Temple of the Traveler: Empress of Dreams (13 page)

“I’m offering forty-five of them.”

Sajika, who had been eating a pickle off Pinetto’s plate, nearly choked.

The seeress haggled him up to fifty stones.

“Brent, go fetch my pack and we’ll count them out,” the builder noted.

The ambassador was in awe. “You carry that much?”

He shrugged. “My wife and I kept half of our wealth liquid at all times in case we had to flee. I should send word to sell the rest and have my laborers join us. There’s a lot of work for them to do here. Although, they might not be able to cross the border until the avalanches are cleared.”

When the gemstones clattered onto the table, the ambassador fanned herself.

“What’s the big deal?” asked Sarajah.

“The loan I just signed with the bank is for two hundred gold weeks at 10 percent interest. We haven’t received word from the eastern army in weeks. There’s a rumor that the Prefect is dead or taken prisoner by the Pretender, and no one wants to take a risk on me.”

“That’s ridiculous,” snapped the seeress. “I’ll renegotiate that for you. Your holding here is worth at least a hundred years. You qualify for the best rates.”

“You’d do that for me?” asked Sajika.

The seeress shrugged. “You’ve taken us all into your beautiful home and requested nothing in return.” Pausing, she added, “Now that I have money, I could pay you ten years’ worth for the wing we’re using. When we leave, you can buy it back at the same price.”

“Okay,” murmured Sajika.

“You’re supposed to suggest a higher price,” Pinetto whispered.

“Fifteen?” said the ambassador weakly.

“If food is included and you finish the repairs,” said the seeress.

“Certainly,” the ambassador said, giddy at the amount of money she’d have to renovate her palace.

“I can get my own food,” noted the builder, “but I’ll need to use your extra space and the barn to house my people as they arrive from Reneau. I’ll pay the same. That will leave me with fifteen stones to buy construction supplies and feed my workers.”

“How . . . many men?” asked the ambassador, struggling to cope with the new information.

“Fifty. They can send for their families once we build houses. I’ll need to get some decent homestead property from Legato.”

“I can arrange that,” agreed Sajika. “I happen to know that his government has no money other than what they confiscated from collaborators. However, ask soon; there are refugees from the Final Temple and Mud Springs pouring over the border.”

Brent perked up. “Any spies or healers?”

“Probably both,” admitted the ambassador.

“Since the refugees were at the falls after the battle, maybe some of them have heard about the smith,” Pinetto suggested.

Sajika locked eyes with the seeress. “We can ask around, love. What did you want to do with all this money?”

“Get another scribe. Maybe I could start a school of magic,” he proposed.

“People will pay
you
for that,” said the seeress. “Think bigger.”

“I want to run some experiments while we heal. Among other things, I think that lenscraft can be used to bore holes for the mine.”

Simon noted, “There’s a stone shed on the shore at the edge of the property. That may be a safe place to use if we take precautions.”

“No explosions,” begged Sajika.

****

Each morning over the course of the week, Sarajah masked off targeted sections of the
Book of Archanos
and had the two scribes copy alternating pages so that no one person would see all the text. The wizard helped her organize the resulting parchment pages into categories and added notes to the margins. At first she was resentful of his criticisms, but soon she realized how much was missing from the document. The young wizard was excellent at building logical, step-by-step progressions like mathematical proofs. He could also cut the raw material like a jeweler to make the result shine its best. In the end, she decided she could tolerate his help.

While the scribes worked, Pinetto interviewed the members of the group about their supernatural knowledge. This filled in gaps in the document. He seemed to think that magic, theology, and mathematics tied together into a single fabric.

In the late afternoon and evenings, he proved this theory by controlling his energy flow better every day. He learned how to focus his energy into a furnace for making glass. Whenever he came for dinner, he wore thick, protective goggles and a pensive smile. The goggles helped hide the white sigils over his eyes. His brow was singed and soot covered. Wary, the workmen left the room when he entered.

“Why are your fingers pink?” asked Brent.

“From doping the mixture,” Pinetto said as he downed his share of the stuffed cabbage leaves at the kitchen table. “I’m making special lenses that focus the light of the Compass Star. My problem is I need a hole that will let starlight in without letting in rain and snow. The hole in the shed roof lets out the excess heat fine but doesn’t quite let in enough light after sundown.”

Simon seemed to wake up at the challenge. “Let me take a look. No one has an appointment for advice for another hour.” Brent tagged along, eager to learn.

As they walked to the shed, Pinetto attempted small talk. The experienced lord intimidated him a little. “So how much do you pay your maid?”

“Pay?”

“Yes. We give ours sixteen silver hours a week plus room and board. I’m worried that’s low because they’re always so cranky.”

“Ingrid sings as she makes reindeer stew,” Brent volunteered. “They never ask for money. We thought it was the local friendliness like all the food you got the first day.”

“They?” asked Pinetto as he unlocked the shed door.

“The local widows take turns cleaning our wing and making meals. The ambassador worked out a schedule,” said the boy.

Simon tried to change the subject. “The semi-domesticated herds of reindeer the nomads maintain are fascinating. They even use them to draw sleds, I’ve been told.”

Pinetto opened the creaky door to the shed.

When the boy saw the cascaded layers of lenses, bubbling pots, and the glowing furnace, he shouted, “Wow!”

“Don’t touch!” both adults said at once.

Then Simon saw the black, metal covering on the hole in the ceiling. “You have the opening protected. Why am I here?”

Once he sealed the door against intrusion, the wizard explained, “Gods can disguise themselves as humans to sneak up on us.”

Simon smiled at perceived absurdity, but Brent said, “Dad, they
can
shift shapes; I’ve seen it.”

The builder stopped smiling as Pinetto added, “Kiateros did it to Tashi, Baran, and me.”

In the heat of the workroom, he pointed to the apparatus. “That’s when I decided that I needed a method of telling whether a person is human or not. Sarajah can usually tell them from humans when they draw on their otherness, but the determination can take days. Gods are smarter than people and always scheming.”

Simon blinked. “You can do that?” He looked at the young Imperial wizard with fresh respect.

“There are some tests that can be done on the flesh with materials like sesterina.”

“I doubt gods would let you attack them in such a manner.”

“The why is more instructive than the act itself. Your son confirmed that the Dawn folk can change shapes in the presence of the Doors to Eternity.”

Brent nodded. “They translate into dream and back again.”

“The gods inhabit several dimensions above us. Our world is flat by comparison, like that wall. According to the
Book of Archanos
and my discussions with Kiateros, when the gods manifest a body here, it’s like projecting a shadow puppet.” Holding his fingers in front on the bright furnace, he caused a giant rabbit to appear on the wall. Making it hop and wiggle, he said, “They can look realistic and interact in our flat world, but humans don’t stand much of a chance against them.” He made a wolf puppet with his other hand and it swallowed the bunny. “To fight them, we have to get between them and the light of the true sun.” He pulled a letter opener out and its shadow stabbed the wolf to death.

“I see . . .,” said Simon, backing toward the door.

Brent’s face animated. “That makes sense! Since sesterina is multidimensional, it can block the projection in our world.”

“Exactly,” Pinetto agreed. “So how do we use this knowledge to determine what we need to know? If you can shape-shift, you can heal almost any wound. I’ve seen Dawn creatures pick up a hand and reattach it.”

“Now you’re scaring me,” admitted the builder.

“Because the Dawn folk can also feed directly from the invisible sun, they have fantastic healing abilities even away from Doors. My ordeal in the mines enabled me to collect several exotic blood samples on my cloak. I preserved them with a touch of wine to prevent clotting.”

Pointing to a step stool, he told Simon, “Look through the eyepiece up there.”

A telescope-like device was focused on a glass bowl in the center of the table. “Shouldn’t this be pointed up?” Simon asked.

The wizard shook his head. “The seeress described this invention in her tome. The Dawn folk use this to magnify blood samples in the plague-lands to see if someone is a carrier. My version isn’t that strong, but it shows what happens clearly enough. I take a dried blood stain, over a week dead, add a few drops of water . . . What do you see?”

“Red soup.”

“That’s how human blood stays, but watch closely. Brent, throw that lever to open the iris on the ceiling.” Around the iris, there was an array of nine pink lenses. The lenses focused the beams on a darker lens over the bowl.

Simon fell backward off the stool. Pinetto helped him regain his balance. The builder was shaken. “I could see it swelling and clotting!”

The boy jumped up on the stool but couldn’t reach the eyepiece. “Aww.”

The builder slapped the lever shut, cutting off the rays of the invisible sun. “Stay away from that abomination!” he told his son. “How dare you risk us all like this? That creature might be able to sense the light striking its blood and be drawn here.”

“No worries. That’s not the sample from the Crystal Grotto Mine,” Pinetto whispered. “It’s about a tenth as active as the pure Dawn creature. This was from something different, someone with the taint or in the process of becoming. I have to tell someone in case I die so there’ll be someone to protect Sajika.”

“Why? What’s this sample from?”

“Tashi. Indoors, he’s healing from his injuries at twice human rates.”

“What do we do?” asked Simon, breathing erratically.

“I want to place him under the lens array and see what happens.”

Simon flung the door open and ran back to the main house. When he ran into the kitchen, the first person he encountered was the ambassador. He shouted, “Your husband is mad!”

Close behind his father, Brent added, “And a genius. Maybe he can help me build that catapult from the
Book of Dominion
.”

Pouring tea calmly into a cup, she said, “He’s not my husband yet.”

The builder sputtered, “That’s all you have to say? Tashi—”

“I know,” she said. “He tells me everything.”

“Aren’t you going to do something?” Simon demanded.

She watched Pinetto trudging slowly back to the house. “I’ll handle it. Go. Tell no one else.” She set out a piece of leftover tart for her lover.

The builder left for his own wing and barred the door.

When Pinetto returned, he removed his muddy boots at the door, donning house slippers instead. He saw the dessert and his face lit up. After he pulled up a chair, he asked, “What’s the occasion?”

“I just returned from a meeting with the king.”

From her tone, he guessed, “Bad news?”

“Your friend, the smith, isn’t coming back,” she said softly, sliding the cup of tea over to him.

“How . . . how do you know?”

“The refugees. Some of them watched from a distance. The smith killed the monster that was chasing us. He sacrificed himself to protect us all.”

Unable to blink or close his mouth, he could only shake his head and moan the word, “No.”

She stood beside him and held his head against her chest. “Several people confirmed: the gods built a shrine to him to commemorate the battle.”

He wept in silence for his best friend, for the horrible fate that had found him, and lastly for the perverse sense of relief. Pinetto could sleep soundly now without having to post wards and sentries for the rest of his life, afraid that the person next to him might sprout an extra set of arms. Mostly, he cried because he hated himself for being so glad he had survived.

The next morning, everyone else had tasks outside, and the convalescing Pinetto was left alone with Tashi again. Eventually, the wizard told the half-troll about his many adventures with Baran Togg and his friend’s heroic death.

When the wizard paused, unable to find more words, Tashi said softly, “He was a trustworthy soul and a good man to have at your back in a battle.”

 “He was the best friend I ever had,” Pinetto lamented.

“I’ve lost every man I’ve called friend.”

“I guess, since you’re a former member of the Brotherhood of Executioners and there aren’t any more priests of the Traveler. Don’t you have family or friends outside work?”

“I keep to myself. You’re more outgoing. I’ve seen you with Simon.”

“He thinks I’m crazy . . . the locals do, too. Frankly, I don’t trust him around Sajika. Every woman around flirts with him because he’s so distinguished, rich, handy, and . . .”

“The poor man just lost his wife. Yeah. I hear that one three times a day,” Tashi commiserated. “Are you worried he’ll steal your woman?”

“We’re engaged, but she’s dragging her heels on the wedding. Permission from King Legato isn’t good enough; we have to get dispensation from the King of Bablios. That’s half a world away on the other side of a warzone.”

Tashi smiled. “Meanwhile, you get sex every day in every room of your mansion with no strings.”

“I want strings,” the tall wizard sighed. “I want what my parents have.”

“You’re supposed to make me feel better and tell me you don’t have sex that often.”