Quintessence Sky

by David Walton

  Matthew shrugged, despondent. "I should have known."

  "What happened to the bones?" Blanca asked.

  "Gone." Matthew fluttered his hand in a vague way. "Out of this world." That's why he hadn't tried this on the pair to Catherine's bell-box. He knew it would destroy it.

  "Then what happened to the end of the thread that was connected to them?"

  Matthew hesitated. What indeed? Aided by the skink tears, he could see hundreds of threads criss-crossing through the room, passing through the walls without difficulty. At first he couldn't see the one they had been working with at all—had the void completely unraveled it? But no, there it was. It had been hard to spot because, as the thread approached the point where the void had been, its brightness smeared, becoming less distinct. The void had done something to it. But it was still there.

  He leaned close to examine it. There were thousands of tiny, bright particles, like dust, clinging to the outside of the thread like a halo, diffusing the light. It reminded him of the way shavings from an iron bar would cling to a lodestone. Was it a similar concept? Were these quintessence particles attracted to the thread's quintessence field? And if so, where had they come from?

  "Blanca, do you see these?" he said. At his words, the tiny particles danced, like sand on a struck sheet of metal. Some of them skittered down the length of the thread and out of sight. Matthew gasped.

  Blanca leaned down to peer at them, her hair brushing his face. "What are they?" The particles jumped again for her. The moment her voice stopped, they stopped moving, freezing in strange and beautiful patterns.

  "One. Two. Three. Four," Matthew said, pronouncing each word sharply and waiting a moment between to let the particles settle again. There was no question; they were jumping in response to his voice.

  Then the particles jumped again, although neither Matthew nor Blanca had opened their mouths. A man's voice emanated from the thread, as if the sound was produced by the jumping particles instead of the other way around. "Hello?" the voice said. "Hello? Who's there?" The voice was oddly muffled, as if spoken by someone with a jar held over his mouth.

  Matthew looked at the open door to make sure, but they were alone. The night was as still as ever, and there had been no noise on the stairs. He leaned close to the thread. "My name is Matthew Marcheford," he said. "Who are you?"

  "My name is Ramos de Tavera."

  MATTHEW and Blanca stared at each other. Tavera? It had been a Diego de Tavera who had tortured and killed his way through the colony a year and a half before. So who was this Ramos? Whoever he was, he must be one of them, an agent of Spain and the Roman Church, who wanted to conquer and control them. Which meant their technology was in enemy hands.

  "How did you get a bell-box?" Matthew said.

  "From the ship," the voice said. He sounded excited. "Are you part of the Horizon colony?"

  "You answer first. Where are you?"

  "In Whitehall Palace. In London, England."

  Matthew took a breath. At least he was far away, not somewhere on the island. But it confirmed what he thought; if he was in the palace, he worked for the king and the queen.

  "Are you related to Diego de Tavera?"

  The quality of the voice, already poor, was deteriorating quickly. The man on the other end responded, but Matthew couldn't make out the words.

  "What?" Matthew said. "Repeat that."

  "Yes," the voice said, though Matthew had to lean his ear close to the thread to make out the words. "He was my brother. He . . ." The rest of the message was lost.

  "What else did you get from the ship?" Matthew asked, but the response was too garbled to make out. He tried several more times, but the voice connection was gone, along with the particles that seemed to transmit the sound.

  Matthew was torn between elation and shock. He had sent a spoken message across a quintessence thread! The implications of that were overwhelming, though of course, as with everything they discovered, it only revealed more that they didn't understand. What were the little particles? How did they transmit sound? Could they transmit anything else? Had he somehow created them with the void? Or had the man on the other end of the thread created them? It chilled him to think that their enemies might somehow have learned more about quintessence than they knew themselves.

  "That was amazing," Blanca said, her pretty face flushed. "You were amazing."

  "Just luck," Matthew said. "Like most of what we discover." He jumped to his feet. "Let's try it on Catherine's box. If it works the same way, we could talk to her, even just for a moment, and she could tell us where she is." If she's alive, he didn't say.

  "How did it work?"

  "I don't know. I had no idea that could happen. Somehow those particles transmitted my voice through the quintessence thread. I can't begin to guess why."

  "And did you smell that musty odor?" Blanca said.

  Matthew raised an eyebrow. "You smelled something?"

  "Yes, it was damp and earthy, like a cellar. Didn't you smell it?"

  Now that he thought of it, he had smelled something like that, but it hadn't really entered his consciousness. "Are you saying you think the smell came through the connection?"

  She shrugged. "Why not? If sound can come through, why not smell as well?"

  Matthew was about to tell her how different the sense of sound was from the sense of smell, but he stopped himself. What did he know? Both traveled invisibly in the air, and for all he knew, both traveled through that invisible realm between the atoms that made up the material world. Perhaps they could both be transmitted along a quintessence thread.

  He broke open Catherine's bell-box to reveal the bones inside. Blanca bit her lower lip. "I hope she still has her box with her."

  Matthew touched a drop of vitriol to the pearl in Catherine's bell-box and used his beetlewood planks to keep the void in check. What had he done before? Nothing really: he had simply closed the void again. He didn't know if it took a particular amount of time to create the effect, or anything special in what he had done. There was nothing for it but to try. He snapped the planks together through the center of the void, closing the gap. As before, the bones were gone, but the thread remained, its end smearing out where the void had been.

  A strong smell of swamp pervaded the room. Not just rotting plants, but rotting meat as well. Blanca, who had been leaning forward to peer at the thread, recoiled and covered her face.

  "Catherine!" Matthew shouted, leaning close and trying to ignore the stench. "Can you hear me?"

  Oh, but it reeked! It was enough to make him feel a bit dizzy. "Catherine! Just talk near the bell-box; we'll be able to hear you."

  They waited, holding their breath. Nothing. Utter silence. The particles on the thread didn't move.

  Then Matthew tried to step back and found that he couldn't move either. His legs were stiff, weighted to the floor like blocks of stone. He tried to change his weight, to make them lighter, but nothing happened. "Something's wrong," he said, twisting to look at Blanca. "I can't move."

  She rushed to him. "No, stay back," he said. "I think it's something with the connection."

  "What's wrong?"

  "My legs won't work." He tried again to take a step. He found he could lift them, but it was like walking with a statue's legs. He couldn't bend them at the knees.

  She knelt down to examine his legs, and jumped back up with a cry. "It's on the floor."

  "What is?"

  "Something wrong. I could feel it. Let's get out of here."

  "Wait. We have to stop it, cut the connection."

  "How are you going to do that?"

  She was right. They should get away and then figure out what to do from a safe distance.

  "My legs are getting stiff, too," she said.

  "Quickly then." They stumbled toward the stairs, leaning on one another. They reached them and started down. This far away from the workbench, Matthew discovered he could bend his knees again, and stiffly managed to navigate the steps. At
the bottom, he and Blanca stopped, and he bent to massage his legs. They felt like flesh again, and he could change their weight just as before. They seemed to have escaped the reach of the problem.

  They paused, exhausted and breathing hard.

  "What happened?" Blanca said.

  Matthew didn't know. Something had come through the connection, something that made their legs feel like lead. Some kind of gas, or spirit, or miasma, he supposed. Whatever it was, they couldn't see it, only feel its effects. And whatever it was, it came from the place where Catherine was, or had been. A place with the smell of decay and death. Did that mean that Catherine . . . that her body . . .? He couldn't believe that. Wouldn't believe it, not without more proof than a bad smell.

  When the first explorers of Horizon had tried to return to England, leaving the effects of the quintessence field, their limbs had become gradually stiffer as the nutrients in their bodies turned back to salt and sand. Was that what had happened here? Was whatever had leaked through the connection somehow causing an interruption in the quintessence field?

  And what should they do now? He had opened that thread like a tunnel between two places, connecting his upstairs rooms with this place of death. Now that it was open, however, how was he supposed to close it? A void was the most destructive thing they knew about—it would obliterate any matter—but the quintessence thread wasn't made of matter, and it was the void that had created it in the first place.

  Blanca gripped his arm. "Look!"

  On the floor near the stairs, a loose, mesh cage held two puff weasels. The furry creatures lay on their backs, limbs splayed out straight and stiff, twitching. Matthew took a step back. He pulled off a chunk from a piece of old bread on a worktable and tossed it toward the cage. The bread hit the floor as a spray of sand.

  "It's spreading," Matthew said. "Coming down the stairs. And somehow, it blocks quintessence. The quintessence field doesn't reach wherever that miasma spreads."

  "How can we stop it?"

  Matthew tried to think. The miasma seemed to move along the ground, like an invisible stream of water pouring out of the connection and spreading out across the floor. If he elevated himself on stilts of some kind, he might be able to make it back up to the connection. Of course, if he fell, he would die. If he could get to his boarcat paws, he might be able to sever the thread, which would probably—possibly—close the hole and stop the miasma's advance.

  In the meantime, it was spreading across the floor toward them. They ran outside into the night.

  "Go and wake Parris," Matthew said.

  "What are you going to do?"

  "I don't know."

  Blanca ran off toward the Parris home. Matthew raced to the storehouse and was back in a moment with a copper shovel. It was actually only a thin layer of copper around the outside, and wood in the middle, so it wasn't too heavy to use. The blade of the shovel was much larger than a standard shovel. Matthew plunged it into the ground. The copper acted as a conductor of Matthew's own quintessence field. Normally, he could change the weight and properties of the matter in his own body, but the copper allowed him to extend that power to whatever it touched. He dipped the shovel down into the solid earth as easily as through water, and pulled a huge mass of it free as effortlessly as if it were goose feathers. He tipped it up onto the ground, allowing the earth to run off the shovel, where he turned it to diamond, freezing it into a squat, vertical wall.

  He shifted to the left and repeated the process, circling his way around the house, creating a ditch with a short wall on the outside. It was the same way they built their houses, only a team of men did the work with copper shaping tools to make the walls straight and true. He would confine the miasma inside a wall.

  By the time Blanca returned with Parris, Matthew had it finished. He climbed out of the circle and explained to Parris what he had done and what he had seen. They circled the wall, tossing bits of diamond and gold onto the ground inside of Matthew's makeshift wall. After a few minutes, they saw the gold objects turn back to their original materials. The miasma was outside the house.

  Only then did Matthew realize his mistake. "Get back!" he said. Of course, a diamond wall wasn't going to hold the miasma. As soon as it reached the wall, the diamond would crumble back into dirt. An earthen wall might still dam it for a bit, but it might also seep right through.

  The land on which the Quintessence Society building stood sloped gently toward them. "Around to the other side," Matthew said. "Get to the high ground."

  They raced around, and here the gold pieces on the ground were still gold. The miasma was all flowing downhill away from the building . . . toward the rest of the settlement.

  "Sound the alarm," Parris said. Matthew ran to the alarm box. There were a dozen of them scattered around the settlement, placed there to give warning if the manticores ever breached the barrier. It was much like a bell-box, only it was attached to a large bell on top of the church. The increased weight of a single ironfish bone was hardly enough to ring such a bell, but it was enough to release a catch, which in turn released a much larger weight, which fell, pulling the bell rope. The bell tolled, its low tones resonating out over the colony.

  At that moment, the Society building itself, also made of diamond, shuddered and creaked like a ship at anchor in a storm. The bottom of the south wall had transformed back into dirt. Under the weight of the diamond on top of it, it was crumbling away, and the whole structure was leaning. Finally, with a deafening crack, the building toppled and crashed into the growing pool of miasma. The south wall, now on the bottom, instantly transformed into dirt and collapsed in a cloud of dust, bringing the rest down after it.

  Colonists began pouring into the street, matchlocks in hand, thinking it was a manticore attack. When they saw Matthew and Parris, they ran to join them. "Forget the guns," Matthew said. He quickly explained what was happening. Most of them weren't natural philosophers and had only the barest appreciation of quintessence, but they had lived on Horizon long enough to accept the idea of an invisible smell that could destroy buildings. The smell of death in London carried disease, after all. Why shouldn't it carry destruction, too?

  "We need to funnel it down to the river," Matthew said. "Keep it away from the buildings. Get the shovels."

  The others scrambled to help, and Matthew raced back around the destruction. It was now possible to see the miasma, if only a little. Throughout the colony, they had erected shekinah flatworms in glass jars on poles to light the settlement at night. Where the shekinah light hit the miasma, however, it seemed to be swallowed up, showing where the miasma was by the absence of light. It was like a barely perceptible shadow, only visible at certain angles, flowing across the ground. And there was a lot more of it than Matthew had realized.

  He ran ahead of it and started shoveling, trying to make a wedge of barricades to direct it into a chute. A few men joined him, and he shouted instructions. They dug fast, and threw up great piles of dirt, but the miasma came faster and higher than they expected. It rushed over the walls and flowed around them, sending them running. The two buildings on either side of them, their foundations undermined, crashed toward each other. One man was struck by a falling wedge of diamond wall, pinning him to the ground, where the miasma quickly rolled over him, transforming him into a crumbling statue of salt and sand.

  "Back!" Matthew yelled. "Farther back!"

  But it was too late. The miasma was spreading, far beyond their ability to control it. They abandoned their attempts and instead ran ahead of it, checking the buildings for anyone left inside and circling back around to higher ground.

  Matthew spotted Blanca running into the small building the colonists used to store common goods and tools. It was one of the few original structures that had survived the devastating quintessence fire of two years before, although its diamond walls were melted thin in some places and its original diamond roof had been replaced with a wooden one. Surely there was no one in there to evacuate.

 
; He ran in after her. The building was one large room filled with odds and ends for general use: split boards and cut stone, small mountains of scrap gold and silver, and a smaller pile of copper. And, of course, the stores of mercury, sulphur, and salt. These three were divided into shares and restricted to one share per family, except by special permit from the governor. Blanca was there, gathering up sacks of salt.

  "This is all we have," she said. "We need to save it."

  Matthew shook his head. "We need to go. We'll get more salt."

  "There isn't any more salt. We need this if we're going to survive."

  She was right, of course, but so was he. They didn't have time. "Take what you have, and let's go!"

  "Not enough."

  Frustrated, he joined her, throwing the bags onto a old canvas sail they used to haul large quantities of materials from place to place. If they could get the salt on it, then between them, perhaps they could drag it out and up to safety. The miasma, however, was too quick for them. Before they had half of the sacks transferred, a spot of light near the door suddenly darkened. He couldn't see how much there was, but he knew they didn't have long.

  "Quick," he said. "Up!"

  Blanca could be as stubborn as Catherine, but she recognized the urgency in his voice. He saw her bend as if to leap, and jumped himself, making his body both light and insubstantial, shooting right through the wooden roof as if it were made of air, and out onto its peaked top. Blanca didn't join him. He dipped his head back in and saw her, her face turned up with a look of terror. Her legs wouldn't move.

  Matthew jumped back down, landing on the pile of salt, hoping it was high enough to keep him safe. He held a hand out for Blanca. She grasped it, and he increased his own weight, balancing her as she dragged herself toward him, barely able to move her legs at all. They were heavy and stiff, and she could no longer lighten them like the rest of her body. There was no way he could leap clear while carrying her. Around the edges, near the floor, the pile of salt began to spark and sizzle. The building creaked and tilted as its foundation was undermined.