Gardens of Mist (The Traveler's Gate Chronicles: Collection #2) Read Free Page A

precious metals and gems flashed on each of his fingers: plain halfsilver bands; gold rings set with sunstone; rune-etched rubies; obsidian bands with small caps of iridian sand. On his face, as always, he wore that small, infuriating, invincible half-smile.
    Nothing will ever disturb me, that expression said. Nothing ever could. If gold coins rained from the sky I would not laugh, and if the sun failed to rise I would not weep.
    Grandmaster Ornheim laced his ring-speckled fingers together and fixed his granddaughter with that same not-quite-smile. “I am proud to be your grandfather, Chloe, you know that. But it is important you not call me that.”
    Chloe would be lucky to get out of this without a twenty-minute sermon on Enosh cultural propriety. “I know that, Grandmaster, I apologize.”
    The Grandmaster took no more notice of her words than a golem would have. Less, if the golem were well made. “Not even in private. Our habits in private never fail to carry over into the public sphere.”
    “Perhaps the reverse is true as well.” Chloe snapped her fingers as though she had just realized something. “That would explain all the lectures! You don’t give enough of them to your students, so all the undelivered speeches bubbling up within you must carry over into the private sphere.”
    Her grandfather’s patient smile didn’t flicker. “Your tolerance is nearly inhuman. You absorb every word of my wisdom with the patience of a mountain, and yet you still find time to put every one of your tools up in its proper place. How do you do it?”
    She was becoming too predictable; he hadn’t even glanced over at the workbench. Chloe let her shoulders slump—she needed to show him that she wasn’t happy about this—and marched over to the workbench, hurriedly scooping up her tools and dumping them into the appropriate rack, drawer, or box.
    Grandmaster Ornheim strolled over to stand beside her, plucking her carved sapphire up from the surface of the workbench. “This is functional. Clean. I can see how this might work quite well, actually.”
    “Of course,” Chloe said, but she couldn’t help a little spark of pride. She had worked for hours on that heartstone, after all, even if she hadn’t done it willingly.
    “Have you any thoughts on the golem?”
    “Oh! Yes, hang on…” after a moment she found it: a glass jar of sparkling golden sand. Iridian.
    She poured a handful of iridian into her hand, and then willed it into the air. A tendril of sand rose, following her thoughts, spreading out into a gleaming sheet of tiny stars.
    “I was thinking something like a bird, you see.” The sand condensed into a glittering model of a stationary bird. She wasn’t sure what kind of bird it was—there were no birds native to Ornheim, so she had only ever seen them on trips outside—but this model looked like a bird to her. “I’d like a light rock for the body, maybe something volcanic, I’m not sure.”
    “And the skystones?”
    “Here, here, and here.” At each word, a hole appeared in the iridian bird: one each at the tip of the tail and at the end of both wings. “Before you say anything, I know it will be a little unbalanced, so I’d plan to put the heartstone here, in the middle of its back.” Some of the spare iridian floated around the bird’s back, encircling where the heartstone would go.
    This was the one part of the process to which Chloe had actually invested time and effort. Anyone could carve the runes of a heartstone; the process was mostly tedious memorization and hours of mindless drudgery. She would rather spend her time in the mines . Designing the golem itself, on the other hand, actually took a degree of creativity, even artistry.
    Plus, in her personal opinion, skystones were amazing. With only a little mental effort, an Ornheim Traveler could make those little blue stones rise and hover in midair. She had begun practicing with skystones since she had first felt her bond to Ornheim’s