by Martha Wells
Emilie couldn’t help thinking about what Daniel had said. She had never considered the idea of going to the university before, it not being something her family would have encouraged. She wasn’t sure she wanted to consider it now, though she had always liked learning new things. She wasn’t sure she wanted to take on the work of a university student, particularly as it would surely mean curtailing her duties as Miss Marlende’s assistant. Even if she could afford the tuition and living expenses, which she couldn’t, she wasn’t sure they would let her in. She didn’t think her village school would compare well to a school like Karthea’s, or Shipands Academy, and surely she would need more basic instruction before going on to advanced classes.
Daniel found the right street, which curved away from the shops and up a hill. There were three-story townhouses along here, crowded together with no front gardens, their stones weathered with age. The carvings of ships and fanciful fish and sea serpents above the windows and pediments suggested they had originally been ship captains’ or cargo merchants’ homes. It was too quiet for Emilie to tell who lived there now, though some of the houses had signs indicating there were rooms to let. Professor Abindon’s didn’t have a sign, and while it was as old as the others and a little crumbly on the edges, its stoop was recently washed and the windows on the upper floors were open to catch the sea breeze.
“I normally send a wire or letter when I visit,” Daniel was saying as they climbed the steps to the door. “But of course this time I didn’t have an opportunity. I hope she’s home.”
Daniel knocked on the door. A housekeeper in a somewhat floury apron opened it, and the first indication that Professor Abindon didn’t keep a terribly formal household was when the housekeeper exclaimed, “Why, it’s Daniel!” She turned to shout down the hallway, “Professor, Daniel is here!”
“Well, tell him to come in!” a voice shouted back, but the housekeeper was already ushering them into the front hall.
It was small and a bit dark but smelled of beeswax polish and bread-baking. Before they had a chance to move, a tall figure burst out of a door down the hallway. It exclaimed, “Daniel, why hasn’t Marlende or Vale answered my wires? What the hell is wrong with them?”
“Uh,” Daniel began, and the housekeeper gave him a gentle prod down the hall. Emilie followed, now certain this visit was going to be even more interesting than she had thought. Daniel said, “They’ve been away. Very far away. They just arrived back in Silk Harbor yesterday, but they meant to leave last night before dark.”
“They were here?” Daylight fell through the open doorway, illuminating a tall woman with silver-gray hair that was as wild as Emilie’s on a bad day. Some of it was confined in a band, but the rest had escaped to hang in frizzy locks around her face. She was strikingly beautiful, with a mix of Southern and Northern Menaen descent in her features and her light brown coloring. “Why didn’t they… What were they doing here?”
“Didn’t you see the newspapers this morning?”
“I don’t read the newspapers; it’s a lot of gossip and idiocy. Why was Marlende in the newspapers?” She frowned at Emilie, though more in confusion than disapproval. “Who are you?”
“I’m Emilie Esperton, Miss Marlende’s assistant,” Emilie said, but Professor Abindon was already dragging Daniel into the parlor.
It was a more of a study, Emilie saw immediately, with tall windows facing the house’s tiny overgrown back garden letting in morning light. The walls were lined with shelves crammed with books and papers. More books and papers and writing materials covered the desk and the library table, but a small sofa and two armchairs were free of clutter. Flustered, Daniel said, “We went to the Hollow World, Professor; we used the aetheric currents.” He dropped down into a chair and Emilie took the other. “It worked just like you and Dr Marlende thought, but we had mechanical trouble and couldn’t return. Miss Marlende had to go to Lord Engal to get help–”
“Engal! Vale went to Engal? Was she out of her mind?” Professor Abindon waved her hands. “Why didn’t she come to me?”
Daniel opened his mouth but no words came out. Professor Abindon shook her head sharply. “I’m sorry, I don’t intend to drag you into the middle of this. Just go on.”
Emilie wondered what “this” was, but she thought Daniel needed help and she dove in. “Yes, we should tell it from the beginning. Daniel, start from when you and the others took the airship to the Hollow World.”
Daniel took a deep breath and launched into the story, telling it as briefly as he could, given Professor Abindon’s impatient expression. As he spoke, Emilie watched the professor’s face. She was older than she had looked at first, though the lines around her eyes and mouth were slight. And she looked vaguely familiar, as though she resembled someone Emilie knew, though she couldn’t think who it would be.
When he got to Emilie’s part of the story, Professor Abindon considered her, her expression skeptical. “How do we know you aren’t working for Ivers?”
“I distracted him while Miss Marlende shot him,” Emilie said.
“And me,” Daniel added ruefully, indicating his arm. “I was in the way.”
“Hmm,” the professor said, but didn’t comment further.
When they were done, Professor Abindon said, “At least Marlende had a good excuse for not answering my wires, but this doesn’t change the situation.”
“What situation?” Daniel asked. “What was so urgent?”
Professor Abindon started to speak, then hesitated, eyeing Emilie thoughtfully. She still doesn’t trust me, Emilie thought, which she supposed was fair. Fair, but not pleasant. Though she was burning with curiosity, Emilie said, “I can walk back to my cousin’s house.”
As she started to stand, the professor gestured impatiently. “Don’t go. If you work for Vale… I trust her judgment. Come upstairs, I’ll show you both.”
They followed Professor Abindon up the narrow stairs to the second floor, then kept following her up a still narrower set of stairs to the third, then up again to what should have been a small attic. Emilie followed the others through the door at the top of the stairs and saw why the professor had chosen this house.
The room had once been made into an artist’s studio, with one whole side of the pitched roof turned into windows, which could be unlatched and propped open with metal poles. Another set of large windows looked down into the back garden, so the room was full of light. A tiny spiral stair led up to a trapdoor in the roof, which Emilie bet opened into a small railed platform atop the house. She had seen them on many of the houses in Silk Landing and knew they were common for sea captains’ and ship owners’ homes. But Professor Abindon wasn’t using this room for artistic endeavors or to watch the ships come into port.
A large gleaming brass telescope stood on a stand beneath the slanted windows, pointed toward the sky. Emilie had seen drawings of big stargazing telescopes before, but never one in person. This one had extra parts, wheels and platter-like contraptions, mounted above the eyepiece, as if for fine-tuning the view. A big table in the center of the room was spread with maps and drawing paper. Pencils and inkstands and broken pen nibs were scattered around instruments that looked like they were for navigation. Emilie thought she recognized a sextant, from the same book with the drawings of telescopes, but the rest were a mystery.
Professor Abindon went immediately to the telescope and looked through the eyepiece. She straightened up and carefully adjusted some knobs. She beckoned Daniel over. “Look here.”
Emilie hadn’t thought there was much point to using telescopes in the daylight. But Daniel didn’t object, going immediately to peer through the eyepiece. He said, “What am I looking at, Professor?”
“Nothing, yet.” Professor Abindon took one of the plates attached to the telescope and turned it upright. Emilie saw the silvery stuff running through glass insets on the metal plate and realized it was a device for viewing aether. An aetheric telescope? she wondered, taking an involuntary step forward. Sh
e had known there were aether currents in the air, just like there were in the sea, but she hadn’t thought about what the devices for detecting them might look like. And did the aetheric streams in the air lead to another world, like the aetheric streams in the seas? Emilie’s heart started to pound in excitement.
Suddenly the professor’s claim of something urgent to show to Dr Marlende began to seem far more worrisome.
The professor slid the plate into a slot in the telescope, made another adjustment, and Daniel gasped. “How long has it been there?”
The professor’s voice was grim. “I first noticed it twenty-two days ago. It was much smaller then.” She pushed her hair back from her face in an exasperated gesture. “I should have gone to Meneport then, instead of just sending a wire. But it’s been getting steadily larger. I kept expecting it to stop.”
Daniel straightened up and motioned Emilie over. She hurried forward and leaned down to the eyepiece, trying to look as if she knew what she was doing. Fortunately, it was fairly straightforward, and she found the right angle to see through the glass lens without much trouble.
She saw intense blue sky, and in the center, a ring of brilliant colors – reds, greens, deeper blues than the sky – with a silver-white spiral woven through it. A description of it would have sounded like something rather beautiful, rather like the description of lines of dark storm clouds against the sky sounded like something beautiful until the hail and wind started. Emilie stood up and stared at the professor. “It looks like a hole.”
“That’s because it is a hole,” the professor said, “It’s an opening in an aetheric stream.”
“But why would that happen?” Emilie said. She wasn’t sure if that was a stupid question or not, but the hole didn’t look like something that was supposed to happen. It looked wrong, strange, threatening.
“That’s what we’d like to know,” Daniel said, leaning down for another look through the eyepiece.
“Yes,” Professor Abindon said, “There are a number of possible reasons I can think of, none of them good. But the one I’m rather afraid of is that it’s opening because something is making it open. Something is out there, pushing its way through to our world.”
CHAPTER TWO
Late that afternoon, Emilie, Daniel, and Professor Abindon boarded the fast steamer for Meneport. Daniel thought they would arrive perhaps half a day behind the Marlendes.
In a highly agitated conversation that morning, Daniel had convinced the professor that they could reach the Marlendes more quickly by going directly to Meneport themselves. Daniel had pointed out that the Marlendes were likely to spend all day today at the shipyards with the damaged airship. And Emilie had thought, though she didn’t say it aloud, that if Miss Marlende had been ignoring the professor’s wires, she wasn’t likely to bring them immediately to her father’s attention once they reached their home again. Obviously, there was some sort of disagreement or sore point between Professor Abindon and Miss Marlende.
Emilie had suggested that they could send a wire directly to Lord Engal, who was likely to have secretaries and so on who would bring it quickly to his attention.
Professor Abindon had glared at her. “You want us to send a wire to Lord Engal to tell him to tell Marlende to read his mail?”
“Yes,” Emilie had replied. “Why not?” Emilie was torn between the feeling that she should be showing more respect for the professor, and the feeling that she wasn’t particularly in the mood to be spoken sharply to for what was a perfectly valid idea. It made her miss Rani more than she already did.
“Hmm,” the professor had said, eyeing her again.
But in the end, they had decided it was best to deliver the news in person, not least because then they would also be able to deliver the extensive notes and drawings that the professor had made, chronicling the aetheric disruption’s first appearance and progress. “Aetheric disruption” was what the professor had told Emilie to call it after Emilie had referred to it as a sky hole. Apparently, that sounded rude, though Emilie hadn’t figured out why yet.
Emilie and Daniel had gone to Karthea’s house to pack their belongings. Emilie hadn’t explained to Karthea about the aetheric disruption, mainly because every explanation she rehearsed as they walked back to the house had sounded alarmist at best. The professor wasn’t even sure it was something they needed to worry about yet, though she seemed to feel that worrying about it was the best course. So Emilie had just said that the professor needed to speak to Dr Marlende urgently and had missed him when he was in town, and that they were going to escort her to Meneport, and that Emilie would write as soon as she had a chance.
By the time they reached the port to meet the professor, Daniel had had the idea to send a wire directly to the office of the docks where the Marlendes would take the airship. It might not be delivered before they arrived, but it was worth a try, and they were sure to reach Dr Marlende more quickly if he knew they were coming.
While Daniel was busy, Emilie took the money he had given her and purchased three passages on the steamer, something she had never done before. She considered it her first act as Miss Marlende’s assistant that didn’t involve being shot at.
This was a fast steamer, and they should arrive at Meneport sometime late that night, so they hadn’t bothered with a cabin. On the second deck of the steamer, there was a large glassed-in space with upholstered benches for seating. Daniel was ensconced on one with their bags, reading though one of the notebooks Professor Abindon had brought.
Emilie was too restless to sit down and went out on deck to stand at the railing. They were leaving the harbor, the cliffs turned golden by the afternoon sun. The wind was cool and refreshing, the sky blue and dotted with white clouds. Emilie leaned on the railing and watched the coast go by, feeling the now-familiar chug of the engines through the deck boards. There were gray stone houses in the little pockets of green fields in between the cliffs, with narrow sandy beaches at their feet. Sailing boats and a small tug clung close to the shore, avoiding the path of the larger steamer.
Professor Abindon moved up to stand at the railing beside her. After a moment, the professor said, “Daniel looks tired.”
“He hasn’t had much time to recover,” Emilie said, and realized neither had she. Only a few days ago, they had been fighting for their lives, and now they were eating dinner with Karthea and buying steamer passages and worrying about what the newspapers printed about them. Even with the aetheric disruption to be concerned about, it didn’t seem real.
“I suppose…” The professor’s gloved hands tightened on the railing. She seemed to change her mind about what she had intended to say. “Vale was well when you left her?”
“Yes, very well. Oh, she was tired. So was Dr Marlende.” Emilie realized then what the professor wanted to ask. She was upset when she found out that Miss Marlende hadn’t answered any of her wires. And Miss Marlende must not have bothered to open any of them, or she would have surely taken a moment to reply. The professor and Miss Marlende must have quarreled about something fairly serious. Emilie tried to explain her position without implying that she suspected there had been an argument. “I wasn’t her assistant until after we got to Silk Harbor. I mean, I wasn’t there when she and Kenar were trying to find a way to get to the aetheric stream, when they went to Lord Engal for help. So… I really don’t know anything about that.” She winced, having the feeling she had just made the whole thing all that much more awkward.
From the disgruntled expression on the professor’s face, she apparently agreed. Professor Abindon said, under her breath, “Well, we’ll see when we get there.”
They arrived late that night. Emilie had gone inside to doze on one of the hard benches, but woke in time to watch from the deck as the ship approached the port.
Mist drifted across the water, but she could see the gas and electric lights of the city sparking in the darkness like low-lying stars, hinting at the shapes of buildings and the presence of streets. She hadn’t s
een this before, the Sovereign’s departure having been far too abrupt to enjoy the view.
Closer, misty lights marked ships floating at anchor, or sitting at their docks, passenger steamships and cargo vessels, and a few big sailing ships that were probably yachts belonging to nobles or other rich families. Some of the docks were dark, but some were brightly lit as ships were loaded with cargo or supplies or allowed passengers to board for an early morning sailing. The dock the steamer was headed for was brightly lit by gas lamps, with some figures standing around it, waiting for the ship to arrive.
Emilie smothered a yawn. She was a little hungry, too. The steamer’s steward hadn’t served an actual dinner, and the sandwiches and tea provided hadn’t been nearly as filling as last night’s meal.
Daniel and the professor arrived then, carrying their bags. Like Daniel and Emilie, the professor hadn’t brought much more than an overnight bag, though in Emilie and Daniel’s case, this was because they didn’t have many belongings with them. Everything Emilie hadn’t left behind at her uncle’s house was in the post, on its way to Karthea.
As the ship closed in on the dock, it slowed down and its engines changed in pitch. It wasn’t big enough to need a tug to push it in, though the process of edging up to the dock seemed tricky. There was a stir of activity on the lowest deck, and someone called out to the shoremen.
“There’s a coach,” Daniel said suddenly. He pointed to the stretch of roadway between the docks and the cargo offices. A few small one-horse cabs waited there for the arriving passengers, and among them was a larger coach-and-four. “Maybe they did get my wire… Yes, that’s Lord Engal’s crest on the door, I’m sure of it!”