The Fire Opal Mechanism
Page 12
Ania stifled a groan. Jorit gritted her teeth. The thing was monstrous.
“That,” whispered the fire opal with Ania’s voice, into Jorit’s ear, “is what you must destroy.”
The press was overwhelmed by the emerald. No longer binding it, the gears were solely a source of ink production for the gem.
Jorit smelled the machine’s inner workings as they heated up to devour another book—The Book of Gems. She blinked, recognizing the acrid scent of mining mixed with the richer tones of inks.
She could feel the gem’s pulse—and hear its fragility. She looked more closely at it when Xachar wasn’t paying attention.
Her miner’s experience paid off—the emerald wasn’t an emerald. It was colored glass. Leaded and fired, with shards of gemstones running through it. All the facets were stained dark—knowledge, ink, and blood curled through them like smoke.
“A fake,” she muttered.
When the inked air around the gem drove her back, Jorit gagged. The smell, the taste of it in her teeth. She coughed then, and Xachar straightened, looking at her with a sad smile, still holding The Book of Gems.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
“It’s a fake gem,” she said to Xachar. “It’s worse than that. It’s—”
Xachar moved closer. “That’s not something you should say. It’s beautiful.”
The press had stopped creating anything but more of itself—of the emerald. And yet Xachar couldn’t see how monstrous it was.
She looked at the boy’s eyes. They were ink-filled. So were his fingernails. He had a small crust of green glass at one wrist. “Xachar, you are in deep danger.”
But Xachar shook his head. “I’m filled with knowledge. I can show you.” He reached for Jorit.
Ania cried out and put two of the blank books on the press. As they slid through the mechanism, the emerald paled, trying to pull ink from empty pages.
Xachar groaned and swung his hand to knock the books from the rollers. They clattered to the floor, splayed and torn.
Xachar reached for Ania. And the clock began to tick faster.
“No!” Ania cried. “Wait. We can’t leave now.”
Jorit lurched forward—Ania couldn’t leave. Not this now. This here.
But it was too late, the clock glowed, and she could feel the heat. And Jorit was falling toward the press, away from Ania. Jorit put her hand out for balance on the press, and the emerald spread quickly, covering her fingers, trapping her.
Calm, stay calm. She tried to tug her hand away. The emerald groaned. Xachar turned from Ania to grab Jorit’s hand and hold it still.
With her other hand, Jorit grasped Ania’s shoulder. “Go,” she said. “Hurry. There’s still time to get this right. They are trying to use the press to change everything.” She could keep Ania from harm. She could help stop the press.
But Ania blinked, her eyes no longer brown and still filled with tears. Her opal-colored eyes gleamed as she whispered, “I know. They’re trying to rewrite the past.”
“You attempted to poison the press!” Xachar countered, his voice breaking. “To hurt the emerald.” In his anger, he pressed Jorit against the machine. The emerald grew faster, up Jorit’s hand, facets tightening around her arm. As the gem grew, she felt things she knew—names, places—draining away.
The room wavered. The smell of ink overpowered her senses.
A woman with a fierce expression, her braid swinging free, stood before Jorit. She held a clock. Jorit felt a memory tug at her, then disappear.
The woman’s eyes blazed. They were beautiful and terrifying. “Time won’t let you rewrite the past, Xachar,” she said, sounding sad.
Then with a yell, the woman raised the clock over her head. An opal glowed, bound within the clock’s bent gears.
The pale, ink-stained boy lunged away from where he’d gripped Jorit, toward the woman. He shouted, “No, I must keep it running!” but the woman brought the clock down hard on the press. The clock’s frame splintered, but its brass gears and the opal they contained jammed into the dark gem, beside Jorit’s trapped arm.
When the clock-bound gem smashed the press, it seemed to scream. The woman screamed with it. And when it screamed, all the ink flooded away, tagging everything in its path with traces.
On Jorit’s face, a small swirl of ink curled. On the woman—Jorit knew her suddenly—Ania’s arm, a swash. Xachar’s eyes filled with the ink and then ran free, in dark tears.
“I didn’t know,” he whispered.
Cracks ran along the emerald with a sound like ice breaking in a Far Reaches harbor.
When a crack spread the length of two facets, more breaks spawned from it, until the fake gem collapsed into dust.
Jorit shook her arms free. She reached for Ania, overwhelmed as all of the memories of their travels flooded back. She knew now what she hadn’t wanted to admit before, in the crush of stopping the press. She didn’t want this person to disappear again.
Ania held her hand tightly.
A loud, creaking groan filled the room.
Without the gem to hold it up, the press listed sideways. Its stressed mechanisms began to disassemble and crack. Pieces fell from it; gears and shafts and rollers struck the floor. When the ink scupper fell away, a cloud of dust rose into the air. As Jorit and Ania held their breath, the dust shaped words that had been stripped from the world in the name of knowledge.
Compendiums of Knowledge stored in the room began to leak. Dark ribbons of ink seeped onto floors and walls.
The ink formed stolen letters, crawling across the floor into words, each one writing itself back, moving fast across the room, under the door, out the windows, in search of their own books, signs, and papers.
Rubbing her arm, Jorit stepped from the room, Ania supporting her. They clutched several books they’d managed to save from the press.
Xachar sped past them into the barracks. Jorit let him go. The ink had left his eyes. Soon he knelt next to a woman who was slowly blinking, the light coming back to her own eyes. “Aunt,” Jorit heard Xachar murmur, “where are the others?”
All around Jorit and Ania, waves of ink swept over the ground and through the air. They followed lines of ink out of the barracks, into East Quadril. Others walked with them, Pressmen and townspeople both, all staring as the ink flowed into words, seeking out the books and shelves where they’d been before.
They passed the library in Quadril, which had been sunk into its foundations. There, words paved the streets outside and decorated the buildings nearby. The blank books Jorit had rescued from the pressroom were soon filled with letters again.
Ania held the former clock’s pieces together in her hands, unconsciously clicking her tongue against the roof of her mouth as she walked until Jorit steadied her.
The librarian lifted her eyes, opal-colored now, and stared at the town, the books in her hands. “Yes, I agree.”
She turned and kissed Jorit’s cheek quickly, almost bashfully. “You didn’t have to stay,” the librarian said.
“Yes I did,” Jorit replied, pulling Ania to a stop in front of the library. “I wanted to see what would happen next.”
“We happened next,” the librarian whispered. “We changed the future. I can see it.”
Jorit felt the librarian’s skin pressed against hers, the glow of her opal eyes and the steam from the pressroom drawing sweat across her palms. She felt the pulse of her heart, like a clock speeding up, and felt her own heart keep time with it.
She ran her fingers across Ania’s cheek. Soft as a moth. Kissed her lips, even softer.
After a moment, she whispered, “We happen next.”
They clasped hands, the last gem-bearer and the thief. Around them, East Quadril erupted in shouts, the Pressmen’s barracks emptied, and the world flooded with words once more.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Tor.com for giving the Gemworld its proper setting. To my editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, and to Irene Gallo, for
their vision; to Lee Harris, Mordicai Knode, Tommy Arnold, Anita Okoye, Rachel Bass, Lauren Hougen, and Ana Deboo.
To Paul Race and to Chris Wagner, who let me mess about with metals, stones, and oxygen-acetylene torches. To my first library, Tredyffrin, and to many of my favorites, including the Peabody, Trinity, the Enoch Pratt, the Library of Congress, the Bodleian, Northwest Akron, the Alderman, the New York Public Library, and the Free Library of Philadelphia. To all the librarians and timekeepers in my life, friends, family, and those I’ve met in the stacks.
To E. Catherine Tobler, Kelly Lagor, Nicole Feldringer, Chris Gerwel, Lauren Teffeau, Aliette de Boddard, Ryan Labay, Lynne M. Thomas, Siobhan Carroll, A. T. Greenblatt, Sarah Pinsker, A. C. Wise, and my agent, Barry Goldblatt, who were all very patient with facets of this story.
To everyone who loves books, or time, or who knows that a little bit of time travel happens whenever a page (or a phrase) is well turned, this is for you.
About the Author
Photograph by Dan Magus
FRAN WILDE’s novels and short stories have been finalists for three Nebula Awards, two Hugo Awards, and a World Fantasy Award. They include her Andre Norton– and Compton Crook–winning debut novel, Updraft; its sequels, Cloudbound and Horizon; the middle-grade novel Riverland; and the novelette “The Jewel and Her Lapidary.” Her short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Tor.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Uncanny, Shimmer, Nature, and the 2017 Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror anthology. She lives in Philadelphia with her family.
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Also by Fran Wilde
Updraft
Cloudbound
Horizon
The Jewel and Her Lapidary
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Begin reading
1.
2
3.
4.
5.
5.5
6.
7.
7.5
8.
9.
10.
11.
11.5
12.
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Fran Wilde
Copyright Page
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novella are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE FIRE OPAL MECHANISM
Copyright © 2019 by Fran Wilde
All rights reserved.
Cover illustration by Tommy Arnold
Cover design by Christine Foltzer
Edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden
A Tor.com Book
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www.tor.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
ISBN 978-1-250-19653-8 (ebook)
ISBN 978-1-250-19654-5 (trade paperback)
First Edition: June 2019
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