by David Walton
Your presence is required for a matter of utmost urgency. Depart immediately with the bearer of this letter and proceed by ship with all speed to Whitehall Palace, London. He will provide you with anything you require. Neither illness nor any other responsibility should delay your swift obedience.
Sincerely,
Juan Barrosa, Court Secretary
On behalf of His Grace, Philip II, King of all Spain, Portugal, Naples, Sicily, England, and Ireland
Astonished, he showed the letter to the officer, who showed it to the chief jailor. Ramos lifted Antonia to her feet. "We're leaving now," he told her. "We're going far away."
The jailor blocked his path. "That letter says you," he said, pointing his finger in Ramos's face. "It don't say nothing about her."
"She's my daughter. She's my responsibility, and she's coming with me."
"Look at her," the jailor said in disgust. "Mad like the rest of them, ain't she? Going to burn like the rest of them, too."
Antonia clung tighter to Ramos and tried to hide behind him. Ramos felt his anger rising. He pointed to the letter still in the officer's hand. "That's from the king, you fool. It says I leave with anything I require. I require her."
"She's demon-possessed. You can't take her back up to the streets."
Ramos ignored him, escorting Antonia toward the door, but the jailor grabbed her by the arm and tried to wrench her away. With a ringing sound like a tiny bell, the officer's rapier jumped suddenly from the scabbard at his belt to a point an inch from the jailor's throat.
"Release her."
The jailor dropped his hold. "The Inquisition'll burn you for this."
The officer gave a tight smile. "Let them try."
CHAPTER 4
THE BLIGHT was spreading faster than Catherine could escape it. The stiffness and burning pain had crept up her torso and into her arms. It wouldn't be long now. Her legs were completely immobile, now, and she couldn't feel them anymore. Her frantic attempts to inch herself out of the circle got little traction in the mud, and there was nothing to grab onto.
The rain drenched her clothes and spattered mud into her face. The smell of rotting plants and putrefaction was overwhelming, gagging her. With a desperate heave, she managed to move her body enough to grab onto a slim tree, but now her muscles weren't working. She could hold on to the trunk, but she couldn't pull herself any closer.
"Look what we have here," said a voice.
She nearly cried with joy at the sound. It was a manticore voice, speaking in their language; it must be Thomas or Paul. "Hello!" she called. "I'm here."
The speaker stepped into her field of vision: a large, gray manticore. The gray's pincered hands were raised and two of his tails slid sinuously over his shoulders. "The star-bird, caught in a net," he said. The sharp sounds his mouth made were punctuated by movements of the pincers and tails, adding specifics to the imprecise ideas that the sounds alone communicated.
Her joy disappeared. This was not a rescue. The gray's manner was challenging, triumphant. Many of the manticores had referred to Catherine as "star-bird" since the manticore attack the previous spring, when she had used a flood of quintessence power to drive them away. It was generally spoken with wary respect, but this gray used the term mockingly.
Still, this was no time to be shy. "I can't move. I need a rope, or something I can hold onto, so you can pull me out."
"My brothers died on your wall," the gray said.
"I'm sorry. I'm going to die right now, if you don't help me. I'm not sure I can even hold on to a rope. Please."
The gray gesticulated and chattered briefly at a lower volume, apparently to other manticores she couldn't see. It was all she could do not to cry out from the pain. All the salt she had eaten, the fresh sea water she had drunk, the bread made from sand: it was all changing back. Her tissues were turning into salt and sand, and it hurt.
Something fell near her head. She focused on it. It was a vine, still green and supple, but dying fast. At the other end, a half dozen manticores held on, ready to pull her out. She wrapped loops of it around her stiff fingers and grabbed hold as best she could. As they dragged her away from the circle, the pain receded, and first her arms, then her legs, became loose and movable again. She lay weak and panting at the feet of the big gray, too exhausted to move.
When she could speak, she said, "Thank you."
They hauled her upright, but the pain now surged back into her legs, and she couldn't stand. She tried to use quintessence to make her body lighter, but it was still out of reach, and she slumped back to the ground when they let go.
"Catherine Parris," the gray said.
Catherine frowned. "Who are you?"
It lashed its tails through the air, irritated. "Don't play games."
"Should I know you?"
The gray hissed. "I am Rinchirith, as all know. But perhaps you truly do not remember. A failing we shall soon remedy."
Catherine thought fast, remembering Thomas's warnings about Rinchirith. Was it coincidence, he of all manticores appearing here to rescue her? She didn't think so. "This was all your plan, wasn't it? You arranged for Thomas and Paul to bring me here, so you could capture me."
Rinchirith made the manticore equivalent of a smile. "Are you surprised? They are my memory brothers. Their loyalty to earth and sky runs deeper than their devotion to this Christ."
"They're dead, aren't they?"
Rinchirith's pincered hands shut with a snap. "They are as alive as I am. I do not kill my own."
In any other circumstance, Catherine could have leaped over them all, could have run away before they knew she had moved, could have blinded them with a blaze of quintessence energy that set the forest on fire. Now, weakened by the blight, she could barely lift her head. "What do you want from me?"
He laughed, a kind of clicking sound deep in his throat. "I don't want anything from you, star-bird."
"Then why am I here? Revenge for your brothers?"
Rinchirith bent and thrust his face into hers. "They are all my brothers. They all cry out for blood. But that is just the dew on the grass, not the ocean. The dreams of the earth snakes are rising, and you do not understand them."
The "earth snakes" were a common concept among the manticores, whose mythos seemed to associate the underground as the place of gods, rather than the sky. They referred to snakes and worms under the earth in mystical tones. Catherine thought it was hardly surprising, given the power of the shekinah flatworms as sources of quintessence. In this context, however, she had no idea what Rinchirith meant.
"That blight is a danger to all of us," she said. "It's growing. I need to get back to my friends, so we can figure out why."
"We already know why," Rinchirith said.
The other manticores seized her arms with their hard pincer-grips. She struggled, but they were too strong. Rinchirith pulled her wrists together behind her back and began wrapping vine around them.
"And we know how to stop it," he said.
THE STORM that night raged like only a Horizon storm could. Towering black clouds whirled through the sky, thrown against each other by unpredictable winds. They struck with sounds like buildings colliding, sending out billows like exploding masonry and hurling lightning like spears of falling flame. In such a storm, most people had the sense to stay inside, Matthew thought wryly. Instead, he stood precariously on the peaked diamond roof of the church, the tallest structure in the colony, drenched with rain, and holding up an iron rod.
"Matthew!" Stephen Parris, Catherine's father, stood on the ground below, bellowing up at him. Matthew could barely hear him over the pounding of the rain and the crashing of thunder.
Parris leaped, making his body lighter, and flew the several stories up to join Matthew on the roof. His lightened body was more easily tossed by the wind, however, and he had to grab hold of the gold cross on top of the church to keep from being blown clear out of the settlement. He quickly made his body heavy again to anchor himself down.
"You're going to widow Catherine before you even marry her," Parris said. He had to shout over the rain to be heard.
Matthew was busy lashing the iron rod to the cross, and didn't look at him. He didn't want to lose track of what he was doing. "We have to understand why the salt is disappearing," he said.
"How is standing on a roof in a thunderstorm going to answer that question?"
Matthew straightened and leaned toward Parris to be heard more easily. "How long has it been since we noticed the change in salt levels?"
"About five weeks."
"And how long have we been having these thunderstorms?"
Parris grunted. It apparently hadn't occurred to him that the start of the wild, nightly storms corresponded with the beginning of the salt shortage. Matthew didn't know which was the cause and which the effect, or if they were both the result of some deeper cause, but he was trying to find out.
"What are you doing?" Parris asked.
Matthew showed him. He had strapped the iron rod to the cross to hold it upright. The bottom end of the rod rested in a glass flask filled with salt water. The water flask was set inside a slightly larger flask filled with mercury, so that the mercury was trapped in a thin layer between the two flasks. He had covered the outside of the mercury flask with black scales from an opteryx.
The storms had plenty of lightning, and they had seen lightning striking the ground, the trees, even the roof of this church. What if the lightning was destroying or using up all the salt? If a lightning bolt hit the iron rod, whatever quintessence effect it had would be transferred into the water. If it used up the salt, the water would glow, and the opteryx scales would measure the amount. Mercury, however, reduced the strength of quintessence, so the mercury would act as a filter, dampening its power before it reached the opteryx scales. That would allow him to measure quintessence on a level far greater than what a single opteryx could store in its body.
"Two fingers of mercury means a thousandfold decrease," Matthew said. "If it reaches violet, that would be around 7000 Q, which would mean that if lightning strikes in a particular acre of ground once a night, forty percent of the salt in its soil would be consumed."
Matthew was doing what he always did: suggest a hypothesis to explain a phenomenon, then perform experiments to see if the hypothesis was true. It was a strange way of thinking to many, particularly those of the older generation. For centuries, learned men had relied on the ancients for their knowledge: the writings of Aristotle and Hippocrates, Galen and Ptolemy. They didn't see the point of his experiments. After all, who was a nineteen-year-old young man to disagree with the ancients? It was radical thinking, and it was Protestant thinking—rejecting authority in favor of self analysis and understanding. Which was why so many of those who thought this way had fled from England when Queen Mary took the throne.
"Say your experiment works," Parris said. "Lightning hits this rod and registers in the violet."
"That would explain what's happening to the salt," Matthew said.
"Then how would we stop it?"
Matthew shrugged. "I don't know. But at least we would know where the problem was coming from."
It would actually be encouraging, he thought, if the current shortage was due to the lightning. Thunderstorms didn't last forever. That would suggest it was a seasonal thing, a regional event that occurred once every several years and then recovered its balance naturally. If they could ration what they had left until the storms abated, they just might survive.
He opened his mouth to say so when the lightning struck the iron rod.
Fire exploded in his vision. He fell backward, off the roof. He made his body lighter just before he hit the ground. Parris clung to the edge of the roof above him, then clambered up again. Matthew joined him.
"That was close," he said.
"Maybe you should have found a safer way to test this," Parris said.
They looked at the flask. The opteryx scales had barely turned a dark green.
"It's not enough."
Matthew shook his head. "It's a lot of power, generally speaking, to blast through that much mercury. But it's not enough to account for the salt reduction on the island. Not nearly enough."
A strong breeze blew across the rooftop. Matthew grabbed the iron bar to steady his balance, then realized what he was holding, and hastily released it. A light from above caught his attention, and he looked up. At the same moment, he fell to his knees, crying out and clutching his leg. The pain in his thigh had increased a hundredfold.
Parris leaned over him. "Are you all right?"
"Look!" Matthew pointed up to the sky. Some of the black clouds had blown away, opening up a patch of night. A few stars shone through, huge because of how close Horizon was to the celestial sphere. Light trailed away from the stars like ribbons, spiraling into the black chasm where a star used to be.
They had noticed it weeks earlier, just before the thunderstorms came and obscured the sky. Most of the familiar constellations were skewed this far west, and barely recognizable, but the Zodiac constellations, the ones that passed over the center of the world, were the least affected. So when a star had disappeared from Gemini, a gap that seemed to suck the light from the surrounding stars, they took notice. It had been a curiosity, although a spectacular one, one of thousands of unexplained mysteries they had encountered since coming to Horizon. Remembering it now, however, the timing of its appearance with the salt shortage didn't seem like a coincidence. Perhaps it was more important than they had realized.
A bubbling noise drew their attention back to Matthew's experiment at their feet. The water in the flask was aglow and boiling furiously. The opteryx scales on the outside were a bright violet edging toward white. The white color became brighter and clearer, the violet less prominent, until it was such a pure white it was hard to look at. The flask rattled violently, and then the scales burst into flame.
AFTER tying her hands and legs, the manticores wrapped Catherine in a net made of vines, like a hammock rolled around her body. Her limbs were no longer petrified, but she was wrapped so tightly she could barely move.
She could just barely feel a warm glow in the center of her body that meant her quintessence connections were coming back. The manticores had taken her salt pouch, but even without it, she should be able to break out and escape, given a little more time to get her strength back.
"Where are you taking me?" she said.
Rinchirith sat on top of her and leaned into her face, his breath nearly choking her. His eyes burned with hatred. "Only where you deserve," he said.
He shoved a pincered hand into her mouth and forced her jaw open. She screamed and struggled, but the sharp ends of his pincers dug into the soft flesh of her gums. Another manticore approached with a the hollow, cylindrical stalk of a plant. He bit open the top and poured it into her mouth.
She choked as the thick, metallic liquid filled her mouth. Mercury. She tried to spit it out, but Rinchirith clapped her mouth closed, and she swallowed painfully. She couldn't breathe. She writhed back and forth until he released her, and she lay on her face in the dirt, gasping and coughing.
Her quintessence connections were gone. Mercury acted in the opposite way from salt, scouring her clean of quintessence instead of increasing the flow. She was completely in their power, and as long as they kept forcing mercury down her throat, she would stay that way.
Two manticores lifted the ends of her vine hammock and leaped up into the trees, carrying her between them. She was jostled and yanked back and forth as they effortlessly climbed through the branches, sometimes facing the sky, sometimes spinning around to face the ground. After a while, the skink tears wore off as well, and she couldn’t even see them.
She was terrified, but after an hour of this kind of travel, she just felt battered and exhausted. She couldn't imagine what they planned to do with her. They could hold her as a hostage to force the humans to some concessions. They could cut her up piece by piece and send t
he pieces to the colony until they agreed to his terms. Only, Rinchirith didn't seem to her like the bargaining type.
What did he want? Catherine realized that they had never understood the manticores, not even the ones who claimed to be their friends. The humans were the trespassers on this island, a place where a hundred generations of manticores had lived and died without knowledge of humanity. Maybe it was arrogance to think the manticores should welcome them with grateful respect. Maybe humans didn't belong here at all.
And now, what would happen to her? She tried to distract herself from fear by thinking about the blight. She had found it in a swamp, a low-lying area compared to the higher ground around it. It was almost as if the blight had been spreading like a flood, seeping up from the ground and filling up the low areas. Would she have been safe from it if she had climbed a tree? There had been flying animals among the dead, but she didn't know how low they had flown before succumbing.
The whole concept of quintessence transformation was something they still didn't really understand. Quintessence turned salt water into fresh and sand into bread, but in some sense, the salt and sand were still there. In a quintessence field, her body could digest it and pass the nutrients to her tissues and keep her alive. Outside the field, the salt and sand would reappear, suffused throughout her flesh. So which was real? Was her body filled with fresh water and nutrients, or with salt and sand? Was quintessence just an illusion? How could both realities exist at the same time?
The manticores gave her neither food nor water, though every few hours, they stopped and forced more mercury down her throat, an even more terrifying ordeal since they were now invisible to her. Her stomach cramped and her vision blurred, but she tried to keep track of where they were going. No human had ever explored this deeply into the island, and she saw new kinds of foliage everywhere. Mostly, though, she looked for landmarks that might help her get home again.