by David Walton
"Hurry," Matthew said. Blanca shuffled up toward him, and as she did, she pulled her legs clear and regained their use. "Now jump!"
They both leaped this time, clearing the roof and landing on top. It was no problem for either of them to leap to the ground from such a height, but they had no idea how much ground the miasma covered. Near the shekinah lights, it was clearly visible as a shadow along the ground where none should be. In the rest of the settlement, however, it was invisible. They knew it was safe to the north of the collapsed society building, but even with the help of quintessence, they couldn't jump that far.
The building underneath them lurched and tilted, nearly pitching them off the roof. Blanca shrieked and held onto Matthew's arm for balance. They were out of options.
"The nearest diamond," Matthew said. "Let's go."
The buildings nearby, although they had collapsed, still had pieces of diamond wall jutting up from the mounds of dirt. If it was still made of diamond, that meant it was high enough that the miasma hadn't reached it, and if they could leap that far, they could make it.
Holding hands, they jumped, the air rushing by them, and landed on the nearest diamond. Blanca slipped and slid toward the ground, but Matthew held her up. "Again," he said.
They leaped again, farther up the slope, to another island. Finally, after three more similar leaps, like crossing a river on exposed rocks, they made it back to where they had started. Behind them, the storehouse collapsed like the others, only this time, a rush of white flame engulfed the wreckage and melted it down to nothing.
"The salt," Blanca said. "It's gone."
"Everything is gone," Matthew said. He shook his head in disbelief, feeling a heavy stone settling in his chest. Before this, his experiments had always brought good to the colony: more food, more comfort, easier ways to accomplish work. He hadn't meant to risk such destruction. He had only been trying to find Catherine.
They watched the last of the settlement crumble away.
CHAPTER 10
RAMOS kept trying the bell-box, but he got no reply. Either it wasn't working anymore, or else the Horizon colonists, realizing who he was, no longer wished to speak to him. He could hardly believe that it had really happened. He had spoken to someone on the other side of the world! He had only just gotten used to the idea that they could make a bell ring a thousand miles away; that was astonishing enough. Now his voice, his own voice, had somehow been made to travel across that immense distance.
His mind spun, trying to invent plausible theories for how it worked. There was nothing connecting his bell-box to anything else. Nothing that could been seen or touched, anyway. Just to prove it to himself, he lifted the box and waved his hand under it, over it, and all around it. He felt nothing. Yet somehow sound had traveled from Horizon to his little box.
What was sound, anyway? It was invisible. Humans made sound by blowing out air, but sound could also be heard underwater, and could be made by striking with a hammer or plucking a string. Generally, it only traveled a short distance; even a very loud noise rarely traveled more than a mile. The sound diminished as it traveled; close to the source it might be very loud, but as it traveled, it was changed somehow by passing through the air—dirtied, as it were, and made less. It reminded him of Aristotle's theory of how a prism turned regular light into a rainbow. He said that the light passing through the prism was dirtied depending on how much of the glass it passed through, so that light passing through the thick part of the prism was colored differently than light passing through the thin part.
What if sound worked the same? Perhaps quintessence was just the carrier, the aether, and either light or sound could travel through it like water in a riverbed. If quintessence was a purer carrier than air, then light passing through it would be less dirtied, and thus purer, more white, as indeed the light from the shekinah flatworm and the pearls seemed to be. In the same way, quintessence-carried sound would not be dirtied as it was in air, and thus could travel a much further distance.
As a theory, it left a lot to be desired, but perhaps more details would help flesh it out. Anyway, there was no sense philosophizing when he could simply test the idea. If quintessence light could pass through a prism without changing color like regular light, then that would support the theory. If it did change color, he would keep thinking.
Barrosa had long since gone to bed, and Ramos was alone in the secret cellar. He took his time, gathering what he needed and setting up the experiment. On one table, he directed lamplight through a prism; on another, quintessence light from his pearl. At first he was disappointed. The resulting rainbows looked the same. Red turning to yellow, passing through green, and fading to violet.
He sighed. If quintessence light had passed through the prism without changing, or at least had changed differently, that might have given him a clue, a piece of knowledge that he could pick at and pull into real understanding. He nearly went to bed right then. The revelation came quite by accident. On the red side of the quintessence rainbow, an ordinary candle stood in its holder. The quintessence light was not shining directly on it. No part of the rainbow touched it. The candle, however, melted.
Ramos examined it in confusion. The wax pooled beneath it in a lumpy mass and was still hot and soft to the touch. What had happened? The candle had not been lit. The room was not hot, and none of the other candles in the room were melted. He slid the prism across the table and shone the rainbow on another candle. Nothing happened. He shifted it to the right slightly, then a little more, until the rainbow shone on the wall a few handbreadths away from the candle. When it reached this point, the second candle rapidly melted. Heart pounding, Ramos lowered his hand in front of the candle, then swiftly pulled it back in pain. His skin was red and tender, as if he had burned it in a fire.
A chill rippled down Ramos's skin. Invisible light. There was some kind of light shining to the left of the rainbow, as if it continued past yellow, orange, and red into more colors, colors that could not be seen. And not just any light, but a kind of light hot enough to burn skin and melt wax. He tested regular light the same way, but as he suspected, it had no such effect. Only the quintessence light could melt candles and burn his hand.
Aristotle had it wrong. It wasn't the prism that produced the colors, any more than it was the prism that produced this new kind of light. The prism, after all, hadn't changed. The invisible colors were a characteristic of the light, and if that was the case, then the visible colors were as well. That meant the prism didn't add colors to the light. The colors were already there.
He aimed at another candle, and this time, he dropped the pearl into a jar of saltwater to increase the intensity of the quintessence light. The pearl blazed into brightness. At first, nothing seemed to happen. Then, with a deep whoosh, the swath of air from the prism to the back wall erupted in flame. The candle, the holder, the table—everything in its path—vaporized in a violent explosion of heat and light. An invisible pulse blasted into Ramos, throwing him backwards and knocking his head against the table behind him.
He lay stunned for a few moments. He touched the back of his head, and his hand came back bloody, but the wound was already healing, thanks to the quintessence pearl. He stood and surveyed the damage. The room was a wreck. In a line from the prism to the wall, there was nothing but soot, the black particles still swirling gently through the candlelit air. A hole had been punched in the earthen wall, leaving dirt still crumbling to the floor.
Ramos sat up, letting his head clear, and a slow smile spread across his face. The king wanted a weapon. Ramos had found one.
THE GIANT salamander snuffled and poked its nose through the square entranceway. It was as tall as Catherine, but so thick in the body that the opening wasn't wide enough to admit more than its blunt head. Its pink face was wormlike, devoid of features beyond a pointed nose and that gaping mouth. Catherine was close enough to see a few wet hairs hanging limply from its chin, like a beard. Its wet skin glistened. It was much larger than an
ordinary salamander, of course, but its dimensions were different, too. It was shorter and plumper, like a leech with legs.
It planted its feet and squeezed, shoving its body into the too-small hole with a squelching noise. It was coming through after all. Fold after fold of flesh rippled into the room until the whole salamander emerged, its bulk blocking the soft light of the spirits beyond.
Catherine flattened herself against the wall, trying not to be noticed, though the monster was close enough to touch. She hoped it couldn't smell her, or that it preferred eating glowing spirits to eating human flesh. She felt a throbbing in her chest that seemed connected to the pulse in the creature's skin. It was like holding a shekinah flatworm in her bare hands and feeling the pulse of its power, only much greater.
It ignored her, if it even sensed that she was there. It pulled its glistening body toward the vertical shaft. As quickly as it had leaped to catch the tiny sparks in its mouth, it leaped upwards into the shaft, blocking the light. It fit so neatly that she suspected it was the salamander that had made the hole in the first place. She heard it squirming its way up toward the surface. It had a long way to go.
She didn't stick around to watch it. She ran back into the large cavern, where the motes of light still swirled in agitation.
"It's gone," she told those nearest. "It went up the shaft."
At first, none of the closest spoke English or Latin, but eventually one responded in kind and spread the word. Gradually, the eddies of light settled.
"What is that creature?" she asked.
Hayes had found her again. "We don't know," he said. "We can't see anything physical. We didn't even know there was anything physical left in the world, until you arrived."
"It looked like a huge, pink salamander."
"It's a monster, that's all we know. We can feel when it's coming closer, though not always soon enough to escape before it devours us."
Catherine explored the cavern, discovering openings into several more caves. Eventually she would need to find a way out, though she didn't want to think too hard about how unlikely that was. For the time being, her most urgent need was to find some food and water. She stepped through into another cave after using a mound of chipped stone to mark the entrance. She didn't want to get lost and be unable to find her way back to where she had started.
The cavern beyond was darker, but a small galaxy of the spirit lights followed her into it. Although they couldn't see, they apparently had some sense of their environment, such that they could flee the salamander or follow her. It was a good thing, because without their light, she wouldn't have been able to see anything. If another salamander came, of course, they might flee again, leaving her behind in darkness.
The cavern walls were wet and echoed with the sound of water dripping. Spikes jutted down from the ceiling, occasionally met by others reaching up from the floor. It was like walking through an alien forest with stone trees and the occasional crystal flower blooming red or white from a cavity. She found a small stream cutting its way through the rock from one end of the cavern to the other. The way this new cavern dipped and turned and opened into other spaces, she was afraid she would have trouble finding her way back, even given her precaution. She wished she still had her pack.
She drank from the stream, which tasted cool and—to her surprise—salty. None of the water around Horizon was salty. Even the ocean for miles around it was fresh, the salt consumed by all the fish and marine life that used quintessence to catch prey, attract a mate, or camouflage themselves. Anywhere else in the world, this water would have been undrinkable, useless to her, but here on Horizon, both the salt and the water were essential to life. She drank eagerly, and, though still hungry, felt much better.
There were other creatures down here besides the salamanders. She saw pale fish in the water, giant eyeless spiders with too many legs skittering out of the light, and colonies of naked bats hanging from the roof. She needed to catch one of those fish, and she needed a fire to cook it, but she didn't see how she was going to manage either one.
She followed the stream up to its source, a rush of water down a smooth wall marbled with mineral deposits. It flowed out of an opening high above her, but that was no barrier, not with a fresh supply of salt coursing through her body. She leaped, adjusting her body weight to control her ascent, and scrambled up through the opening, soaking her feet.
A smaller cave now tunneled back into the rock, following the water, gradually higher. She continued, reasoning that it was better to go up than down, and that the water must come from somewhere outside, though given how far she had fallen, she held out little hope of climbing to the surface this way.
She climbed further, not sure what she was looking for, but knowing that sitting down in despair wouldn't get her very far either. The lights began slipping away behind her, no longer following, but she could see another light in the distance, beyond a bend in the tunnel. She rounded the bend, and found it was farther away and brighter than she had at first thought. Was it possible it was sunlight? Could she be coming out through the side of the mountain?
When she rounded the next bend, the light was so bright it hurt her eyes, and it definitely was not sunlight. It reflected off the white surface of the cave wall, and she gasped when she realized what she was seeing. She licked her finger, touched it to the wall, and put it back in her mouth. Salt. She closed her eyes and savored the taste.
There was enough salt here to provide for the colony for months. Years, depending on how deep it went. She pressed closer to the light, sliding sideways and shielding her eyes. Finally, she could see where it was coming from. Hundreds of shekinah flatworms lined the walls, their bodies pressed to the salty surface like leeches to a wound. The light from their bodies flared and blazed in time to their motion. She pressed farther in, barely able to see, closing her eyes to slits and blocking most of the light with her hands. The shekinahs surrounded her. She had to step carefully to avoid crushing them.
As she progressed, the shekinahs grew larger. The ones at the entrance to the cave were finger-sized, just like the ones they caught and used for light back in the colony. Farther in, they were the size of her fist, fat and soft. Beyond that, they were as big as her head, then bigger still. The larger ones seemed stretched, pinker and more translucent, and producing less light. She reached a cavern where the walls and ceiling opened up, still glistening white with salt. The light was less bright here, and she could open her eyes. Doing so, she realized her mistake. The largest shekinahs had legs. They were giants three times as large as she was, pink, earless, and eyeless, with flat tails and gaping toothless mouths.
This was the salamanders' lair.
CHAPTER 11
RAMOS stood in a field of yellow wildflowers that stretched to a distant forest line. Thousands of bright blooms swayed in a gentle breeze. The temperature was mild, and thick clouds glided through a blue sky.
King Philip sat on a three-legged stool that his page had carried for him on the four mile walk from town. Philip himself had ridden a horse, as had his guards and his inner circle of advisors. It was a small retinue for the king, who usually rode with at least a hundred. The king's advisors were all generals, battle-hardened men who had commanded armies in France or Italy or Turkey. The government was run by bureaucrats, but the men Philip trusted were those who fought for him.
Ramos tinkered with his device, adjusting the height of the wooden stand, checking its balance, nervous for everything to be just as it should be. He briefly explained the apparatus. The pearl and prism were shut inside a box mirrored on the inside, but a black wooden barrier could be slid into place, dividing the pearl and prism into separate compartments. A hole in the front, set at the proper angle, would let out the invisible light.
One of the king's advisors, a thickset man named Carillo in a cream white doublet, yawned.
"The strength can be adjusted," Ramos said. "This is low power, with no salt used at all." He held one of the flowers in fron
t of the device and lifted the barrier. The petals blackened around the edges, then curled and shriveled until nothing was left but black powder drifting away in the breeze.
Carillo snorted. "Better a flint, my lord, if I wanted to light a cookfire."
Ramos replaced the barrier, ignoring the comment. He explained how he had split the light into colors with a prism, how the candle had melted, how he had deduced the existence of invisible light outside the span of colors they could see. The men shuffled their feet and looked impatient. He was losing them. He had never been good at presentation; the things that seemed crucial to him weren't necessarily of interest to his audience.
He decided to skip the explanation and jump ahead. He had set up a simple wooden crosspiece in the field. He walked over to it and placed a hat on the top point and wrapped an old cloth around it to serve as a cloak.
"This is an enemy soldier," he said, "and this is high power." He opened a hatch at the back of the device and pulled the top off a jar of salt water.
"I hope the enemy is lame," Carillo said, "or you'd be dead by now."
Ramos tipped the jar into the compartment where the pearl sat. He had only used a few drops before, but, irritated at Carillo, he poured it all in, filling the compartment with the white liquid and leaving a slick of wet salt behind in the jar.
Ramos motioned at the men. "Stand back, please."
Some of the men edged back slightly, but Carillo held his ground.
With a flourish, Ramos pulled the barrier free. For a moment, nothing happened, and he feared he had ruined the experiment by drowning the device. Then the stick figure's cloak exploded in a rush of flame, as did a wide swath of flowers around it. In moments, the figure was incinerated, the clothes vaporized, and black ash drifted through the air.