leapt from the chair, knocking it over. She threw herself at him, her arms winding about him as she wept into his shoulder. “Crafter be praised that you’re alright. Jaren said it could take days, but I never in my wildest dreams—”

“What?” Sal asked, shaking the last cobwebs from his brain. “What would take days? What happened?”

“I’ve got to get Jaren,” she said abruptly, scrubbing her eyes dry as she rushed from the tent to summon the emerald, pausing only a moment at the tent flap to look back at Sal and make sure he was real before disappearing into the morning.

Sal crunched his eyes shut and clutched at his head in a vain attempt to still the throbbing. As it happened, he really didn’t need to. It had already started to fade, and was completely gone a few moments later.

Gingerly, he opened his eyes again, convinced that the pounding would return. But it didn’t. He opened his eyes all the way without the expected explosion, then blinked hard a few times just to be sure.

Strange. Now that he thought about it, he actually felt pretty good. Both eyes were working. All his appendages were in the right place. He didn’t feel like barfing anymore. He wasn’t even dizzy.

Morphine. However backward they are, they must have discovered morphine
.

A faint buzzing in his head seemed to back up that theory, but... no, something was wrong. He decided that he wasn’t stoned, but it was something similar. It wasn’t dizziness. He couldn’t really describe the sensation, yet it was familiar somehow. Before he could really consider it, Jaren burst into the tent, trailed by Marissa and Delana.

“Now, now, Sal,” the emerald admonished, slipping seamlessly into what Sal thought of as his doctor mode. “Just lie back, there’s a good chap. No need to rush your recovery—”

“I’m fine, Jaren, really. I’m not even dizzy.” To prove his point, he pushed Jaren back and slipped from beneath the covers, barely wavering as he took to his feet.

“Well, you seem to have recovered physically,” Jaren granted, his face drawing up in restrained mirth. “But your powers of observation still leave something to be desired.”

Sal didn’t need the emerald’s quip to bring home the reality of the situation. Marissa’s eyes were riveted on the lower half of his body, her cheeks flushed. Delana, on the other hand, whipped her head away, throwing up a hand to shield her eyes.

That was more than enough to put him into motion, diving back into bed and throwing the covers over his newly discovered nakedness. Deciding that discretion was the better part of compassion in this case, Delana backed out of the tent, pulling a reluctant Marissa behind. “I believe you have an order of enchanted bows to finish?” the amethyst was saying as the two left.

“Well, I suppose you could look at it this way,” Jaren said clearing his throat politely. “This is one less secret between you and Marissa.” The emerald neatly sidestepped the pillow that came flying in response. Undaunted, he scooped up Sal’s pants from where they lay over a wooden footlocker. “It’s probably just as well that we’re alone, actually.”

“How long was I out?” asked Sal, taking the proffered breeches and pulling them on.

“Seven days. Two days longer than anyone I’ve ever heard of, which was the cause of our worry.”

“Yeah, I imagine I’d be a little worried myse—” He stopped, Jaren’s words finally registering. “Seven days?!? What, was I in a coma or something? And what do you mean, ‘anyone you’d ever heard of?’”

The emerald’s face broke in a wide grin, but he said nothing. Instead, he pointed to the mirror hanging on the central tent pole. Sal stepped to the mirror, wondering what his face had to do with anything. He didn’t know what he had expected, but what stared back from the mirror was definitely not it.

His right eye was normal, its hazel iris dilated from the dim light in the tent. His left orb, however, had no iris. In fact, he would have sworn that someone had completely gouged his eye out and replaced it with a glass ball, had he not been able to see with it. Or maybe it was a crystal ball?

Or a diamond...!

Though smooth on the surface, tiny flashes of rainbow color shimmered deep within the clear orb, reminding him eerily of the gem he’d touched in the prison coach. Purples, reds, greens... it was at once beautiful and terrifying.

“Does this mean...?”

“When a mage ascends, he is struck unconscious,” Jaren explained, confirming his suspicions. Sal just continued to stare at the glittering gemstone in amazement, barely absorbing what was being said. “He may experience a great deal of pain, which is made all the worse by panic or resistance. The comatose state usually lasts from two hours to three days, depending on how deeply the mage is attuned to his soulgem and how hard he fought his ascension. You apparently fought harder than most.”

“I guess that’s why my head’s buzzing then.”

“No. Actually, that’s a reaction to the mana within me. I suspect you could always feel it before, by the way you described your eye tingling. Now that you are ascended, you will feel mana more acutely. Even
see
it, once you learn how.”

Sal turned his head slightly, and the color patterns within the diamond changed. Enchanting as the orb was, he still forced himself to pay attention to what the mage—the
other
mage, he reminded himself—was saying. “I’ve never heard of a diamond mage before,” he murmured.

“Neither have I,” the emerald said with an awed sigh.

Sal looked sharply at Jaren. The emerald mage held his hands up defensively, suddenly very serious. “Relax, Sal! Relax,” he urged firmly. “You might wield accidentally before we’re able to teach you how to constrict the mana flow.”

Reflexively, Sal crunched his eyes shut and tried his best to clear his mind of all thought.
Geez, I could kill someone—or even myself—without even knowing how I did it! How the heck am I ever supposed to learn how to wield if there
’
s never been another diamond mage?
He ran through his hilts hurriedly, and for a wonder, it worked. The words of his mantra stuck in his mind, clearing out all thought but that which was devoted to his recitation. He repeated them, slowly, savoring every syllable. Finally, he felt confident enough to open his eyes again. He studied the emerald’s face, searching for answers of some kind—
any
kind—but only found the same perplexity that he himself felt.

“How did this happen?” he asked finally.

Jaren just shook his head. “We don’t know. We’ve discussed it for days, but have come to no solid conclusions. We don’t even know where to begin in your training. There hasn’t been a new soulgem in over four thousand years, so we have no basis for comparison. We don’t know what element—if any—that Diamond may be lord of, so we can’t even begin to understand how to approach the situation. And until we can, you and our new granite friend share a common problem. You’ll both have to teach yourselves.”

***

The sound of the hammer striking hot steel was comforting to Keth. He lost himself in the dull thunk-thunk-thunk as he shaped the metal, punctuated by the occasional peal as his hammer slipped and struck the bare anvil.

He didn’t see the glowing steel the same way his Master Seti did. Oh, he saw it alright, but in Keth’s sight, the bar glowed its weakness, not its heat. Near the tongs, where it was coolest, the steel bar was a dark blue, almost black with strength, fading to a lighter shade where the metal had been softened by the head of the forge. The orange of his skin stood out in stark contrast, glowing an indistinct yellow where his bones ran beneath.

His sight was just one of the many things these people had questioned him on, both during the trial of acceptance, and after. It was calming to get away, to listen to the crackling of the forge fire, and remember when days were simple—when the sky was actually blue, and when flames could actually be seen, not just heard and felt.

He cursed the mage recruiters under his breath, beating his anger into the cooling bar where it dispersed for a time. Before they came with their damnable Tiled Hand, there was beauty to the world. There were green fields, red and yellow autumn leaves, tan fawns with white spots, grey rabbits with shiny, black noses. Nanette... Not a day went by that he didn’t think of his Nanette. So beautiful, with her flaxen hair, her strong chin, her slightly crooked nose where she’d broken it in her tenth summer. She was by far the Crafter’s greatest work. But that beauty was gone. All beauty was gone.

The cold springs that trickled eastward from the Stormbreak Mountains before merging with the Rhu’sai used to run an icy blue. Now, yellow-green ice floes bobbed in the blood red water. The same red also colored the waters flowing past Scholar’s Ford—a city which, incidentally, was now blue-green with light blue walls. He could not even see the sun anymore, as it had no substance. No sun. No stars. Only the moon, hanging light blue in a white sky.

Feeling his rage returning, he beat the steel bar even harder, drawing a curious glance from Master Seti. But the smith said nothing, simply let his new apprentice work out his own frustrations.
He
’
s a good man
, Keth thought. The entire village had gone out of its way to see that he’d felt welcome. Even after their leader Reit had asked him about the murder.

I didn
’
t mean to do it
, he remembered saying. And that was true, as the Heads of Order had verified. But that didn’t excuse the fact that he’d done it, actually taken life.

He thrust the cooling bar back into the coals of the invisible fire, and watched morosely as the steel softened...

***

“Keth”, called a woman’s voice. Careful not to drop the steel—it was already glowing brightly with heat—he turned toward the doorway.

“Aye?” he called back.

“Keth, yer father wants ye,” his mother said, drying her hands on her apron. “We have visitors he wants ye to meet.”

“Aye, I’ll be right there, Ma.” He was irritated at the break in his work. There had been more than enough work to go around since coming here. An uncle had left this farm to his Da in his departing wishes. Da knew little of the crop rotations in this part of the world, little of the soil, but the new farm was five times the breadth of the old, and far be it from the old man to turn down an opportunity.

Having to pack their lives up and move clear across the mainland hadn’t helped either. The six moons it had taken them, even along the highroad, to cross from the Northern Plains to the eastern foothills of the Stormbreaks had cost them three cows and a good packhorse. The trip itself cost his Da a quarter of what he’d sold their own farm for, then a third of what remained to winter in Scholar’s Ford. They finally reached the new homestead nearly a week into Newbreath, though the Month of Thaws brought them little of its accustomed cheer. The homestead was in such disrepair that it was all they could do to get things in shape before the planting of the early crops, to say nothing of actually enjoying the Festival of Courting. And those fields... those Crafter-cursed rocky fields...

Still
, he reminded himself,
complaining will do no good
. Even now, two years later, the work continued.
And the work will still be here when I get back from entertaining our guests
, he sighed to himself,
so I
’
d best be done with this
. Turning, he replaced the would-be horseshoe in the forge just outside the coals, then went to answer his father’s summons.