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

vast earth.
    Grandmaster Ornheim waved his hand, and the iridian wrenched itself from Chloe’s control, flowing back into the jar in a sparkling golden river. One tendril of sand even reached back out and pulled the lid back on. “Very good. You’ll be ready to assemble your golem soon, but don’t get ahead of yourself. You’ve got plenty of time.”
    This from the man who would spend six weeks studying a block of marble before he first touched it with his chisel. “Yes, Grandmaster.”
    Before her grandfather could say anything else, Chloe turned and pulled open the door. Some of her friends were going Beneath today, and if she was lucky, she might get there in time to join them...
    Grandmaster Ornheim’s hand rested softly on her shoulder, and she almost screamed in frustration.
    “I hope you’re not leaving quite yet.”
    “No, I’m not,” Chloe said, in the most unconvincing tone possible.
    “You need to—”
    “Yes, I know. You tell me every time.”
    The Grandmaster stroked his beard, always playing the venerable old teacher. “You do? Then tell me, what must you do before leaving?”
    Chloe briefly wondered if she could just start running. How far would she make it before her grandfather brought her back? It was an unfair thought, of course, since Grandmaster Ornheim would never physically stop her from leaving. His disapproval, along with the inevitable lecture when she returned, was enough to keep her in place.
    Besides, she owed him more than that. Even if he sometimes made her want to slam her face into the side of a boulder.
    “An Ornheim Traveler must always stay and watch the Cycle,” she recited. “It is by the flow of the Maelstrom that our lives are guided, and we must respect that flow.”
    “Lest we be crushed beneath it,” her grandfather finished. “Sit. Watch the Cycle. The City Beneath has existed for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. It will still be there in an hour.”
    An hour? In her estimation, she could learn the Cycle safely in one look. It wasn’t that much different from glancing at a clock, after all. Not in principle, anyway.
    Chloe walked up to the edge of the cliff outside their house and leaned on the railing. Her home—like everyone’s home, here in Ornheim—was carved into the side of one of the more stable mountains. A path three or four paces wide stretched out from the front of the house like a porch, terminating in a seemingly endless drop down to Ornheim’s dark surface. Only Master-level Ornheim Travelers were allowed to descend that far.
    Master Ornheim Travelers, or those few who fell through the thin wooden safety railing. Chloe didn’t spare much thought for the drop, though. She had lived with that threat for most of her life. And she had better things to worry about.
    Above her whirled a Maelstrom of Stone, flying and dancing in an endless cycle.
    Rivers of shining golden iridian drifted by, twisting like giant ribbons on an invisible breeze. A star-shaped chunk of rose quartz the size of a barn rolled in a lazy orbit around an inverted mountain with a flat top. It looked like it had been torn up from the ground by the roots. As Chloe watched, she saw specks of blue flickering toward the bottom of the floating island. It was kept aloft by veins of skystone, then.
    A stone titan plodded by, looking like a craggy face the size of Chloe’s mountain. Its dull eyes were fixed on some invisible point in the distance. Some people built villages on stone titans; they avoided great danger, and tended to visit water sources quite often. Chloe could never imagine living on a mountain that wasn’t stationary, herself.
    The sky of Ornheim remained in constant motion. There was no backdrop of sun or stars, as there might have been in the World Above, but layer after layer of spinning, walking, shifting, dancing, moving stone in every shape, size, and color. Legend had it that Ornheim was nothing more than an unimaginably vast cavern, with a ceiling out