Quintessence Sky

by David Walton

  "Well, how does it work?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "Explain it to me. How does the bell-box work?"

  Matthew sighed. "We take a jawbone from an ironfish and separate it from the skull, where the quintessence pearl is. When we . . ."

  "I know how you make it," Blanca said. She tossed her dark hair. "Tell me how it works."

  He was quiet for a moment, thinking. "Living things are anchored to their spirits with threads of quintessence. Horizon animals have pearls which link their thread to some part of their body—a jaw, a leg, an eye—that allows them to tap into the quintessence and use it."

  "And the bell-box?"

  "We simply stretch one of those threads and make it work at a distance. The threads seem to stretch indefinitely—as I said, they're not really part of our universe. It's some kind of energy, like light or heat." He kicked the table. "Or gravity. Or magnetism. Who knows what it is, really. We've debated these things a thousand times. We don't have time for philosophy."

  "Could you look through a connection to see what was happening on the other side?"

  Matthew thought of the time, more than a year before, when Catherine's spirit had traveled back from beyond the grave on such a thread. He hadn't seen it himself, but her father had described it sliding along the thread like an endless snake swallowing its meal. Did that mean the threads had an inside layer, like a tunnel? Might there be some way to connect to her now in the same way?

  He pinched his lower lip. "If you could split open a thread . . ."

  You couldn't cut such a thing with a knife or a sword, of course. It was invisible and intangible. He had walked through a hundred of them just by crossing the room. But was there something which might?

  He crossed to a workbench, put a drop of skink tears in his eyes, and blinked past the initial burning. He strapped a pair of boarcat paws to his hands. Boarcat claws were unique in that they could actually interact directly with quintessence threads, which was how they wrapped threads around their bodies, enabling the special powers they enjoyed.

  "What are you trying?" Blanca said.

  "The obvious." He found the quintessence thread emanating from Catherine's bell-box, grasped it firmly with the boarcat claws, and picked at it, trying to find an edge or some strand he could get hold of to unravel it. There was no such thing. It was as pure and unbroken as a beam of light.

  He sat back. "Why do they have an inside layer?"

  "What?"

  "Things always have a reason. If quintessence threads are like a tunnel, what's the purpose? What moves through the tunnel?"

  "Information?" Blanca said. "When you close the ironfish jaw in the one box, the bones in the other box get the message that they should turn to iron."

  "More than that. The power to transform must travel, too, because the other side doesn't need to have a pearl, or even be in a quintessence field. The energy for the transformation must travel through the thread."

  Matthew snatched up another bell-box pair and placed them one on either side of the long work table that stretched the length of the room. In the center of the table, between the two boxes, he placed a black opteryx scale. He pressed the level on one bell-box, ringing the bell on the other. The scale stayed black.

  "Hmm. Maybe it's too small to register?" He poured a little salt water on the scale and tried again. This time, when he pressed the lever, the scale flared a dull reddish color before fading back to black.

  "So it's true," Blanca said. "Quintessence flows through the thread."

  "Not a lot," Matthew agreed. "But it does."

  "Unless it's the flow of quintessence itself that makes the thread? Like a river in a stream bed?"

  "No, then the scale would glow all the time. The quintessence only flows for a moment." Matthew paced, considering it. The thought of Catherine in danger and the need to do something about it distracted him, making it hard to hold on to a thought.

  "We know a spirit can be sent this way," Matthew mused. Catherine's spirit had come back from the dead along such a thread. It wasn't something they could do again, as it required someone else to die, and risked destroying the world besides, but at least they knew it was possible.

  "What if spirits are made of the same energy?"

  Matthew sucked in his lips. "So this is spirit stuff we're sending back and forth." A thought struck him. "What if I could send my spirit to her?"

  Blanca's face turned grave. "What are you suggesting?"

  "Sinclair brought Catherine's spirit back by pulling her thread out of the void and tying it back to her body. What if I opened up a void in the end of this thread, and sent my spirit through it. Would it come out on her end?"

  Blanca's eyes were wide. "Or would you just die?"

  "I have to try something."

  "No. Suicide won't help her, Matthew."

  "I won't be reckless. It's a good idea. We'll just try it a little bit at a time."

  He pulled a vial of vitriol from a shelf. Vitriol was made from sulphur, which was the most dangerous of the three alchemical substances. Salt and mercury merely altered the flow of quintessence through the world. Sulphur opened up a hole in the world itself, a void of pure emptiness that could be difficult to control.

  Rather than risk experimenting with Catherine's bell-box, Matthew crossed the room and picked up the broken bits of the orphaned one he had thrown against the wall.

  CATHERINE approached the square of light hesitantly.

  "A bheil Gàidhlig agaibh?" a rough man's voice spoke out of the darkness.

  Catherine jumped and backed away. She couldn't see anyone, and yet the voice had sounded right in front of her.

  "Que parla català?" said a different voice.

  "Spreekt u Nederlands?" said a female voice behind her. Catherine whirled, still unable to locate a speaker.

  "What about English?" the female voice said again in a lilting accent.

  "Where are you?" Catherine said.

  "Do not be afraid," the voice said. "My name is Griele. I come from Flanders. I am a weaver. I have two daughters, Anke and Ilesabet. What is your name?"

  "Where are you?" Catherine said again. "I can't see you." She took a slow step forward, toward the square of light. As she did, she heard other voices, fainter and more distant.

  "No, of course," the voice said. "We can not be seen. You are new here?"

  "Yes."

  "We are—how you say? Ach, not good English."

  "I speak Latin, too," Catherine said.

  "Ah yes? That is good. Pietro!"

  At this, the voice of a young boy spoke out. "Sì?"

  "The Latin, please," Griele said. "Introduce yourself."

  "I am Pietro Morosini, son of Girolamo Morosini, Captain of Brescia," the boy announced formally, in Latin. "I am held prisoner against my will. It is proper for you to address me as 'lord'. It is also proper for you to tell us your name."

  Catherine's head was spinning. She was surrounded by a crowd of invisible voices. "My name is Catherine Parris," she said. She reached the square opening and stepped through. On the other side, the cavern was even larger than the one she had left. This one had a high ceiling, invisible in the darkness. All around, as far as she could see, there were smears of light—not enough to actually illuminate anything, nor seeming to come from any source. Just thousands of diffuse patches, some gathered together in great bright auras, some set apart on their own. They were all moving.

  She heard all kinds of languages, most of which she didn't recognize.

  "There are so many of you," she said.

  "This is only one room," Griele said. "There are many more."

  "Are you . . ." Catherine cringed to ask it, but she was, after all, deep below the ground. "Are you the dead?"

  "That is the question, isn't it?" said yet another voice. Catherine had trouble telling how many people were a part of her conversation. There were lights all around her—were they all listening to her? This new voice was a man's, deep and old
, with a native speaker's command of English. "You see, we all came here on the same day. On the evening of the August the tenth. If it were one at a time, here and there, maybe. But all at once? No. I am Hayes, by the way. From Sussex. At your service."

  "What are you saying?" Pietro demanded irritably in Latin.

  Hayes explained in Latin.

  "We could have died on the same day," Pietro pointed out.

  "True," Hayes said. "But from every country in the world? All at the same time?" He switched back to English. "Pietro insists we're all dead. He won't stop talking about it."

  "Perhaps the Lord came for us," Griele said.

  Hayes made a coughing noise. "Does this seem like heaven to you?"

  "Please," Catherine said. "Why do you all look like lights?"

  There was silence. "You can see?" Hayes said.

  "Of course. I see little patches of light that seem to represent each of you. There's a great crowd of you in an enormous cavern of rock."

  "We're underground?" Griele said.

  "Wait," Hayes said. "Do you still have your body?"

  "Yes."

  "How did you get here? Did you just wake up here like the rest of us?"

  "I fell down a hole." The details seemed like too much to explain.

  "A hole . . . from where?"

  "From Horizon. An island to the west. At the edge of the world."

  There was a stir at the far end of the cavern. Lights began to swirl and eddy upward, as if they were motes underwater. She heard distant screams.

  "They're coming," Griele said. There was a sudden note of panic in her voice.

  "What's coming?" Catherine said.

  "We don't know what they are," Hayes said. "But they—"

  "Flee!" Griele shouted.

  The disruption surged toward them with incredible speed, lights scattering toward the roof. Catherine saw a giant pink body, moist and glistening, that ran and leaped high in the air, a creature twice her size, with splayed feet on the sides of its body and a mouth gaping wet and wide. Its mouth closed around a fleeing light—Catherine couldn't tell if it was one of those she had just been speaking to—and snapped shut. It landed, yawned, and licked its toothless mouth. The light it had caught was gone.

  Its pink skin was hairless and translucent, like a salamander's, and it pulsed with the effort of its exertion. It had no ears or eyes. It leaped again, and she caught sight of a fat tail balanced on the ground. It closed its jaws around another light and brought it down.

  It had happened so fast, Catherine hadn't even moved. She backed slowly away, hardly daring to breathe, until she had reached the square entrance through which she'd come. She slipped through and pressed herself against the wall on the other side, hoping the entrance was too small to admit the monster, but doubting it. There were no other exits from the cavern except for the sheer, vertical shaft down which she had fallen.

  CHAPTER 9

  "I'M telling you, it rang," Ramos said.

  "It couldn't have." Barrosa picked up the bell-box and looked at the bottom, as if he might find some answers there.

  "More than that. It rang in a pattern. Three rings quickly, then a pause, then three rings again. It did that same pattern twice."

  Barrosa narrowed his eyes. "That doesn't make any sense."

  "I know. You can see, the lever and the bell aren't even connected, and I wasn't touching it. And don't tell me there was an earth tremor; there was no such thing."

  "I believe you," Barrosa said. "But that pattern—I didn't even think this one worked at all."

  Ramos stared at him. "What do you mean, worked?"

  Barrosa touched the jawbone. "When you press the lever, this bone changes material. It becomes very heavy, like metal."

  "I've noticed that. But it's not connected to the bell."

  "It's connected to the fragment of bone on this box's twin. When you pull this lever, the other bell rings."

  A chill ran down Ramos's arms. "And . . . when you push the other one, this one rings?" The implications of such a device flooded through his mind. "But how do you know this?"

  Barrosa shook his head. He put the bell-box back on the table and crossed to a corner of the room. He brushed some dirt away from the floor to reveal a plank of wood which, when lifted, revealed a small locked chest. He lifted it free and brushed off the dirt.

  "You've been keeping secrets from me," Ramos said.

  "The king wanted it kept quiet. You didn't need to know."

  Barrosa produced a key and soon had the chest open. Inside was another bell-box.

  "We thought the others were broken, or that their pairs had been lost at sea," Barrosa said. "The pair to this box, however, is on La Magdalena, one of the ships in the Armada, off the coast of Portugal."

  Ramos was confused. "So what—"

  "Just watch." Barrosa depressed the lever with attentive precision, first once, then twice, then three times, then four. Nothing happened. He waited. Then, without anyone touching it, the bell on top of the box rang. It didn't ring as if it had been jostled; it rang once, then twice, then three times, then four.

  "I don't understand. There's a delay?"

  "No."

  It came to him. "Someone on La Magdalena . . . "

  "Yes. When I pressed the lever, the bell on La Magdalena rang. Someone there just responded to my message by doing the same thing I did. That's our initial greeting. We use the same pattern every time, to show that it's really us.

  "Wait a moment." Barrosa used the lever again, this time with a varying number of strokes. He consulted a tiny book along the way. Once again, an answering series of rings returned, and Barrosa wrote down the numbers: 3, 5, 2, 1, 3. 6, 1, 1, 2, 4. When the bell finally fell silent, he paged through the book again, looking for the numbers.

  "It's a code," Ramos said. "You're actually talking with the captain of La Magdalena, even though he's at sea."

  "We could have done a lot better. The code is very limited, mostly a set of key phrases rather than a true language. It's sometimes frustrating, because the captain tries to communicate something more complex, but we can't figure it out, or the king wants to ask a question we have no way of encoding. Today, however, he reports that the wind is fair and their heading true."

  "So what does three rings, pause, three rings mean in your code?" he asked.

  "That's the thing," Barrosa said. "It doesn't mean anything. Not only that, we never had a pair for that box. We assumed it was lost at sea, along with all the other worms."

  But if La Magdalena hadn't been the source of the ringing, where had it come from? Ramos's thoughts drifted to the island where, so it was said, a group of renegade Protestants still survived. Someone had made this box, after all. Was it really possible? Could the other half of this box be half a world away?

  MATTHEW laid out the pieces of the broken bell-box. The mechanism wasn’t the important part. What really made it work was the quintessence connection, and that he couldn't break by throwing it against a wall. He separated the jawbone and positioned it so he could see the glowing quintessence pearl nestled in the delicate whorls of bone. Carefully, he tipped one drop of vitriol out of the vial onto the pearl.

  The glow vanished. It didn't just fade; it winked out, leaving a gap of black nothingness in its place, as if the pearl had been cut out of the world. As far as they knew, that's more or less what had happened. Since Aristotle's day, men had argued about whether the material world was continuous or made of tiny atoms whizzing and colliding through empty space. Their study of quintessence—the fifth essence that alchemists had written about for centuries—more or less proved the atomistic theory. They were able to pass material objects through other material objects—impossible if matter was continuous—and see the underlying void first-hand.

  The void grew, first to the size of his eye, then to the size of his fist. Left unchecked, it would continue to grow, destroying everything in its path, until it lost stability and the surrounding matter rushed into and c
ollapsed it. Men had died experimenting with voids, before they knew what they were doing. It wasn’t something to rush.

  Matthew selected two beetlewood planks and used it to control the void's size, pushing it back a little here, a little there. Just as manticores and compass beetles couldn't pass through this particular type of waxy wood, so the void was confined inside it. Matthew had even built special compartments with voids trapped between two layers of wood, allowing him to conduct experiments inside the compartment with no quintessence field, just as things would be back in England.

  The quintessence thread, which had been emanating from the pearl, now seemed connected to the void. The thread didn't pass into the void, or stop at its edge; instead, it seemed to thin out and expand, like a cone, to envelop the void, almost as if the void was the thread itself, being stretched open.

  It's like we're looking inside the thread," Blanca said, echoing his thoughts. "It's like the interior of the thread is the void—a black tunnel, with no view of the other side."

  "The space inside is huge, though," Matthew said. "Just an infinite nothingness, as far as we can tell. A man could fall into the void and just keep on falling, and never return." That very thing had happened to Maasha Kaatra. He knew it didn't invalidate Blanca's suggestion, though. Concepts of space, of interior and exterior, didn't necessarily hold when dealing with quintessence concepts. The interior of a thread might very well be an infinite blank space, for all he could say.

  "What happens if you throw something into it?" She picked up a broken piece of wood from the bell-box and tossed it accurately, straight into the void. It was like throwing something off a cliff. It dwindled into the distance until it disappeared.

  Now that Matthew was staring into the void, the prospect of trying to feed his own spirit thread into it seemed more reckless. If opening a void at one end of a thread really did create a tunnel to the other side, why couldn't they see through it? No, a void was simply non-existence, the absence of reality, as it always had been.

  The void was becoming harder to control, growing more quickly and in odd directions, escaping Matthew's ability to push it back with the beetlewood. He clapped the planks together through its center, and it disappeared. The material that had been inside the radius of the void—the jawbone and its pearl, pieces of the broken box—were all gone. Air rushed back into the area with a sharp pop. Even a small circular depression was cut away from the workbench.