A Door Into Ocean Read Free Page A

of Uriel the Spirit Caller. Uriel communed miraculously with the Spirit of the Patriarch who ruled from Torr, four light-years out in space. He was supposed to call on all the knowledge of the almighty Patriarch.
    Spinel ran after Uriel and slipped a coin into a deep pocket of his robe. “Uriel, how come those moonwomen don’t get dragged away from that tree?”
    Uriel turned his solemn face, and his starstone winked on his chest. “If I were to sit at the tree, I would not be disturbed either.”
    â€œThat’s no answer.” Sometimes the Spirit got garbled in transmission.
    â€œFor shame,” hissed a neighbor behind him. “Talking back to a Spirit Caller.” But Spinel had already run off to tell Ahn what Uriel had said.
    â€œIt’s more than that,” said Ahn, as her good eye frowned at a customer pinching the tomatoes. “Those guards were scared.”
    â€œScared?” His toes twitched. “Why … scared?”
    â€œThey’re as superstitious as Dolomite goatherds. And why not? The moonwomen just stay there, cool as ice—they must have some sort of
power in their veins, or they’d have run off like sensible folk.” She sketched a starsign to ward off evil and whispered, “A pair of witches, if you ask me.”
    Vexed, Spinel snapped his fingers and turned away. He knew better than that; he had had eight years in the schoolhouse, after all. He would go back and ask his father, Cyan the stonecutter, who had the last word on everything. So he skipped through the cobblestoned streets past houses draped with fishing nets, dodging one-armed beggars and the nodding horses of farmer’s carts and the firecrystal van of the Mayor. In the artisans’ quarter he reached the old shop where his family had lived since before he was born. Behind the counter his sister, Beryl, looked up with a tired smile.
    In the basement was his father’s workshop, hung with round saw-blades for marble and agate and cluttered with tools for the precious gems. The air smelled of wet clay from the polishing.
    Cyan sat hunched over a wooden lap wheel that whined as it spun and spattered beneath the water stream. His face was shadowed harshly by the floodlamp that drained firecrystals so fast. The surface of the wheel was grinding a facet into a yellow-green peridot, until Cyan raised the dop stick to change its angle.
    â€œFather, listen,” Spinel shouted in his ear.
    The whining stopped, and Cyan looked up through his thick safety glasses. His nose was broad and flat, as if he had held it, too, to the lap wheel for thirty years.
    â€œFather, why did those guards run away from the moonwomen?”
    Cyan regarded him balefully. “Fool’s luck is the reason. Don’t think it will last, for to cross the firemerchant brings worse luck than fool’s gold. Son, when will you get yourself a decent stonesign like your brother-in-law, instead of running wild in the marketplace and poking your nose in the affairs of strangers? Keep away from them. Now go cut the tesserae for Doctor Bresius’s new wainscoting.”
    The lap wheel whined again. Spinel went to switch on the diamond-edged saw, and as he did so his father’s light dimmed briefly. Vengefully he wished it would go out altogether; but then he himself would only be sent back to recharge the firecrystal, for a sum that made his mother screech every month.
    His mind wandered dangerously from the saw. It was not for him to put in the long tedious hours that produced fine crystals. Those creatures
by the tree were the oddest sight he had seen in this sleepy town, one he could not soon forget.
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    The Sharers did not turn white again, and they approached no one. Once an exceptionally brave market woman ventured to ask their advice on the use of medicinal herbs from the moontraders. What she learned then amazed even Doctor Bresius from Iridis; and thereafter, knots of villagers gathered at