The Fire Opal Mechanism

by Fran Wilde

  “You said you were good with tools. I say you were lucky. Good men have been lost trying to fix this press. Getting too close to the”—the Presskeeper gestured at where the gem rested, hidden now—“has consequences.”

  “It just felt like what I was doing was right,” Xachar said.

  “Just felt like . . . ,” the Presskeeper sputtered. “This press, and its workings, are known to only a few, young man.” He closed the door and stood before it, hands forming fists at his hips. “If you’ve been sent from another Pressman faction to spy on the Midnight Emerald, you will not make it out of here.”

  “No! I crawled into the workings and fixed the jam, then stayed to fix the piston,” Xachar answered, feeling a little breathless now at the thought. Something about what the Presskeeper was saying nagged at the back of his mind. He began to sweat again. “I’m no spy! I was told to keep the press fed! That’s all I wanted to do!” His voice cracked with panic.

  “You’ve seen a state secret,” the Presskeeper said. “You have two choices. Work here, sleep close by, speaking to no one outside the barracks. Or . . .”

  “Or?”

  “We’re at a sort of war, young man. There are spies in war. I thought we were safe because so few can get as close to the Midnight Emerald as you did, and fewer still could leave this building afterward.” The Presskeeper frowned. “But you’re not drooling or shouting about visions. We are tasked with a very important responsibility here. Knowledge for everyone. And anyone who turns against us is committing treason.”

  Treason? Xachar wondered. Against Knowledge? But he bit his tongue. Agreed to stay with the press, its greenish light, its strange noises.

  “Then I’ll try you out as my assistant Presskeeper. You will fix it when it breaks and clear all jams. You’ll keep the press fed, both manuscripts and ink.” He said it with the sort of relief in his voice Xachar had heard from his parents when he’d gotten old enough to mind the cows. “Though no one’s lasted long enough yet to be useful.”

  Xachar was useful.

  “What ink does the press require?” Xachar began. He felt a strange mix of triumph—he had a job, he hadn’t failed—and fear—he wasn’t sure he wanted this particular job. In order to do it, he’d have to keep information from others. Which wasn’t what he’d wanted at the parade so long ago. Knowledge for Everyone. That was important.

  But sometimes, to achieve a goal, compromises must be made. Xachar knew this. The Pressmen pairing with the Western Mountains, for one.

  “The ink from the manuscripts deepens the emerald’s power, which keeps the press running. The dust from the press has certain properties. . . . Sit down.”

  Xachar sat.

  “The old gems of the Jeweled Valley. Heard of them?” the Presskeeper began. “They did spectacular things. Hid a whole kingdom from armies for centuries. Destroyed minds. Dangerous things. All of them gone now. But the emerald inside the press is sort of like that. As long as it has ink and paper to keep running.”

  “And what did you do when it broke before I got here?” He had to ask.

  The Presskeeper jerked his head toward the hall. “I’d drag the latest operator from the room and fix it myself.”

  And the Presskeeper then began to speak of things so strange that Xachar could only nod. It would be many days before he truly understood, and by then he would know more than the Presskeeper did.

  5.

  Jorit

  Between one moment and the next, Jorit was torn from the sunken library’s dusty confines and dropped unceremoniously on the forest floor, Ania beside her.

  The Far Reaches’ ocean breezes were gone. The gulls, silent; the seashell-riddled crunch of the paving stones outside the library, exchanged for mud.

  How?

  Pine tar, burning. The bitter smell of a fired cannon. Jorit coughed, pawing through a haze of smoke, and in the near distance, she spotted a palace built in an ancient style, in flames. No refuge there.

  For a moment she wondered what wealth lay inside such a palace, and whether it would be worth looking. But the clock still ticked against her hand and called her to reason. Ania clung to the device too.

  A river glinted between evergreen trunks. Sparks against dark shadows, instead of the Far Reaches’ lowland moonlight silvering the archipelago’s edges.

  Where are we? “What happened?” Jorit whispered, and started to crawl away, trying to stay low.

  Eyes squeezed shut, Ania cried out in fear and grabbed for her, nearly dropping the timepiece. “Don’t! Don’t let go.”

  Jorit bent toward her, the panic in her voice too much to ignore. The air whistled as a stone was heaved from the castle wall. The projectile flew right over their heads.

  “You don’t let go, I won’t let go,” Ania whispered. Her voice had an odd lilt to it.

  Jorit held tight to both Ania and the timepiece. “I won’t,” she promised. Ania was shaking violently. So was Jorit.

  “We’re in danger here too!” Ania whispered, even as Jorit wondered where “here” was.

  “Not the Far Reaches. Not anywhere near . . . ” she said. “How do we find a safe place to go?”

  They had to get away from falling rocks and fires. Away from attacking guards wearing ancient Western Mountains insignia.

  Ancient Western Mountains . . . Jorit gasped again, breathed in smoke, and doubled over in another coughing fit. “We’re in the valley.”

  Another look around once she stopped coughing, and she was certain. This was the valley of her great-grandmothers’ childhood. Maybe earlier. By the time Jorit was born, before her family fled, there’d been many fewer trees. Still, she’d know the woods and the river anywhere, and the ruins, somewhat.

  But evergreens weren’t the right trees—and the ruins . . . weren’t ruins. Jorit’s limbs grew heavy with panic.

  A young woman ran past them, dressed in a tunic that Jorit could only think of as archaic. Her hair was snarled in knots, and her face streaked with tears. She didn’t look left or right, just dashed for the river, heedless of Ania’s soft whimper at the sight of her.

  “It’s not safe!” Ania said again, more out of shock than fear. She started to pull away but still clung to the timepiece. Jorit refused to let go of it either. A worry tickled her. The clock. The cloud. The ancient castle.

  The clock began to tick faster.

  “The disappeared Pressmen. The Master Archivist,” Ania whispered again, her eyes wide. “You sent them here?” She looked around, as if for a lost friend. The clock gears grated loudly. “No. Not here. Too early.”

  “Who are you talking to?” Jorit wheeled on her companion. “You did this to us?”

  “I don’t think so?” Ania said. “I—” Her eyes widened. Jorit looked over her shoulder. More soldiers came from the palace.

  “Answer me!” Jorit pulled the librarian and the clock behind a large stone formation. Ania resisted the whole way as the clock grew heavier in their hands. “Or help get us out of here.”

  “I don’t know how!”

  Jorit considered the clock—their only weapon—and whether she could use it against a soldier. She thought for a moment about leaving Ania to them while she escaped. But when she looked at the older woman, her braid disheveled, confusion overtaking fear in her brown-flecked eyes, and the clock both of them held tight to, Jorit knew she couldn’t do it. The librarian had helped her—a thief. She would help the librarian.

  She hissed in pain as the clock case heated up. The beat of the clock escalated until it again crescendoed, and Jorit’s heart kept time with it.

  “We have to keep the clock safe,” Ania said. “It’s our only way home.”

  Jorit scoffed. “It’s a broken timepiece with a cooling problem.” But she knew it was more. She’d seen the glow. Had felt the heat. Even if the grating and ticking didn’t sound like anything but an old clock.

  In the shade of their hiding place, Ania’s eyes rolled back into her head, and Jorit grabbed her before she fell.
She lowered her unwished-for companion to the soot-marred grass while sparks dropped all around them.

  “The soldiers, the valley’s fall, the Jewel,” Ania whispered. “Everything begins. Everything ends. I’ll save what I can.”

  Then, as before, the ticks seemed to stretch out.

  Hair prickled on the back of Jorit’s neck. Her arms sprung up goose bumps. “Teach me not to steal from a library,” she whispered, not letting go of the clock or the librarian. For once, the thing Jorit knew best was that she was afraid.

  But it wasn’t the clock that frightened her. Ania had said “the valley’s fall.” The Sixth Kingdom—they were watching it end. And if they weren’t careful, Jorit realized, they might disappear with it.

  Ania’s murmurs grew softer. Then paused as if someone answered. Jorit strained her ears, but all she heard was cries for help from the distant palace.

  Another figure ran toward the river, dragging a cloak filled with shards of leaded crystal. In the firelight, the green fabric looked as if it were bleaching white. The glass looked black and green, the color of the Pressmen’s gems.

  The clock ticks became one long sound, and the world drew gray and close again. Jorit could hear her heartbeat in her ears. Her breath stretched out painfully, as if she were being pulled along a thread, becoming the thread; it was sickening, almost maddening. She held on tight to Ania. To anything familiar as she watched the clock.

  The timepiece’s hands spun backward. The bezel points seemed to all glow at once, even as the ticks became one long noise and the world faded around them.

  When Jorit came to, Ania was gone, and the timepiece too.

  * * *

  She lay beside an alley-shadowed puddle, the sewer stink wretched all around. Between the gap of buildings, sounds of a parade echoed. A flash of blue and white fabric appeared. Had Western Mountains armies found her valley hiding spot?

  No, Jorit wasn’t in the valley. The building wall bore a sign for a restaurant in East Quadril. One Jorit’s grandparents had often remembered fondly. The sign was new.

  Jorit got to her feet. There were no marching soldiers here either. The street was filled with banners that said Share Knowledge. Men and women wore blue and white sashes, carried freshly written placards.

  Pressmen.

  But different ones than Jorit knew. These Pressmen smiled and waved, and there weren’t that many of them. The parade barely stretched three blocks. Few of the marchers wore the familiar blue and white, just pins and patches with a book on them, mostly handmade. People on the street cheered as the Pressmen handed out leaflets. Two men carried a trestle of pale green gems in the parade’s midst. A banner on the trestle read Knowledge: More Valuable Than Gems.

  Jorit squinted. She could make out glass gems—certainly fakes, discernable even from a distance. What were the Pressmen up to?

  As she watched, a Pressman stepped away from the parade to relieve himself against the alley wall. When he spotted her, he stepped quickly back out into the street with a swish of rough cotton workman’s clothes.

  Ania appeared around the corner and pulled Jorit away from the parade. “You’re awake!”

  “Where are we?”

  “In Quadril,” she said, and hesitated. “I think. But this march happened decades ago. My mother watched it from her parents’ window, until her grandmother caught her and pulled her away. She called it the Parade of the Last Gems and the First Knowledge.”

  Jorit knew the name. “You’re from Quadril?” She almost said “also” but bit her tongue.

  Ania shook her head. “My family is. I was born in the Far Reaches. But they’re here. Somewhere close. Why are we here?”

  Jorit frowned. “Our ancestors were neighbors, then.” But she knew they hadn’t been. Her family was from the valley. No one took you seriously if you said you were from the valley—so much bad luck there. So many strange things had happened there. Once, the Pressmen had been interested in things like that. They’d offered a high price for information about the valley and its gems to the nearby mining school. She and Marton had gotten in trouble for refusing. Now Jorit didn’t want that kind of attention ever again.

  If her family had been scholars like Ania’s, Jorit would have been able to attend the mining school without a problem, instead of struggling to gather the fees. But they also would have been driven out when the Pressmen really took hold. The universities in Quadril were the first to close.

  Instead, the hum of giant machinery printing the day’s news and readings had been one of Jorit’s earliest memories, and joys. Before. But that was in the future. Now the Pressmen were only a parade.

  “Your family left after the first marches. Mine stayed.” Jorit waved her hand. She felt the air move against her skin. Heard the cries from the marchers. Smelled the roast nuts the street hawkers had rushed to bring out once they saw the parade coming.

  She was here and now. She didn’t believe it. Wouldn’t believe it.

  These Pressmen were so different from the ones who sacked universities. They were friendly. From the looks of their outfits and the gem display, not altogether well unified yet either.

  Ania nodded. “I can prove it.” She held out a fresh leaflet. This one was printed roughly on grasspaper, in an old style. No. Jorit looked closer; it was machine set, the letter forms rough and hand-pressed. A very new art, for the time.

  “Printed.”

  Ania nodded, taking the paper back. More knowledge is better. Learn how to spot accuracy. “I remember Grandmother talking about this march,” she said. “Everyone thought the Pressmen seemed smart.” She shuddered. “That they’d add to the local arts and culture, not—”

  “Control it?” Jorit nodded. “Something changed.”

  The alley grew lighter as the sun rose high in the sky. The street began to steam. More smells: horses, sweat.

  More shouts, this time from the street. Men and women wearing academic robes marking them as members of the two nearest local universities yelled. Their arms swung and their robes belled out as they threw fruit. In an instant, a Pressman’s white cotton shirt turned brown and streaked with tomato seeds. Jorit smelled rot.

  “You cannot use what you can’t understand; knowledge refined is better than knowledge to hand!” More academics shouted the Pressmen down. The crowd seemed to stutter, its affections pulled both ways.

  The Pressmen still smiled, but their parade slowed. “We differ in our opinions, that is all,” one of the bearers of the false gems said.

  “You are wrong! That is worse!” a professor shouted. “You need education, not just knowledge. Progress cannot happen without refinement. Discourse.”

  “But you would choose who gets to talk. Who progresses.”

  Both sides now were stilled in the street; the fruit had transformed into fists.

  Nausea rose in Jorit’s throat. Her grandmother had never mentioned there was an altercation. No one was right here.

  Leaflets scattered on the ground as small brawls began to knot the parade. Jorit pulled Ania’s arm, but the librarian stared across the street. “Did you see that woman?”

  A young Pressman fell to the ground. Her companions carried her to the sidewalk.

  “What?” Jorit looked. “Who?”

  “Handing out flyers. Gone now,” Ania said. “She looked so familiar.”

  Jorit peered toward the street and the parade, but dragged her friend back into the shadows as another Pressman took shelter in the alley, with two friends, calling, “Come out, friends, and help us.”

  You’re not our friends, Jorit thought, pulling Ania against the wall. And we must not be pulled into this. But it was too late. Sunlight shadowed the Pressmen’s faces and shoulders, their fruit-stained placards blocking more of the sun as they stepped between the buildings.

  Fear can slow things down, same as sorrow, she knew. But even as time seemed to still, she saw that they were trapped.

  Another dead end.

  “How did we escape befo
re?” Jorit whispered. “Now would be a good time to do it again. It’s not safe here either.”

  The sounds of fighting faded, then belled again as the few remaining Pressmen dropped their placards and ran for cover. The alley-bound Pressmen sighed and ducked deeper into the shadows for cover too. They didn’t ask for Ania and Jorit’s help again.

  Ania stared at the clock in her hands. “I wish I knew.” Fear tightened her voice around each word. As she spoke, the timepiece began to tick faster.

  A new time wasn’t necessarily better, Jorit realized. The clock’s one setting seemed to be danger. Will we ever see home again? she wondered. Not necessarily the where, but the when.

  “Not back to the library, but to our own time? Perhaps?” Yes. She wanted to live in that time, or at least live past it. Jorit couldn’t keep the urgency out of her voice.

  “I don’t know how,” Ania said. She stared at the clock case, which was growing hotter. Glowing, in fact. “All right,” she said.

  “Who are you talking to?” Jorit wanted to shake her.

  One lone Pressman walked into the street. He held a piece of lead glass. Raised it to catch the sun and refract it into the shadows. Green-tinted light angled toward them.

  Then the flyer Ania held began to lose its color. And the glass? The prism turned the gray-green color of the page’s ink.

  Ania crumpled the flyer into her pocket as the prism turned dark as midnight. Instead of glass, the Pressman now held what looked like an emerald, much like the gems on the trencher, but far darker.

  He turned it toward the academics. Meantime, the other Pressmen came after the librarian and the thief, even as more Pressmen advanced on the scholars.

  Jorit pressed Ania as far back in the alley as she could, climbing a pile of trash that was pushed against the wall, trying to get higher, to buy more time, to become part of the scenery.

  This time, there was no clockroom to hide in, no way to disappear. “Come on, clock!”

  Ania whimpered as a Pressman grabbed roughly at her boot. She stumbled on the garbage pile but did not drop the clock or the flyer. The inside of the paper still had ink on it.