Eye of the Ocean Book 3 Ji'jin Station

Eye of the Ocean – Book 3: Ji’Jin Station
She had been on worlds where the night sky was the color of his eyes. They
spoke to her of a mix of hope and resignation, more words than the shake of his
head offered. If she touched him, would he be real?
Finally, it was Oimit's words she heard, not his. “Empress, I'm not intending to
hide. It's the island, from inside the diamond mouth.” Plainly spoken, stripped of
anything that might reveal how she felt at the challenge.
There was no balance to the Zimmer, no checks on what she was. The
woman's perfection tore at her more than Tu'pin's did, upsetting her without
granting recourse. “An island?” she said, letting the cold of her tone provide what
solace it could.
Oimit responded as plainly as before. “Part of it. In the diamond, it repeats to
make a full circle out of what is about a third here.” She put her bowl down,
empty.
“Yes. Our sources aren't as complete.” Dreams and the remnants of the flitter
Net, the island already shattered in both. In the days between now and when
word had arrived from Rigyant, she had gone deeper for other dreams, other
memories, and found she couldn't hold them more than she could hold time with
her bare hands.
Fresh tea. A more complex tea ritual, with Cayse prompting her responses
until she fell into the sequence. With it came the sound of Kascin's flute, a faint,
simple melody that matched the exchanges, repeating over and over but seeming
to grow with each passage of the sound around the stone garden. The reed had
come home, Poss a’ltic thought. Camerat to Camerat. The boy sat cross-legged in
the door of the flitter, playing as though to himself alone.
Sour, a stronger bite to the tea, she held the tiny bowl herself and let it cool.
The reed garden was hot and very humid and the sound of the flute was putting
her on edge. She didn't like this enclosed space and the music only defined it
more clearly. A trap, a prison, her mind whispered. But for who? Another
woman's life or simply too close to her own dreams?
“What we saw in the diamond was Camerat, quite obviously,” she continued at
last. The bowl fell, the tea wetting the sand; she had lost all sense of holding it.
Cayse picked it up without comment. “And the legends besides, from the Lady
Cult where there is only one god, ever... There aren't many places in Cam'lt
Temple where they could have kept someone who had unstable access to
overpattern.”
She looked to where A'in waited by the flitter and nodded, he walked over
heavily. No need for him to catch dignity, he wore his pride quite as openly as his
anger and contempt. As he knelt beside her, she felt that the familiar tension of
his body was heightened, he was drawn taunt. He didn't touch her.
“Just shaped glass and silver wire,” she said, keeping her eyes on the girdle he
placed on the tea splashed sand in front of her. “Temple made - a restricted
Laurel Hickey www.2morrow.bc.ca