Free Gateway by Sharon Shinn Page A

but he was looking down, studying the swirls the currents had left behind.
    “See that?” he said when they were about fifty yards from the bank. “Looks like there was a little groove in the bottom of the riverbed, and a whole pile of stones collected in the middle. Let’s start there.”
    There were maybe five hundred other people fanning out to take up positions in the dammed river—male, female, old, young, heiren,cangbai, Han. Most of them wore thick, high rubber boots and carried a variety of sacks and tools, but a few waded out barefoot and crouched near the mud line, sorting through the debris with their hands.
    “So, what are we looking for?” Daiyu wanted to know.
    Kalen dredged a wire net through the top layer of mud and shook it till most of the soil filtered out. Left behind were about a dozen rocks of all sizes and composition.
    “A qiji can’t form in the presence of certain minerals, so you can leave behind anything that’s got streaks of black or red in it,” he said picking out three or four stones, showing them to her, and tossing them away. “But anything that’s this shade of gray or rose—that could be a qiji . Save those.”
    She looked doubtfully at the rocks remaining in his wire mesh. That still left a lot of possibilities. “Where shall I start?” she asked.
    He pointed at a slick of mud a few feet away. “There’s some buildup right over there. See what you find.”
    A little reluctantly, she took a few steps from his side. She had been nervous about walking this far out into the mud, but she hadn’t wanted to be left behind on the riverbank. Here on Jia,shedidn’tactuallyfeelright—shedidn’tactuallyfeelsafe—unless she was near Kalen.
    Once she made it to the small tumble of debris that Kalen had indicated, she scooped up her first collection of stones with the long-handled sieve. Of the ten rocks she shook free of the mud, four were black and one was veined with blurry copper. But the rest were a soft, chipped grayish rose, and she dumped them in the shapeless sack she wore on a strap over her shoulder.
    This could be a really long day.
    She got a rhythm down in the next half hour—bend, scoop, shake, sort, bend again. In addition to stones, she brought up bits of broken glass, fish bones, unidentifiable scraps of metal, what looked like animal teeth, twigs and clumps of bark, the occasional live worm. Twice when she sorted through her collection of debris, she picked up ordinary gray rocks and felt a tingle against her fingertips. By this time, Kalen was too far away for her to shout out a question, so she tossed those stones in the sack just in case.
    By noon she was famished and thirsty, even though she had brought a handful of crackers and a full water bottle to see her through the morning. She was just about to tramp back to Kalen to ask how much longer they would be working when the air was filled with the silver riffle of dozens of tiny bells.
    “Daiyu!” Kalen was calling before she’d even registered what the pretty noise might mean. “They’re going to raise the gates! Out of the river!”
    “Eek!”she squealed, and tried to fight her way faster through the heavy mud. Kalen laughed and caught up with her, putting a hand under her elbow.
    “They give you time to get out before they lift the gates,” he assured her.
    “It might take me longer than they think to get through the mud,” she said breathlessly.
    “How’d you do?” he said.
    “I don’t have any idea! I picked up a lot of rocks, though.”
    “Hand me your bag. I’ll carry it for you.”
    “I can carry it myself,” she said indignantly. But she didn’t protest too much when he simply reached over and lifted it from her shoulder, settling the strap across his chest.
    “Not very heavy,” he teased. “You must have thrown away a lot more rocks than you kept.”
    “I thought I was supposed to.”
    “Never know what you might have left behind.”
    They were almost at the riverbank when