Crystal Doors #1 (16 page)

“This isn’t like what happened yesterday,” Gwen said.

Like lights suddenly burning out, the crystals sparked, flashed, and then cracked, turning into blackened lumps. The last reflections spangled in the air like flash-melted snowflakes. The now-empty water basin shattered.

Lyssandra stared down at the spell in her hands, as if to reassure herself that she had read every word correctly.

Gwen sank to the platform. “So close.”

Rubicas looked at the burned-out lumps and sighed. “Those were quite valuable crystals. I suspect Vir Questas will be upset that they are lost.”

Orpheon shook his head. “The explanation is obvious — the array was not set up properly. At least one of the angles was wrong. Or one of the radial distances, possibly both. Such a waste of star aja.” He frowned at Gwen, and she felt as if she had somehow failed. “It is a very meticulous process, and these two have never attended a single teaching at the Citadel.”

The sage stroked his beard. “Hmm. We are fortunate no one was hurt.”

Gwen climbed to her feet, indignant. “But that’s not it at all. I measured and remeasured!” Orpheon gave her a patronizing look.

Rubicas sighed again. “No use arguing about it now. Orpheon and I have to get back to our spell. We are very close to
a breakthrough. Now, can you all help clean this up?” He didn’t seem to be casting blame. Gesturing to the ruined array, the sage looked once more at Gwen. “I expect you have some apologies to make to Vir Questas, too.” Then the old man and his assistant descended the spiral staircase back to his laboratory.

Gwen was dismayed and confused. Vic said, “It’s not your fault, Doc. I watched you — in fact, I watched you until I was sick of it. You didn’t make any mistakes.”

“Yet something obviously went wrong with the array,” Sharif said.

“I can’t understand it,” Gwen repeated. “I was so careful. I used chalk to mark the positions.” She paced over to the two blackened crystals, then to the other intact ones. She lifted an undamaged crystal. “See? There’s my chalk mark.” She went to the others, proving that she wasn’t imagining things.

The intact crystal had a distinct chalk mark. When she went to the blackened ones, she found marks there too. But then something caught her eye. Several inches to the side, she saw another faint mark. “Wait a second!” She bent closer. There was definitely another chalk mark, but someone had rubbed it away. “This crystal was moved!”

Vic peeked under the second blackened crystal and searched until he spotted another faint shadow of a chalk dot. “Yup, here it is again. Somebody shifted this crystal for sure.”

“I knew I should have remeasured everything!” Gwen clenched her fists.

“My people have a saying: A small amount of suspicion at the right time often prevents disaster,” Sharif said.

Angry now, her violet eyes flashing, Gwen looked at her friends. “If I made a mistake, I’d admit it. But this wasn’t my fault. Somebody sabotaged the experiment. Somebody knew we were going to test this crystal array — and they didn’t want it to work.”

“Why would anyone do a crazy thing like that?” Vic said.

Gwen narrowed her eyes. “To stop us.”

ALL NIGHT IN THE Citadel dormitory, Vic watched his cousin stew over the sabotage of their experiment. He felt just as incensed, but also mystified. At Ocean Kingdoms, when his dad had mentioned going away to lie low, Vic had never expected it would be to a place like Elantya. His father’s warnings through the magical window had convinced him that he and Gwen would have to stay here in the island realm.

So, they had to fit in somehow and take advantage of the unexpected new realities here. But if someone had wrecked the crystal array to prevent them from making contact with his dad again or opening a door to Earth, maybe Elantya wasn’t quite as safe for them as his father had hoped.

“We have a lot to learn,” Gwen said.

“No kidding.” Vic could barely keep himself from rolling his eyes.

“So it’s time to start.”

The next morning, when the cousins followed Lyssandra and Sharif to the Citadel for their first official day of courses, Vic tried to keep an open mind. Unfortunately, he’d had more than his share of bad luck at Stephen Hawking High with a couple of prison-warden staff members who looked at school rules as unshakeable laws, and teachers who did not understand his quirks or reward his unorthodox (though often effective) ways of learning.

If a subject interested him, Vic could sit still for hours and concentrate until his legs cramped. At such times, Gwen joked that she could come in with a brass band and he wouldn’t even look up. But for most subjects, his attention span was not very compatible with all the distractions in a standardized classroom.

Vic let out a soft groan. “Just what I needed: a whole new batch of instructors telling me how stupid I am.”

“That is not how our sages teach,” Lyssandra reassured him. “During a discovery session, for example, a sage guides discussions and asks thought-provoking questions so that all in attendance may come away with a richer understanding.”

Well, that did sound more interesting than chalkboards and essay questions. “So it’s kind of like a classroom lecture, Jeopardy-style.”

Lyssandra touched a hand to his arm and drew the context from his mind. “Ah, I see. The participants are not told what conclusions to draw. Many perspectives are offered, and spirited
discussion often continues in small groups long after the discovery forum has ended.”

“No homework. No worksheets. No essays. And no wrong answers — sounds like my kind of class after all,” Vic admitted. “I wonder what the final exam looks like.”

Lyssandra smiled. “Life is the ‘final exam.’ Our discovery today, however, leads into a praktik, where we will put our learning to use.”

The Citadel buildings were linked by covered walkways and interspersed with arches, gardens, fountains, and water clocks. Even the sculptures moved with crystalline engines powered by sunlight.

Sharif expertly began to roll Piri’s glowing ball up and down his arms and balance it on his hands. As he continued contact juggling, flickers of pink light showed how much the nymph djinni enjoyed the ride.

Lyssandra led them into a brightly lit, well-ventilated chamber. When the four companions took their seats on a stone bench, apprentices and other novice students — novs — arranged themselves around the hall. Six long tables were covered with bowls of powder, beakers of colored liquids, and rough-cut gems that sent out tendrils of smoke whenever light hit them.

“Oh!” Gwen looked around at a loss. “We didn’t bring any school supplies. I have no way of taking notes.”

“Did you bring your mind?” Sharif tucked Piri back into her mesh sack. “That is all you need.”

With conscious effort, Vic decided not to tease his cousin.

To his surprise, the anemonite Sage Polup was their instructor. The many-eyed jellyfish genius in a mechanical body was utterly unlike any teacher Vic had ever had — a good sign. “I hope he doesn’t give homework.”

“Our purpose today,” Sage Polup began, “is to examine a variety of crystals and their compounds to learn how each refracts, absorbs, and emits magical properties.” His voice bubbled in stereo from the speakers in his artificial body.

“In other words, it’s a chemistry class,” Gwen whispered to Vic.

“What is the primary engine of our magical power?” Polup asked.

As the novs and apprentices began to answer the sage’s questions, Vic discovered that his mind wasn’t even tempted to wander. He learned that Elantyan magic is powered by seven distinct forms of aja crystals, and each one was passed around and discussed. Fire aja is always red, sun is orange, dust is yellow, sea is green, wind is blue, sooth aja — for telling lies from truth — is white, and star aja, the rarest form, is violet.

“I will not explain their properties to you. You will witness them for yourself. That is the best way to learn.”

At the end of the discovery portion, the anemonite sage called the students to the experimental tables. Vic stood with his cousin, fascinated by the liquids and powdered crystals set out for the students to sample.

The different forms of crystals ranged in consistency from powdered sugar to pea gravel, and all had odd properties. Some flared with dazzling light; some released colorful fumes. Other
powders, when mixed together, melted into a flowing liquid that balled up and rolled, as if it were alive, but quickly dried and collapsed back into fine crystal grains when it fell into shadow.

As Sage Polup moved his mechanical body among the groups of students, the floating anemonite watched them all with his ring of eyes. “When I lived under the waters, I had no opportunity to study dry aja crystals. But the merlons forced us to perform all manner of tests and make elemental discoveries.”

“I suppose you couldn’t use fire, either,” Gwen said. “When I took Chem Lab, we heated substances with a Bunsen burner.”

Polup stopped next to her station. “Certain flames do burn under water, and there are undersea vents where lava flows. The merlons direct great armored turtles to carry experiments to these volcanic cracks for them so they can study the effects of the elements. I was taken to the flaming cracks only once, shortly before I escaped the merlons.”

“So how’d you ever get away?” Vic asked. “I bet it was quite an adventure.”

“That is not a tale for this class,” Polup answered. “The waters in which the merlons live are dim and cool. In their cities, kelp gardens and coral shelves filter the light from above. Suffice it to say that the merlons do not like intense heat or bright lights.”

The strange sage moved off, talking to other students. Vic continued his experiments — or messing around, as he thought of it — until he and his companions thought they had exhausted the possibilities.

Polup clanked back to the center of the hall and called for
them to stop. “When dissolved and suspended, crystal powders can be made into aja ink, with which we write our spell scrolls. Crystal powders in specific patterns can also draw magic from the world or the elements and bind it into a form that we can use.”

Two journeysages set up pictures of simple geometric shapes — circles, triangles, trapezoids — and a few complex designs that Sage Polup showed only briefly. “By drawing such patterns in crystal powder, we can unlock useful energies. These complicated designs” — he indicated the special drawings — “should not be used by novices and apprentices. But you may begin with the simple patterns.”

Picking up fistfuls of powder and letting the grains dribble out as if he were making a sand painting, Vic tried to draw a triangle. When he was finished, the outline shuddered and then snapped into a perfect shape, as if linear magnets were drawing iron filings into a grid. “That’s cool!”

Gwen made a ragged circle that also snapped into a perfect round outline. Lyssandra touched the rectangle she had drawn. “Mine is very warm.”

Gwen tentatively touched her own circle. “This is cold.”

Vic felt an unexpected breeze rise from the tabletop above his triangle. Enjoying himself, he began to toy with combinations of shapes, drawing a circle around his first triangle, and was amazed when the outlines shifted position, one inside the other and then reversing. Vic didn’t know exactly what purpose that might serve, but at least it was fun.

They tried combinations of designs, and each shape rewarded them with an unexpected result, from ripples in the
air to a humming sound to a sweet honeysuckle smell. Nothing terribly useful, as far as Vic could see. He considered trying one of the advanced patterns, just to show off, but Sage Polup had put the pictures away and he couldn’t remember what they looked like.

Suddenly, he had an idea. He pulled out his keychain with the five-sided medallion his mother had given him.

Drawn by his movement, Lyssandra’s gaze turned toward Vic. “That charm with the symbol on it. I saw it — or one just like it — in a dream.” She spoke in a hushed voice. “At first it spun and danced above sparkling waters, then it splashed like a porpoise in the waves. It was a very happy dream, but at the end, something pulled it, and it sank to the bottom of the ocean.”

Vic grimaced. “I hope that doesn’t mean I’m going to lose this. I’d be awfully upset if I did.”

When Lyssandra went back to her work, he looked at the medallion again. Rubicas had been excited to see it, so maybe the design would have some interesting properties. Holding the disk in one hand, he tried to duplicate the loops, angles, and swirls in crystal dust on the table and hoped the magic itself would know to make the lines straight and the curves smooth.

In the last two years, missing his mother, Vic had spent a lot of time in his room, just staring at the medallion, trying to interpret its meaning. He had always wondered what the unusual markings represented. When he completed the last loop, he called to his cousin, “Look, Doc. I made the symbol on our —”

Suddenly the new pattern shimmered and brightened. At
first, it began to glow, then to blaze. “Whoa!” He stepped back, blinded by the glare.

The other students gasped and pointed. Sage Polup swiveled in his mechanical body, and the teaching assistants came running forward.

Gwen groaned.
“Now
what did you do, Taz?”