by David Walton
The room was littered with experimental detritus: bones, horns, claws, feathers, beaks, skins, furs, carcasses or parts of them swimming in spirits, piles of petals and herbs, mortars and pestles, rows of jars with powders, tinctures, extracts, and solutions of all colors, the carapaces of beetles, husks left by molting firewasps, and a pyramid of tiny marmoset skulls. A jar of Shekinah flatworms illuminated a pale corpse lying on a table set against one wall. Catherine recognized John Mason, a man who had died by the river that morning when he picked up an acid salamander.
Sinclair set the wooden box on the table. From inside, he cautiously
lifted two severed and dried paws with needle- sharp claws. Catherine knew those claws had enough venom to kill him before he could take his next breath. She moved a little closer, not wanting to miss anything.
Sinclair lifted a tiny blue bottle and showed it to Catherine. "You'll want this."
"What is it?"
"The tears of an animal called a seer skink. Put it a drop in each eye, like this." He mimed how to do it, and she followed his lead. She had already applied it to her second eye when the first one began to burn. Soon both eyes blazed with intense pain. She screamed and clawed at them. He had blinded her. He'd given her acid for her eyes, and like an idiot, she'd poured it in.
"Stings a bit," Sinclair said. "It'll pass."
Just that quickly, she blinked back tears, and the pain was gone. "You could have warned me," she said, and then she stopped talking and stared. The room had come alive.
Tiny networks of light crisscrossed through the air, not randomly, but connecting various items of bone and beak and skin. An iridescent bird sat perched on the table where she was certain one had not been before. As she watched, it flapped its wings, then launched itself up and out of the room through the ceiling. Bright insects buzzed to and fro. Far from being dazzled by all the light, she felt like the world had grown suddenly clear, as if the rest of her life up to this point had been viewed through a veil.
She lifted a hand and reached for a cord of light, but her hand passed through without breaking it or casting a shadow. A faint filigree of light curled intricately under Sinclair's and Maasha Kaatra's skin, illuminating them, thicker in the trunk and branching out toward their fingers and toes. She lifted an arm and saw the same effect in herself, and thought: Blood. Specks of quintessence were flowing in their blood, healing any injury.
"That bird," she said. "The one that flew away. It's invisible, isn't it?"
"Yes," Sinclair said. "Both invisible and insubstantial. There are some species that stay that way most of the time, perhaps even all the time. Under normal circumstances, their lives would never intersect our own."
Catherine spun, trying to take in everything. This was literally a new world, separate and yet parallel to her own.
"What do all the connections mean?"
"They mark a quintessence link. When a material is infused with quintessence, then separated into two . . . Here. Watch."
Sinclair took a tiny bone from a shelf. She didn't think it was an ironfish bone, but she couldn't identify it. Marmoset, perhaps? He snapped the bone in half. Light flowed from the break like molten metal, and as he pulled the pieces away from each other, a new strand pulled out between them. He tossed one bone half to her, and she caught it awkwardly. The strand stretched to connect the two pieces across the room.
"Just like the bell- boxes," she said.
He nodded.
"Just like the tamarin bond, too," she said. "The atoms are connected through quintessence. That's what Gibbs was saying to the Society, but most of them didn't believe it."
"People are slow to change," Sinclair said. "Only a few of us can see past the stories to the way things really are." He threw the bone aside. Unlatching a cage with two birds inside, he grasped one of them gently and drew it out. Even the bird had fine veins of glowing light moving through its body. Its head bobbed in quick jerks, but its wings were entirely enclosed in his hand. "You must see how it works," Sinclair said, "so you know how to help."
Catherine realized what he was going to do a moment before he did it. "Don't!" she said, but Sinclair closed his other hand over the bird's head and gave it a swift twist. When he removed his hand, the head hung limp, and the glowing veins were dark.
Solemnly, he laid the dead bird on the floor. "First," Sinclair said, "we need a surrogate to stand for his life."
He lifted the other bird from the cage and placed it in Catherine's hands. "What are you going to do?" she asked, but Sinclair put his finger to his lips.
He strapped the dried boarcat paws under his own hands with loops of string, the three claws of each paw attached separately to three of his fingers. Gently, as if playing a lute, Sinclair plucked at one of the strands of quintessence leading out of the living bird. The strand moved at his touch and bent, as if a light beam were a material thing.
"A boarcat's claw is a remarkable tool," he said. "And the boarcat female knows how to use it."
"Does she have tears like the seer skink?"
"Not that I know of. She must sense the quintessence in some other way."
Quickly, like a girl playing finger games with loops of yarn, Sinclair wrapped the strand through his fingers and stretched it toward the dead bird. He wrapped it around the bird's chest and tied it tight. Its chest began to rise and fall in time with the living bird. A second strand tied heart to heart, and light once again pulsed through glowing veins. A third tied head to head, and the bird sprang to its feet. Its head bobbed and twitched from side to side, in exact mirror imitation of the one in Catherine's hands.
"It's a puppet," Catherine said.
"True," Sinclair said. "It's animated, but not truly alive, not its own creature. The last step is to recapture its spirit."
Catherine looked up, half expecting to see a ghostly bird flying around the room. "How can you retrieve a spirit?"
"From the place spirits go when they depart. From the void."
She hadn't seen a void, but she shivered anyway. "I thought it was dangerous," she said. "Father said it almost killed you the last time."
He grinned like a cat. "Not the last time. Just the first time. I've reproduced them since then."
"But that's why you wanted Matthew to make those boxes, wasn't it?"
"Your young friend is good at making things. Such a box will be useful, but I can't wait for him."
Sinclair opened a metal tin and lifted out a quintessence pearl. Nearly all animals on Horizon had them somewhere in their bodies, so it had not been hard to replenish the supply they had collected from the ironfish. He set a dish onto a metal stand that held it at the same height as the table and poured in a few drops of vitriol. "This is the reason for the sulfur in the boarcat's fur," Sinclair said. "She runs her claws through it and collects enough to create a small void." He stood back and dropped in the pearl.
The pearl's glow vanished, as did the pearl itself, leaving a tiny black sphere in the dish. The sphere began to grow.
As it did, a faint new strand appeared, passing from the dead bird into the void, like a rope stretching out of sight down an endless well. As the void grew, the strand grew a little brighter. "This is the difficult part," Sinclair said. "This is the reason I will need your help."
Maasha Kaatra approached holding two flat planks of beetlewood. He already seemed to know what to do. When the void grew larger than his fist, he began to push it back with the beetlewood planks. It worked; apparently the void was unable to grow beyond the beetlewood. If he held the planks in one place, however, the void would bulge, becoming egg- shaped, and he would have to move them to stop its growth in that direction.
As Maasha Kaatra controlled the void's growth, Sinclair began to manipulate the strand that led into it from the dead bird. He pulled more and more of it toward him out of the void, looping it around the boarcat claws, around the bird's body, and around the strand that led to the living bird.
"Every creature has an anchor that
ties its soul to its body," Sinclair said. "In death, that anchor is lost to the void. If I simply pulled the spirit back into the bird's body, it would flee back to the void as soon as I released it. That's why we need a surrogate— a living bird to give its anchor in place of the dead one's. For them both to live, the anchor must be shared between them."
Catherine felt a tug on the living bird as the strands were entangled. The strand from the void grew thin and taut, and Sinclair strained to wrap it tighter. At the other end of that strand must be the bird's lost spirit.
"Don't let it go, now," Sinclair warned.
The strand began to thrum like a lute string. Vibrations oscillated back and forth along its length, growing larger and brighter. The void seemed to open more quickly, and Maasha Kaatra was hard- pressed to keep it under control. He moved with lightning speed and grace, but every time he pushed it back in one place, the darkness leaped out in another, as if the world were a fabric tearing away from a hole. The living bird in her hand began to vibrate, too, and Catherine had to plant her feet and lean back to keep it from pulling out of her hand.
Finally, with a blinding flash, the end of the strand licked up out of the void and into the dead bird. Like a tug- of- war when one side lets go of the rope, Sinclair, the dead bird, and Catherine flew backward. The whole room, in fact, seemed to leap in a sudden tremor. Maasha Kaatra lifted his planks like two swords and clapped them together right through the center of the void. The void disappeared with a pop.
In the silence, Catherine heard a flutter. The dead bird hopped and flapped its wings. Afraid she had killed the one she held, she opened her hands, but that bird was safe as well. Before they could fly, Sinclair scooped them both up and brought them back to their cage. They fluttered and bobbed and pecked, as independently bright and alive as they had ever been.
Catherine could hardly breathe. She knew what would happen, had known the whole time, but somehow hadn't believed it. She had seen this bird limp and dead, and now it lived. Her gaze ran from the birds to the corpse of John Mason, and a chill ran down her back. Now that she really knew it could be done, it terrified her. Part of her was eager to start; the other part wanted to run home and cower in her bed.
"What do you want me to do?" she said.
"Maasha Kaatra will be the surrogate this time. I need you to control the void."
"What if I can't?"
"You saw how it was done. Just push it back wherever it grows too large."
"I don't know . . . ," she began, but the look he gave her stopped her short. She could almost hear his thoughts— that he should have known better than to ask a girl. He was the only man who trusted her to do something dangerous and hard, and here she was about to give up the chance.
"I'll do it." She snatched the planks from his outstretched hand. "You do your part. Don't worry about me."
Sinclair put a hand of his Maasha Kaatra's shoulder. "Are you ready?"
His friend nodded. "Let's begin."
They began. Maasha Kaatra and Sinclair lifted John Mason's corpse and set it on the floor. Maasha Kaatra lay down next to it with his muscular arms folded across his chest in imitation. This time, Sinclair wrapped glowing strands around him instead, chest to chest, heart to heart, head to head. The corpse breathed, glowed, and finally moved, mirroring Maasha Kaatra's arms and legs like a marionette on strings.
Then it was her turn. Sinclair produced a second void, and she began to control it, awkwardly at first, then with growing confidence. It really wasn't that difficult. Another glowing strand ran from inside the void to Mason's body, and Sinclair began the process of teasing it out, wrapping more and more of its length around the corpse, and tangling it with the strand connecting the corpse to Maasha Kaatra.
Soon he was laboring with the effort, struggling to wrap each length as if hoisting a mainsail by himself with a hundred feet of rope. The void began to grow faster. It became more mutable, too, changing its shape more rapidly in response to her attempts to push it back. She tired, and the emptiness began to fill her vision. It was a hole in the world that constantly sucked more and more into itself. She felt like she was trying to patch the hole by pushing matter over it, but it kept tearing larger. It was bigger now than it had been, almost blocking her view of the rest of the room, and she began to beat at it frantically.
Maasha Kaatra had closed it completely by slapping the beetlewood planks together across the center. "I can't control it," she said. "I'm going to shut it down."
"No," Sinclair said. "I'm almost done."
The oscillating began. Vibrations thrummed back and forth from Mason into the endless depths of the void and back again. The void grew larger yet, forcing Catherine to take a step back. "I can't wait," she said, and slapped the planks together. But it was too late. She could no longer reach the center. Her slap simply pushed it back, but didn't close it.
Sinclair saw. "Run!" he said.
She stumbled backward, dropping the wood. Sinclair abandoned the boarcat paws. Maasha Kaatra, clambered to his feet and stood transfixed by the glowing vibrations, not seeming to hear. "Girls?" he said. "My girls!"
Catherine tugged at his arm. "Get back!"
"They're in there," he said. "I can reach them."
"No!"
His gaze turned to her and he gripped her wrist painfully. "Murderer," he said in a terrible voice. "You killed them."
She tried to pull away, but he was too strong. "Maasha Kaatra!" she shouted. "It's me, Catherine!" The void was enveloping them. She could see nothing in its darkness. "Let me go!"
A gurgling cry came from the floor, and the corpse of John Mason struggled to rise, wrapped in glowing cords, fresh blood running from his open mouth. Catherine screamed and pulled again, this time yanking her wrist out of Maasha Kaatra's grasp. The vibrating strand connecting Mason to the void blazed like the evening sun, and then broke.
To Catherine, it felt like the floor flew into the air to strike her face. Instead of just throwing her backward, as with the bird, the whole room lurched and shook. She looked up from the floor in time to see Maasha Kaatra fall backward like a tower toppling. Where he should have struck the floor, the void was there, and he kept falling, tumbling farther and farther, like a rock into a bottomless well.
The void collapsed with a pop. Catherine lay still, afraid to move. Sinclair, too, stood rooted in place, whispering the word "no" over and over. He didn't seem to see her.
On the floor, the corpse of John Mason lay still, composed entirely of crumbling sand.
Chapter Twenty-four
THE island ended in a sheer cliff . The forest gave way to scrub and dirt, which in turn gave way to bare rock, which dropped off suddenly, straight down into blackness. The cliff continued down for miles, beyond what the eye could see, and no stone thrown over the Edge ever hit bottom, no more than did the torrents of ocean that rushed over it to the north and south.
On the side of this cliff , unseen by any human, a colony of cliff dippers flocked out of their roosts and began to hunt for food. The dippers had long necks and bills like cranes, but with a glaring difference: their beaks were on sideways, opening to the left and right instead of up and down. As they flew along the cliff face, they bent their sinuous necks and plunged one side of their beaks into the solid rock, skimming as if through water. Their prey was a fat beetle larva that curled itself inside the rock to await its metamorphosis. Each time a dipper touched one, it snapped its beak shut in lightning reflex, dragging the food out of the rock, and swallowed it whole.
Then the impossible happened. The cliff betrayed the dippers. A section of rock they had hunted for countless generations suddenly hardened, trapping several beaks inside. Feeling the sudden resistance and interpreting it as food, the dippers snapped their beaks shut, slamming their bodies into the cliff . One beak broke off , freeing its owner, but the others screeched and scrabbled and flapped their wings, unable to move. The off ending section of rock rumbled and shook and then sheared away from the cliff f
ace, slowly at first, then with gathering speed, dragging the screaming birds into the abyss. Their fellows flew after them, crying their confusion, but they couldn't keep up with the falling rock, nor reach the top again if they flew too low. They beat their wings, rising with the air currents, and returned to their nests.
EVERYONE felt the earthquake, though no one else knew what had caused it. Catherine avoided them as she made her way back through the streets. There was no damage to any of the buildings that she could see, but then, what could damage buildings made of diamond? She reached her own home without having to talk to anyone, and was relieved to find that Matthew was not there, as he so often was these days. She didn't want to face him and his smug rightness. She was shaken and afraid. It had all gone so wrong. Her confidence that morning, that they could experiment with such deep and violent powers without risk, seemed so stupid now.
She ran to her bedchamber, grateful not to meet Father, either, who was probably out talking about the earthquake and what it meant. She was alone.