Gemworld (14 page)

Sal listened quietly as Jaren consulted the other mages. If he’s a potential, he should have ascended when he touched the Hand. Maybe it’s a residual effect of the healing—Sal is from another world, after all. Was it possible that Sal was a potential in his
own
world? The questions ran on and on.

Finally, Sal had had enough. “Look,” he said, exasperated. “Isn’t there some way you can test me without using the gems? I mean, what do you guys do when there isn’t a Tiled Hand around?”

“Mana,” Menkal said, catching on. Met with blank looks, the sapphire mage elaborated. “Our souls are attuned to different gems, but the end result is still the same—we are able to wield mana to shape our world. We test him for sensitivity first, as we would in lieu of the Hand. If he doesn’t ascend, we can fill him with mana forcibly, try to effect ascension that way.

“Ah, I think I see,” said Jaren. “Even without his soulgem present, he might be able to establish contact through an influx of pure mana.”

All of which was Greek to Sal, but he listened in silence as the mages deliberated.

Agreed on a course of action, the Heads of Order arranged themselves around Sal in much the same way they were on the dais just weeks before. Touching Sal with one hand, their neighbor with the other, the mages closed their eyes.

Instantly, Sal’s eye began to twitch beneath the lid. His breath caught in his chest as the mana flowed into him. He could
feel
it building up within him! Like sunlight, it filled every crack and corner of his being. He was elated at the awesome power that surged through his veins. But the elation was short lived. As the mana continued to build, that sunlight turned to fire, cooking him from the inside. His eye spasmed painfully in its socket, threatening to explode. His teeth ground together uncontrollably.

Then all at once, it was over. The mages lowered their hands and looked up at him. They shared a common look between them, both hopeful and disappointed at the same time.

He felt the same as always. He hadn’t ascended.

“Well, he
is
sensitive, at least,” Jaren said, addressing the common disappointment they all felt.

“But if he’s not attuned to any of the six soulgems, then what does it matter?” Senosh demanded, his fiery eyes flaring in frustration.

Jaren looked for a moment as if he would say something, but then swallowed his words. Too tired to pursue the matter, the other mages let the matter drop, deeming it labor for another day. Bidding each other good night, the Heads of Order departed for their respective homes, leaving the final word to Jaren.

Sal sat down on the emerald’s stoop, completely at a loss. “So now what?”

“You keep doing as you have been,” Jaren answered matter-of-factly. “You obviously have magical potential, but there’s something missing. Crafter knows what that might be. But whenever He’s ready for you to become a mage, you’d better hope that
you
are. So I’d suggest that you continue in your current studies for the time being. I’d just as soon not increase your workload just yet. Besides, what you’re doing right now should suffice.
Shol
’
tuk
will provide a modicum of discipline that should prove useful, while gemsmithing will give you at least a partial insight as to how the various soulgems work in tandem one with another, as well as the world at large.” Marissa stepped to Sal’s side in agreement with the emerald.

The argument was sound—don’t rock the boat. The only problem with it was that he knew little more than he started out with. With a sigh, Sal thanked his friend for at least trying, and bade him good night.

The walk back to Marissa’s wagon was a quiet one. No matter how they tried, they could not recapture the carefree mood from earlier that night.
Perhaps it
’
s for the best
, Sal thought sullenly. After a week of foolish giddiness, a little sobriety could only help the budding relationship. He sighed for what seemed the hundredth time that night, glad to finally at least be comfortable around Marissa. As the artisan looked deeply into his eyes, wishing him a good night, it was clear that the feelings were mutual.

He drank in the sight of her for a few more moments, then turned for home, feeling her eyes on him as he walked away. Her image remained with him long into the night, comforting him the few times his thoughts led back to Jaren’s wagon.

***

Jaren was awake long into the night himself, pouring over his books in much the same way Sal had found him earlier. The earlier text had been A Treatise on War, by the emerald mage Tamet Skri. Jaren nearly considered it to be required reading for any emerald thinking to join the Resistance. Even a century later, Skri’s position on the emerald’s place in warfare was revolutionary.

Many emeralds had their favorite passages. Jaren’s was this: “It is more preferable to take a life to better the world than it is to save a life that might worsen it.” Granted, it was a rather jaded view, but to Jaren, it almost seemed that Skri had foreseen the Resistance, and the things emeralds would one day be forced to compromise in the name of freedom.

But since Sal’s visit, Jaren’s attention had turned to another book in his library. This one was far older, its leather cover and binding threatened to crumble at the slightest strain. The six soulgems adorned the front, arranged in a pentagram, with the circular backing done in obsidian and the five outer rays of the star in the remaining soulgems, ringing an empty pentagonal space in the center. The book was written about that empty space.

For hours, Jaren searched for one particular passage. As the night wore on, his vision began to swim, fatigue stealing over him. He was just about to trade his book for his bed when one certain phrase caught his attention. Adrenaline surged through his veins as he finally found the elusive passage, bringing him fully alert. He read the words aloud:

“
Prism of Light, One from Five

Four embrace, one defies

One remains unrealized...
”

He repeated the words, allowing his mind to digest them thoroughly, as he had many a night before. But none of his usual questions broke in, tempting him down endless paths of reason that would ultimately lead him nowhere.

No, tonight was different, because for the first time, he knew something of what he was looking for. He had no answers per se, but he knew where to start. He was sure of it, and that surety ignited a zeal for the prophecies that he hadn’t felt since he was a dirt poor farm boy from Darsen’s Way.

In some way that the emerald had yet to fathom, the prophecy spoke of Sal—the only man Jaren had ever known, alive or dead, to be sensitive to all four translucent soulgems.

One might say “embraced” by them. That Sal had not ascended hardly mattered. As far as Jaren was concerned, it was a foregone conclusion that he would in the Crafter’s own good time.

Candlelight filled the small room, silhouetting the lovers against the walls of the tent. Oh, how he’d longed for this moment.

Auburn curls cascaded over her shoulders, misty with perspiration and shimmering as Marissa swayed in concert with Sal, dancing to the music of an unseen band. She was dressed in a green silk evening gown with spaghetti straps, her body warm against him. He didn’t even notice the itchiness of the tuxedo shirt, normally intolerable in even the best circumstances. The singer of the unseen band belted a soulful version of “Earth Angel” as the saxophonist readied for his solo. A cool breeze blew through the night, rustling the tent flaps in their moorings. Something was so wrong about this... and yet, it couldn’t be more right.

Marissa laid her head on his shoulder with a contented sigh as they swayed, her hand combing the stray hairs that fell across his forehead. It tickled a little, but it felt good.

Slowly, the fog of contentment began to lift. Something was wrong. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but there was something about this dance that didn’t sit well with Sal. Something about… his eye?

Yes, that was it. That tickle he felt in his forehead… it wasn’t in his forehead, but his eye, the one that was ruined in the raid.

(
Raid? What raid?
)

But it didn’t just tickle. There was an unpleasant aspect to it, a bit like touching a low voltage electrode. And someone was turning the voltage up.

He tried to pull back, but his body refused to obey. Even his arms lay useless at his side, wrapped indelibly around Marissa’s waist. With every passing second, the sensation in his eye grew from annoying to intolerable. Sal squirmed helplessly—or would have, if his body would just do what it was told—desperate to rub his eye, claw at it, anything to relieve him of the awful irritation. But he had no control over his body, doomed to dance endlessly as the irritation built to a crescendo in perfect time with the disembodied music.

Sensing his unease, Marissa looked up, concern etched on her face.

“M-m-my eye... my eye,” Sal said shakily.

“Oh, you poor dear. There, there now. It will all be over soon,” she cooed, stroking his cheek once more.

His unaffected eye went wide at the sight of Marissa’s hand. Each finger was multifaceted, and glittering a different color in the candlelight. She touched her obsidian palm to his cheek, stroking her fingers along the curvature of his temple.

“It will all be over soon,” she whispered again as Sal’s eye twitched uncontrollably, painfully in its socket. It thrummed and throbbed to the beat of an unseen drum, pressure building all the while until it finally exploded outward, ripping a scream of shear agony from his throat...

...which trailed off as he found himself sitting upright in his own bed, shivering in a cold night sweat. The phantom pain in his eye died much slower than the scream it birthed.

A dream. Please let it be a dream
.

He threw the quilted wool blanket to the side and reached across the pallet to a lamp he kept there, wick down and shuttered to give only the dimmest light. He turned up the lantern’s wick and launched himself at a mirror that hung from the tent’s central pole. The lamp’s dim illumination—a housewarming gift from Marissa—was just enough for him to see by.

He fully expected to see a blob of greenish jelly hanging from an empty eye socket, but what he saw there was the same thing he’d seen for weeks. Aside from the slightly irregular iris, colored a lighter shade of hazel than the other and shot through with early morning redness, his rebuilt eye looked perfectly normal.

He let out a breath that he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. It
had
been a dream, nothing more. All his thought about healed eyes, potential mages, and Tiled Hands must have really taken its toll for him to have had such a dream. And so real, too. He even felt the pain, though it was much duller now and fading faster by the minute.

Relieved beyond measure, he turned and collapsed onto the bed, exhausted from the panic of the dream. He took a slow, deep breath, then droned out a few tight repetitions of his rawhide mantra.

Death is raw, like the hide of the newly skinned bull
.

He felt his focus sharpen, the words working their way into his soul. He repeated the mantra, and once again. The longer the words floated across his consciousness, the more centered he became until finally, he was once more at peace. No more rushing adrenaline or shortened breath. No more pain in his eye. All that had been replaced by logic, focus, and some good old fashioned two a.m. weariness.

“Well,” he told himself wryly, his mind now returning to certain supple curves. “The dream wasn’t all
that
bad.”

With a somewhat forced smile, he laid back and waited for sleep to reclaim him. It was a long time before it finally did.

***

Tired as he was, Sal was up before dawn. He bathed and ate breakfast in ample time to meet Retzu on the village green. Like clockwork, Retzu was there with the breaking of the sun over the eastern tree line, rounding the dais where Sal had been on trial only a few weeks previous. Funny, what had once seemed as foreboding as a gallows now seemed no more sinister than his grandmother’s peach tree back home. Thinking of that tree—and the switches Granny used to make him cut from it—brought a smile to his face... a smile that faltered when he realized that the assassin hadn’t brought the bokutos with him.

“I’m glad you’re in so good a humor,” Retzu said, stretching. “Because we’re going hand-to-hand this morning.”

“Yeah, I kinda noticed that.”

“I thought you might,” the assassin said with a roguish grin. “You have come to a point where the bokuto will not serve you as well as knees and knuckles. Granted, that means more bruising, but that is to be expected at this stage. Perhaps even encouraged. With or without weapons,
shol
’
tuk
is as deadly art form, and one cannot truly grasp its wonder as long as one remains dependent upon his sword. It is a tool, an extension, nothing more. A
shol
’
tuk
adherent must be prepared to face an opponent under any circumstance using any weapon at his disposal, even his own body. And if you ever mean to move from the rawhide hilt to the doeskin, increasing the difficulty and risk of your training is absolutely essential.”

“If you can’t run with the big dogs, stay on the porch?” Sal translated.

“Errr... yes, something like that. I think.”

Sal nodded and turned toward their usual sparring area, when Retzu stopped him. “Not today, mate,” he said as he mounted the dais, motioning for Sal to join him. “The lesson will be full contact. No death moves, obviously. Broken bones, however, are optional,” he said with a mischievous twinkle in his eye. As Jaren had been regularly healing their wounds, Sal wasn’t entirely sure Retzu was joking. “The object is to throw your opponent from the dais. Use the moves I taught you with the bokuto.”

“But those were sword moves,” Sal protested.

“Just so,” Retzu said. “But as I said before, the sword is merely an extension of your body. The blocks and strikes with the sword can be directly translated for hand-to-hand use. Just relax and let your training take you. May the best man win.”

Sal groaned at that last, trying to suppress the thought that he likely wouldn’t be the best man. Retzu’s style of teaching was sink-or-swim. He continuously pushed Sal well beyond his limits, often resulting in injury, which Retzu shrugged off. He claimed that it promoted adaptation and improvisation. “It teaches you to focus on the goal, rather than the path leading to it,” in his words. Good idea, Sal thought, though he was more interested in learning things the right way without messing up something that Jaren might not be able to fix.

Days before, Retzu had been teaching Sal how to evade blows from behind. A crowd had gathered to watch Sal get pulverized, as usual. The villagers got about an hour’s worth of entertainment before Retzu stopped and asked the most asinine question.

“What is your goal?”

“What do you mean, ‘what is my goal’?” Sal panted incredulously, throwing down his bokuto in disgust. “Not to get hit!”

“Then why are you allowing me to hit you?”

“Because I can’t see behind me to block,” he snapped.

“Why do you have to?” Retzu asked, rhetorically. He began to circle Sal as he talked. “
Shol
’
tuk
is an assassin’s art. Assassins do their work mainly at night, when it is the hardest to see, or be seen. A
shol
’
tuk
adherent can attack or defend just as well blindfolded as he can on sight. Perhaps better. An adherent’s body is the vessel of his will, a more versatile and deadly tool than any weapon he might carry. The sword responds to the wielder’s commands. The body responds to need. Do you understand?”

“What are you, frikkin’ Buddha?” Sal muttered under his breath. He understood none of Retzu’s philosophical rhetoric, but he allowed himself to dwell on the words anyway. It at least helped to occupy his mind while he was getting pummeled.

The morning continued in much the same manner until inexplicably something clicked in Sal’s mind. Whether it had been the latent wisdom of Retzu’s words, or the pain of his kicks and chops, Sal would never know, but the blows that had been landing before started missing. Inexplicably, Sal began to evade them. Well, inexplicably as far as Sal was concerned—Retzu didn’t seem the least bit surprised. By lesson’s end, Sal was evading about seven out of ten strikes. Fairly decent by Navy standards, but then again, Retzu was twice as fast as any SEAL instructor Sal had ever had, even with the assassin holding back.

And that had been the way of it. As the days progressed, his body grew more and more into the tool that Retzu had described—lithe, lethal, truly the vessel of his will.

Now he took his place opposite Retzu on the dais. Even this early, spectators were taking their customary places around the combatants. They’d come to expect great things from these contests, as master shaped and molded student, and congregated earlier and earlier each day, until finally they too began to find their way to the village green at daybreak.

I
’
ll give them something to watch today
, Sal vowed silently. He knew he couldn’t beat Retzu down, but he would at least hold his own. Setting his jaw, he bowed his respects to his teacher, and drew himself into
shol
’
zo masu
, his unarmed fighting stance. The still gathering crowd let loose a rousing cheer, ushering the day’s event. Then the blood began to fly.

The two danced around the platform, a veritable cloud of kicks, punches, and blocks. Sal crossed his arms to block a high punch to the face, then grabbed Retzu’s wrist and pulled him in for an elbow strike to the nose. He was rewarded with a spinning chop across the shoulders. A body blow here, a leg sweep there. Block. Dodge.

Retzu leaped high in the air, twisting as he came down. Sal wasn’t sure how many times his opponent kicked him in the face, but it was more than he could block. Vision fogged and arms became leaden. He retreated, almost tripping over the edge of the dais. Just catching his balance, he dropped to his knees and somersaulted under another wave of kicks. On the back side of the assassin, Sal planted his hands and kicked backward. His feet caught Retzu still in mid-leap, and sent him tumbling over the edge and onto the village green below. The crowd rang out a cheer for the victorious student, and money exchanged hands.
Some folks won big on the underdog
, Sal thought wryly. He gave a tired wave to his adoring fans then doubled over panting, trying vainly to catch his breath.

Retzu was back up on the dais well before Sal had recuperated. He noted sourly that the assassin hadn’t even broken a decent sweat. As the assassin approached, he reached into a hidden pocket within his leathers, producing a strip of soft leather. “Nice move at the end,” he commented. “Definitely worthy of an increase in status. Welcome to the doeskin hilt, Sal.”

Sal flushed with excitement as he took the doeskin strip, in his mind already affixing it to his hilt. But before he had that opportunity, a horn pealed in the distance, sounding some sort of alarm.

“A messenger from a neighboring village,” Retzu said, judging apparently by the sound of the horn. “Wayfarer’s Rest, most likely.”

“Whoever it is, they sound excited,” Sal panted. The two left the dais for the council tent, making their way through the crush of curious villagers.

Jaren was there to greet them. As he ushered them into the tent, the emerald noticed Retzu massaging his backside, grimacing in pain.

“Everybody gets lucky once in a while,” the assassin said, a bit too casually. Amusement twinkled in the emerald’s gemstone eyes, but he kept his face carefully neutral as he led them to places on the floor near Delana, taking his ease behind them. The emerald laid his hands upon Sal and Retzu. Sal’s eye tingled as mana rippled through his body, seeking out his injuries. But for once, his mind really wasn’t on his eye.

The messenger sat next to Reit across from Sal, both men reclining on the thick cushions that the council used to sit on in their meetings. The messenger’s voice was hoarse from misuse, his speech broken by gulps of wine and gasps of air.