“At this rate, we will make Wave’s Lament in two days,” offered the pirate captain to his guest over lunch. “The season favors us.”

  “Of course,” Donovan replied. “I would hardly have absconded with my prizes against the Spring.”

  That wind was as predictable as the Harvest, though in the opposite direction. No sane smuggler timed his expeditions against the wind, not as the navies of the world increasingly turned to powered sail.

  The captain and the thief drank together in the first mate’s appropriated cabin. For the captain, this was a chance to swap stories with an old accomplice. For Donovan, this was preparation for the task ahead.

  A little liquid courage for the thief who dared to greater prizes.

  The pirate offered another drink. “Now then. Will you tell me how you came by your artifacts?”

  Donovan instinctively shifted a hand on top of the leather pouch in which rested a bauble and a diary, both precious beyond words.

  “Come now. I attested to your good name when I deposited you on Ruhum’s fair shores. Why would I betray you now?” the captain protested.

  There had been another Donovan at the start of that journey; the pirate and the thief had dumped that man’s body overboard together.

  “Maybe you found someone else to heave corpses,” Donovan suggested.

  “The role of a captain is to supervise!”

  Laughing, Donovan withdrew the diary. “Then supervise the words of the damned. Just as I said so many years ago, the demiurge walks among us.”

  The captain opened the diary to a random page and whistled at the tight text. “The stolen language.”

  Donovan nodded. “Our birthright.”

  A language of runes and truths, magic and power.

  “And you can read it?”

  “Of course!” With great difficulty and a good deal of guesswork, but Donovan did not admit weaknesses.

  By the same token, the Redeemer would not admit how he discovered the diary in the first place. What mystery was there in admitting that he visited a noble estate for routine repair work, peeked into the library, and recognized a rune that no normal man knew on a binding?

  From there, he needed to only bide his time as a mason until the season turned favorable for a quick escape to the south.

  That the diary led to a greater treasure was a bonus.

  No, Donovan would let some matters remain mysteries…all part of his grand plan.

  “Do you think I’d have paid you so much for all those scraps if they were useless?” he asked, redirecting the conversation.

  “People pay a lot of gold for a lot of strange stuff,” the pirate shrugged. “I know a woman who paid five gold for a wig of pure Whistler hair.”

  “And?”

  “I sold her a horse’s tail, of course! Freshly shampooed!”

  They laughed again. How refreshing to speak openly with another man of practicality.

  “So, your partner in crime. The High Priestess. What did she think of these prizes?”

  No one declared that she was the High Priestess but herself.

  “She will be informed in time,” the stone mason replied coolly.

  Her usefulness has run its course. Fanatics are always a liability in the end.

  The captain paused mid-sip. “Ah? Interesting.”

  “Is this a problem?”

  “Only if you cause one,” the captain responded. “Once you’re safely to shore, I’m headed north again. It will be against the wind, of course, but the northern market is always starved for ‘exotic goods’ over winter.”

  “Tell her no lies on my account.” By the time this caravel managed to crawl into the Lumian harbor, Donovan would be beyond all reach with his prizes.

  “How much is the diary worth?” the captain asked, pushing the tome back to its new owner. “I could fence it if need be…”

  “Haven’t had enough of my gold?”

  “The winters are beginning to seep into my bones. My thoughts turn to retirement.” Leaning back, the captain sighed. “I’ve shipped a lot of goods and made my fill of gold. Most of my life is behind me, and I wonder…”

  “What more exists?” Donovan suggested.

  “Even fine wine is ash on my tongue,” he mused, peering into his dregs.

  Stowing the diary, Donovan withdrew a small, honey-tinted gemstone. Wide as a fist and cut into hexagonal planar facings, the gem caught the sun through the tiny window yet gleamed quite dull. It would have fetched a gold or two from size alone, but its luster was too dull for fashion.

  “What trinket is this?” the captain asked.

  “Pick it up,” the Redeemer ordered.

  With smuggler’s speed, the sailor snatched the gem and inspected its facings. “Manufactured, of course. High grade. How did they cut the facings so smooth? Luminescence is awful, though.”

  “How much does it weigh?”

  “Hmm, about an apple. Rather light for a stone, isn’t it?”

  “So it seems.”

  As I suspected! The uninitiated lack the spiritual refinement necessary to recognize true power, even held in their hands!

  This only confirmed once more his worthiness to walk this path.

  “I can give you a gold for it right now, or refer you to my fence…”

  “No.” Donovan held out his hand.

  For one tense moment, the captain stared into the gem. “Though the surface is dull, inside it is rather…lustrous…”

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  The Redeemer rapped his knuckles on the table.

  The captain started.

  “I will meditate now,” Donovan pronounced. “See that I am not disturbed!”

  “Right…” the captain deposited the gem on the table. Shaking his head and dusting his coat, the captain departed.

  Behind him, Donovan wedged the door shut with a chair. He drew the curtain over the port window, drenching the room in darkness, and navigated to the table by touch. In the dark, he felt the truth beneath the stone that eyes could not perceive: cool, throbbing, and weightless. A concept wrought in the form of stone.

  For only the wise is the truth revealed.

  He placed it on the floor, knelt before it, and stilled himself with twenty measured breaths.

  “Power within, obey my call,” he commanded the gemstone.

  It laid on the rocking floor of the cabin in the usual manner of inanimate objects.

  “Power within!” he intoned from deep in his throat.

  Still nothing.

  He completed twenty more breathes and then intoned fragments of the ancient language.

  It laid there.

  The ship’s cook rang the lunch bell for the other passengers.

  He forced himself to breathe deep and slow until his fingertips tingled and his mind swam. Until he could no longer tell the difference between the rocking of his thoughts and the ship. Until his heart seemed to stop beating.

  Long after losing count, a taste of gold wafted to the edge of his consciousness.

  Donovan tried to latch onto that thought. Trying to grasp, he found nothing. Instead, the cabin snapped back into detail: rough wood, stale air, and the chatter outside.

  Again.

  Gritting his teeth, he began to measure breath again.

  Again, the tease of light like honey.

  This time, he allowed it to drift into his mind while he remained empty.

  He did not open his eyes, but he began to see: a mist of golden dew floating from the gemstone to his lips. He drew a startled breath; the taste of honey flooded his sinuses; and patterns like flowers erupted behind his eyelids.

  Donovan slowly raised his arm and pressed his fingertips against the streamer. It thrummed at his touch, color solid as a woman’s ribbon and twice as soft.

  Honey sang against his lips, a wordless question. Would he bend his head and listen to a subtle and slow—

  I have no time to await permission!

  He seized the ribbon in his right hand. It squirmed, but he squeezed tight. The taste of honey died, a wordless question squashed, but he remained in this strange realm so long as his grip held firm.

  Before him, the darkness erupted with meaning. Mandala of gold and honey bloomed, creating a garden of fractal shapes. There were flowers and trees; deer and songbirds; rivers and mountains; all ran together and stood apart, born of colors that ran without moving. Each sang, singular notes in a greater pattern, like wind chimes before the storm, and the whole slowly rotated like the sky above.

  He stood both near and far, among the garden and aimlessly floating above. He stepped closer, and the garden neared without movement.

  Still, silent.

  Teeming, singing.

  He raised his left hand and breezed his fingertips against a flower bud. Its colors spun and fractured; its notes rang deeper and faster. What had been one flower opened into a vista. Each stroke was a rune, and each fold was a poem, and together they mapped all that was.

  “The words which the demiurge stole…” he whispered, dipping his left hand into the light.

  His fingers sank into the pattern. Became part of it. Color bled into him, and it whispered meanings that had been waiting breathlessly for his touch.

  Donovan remembered words he had forgotten before he was ever born.

  He cackled like a madman. Here was the fire of the gods and the key to that diary!

  “I will reclaim it all,” he breathed, clenching the ribbon tighter and striding forward. “I will drink it all!”

  The leash of light pulsed with tension, a warning for the wary.

  In the dark, two minds stirred.

  The first mind lurked in the reflection of the mirror. It was the darkness cast by light, the shadow thrown by the sun, and the ignorance found in knowledge. It lurked beneath the garden, separated by only the razor’s edge of a glass pane, waking from the depths of Donovan’s shadow.

  The Gamchicoth peeled open innumerable eyes, drawn by the terrible hunger in the little man just above reach.

  The second mind rose from the distant mountains and walked with such care that only the subtle shift of colors marked its approach at all. For brief moments, the colors offered the silhouette of a woman in flowing robes, one hand on the hilt of a sword forged from fire.

  She marched for the trespasser.

  Cackling, Donovan perceived neither.

  When she drew her blade, it caught the fire of suns. Its golden edge illuminated her robes, but her face remained shrouded by her hood.

  “Man of jungle paths,” she thundered, “you trespass by stolen light in sacred gardens.”

  He staggered backwards, losing the meaning behind the colors. The ribbon of light bucked against his fingers, eager to strand him. Clutching the lifeline tight, Donovan spun on a heel and fled.

  His shadow followed, squirming below in the wake of his greed.

  The guardian made no move to follow. Instead, she clasped her blade with both hands. “Harken well these words, mortal. For those who tread in the realm of the divine arcana…”

  He ran, the colors blinding and confusing. His heart hammered, and sweat rolled down his back. Though he desperately wished to wake, his legs would not budge; his eyes would not open. He had traveled so far without moving, and now the only portal home was the gemstone gleaming at the end of a golden leash.

  Gasping and stumbling, he leaped for that stone, arm outstretched.

  “…no living man escapes his sin.”

  He grasped the stone in hand.

  She struck. In this place, distance was immaterial, and her blade drove through his forearm. Muscle and tendon sundered, and…

The splash as a dead man’s boot fell into the ocean.

“You don’t know the first thing about masonry.”

Another splash as his other boot followed suit, relieved of its coin.

“Please. You think I can’t pick up a bit of stonework in a month?”

Two murderers in the night, looting a corpse.

“Whatever you say…Donovan.”

The splash as a dead man joined his boots.

  “Get me out of here!” Donovan screamed, animal terror shrill in his own ears.

  The gemstone flared.

  The mandala colors fractured, the garden rang a terrible note, and a monster roared in freedom.

  His eyes flew open, and he beheld the drab, dark cabin.

  But behind him, the guardian still pursued. An open gateway, a judgement inevitable…

  He heaved the gemstone away with his left hand, but she rattled the bars of his mind with her approach…

  Planting his right arm to rise, he instead toppled to the cabin in immense pain. His right hand ignored his commands, and the reflexive twitch of severed muscles sent white hot agony soaring into his elbow.

  The stonemason’s right arm had been maimed, the flesh sundered straight through the gap between radius and ulna.

  “Better to remove the arm of a sinner,” admonished the towering guardian. “The price must be paid.”

  She took one more step closer, and he was sure he was at his end.

  Yet she drifted into and through him like fog. He smelled the wet summers of his childhood, and heard his first lover’s laugh.

  “The tool of loving kindness remains ready.” Her voice echoed from inside his own mind. “Sacrifice this path of folly.”

  She was inside of him, and he understood her intent with crystal clarity even as he clutched his maimed arm with quaking fingers.

  Woven Light. Potential called into form. A path set in the stars, and it rebelled against his intent. Like a boulder, it only wanted to flow in the direction of its birth.

  It could be the power to mend his arm…but only if he consumed it utterly.

  Surrender his quest and regain his body.

  And live the rest of my days, having tasted and turned away from Truth?!

  “I will not bow before demiurge or demon!” he hissed, clutching his useless arm.

  The guardian said nothing, and her presence faded from his mind.

  Am I free…?

  Outside, the captain bellowed instructions to his men. He pounded on the cabin door. “Donovan! Meditate later! A storm fit to swallow a dreadnaught has spit up from the depths, and we’ll be lucky to see morning!”

  The Redeemer groped for something to bandage his arm, head swimming. What good his resolve if he bled out across the floor?

  Screw the guardian! I will not return empty handed. Surely there is a spell in this diary to heal my arm!

  For he would learn Truth, and no false gods or shadow with a sword would stop him!

  A wondrous idea, whispered a dark and inky presence in his mind. So much more remains for you to eat…

  The ship rocked suddenly, as though a great and slimy presence taunted it.

  You have such courage, little dreamer. Such hunger. Oh, you and I are of a mind, and how could I thank the one who let me free? Let me tell you a secret, little dreamer. There are other gemstones. Other tools. The ones you call false gods coveted them in their sanctums…I will show you…

  The presence squirmed in his mind, foul and inky, and left behind a nugget of the knowledge the so called holy would deny him.

  He saw now, clearly, that the Gamchicoth was only perceived as disgusting because the so-called gods hated its courage. It was sentenced to ugliness, the fate of those who spurned the order of the cold masters of the universe…

  You can have so much more. Eat so much more. Eat, eat, eat…I am so hungry…and something calls me in the west…yes…she calls me…

  Donovan shivered from blood loss and euphoria both.

  “Yes,” he wheezed. “Yes…only a coward would stop now. There is so much more…”