Quintessence Sky

by David Walton

  As any rate, it was now Ramos's duty to make the suffering of those men worthwhile, by harnessing quintessence to Philip's holy cause. If quintessence was worthless, they had died in vain. On the other hand, if it increased the might and influence of the Church, then they were martyrs who would be rewarded in glory. It all depended on what he and Barrosa could accomplish.

  "Let's get to work."

  THE FIRST thing Ramos accomplished was an inventory. His predecessors had left the cellar room a shambles, with miracles scattered underfoot and no organization. Ramos wanted to know exactly what they had, what was known, and what was unknown.

  The large quantity of gold miscellany filled a fish barrel. There were six kinds of animals, the names of which Barrosa had recorded from interviews with the returning soldiers before they died. The worm was called a shekinah flatworm, and seemed to be the actual source of the quintessence magic, or at least critical to its working. The eel Ramos had seen was called a Midas eel, for obvious reasons, and the bizarre frilled creature that floated to the top of its cage they called a puff weasel. The creature that had killed Perez was called a sooty toad, and it was still alive. It had appeared to immolate itself along with Perez, but Barrosa had later found it in a corner, croaking lustily. He had managed to coax it back into its cage with a scattering of dead crickets. There was also a bird—or at least, they assumed it was a bird. It sat on a perch, squawked, fluttered what sounded like wings, and ate seeds from a dish. It was however, entirely invisible.

  Finally, there were the compass beetles. These were the only animals of which they had more than one specimen. The soldiers had brought back a dozen from Horizon, but they ate any green leaves and bred readily, so that now they had many more. The glass cage in which they were stored was a strange sight, however, since all of the beetles were pressed to one side, scrabbling to get through the glass. If Ramos turned the cage, the beetles moved, too, so that they always faced to the West. This was how the Spanish ship had found Horizon, Barrosa explained. The glass had been waxed, since the beetles could fly right through just about any other material.

  There were plants, too, some with invisible, poisonous spines. All together, despite the wonder of everything he saw, Ramos was a bit disappointed. The collection had not been gathered by scholars. There were no rubbings, no dried flowers and leaves, no drawings, no written observational accounts. The choice of what to bring back had been made based on what would most be most impressive to look at, not by what would yield the most understanding about quintessence and Horizon.

  Barrosa and King Philip quickly became impatient with Ramos's approach. The old trio of philosophers had shown the king new wonders every week, sometimes every day. So far, all Ramos had done was organize the room, make drawings, and write long lists. As far as Ramos was concerned, however, it was the only way to proceed. God had created an ordered universe. In the study of the natural world, just as in the study of theology, the whole could be comprehended only by understanding each piece.

  Once everything was organized and labeled and written down in Ramos's tiny, neat hand, he began to study it systematically. The shekinah flatworm was the center of everything, the source. As Barrosa had described, the power of the pearls would gradually dissipate the longer they stayed away from the shekinah. Their light and influence would increase with the application of salt water, but that increased the dissipation, too. The farther away the pearl was from the shekinah, the faster it lost its power, and Ramos recorded that quintessence power had an inverse relationship to both time elapsed and distance traveled from the shekinah.

  It occurred to him to wonder about the light. Standard light, from the sun or a flame, had no healing or transformative powers. The shekinah flatworm, however, blazed with light, as did the pearls. Was the light different than ordinary light? Did the light itself contain the power, or was it simply an offshoot of it? In the Holy Scriptures, the glory of God was always associated with a bright light—the face of Moses on Sinai, the transfiguration of Christ, the appearance of the risen Lord. Was this a heavenly light?

  He began testing it. The first thing he discovered was the light's ability to shine through most objects. A piece of wood held in front of it cast no shadows. Metal was similarly ineffective in blocking the light, as was ordinary gold, although interestingly, the transformed gold did cast a shadow. Which was a significant discovery: it meant the transformed gold wasn't completely transformed. There was an aspect of it, not seen or felt, that was different from real gold. The black pouches effectively blocked the light of the pearls, but Barrosa said the pouches had come from Horizon, and thus were probably fashioned from the hide of some Horizon beast. If he placed a pearl in an ordinary leather pouch, it shone through the material just as brightly as ever.

  Finally, he tinkered with the strange boxes that had bells mounted on the top. It appeared as if the lever on each box was meant to ring the bell, but when he pressed it, nothing happened. He sawed carefully through one of the wooden sides to see the interior and found, oddly enough, a set of old bones. At first he thought it might be a fetish from an aboriginal tribe, like a shaman's bone bag. But no, the bones were carefully attached, one to the lever and one to the bell. The one attached to the lever was a jawbone. Based on the shape, and the lack of teeth, Ramos guessed it belonged to a fish of some kind, perhaps a herring or a carp. But, no, that couldn't be. This was the jawbone of a Horizon fish, and thus it would be special in some way, just like the eel or the other animals in the room. The other bone, hanging from the bell by a string, was nothing more than a fragment, and whether it had belonged to the same fish or not, he couldn't tell.

  He moved the lever up and down, watching how the hinge of bone inside opened and closed as a result. Open, closed. Open, closed. The odd thing was, the lever and the bell were not attached in any way. So what was the point? Perhaps they used to be attached, and the bones had broken apart during the journey. That made some sense, though it still didn't explain why someone would attach a lever to a bell through a collection of fish bones.

  Finally, he stopped playing with it and just sat there, contemplating the mystery, but not touching it. It was only then that, with his hands nowhere near the mechanism, as if invisible fingers had grasped the bone fragment and pulled it sharply downward, the bell rang.

  CHAPTER 8

  CATHERINE fell.

  It took much longer than she expected. She screamed and covered her face, expecting at any moment to smash into jagged rocks.

  She kept falling. The deafening wind fluttered her hair and clothes, and she pitched dizzily end over end. She wondered how deep this cave shaft could possibly be, since even if she had jumped off the highest point of the mountain, she would surely have hit bottom before now.

  Then she noticed she was falling more slowly. The air didn't buffet her as violently, and the blur of rock walls to either side became easier to distinguish. She tried to control her tumble, and found that she could, falling roughly feet first.

  Still she slowed. The experience was, if anything, like throwing a ball high in the air. As it flew higher, it would slow down, losing speed gradually at first, and then more swiftly, until just at the peak of its arc, it stopped. She felt like a ball thrown, but upside-down. When at last, below her, a flat rocky floor appeared, she was no longer falling so much as floating downward, and at the moment her feet touched down, her speed fell to nothing, so that she hardly noticed the impact at all.

  For a moment of violent vertigo, her sense of direction reversed, and she expected to plummet head first, back the way she had come. Instead, she swayed slightly, regained her sense of balance and gravity, and realized that, against all expectations, she was still alive.

  She couldn't see the top of the shaft. The walls were rough and covered with what looked like a wet lichen, but they rose more or less vertically until they met at a point far above her. The walls stopped just short of the floor, however, creating a low roofed cave that stretched in every directio
n, high enough that she could walk under it if she stooped. Water dripped from the roof, and jutting spikes cast eerie shadows.

  In one direction, a dim yellow light glowed, which must be the only reason she could see anything at all. She ducked low enough to clear the ceiling and began to make her way, bent uncomfortably, toward the light.

  The light came from a doorway. An opening anyway, roughly square, without a door. Before she got close enough to make out any details, she heard voices. Human voices.

  "Hello?" she said. Her own voice sounded thin and weak in this vast underground space. "Who's there?"

  A TREE stood in the center of the settlement, and colonists used it to post notices, offer services, and advertise needs. Walking by, Matthew saw a prominently placed poster with a cartoon drawing of his father, bishop's hat on his head, dropping his pants to copulate with a manticore. It was crude, offensive, and shocking—such attacks on politicians occurred in London, but he had never seen anything like it here.

  Matthew tore the poster down and tore it to pieces. There was no question in his mind who had put it there.

  "Hey," said a rough, Scottish voice. "What do you think you're doing?"

  Matthew turned to find James Ferguson glaring at him. "Removing a vulgar drawing," Matthew said.

  Ferguson gave a mischievous smile. "That was mine," he said. "Funny, eh?"

  "It's not at all funny. It's crass, and it's slandering a good man."

  "Come on, though. Your father, he's a bit of a prude, isn't he? Imagine him with his pants down. Can't do it, can you? I don't think he even takes them down to piss."

  Matthew wasn't in the mood for this. He advanced on Ferguson, fists clenched.

  "Whoa, slow down." Ferguson raised his hands in surrender. "Your father's a good man. He is. Best man in the colony; nobody doubts that. He's just in a bit too deep with the enemy. Too kind for his own good, that's what he is. And for our good, too."

  Matthew shook his head. This was how Ferguson won men's hearts. Not by railing against his father, but by making him look ridiculous and weak. He never challenged him to his face, nor did he put himself forward as a rival leader. He wasn't a fighter; he was a poisoner.

  Matthew pointed at the tree. "No more pictures," he said.

  "Okay, whatever you say." Ferguson raised his hands again.

  "And leave my father alone. He's your governor. Show him some respect."

  Ferguson shrugged. "He's not really a governor. Just acting, as it were. He's got no royal writ."

  "What difference does that make?"

  "Well, if Princess Elizabeth shows up and proclaims him governor, then that's what he is. Until then, he's just filling a vacancy, isn't he? Anyone could do it."

  Like most of the colonists, Ferguson thought of the Protestant princess Elizabeth as the rightful queen of England instead of her Catholic sister Mary. "Princess Elizabeth isn't likely to pay us a visit any time soon," Matthew said. "That doesn't mean you don't owe him your obedience."

  "Spoken like a diligent son," Ferguson said. "But come now. Haven't you ever thought someone else could do a better job than your old dad?"

  Matthew shoved Ferguson out of his way and kept walking. He didn't want to hear any more. Ferguson was too close to being right.

  "The manticores aren't our friends!" Ferguson called after him. "Either we conquer them, or they'll destroy us."

  Back in his rooms on the second floor of the Quintessence Society building, Matthew fed the torn pieces of poster into a candle flame, watching each one burn down until it nearly singed his fingers. Catherine's bell-box lay silent on the table in front of him. He'd rung it for hours, with no response. He knew it was futile, but every time he decided to give it up, he tried it just one more time, just in case. He needed to do something, but anything else he could do was just as useless. He could try searching for her in the forest, but there was little point in that—the forest was vast, and he had no idea where she was.

  It was dark outside, though a single shekinah in a jar provided him with plenty of light. In a distant way, he knew he was hungry, but had little motivation to eat. He was supposed to be so clever. The whole colony looked to him for daily miracles. But when it really counted, he could no more alter his circumstances than a child.

  His only hope was that Catherine still had her bell-box but was unable to answer it, or that her captors had it and she might find a way to reclaim it. If so, he wanted to be here when she called. It was his only link to her, and if it had been destroyed or left behind, he had nothing. Not even hope. He stood and paced to the window, looking out into the darkness, waiting for inspiration.

  A bell rang.

  He whirled and rushed back to the workbench on which Catherine's bell-box sat, but the bell sounded again, once, like a chime, from his left. Where was it coming from? He opened a cupboard and began pawing through it, knocking aside pieces of gold, bones, and fragments of fur. It was full of oddments, items he'd saved for some later use out of broken or discarded inventions. The bell kept ringing, and finally he found it, pushed to the back. It was an orphaned bell-box, one to which the pair had long since been lost. He'd kept it to use for spare parts.

  His first thought was that Catherine had somehow found its pair and was using it to contact him, despite how ridiculously unlikely it would be for her to stumble upon a lost bell-box in the middle of the mountains, farther away from the colony than humans had ever ventured. He tapped a quick greeting on it, using their code: three taps, then a pause, then three taps again. Silence. The bell-boxes, including this one, had a damper on them to allow the bells to make only short rings: lift the lever up, the bell would ring, push the lever down, it would stop. This allowed them to deliver messages quickly. After trying the greeting again, the bell rang, but it was a single, continuous ring, with no dampening. Which meant nothing.

  Stupid. It was just a phantom, a random fluctuation of the quintessence thread. It happened sometimes—an orphaned box would ring for no reason, sometimes even when they knew its pair had been destroyed. Perhaps it had been lost in the forest, and an animal had gotten a hold of it. Or maybe the loose thread, flapping in an extradimensional breeze, somehow wrapped itself around some other thread that cued the ring. They had no idea, really. It was just a mystery, one of thousands.

  Matthew threw the box across the room, where it smashed against the wall. They would never understand quintessence. Not in any real sense. They were fish who, after studying a sunken ship, thought they understood the world above the water.

  He heard footsteps on the stairs. A light knock on the door. "Come in."

  The door swung open to reveal Blanca's somber face. "What are you doing?" she said.

  "Trying to contact her."

  Blanca eased the rest of the way into the room. Even on Horizon, where many of the old world's social taboos had disappeared, there would be a scandal if they were discovered alone in his apartments at night, but he didn't ask her to leave. He was despondent, and the company was welcome. She set a sunfruit and a chunk of sandbread in front of him. "Eat."

  He bit into the yellow fruit. It was delicious, and he bit again, feeling guilty for enjoying food when Catherine was out there, perhaps already dead. He ate it all anyway, driven by hunger.

  "Catherine is strong," Blanca said. "She knows the manticores better than anyone."

  Matthew tried for a smile. "You're right. She's probably fine."

  "I wouldn't put it past her to come walking in tomorrow without a scratch."

  It was just talk, but it made Matthew feel better all the same. Blanca was an inherently empathetic person, feeling the emotions of others sometimes more deeply than she felt her own. Catherine would have told him to stop moping and do something. She had no patience for melancholy. Blanca was so different than Catherine in some ways: gentle where Catherine was brash, quicker to listen than to talk, always understanding. Though in other ways, they were much alike. They were both independent, with a plan for their own lives that
didn't take much stock in what others thought they ought to do.

  It was that quality that had put Catherine in this situation in the first place, maybe even gotten her killed. Why hadn't she listened to him?

  "She'll come waltzing into the settlement with a manticore entourage to tell us they've named her their queen," Matthew said, trying to match Blanca's light tone, but failing.

  Blanca smiled back at him, and Matthew could see that she was suffering, too. "Even so, isn't there anything we could do"—she waved her hand vaguely around the room, indicating the various implements and paraphernalia—"with this stuff? To find her?"

  Matthew slumped, dropping his chin into his hands. "It's not sorcery," he said. "There are specific things we know how to do. Finding a person across miles of forest and mountains isn't one of them."

  "You have her bell-box, right?" she said, pointing. "There's a quintessence thread connecting the boxes, and you can see it using the skink tears. Can't you just . . . follow the thread?"

  Matthew shook his head. "You'd think so. It looks like a thread, and it seems to go straight, but it really doesn't. It's not part of our world at all, not really. We tried following a thread before, thinking we wouldn't have to bring the compass beetles with us on expeditions—we'd just follow the bell-box connection home. When the boxes are close together, it works fine. But the farther they get apart, the stranger it gets. The thread points off in a random direction, not toward the other box. Trying to follow it takes you on a path that, while it may not actually be infinite, might as well be. We walked for a full day and never reached a box that we knew to be only two miles away on a straight course."

  "There's got to be a way," Blanca said. She put a hand on his arm. "You're the cleverest person I know. You can figure it out."

  Matthew shook her off. "It can't be done."