Asunder: A Gathering of Chaos by Cameron Hopkin (children's ebooks free online .txt) 📕

Renna cackled with glee from the other side of the room. “I knew it!” she whispered fiercely. She stood facing a bookcase laden with oversized volumes, and she hauled on one edge of it, pushing it into the room. Instead of scraping across the carpeted floor, it swung smoothly, hinged on the far side like a door. It was a door – a hidden one. Bare stone stairs curved down and away on the far side of it like a dark, empty mouth leading down to the center of the earth. The Hand’s eyes were shining. “A secret get-away for the Governor so he can do his dirty work unobserved,” she chuckled. She didn’t sound as if she disapproved. “Come on.”

Nira balked. “That seems like a bad idea.”

The priestess turned from where she stood on the first step down. “I wasn’t asking,” she growled.

Is this woman mad? I’m ready to stain my trousers, and she just plows ahead. She reached for some thought, some reason that might make give pause to the rail-thin juggernaut of a priestess. “We don’t know where that goes,” was all she could manage. Weak. “And we don’t even know if he went that way.”

The sour-faced woman opened her mouth to give a scathing retort and pulled up short, an idea dawning on her face. “Can you see where he went? If you touch one of his things, perhaps?” She bustled back into the room, searching for a candidate for her experimentation.

Nira stifled a sigh. “I – I don’t know if it works like that.” She felt hesitant to even try. The vision she had shared with the woman had not been a pleasant experience. If she were being honest with herself, she had thought about the entire ordeal as little as possible. If she thought about it, it became real again instead of just some fever dream. Run away, run away some more. I’m such a coward.

“You never will know unless you try.” She opened up the drawer of the nightstand and withdrew a cloth purse. “This ought to do it, I think. Catch.” Renna tossed the purse at Nira, who flinched as she caught it, bobbling the little sack awkwardly. It was sheer luck that she managed to keep from spilling it all over the floor.

“Well?” Renna demanded.

Unclenching, Nira rolled the purse in her hand. The cloth was very fine, as was the drawstring cord. If she had a shirt of the same material it would be the nicest thing she owned. “No,” she said slowly. “Nothing.” It was a relief.

“Well, pull it open and touch the money. Maybe it has to be something he touched directly.” Renna came close and peered at the pouch as if it had failed her personally.

Nira slipped two fingers into the aperture of the purse and pulled, loosening the drawstring. Her eyes widened as she saw just how many gem slivers the pouch contained. Blue and red discs glinted at her, and her heart leapt. Is that an emerald flat I see in there? She could live for years on this much. Reverently, she dipped in with a thumb and two fingers and pulled forth a sapphire flat. A month’s hard labor between my fingers, and this man leaves it in a pile by his bed. Her fingertips seemed to vibrate at the touch of the cool, slick gem.

“Still nothing?” the priestess asked, disappointed and impatient.

The vibrating sensation increased, and Nira felt soft whispers caress the back of her skull. The room seemed to spin a little. She could see in her mind’s eye the dark, dirty face of some impoverished backcountry miner as he pulled the sapphire from the ground, his granite pick dropping into the mud as he praised the sky for finding the gem that would keep the foreman from killing him for another week. She could see the band of gem in the shining, uncut stone that would eventually become the flat that she held between her fingers. She saw the grinding wheel that cut the flats away from each other and felt the avaricious fingers of the mining boss as he heaped the freshly minted monies into bags for transportation to the great cities of the Mainland.

She blinked. “Nothing,” she said, hurriedly dropping the money back in the pouch and cinching it tight. “Sorry.” It wasn’t a lie; she hadn’t seen anything about the governor. Somehow, she knew that the less Renna knew about what she saw, the better.

The odious woman grunted. “Might as well hang on to that,” she said, gesturing to the pouch. “We might need it.”

Nira looked up at her, shocked. “You want me… to steal? From the Governor?”

Renna shrugged, passing back over to the hidden passageway. “I doubt he’ll even notice it’s gone. Besides, we’re in the service of Gaia. All wealth comes from her, and she puts it where she pleases.”

I’m in the service of myself, you terrible old woman. She tied the drawstring around the rope she used for a belt and tucked the pouch inside her trousers. The weight of it made her giddy. There was something positively delicious about stealing from someone who had so very much. She would have never taken so much as a chipped pearl flat from one of her neighbors, but this was different. It didn’t even feel wrong.

“No more dawdling. Either he’s down below somewhere or he’s not. I don’t want to have made this trip for nothing.” With that, the Hand snatched up her stolen glowpod and marched into the dark stairwell. Nira took a deep breath and followed. Having the money tucked into her pants was emboldening, somehow. That’s stupid. If someone wants to put a spear in me or a thorn in my eye, a pile of gem chips isn’t going to do anything. There was no logic to it. Still, it made a difference.

The stairs wound deeply down in a tunnel of quarried stone. A