by David Walton
Parris had seen through a tamarin's eyes. He knew there were hundreds, if not thousands more of them living and traveling through the forests and rivers and mountain gorges of this vast island. If it came to war against that vast population, there would be no help for them. They would die.
THEY closed the gates behind the tamarins, but Parris couldn't help wondering how many might remain behind, invisible, to spy or kill or steal. He and the soldiers would have to search every building before their special sight wore off . And they would need more skink tears. A lot more.
The colonists cheered and shouted and clapped the soldiers on the back, as if this were a great victory instead of a disaster. Parris caught one look at the scowl on Sinclair's face and knew he wasn't the only one who saw the truth. Parris approached, Tate strutting behind him like a conquering hero with his matchlock on his shoulder.
Sinclair shook with rage. "Mr. Parris. Mr. Tate. You are under arrest for assault and murder on friends of this colony."
Parris and Tate reacted together. "What?"
"I'm not part of this," Parris said. "I told him not to shoot."
"And how did he and his men see their invisible targets?"
Parris's mouth dropped open. "I . . ."
"You are both relieved of all authority and freedom and will be kept in chains until your trial."
"I gave it to them so they could watch!" Parris said. "Not to kill!"
"Take them away," Sinclair said, but no one moved. It was Tate's soldiers who carried out Sinclair's authority in the colony, and here was Tate himself, under arrest for a crime they had all participated in. Despite his horror at being wrapped up in it, Parris had to admire the pure power of Sinclair's personality and his total expectation of obedience. For a moment he thought Tate would challenge him, would refuse to submit and command his soldiers' loyalty. Instead, Tate took the matchlock off his shoulder and handed it to his second- in- command with dignity.
Parris tried to catch Sinclair's eye. "I swear to you, I was not a part of this."
"Then you're simply a fool," Sinclair said. "Why do think I kept the discovery of the skink tears to myself? Out of greed?"
"No—"
"So I could protect the knowledge!" The veins on Sinclair's head throbbed and his eyes were wild. "So that fools with guns couldn't start wars that we can't win. You and your little Society, you sit around praising your free exchange of ideas, and what's the first thing you do when you get your hands on a secret? You give it to the very people who will do the worst possible thing with it!"
Parris felt his own anger rising. "And why were the tamarins here in the first place? Because you couldn't resist playing with powers you don't understand! Instead of taking precautions, instead of writing things down and sharing them piece by piece, you rush into a dangerous experiment that kills a man. And you call Tate rash for firing his gun? You sat in that house and fired a larger weapon with less understanding of the implications. Somehow, they knew what you did. That's why they came. The problem is, we don't know what you did."
"Enough!"
"If you want to keep control of this colony, you'll have to include all of us. No secret experiments, no hidden knowledge. This isn't your private expedition anymore. We're all here together, and we have to know everything if we're going to survive."
Sinclair's mouth twisted in a sneer. "You're just angry that your own daughter took my side."
Parris gasped at the injustice of this. "And what if it had been Catherine who died? Would you still dare stand there and tell me you did the right thing?"
Sinclair moved closer, until Parris could see the wild anguish in his eyes— not just anger, but something approaching madness.
"It's why we came," Sinclair said, his voice shaking. "The secret of life. It's all that matters."
Parris looked around the clearing at the people watching: colonists, sailors, Tate's soldiers, members of the Society. Intelligent men, strong men in their way, but could any lead them through this storm the way Sinclair had led them across the ocean? He didn't think so. He knew he couldn't do it. If Sinclair crumbled, they had no hope.
Parris took a last step toward Sinclair, bringing them face- to- face. He placed both hands on Sinclair's shoulders and gripped them. Tate's soldiers stood transfixed; no one moved to intervene. "We need you," Parris said. "And you need us."
"We were so close."
"Right now we need to concentrate on staying alive. Those tamarins will be back. Lead us."
Sinclair nodded. He looked at Tate, still standing by his second- in- command. "Thank you for your bravery and service to the colony," he said wearily. "Take your gun. Mobilize your men. We're going to war."
Chapter Twenty-five
AS soon as the sun set, Chichirico appeared in Catherine's bedchamber. She knew what he wanted. Just like the grays, he had felt the earthquake, and somehow he knew that humans had been to blame. She didn't want to open her mind to him. She was ashamed of what she and Sinclair had attempted, and she didn't want Chichirico to know the part she had played in it. Nevertheless, she shifted in bed, presenting her back to him, and allowed him to make the connection.
She thought he would be angry, that he would show her images of tamarin homes destroyed in the quake, but instead, he was elated. The damage, it seemed, had mostly been to the gray tribe's villages. He showed her a memory, though she could tell it was not his own, of a mercury spring at the Edge. The ground was shaking violently.
Cracks appeared in the earth, passing around the spring. The cracks widened, the ground tilted, and the precious mercury spring crumbled away and fell until it passed out of sight in the abyss.
THE spring was in the grays' territory. To reach another one, they would have to cross red land, or else come to an agreement with another tribe. The grays were furious, but Chichirico was pleased, and even more delighted with the battle with the grays in the settlement. The tamarins viewed it as a natural and expected part of their friendship that the humans should join them in fighting their enemies. Since it was Chichirico who had formed that alliance, the humans' actions had strengthened his leadership of his tribe.
Tell your father and Sinclair, Chichirico said.
She wanted to ask why he didn't tell them himself, but she knew the answer already. Of all the humans, only she had been willing to enter into a bond with a tamarin. Tamarins conducted diplomacy through memory bonds, not through speech. Chichirico wasn't going to trust his imperfect command of English to communicate effectively. That meant that for the time being, she was the bridge between the colony and the tamarin tribe.
SINCLAIR found John Marcheford sitting cross-legged on the floor of the church's nave, surrounded by paper. The paper was rough and fibrous, apparently of his own making, and thickly inked with words and symbols. The symbols looked like stick figures with too many lines. Marcheford had fled to the settlement when his home had been attacked by tamarins. These papers were all he had brought with him: the rudiments of a written tamarin language into which he hoped someday to translate the Bible.
"The tail- waving component makes it a challenge," Marcheford said. "I'm using a combination of Roman characters, like in our alphabet, and ideograms, like they use in Cathay."
"In case you didn't notice, they tried to kill you," Sinclair said.
"Not all of them."
"Ah, yes. Your converts."
Marcheford had a handful of tamarin converts who had warned him of the attack, allowing him to reach the settlement alive.
A jar of Shekinah flatworms stood on the floor near Marcheford's papers, though its light was dim. As flatworms crawled around the inside of their jars, they excreted a sludge that collected at the bottom. The sludge worked as the opposite of light: not just black, it actually pulled light out of its surroundings. Shadows became darker in its vicinity. Candles became dimmer. Eventually, the effect of the growing puddle of sludge would overwhelm even the flatworms' bright light, and the jars would have to be cleaned out before
they could be used again.
"I was sorry to hear of Maasha Kaatra's death," Marcheford said. "It's a hard thing to lose a faithful friend."
Sinclair clenched his fists hard enough to hurt. "He was with me for eight years. He had two daughters, did you know that? His father sold all three of them into slavery to the Portuguese. I was with a Dutch ship, but I always talked with sailors from other ships at berth, asking about strange sightings and hints of magic. When I went to visit the Portuguese vessel, most of the crew was ashore, with only two men left to man the ship. I found them in the hold, and the things they were doing to those two young girls . . . I can't describe it to you, Bishop. They were drunk and I overpowered them both and tied them up, meaning to leave them to the wrath of their captain.
"When I understood that Maasha Kaatra was their father, however, and that he had been made to watch from his chains, I freed him and let him have his revenge. It was too late for the girls, though. They both died. Maasha Kaatra meant to kill himself as well, but I told him about my search. I told him I meant to understand death and learn how to turn it back. I didn't lie to him. I told him that wasn't likely, even if I succeeded, that he would see his daughters again, but the idea caught in his mind. He had no home or family left, and didn't place much value on his own life. I think the only reason he didn't kill himself was the thought that he might help me reach my goal, and thus save other men's daughters from the same fate.
"I freed the rest of their slaves as well, who plundered the ship and then burned it. Maasha Kaatra followed me back, and never left my side." Sinclair rubbed at his temples. "I think that, at the end, he might actually have seen his daughters again."
"He was loyal and good. All men must die when their time comes." Marcheford said.
"No." Sinclair said. "It wasn't his time. God killed him to punish me."
"You think Maasha Kaatra's death was about you?"
"He died in my experiment, doing what I told him to."
"He died in pursuit of his own ends, making his own choices for his own reasons. The manner of his life and death was between him and God. You didn't own him. Perhaps he felt that these eight years were worth it, and perhaps not, but that is nothing to do with you. You miss his friendship, even if you can't admit it. Let yourself grieve for him."
"Listen," Sinclair said.
"That's not how it works." Marcheford stood up from his papers and straightened his back with a popping sound. "God isn't threatened by you. You can't fight him or steal from him."
"Let's just say I got his attention." Life, Sinclair didn't say. I nearly took back a life. The hairs on his arms prickled. This was bigger than Prometheus stealing fire. He was taking the fight to the very stronghold that gave God his sway over mankind— the fear of death and what came after.
"You think you've found something new," Marcheford said. "But nothing is new to God. He made quintessence. Nothing you can do with it surprises him."
"What if he didn't make it? What if quintessence is the raw material God used to make the world? We're doing things here God never intended. Man is taking command. This is far beyond the Tower of Babel, and this time we're winning."
"Yet you fear God will make you pay for your actions."
Sinclair turned away, annoyed, and struck at the air. "Listen, this isn't why I came here. You know the tamarins pretty well. We need your help to figure out how to beat them."
"How to kill them, you mean."
"Only to defend ourselves. We're not going out hunting them."
"As I understand it, you fired the first shot."
"Tate did. The fool. But that's not the point. We either need to know how to fight them and win, or else we need to convince them that we're not to blame." He thought back to the confrontation in the square. "You know a lot of tamarin words. Do you know what this one means?" He repeated the word Catherine had not known how to translate, the thing they said was gone forever because of the earthquake.
"It was a location," Marcheford said. "A place where they conducted the memory ceremonies that tied a young person to a particular family for the rest of his life. It stood right at the Edge, until the quake."
"What happened to it?"
"It's gone. The whole cliff face sheared off and fell."
"You saw it? You've been to the Edge?"
"Yes, I've seen it. The land just ends. A drop into pure blackness. The sun sinks into it every night until it disappears."
"So that's why they're so angry. Thanks." Sinclair headed for the door, but Marcheford called him back.
"Governor?"
"What?"
"I don't know what you plan, but I know one thing. If you set yourself against God, you'll lose."
Sinclair grinned. "That's what everyone thinks. That's why they never try."
THEY hauled the remaining bronze cannon from the ship and strengthened one of the platforms around the palisade to hold its weight. It was positioned along the line of approach from the river, the easiest way for a human army to advance, but Parris doubted it would do much good against tamarins. They could approach from any direction, invisibly. What the settlers needed most was a way to see them.
In two days, hunters collected dozens of seer skinks, which were caged in Sinclair's bestiary and milked for their tears. One of the hunters returned with a story of a large gathering of gray tamarins, all of them screeching and leaping from tree to tree. Another of the hunters never returned at all.
Besides arming the palisade guards with skink tears and bell- boxes, they deployed scouts with spearhawk beaks to patrol the surrounding land as far as the bay. Spearhawks were birds with needle- thin beaks that preyed on the kind of eel they used in the colony's eel ponds. Their beaks were sensitive to the direction of nearby quintessence pearls, allowing them to sense the eels from hundreds of feet in the air, dive into the water at tremendous speed, and plunge their beaks through fast- moving creatures only a few inches wide. The beaks were drawn to the pearls like iron to a lodestone, adjusting their aim as they fell. The scouts used the beaks as a kind of divining rod to sense the presence and direction of any animals— or tamarins— that got too close to the settlement.
Parris thought the settlement was secure, until the next morning, when Catherine revealed that Chichirico had paid her another night visit, apparently slipping past all the scouts and guards and into her very bedroom without notice.
"He said the grays are gathering for war. The reds are still on our side and will fight the grays alongside us. In fact, he seemed pretty happy about it. Before we fought the grays, Chichirico's brother Tanakiki was still popular, and a lot of them thought he should still be chief. Now they're all supporting Chichirico."
"What are the grays waiting for?" Parris said. "They could kill us all now. They could have done it the day Tate started shooting."
"Chichirico says they're afraid of us. We can see them and kill them, something Chelsey's settlers never figured out how to do. They don't know what we're capable of."
"Which means that when they finally do attack, it'll be with overwhelming force."
One of the smaller buildings had been converted into an experiment room for the Society, and Matthew, who barely left it, ended up living on the second floor. The first floor now doubled as a communications center. Parris found Matthew there with a group of volunteers, mostly women, sitting at tables with bell- boxes, transcribing messages as they came in from the scouts. The women were the wives of Protestant refugees, educated enough to know how to write, whom Matthew had taught the ring codes he'd developed.
"I was thinking," Matthew said. "A bell- box could be rigged to pull other things besides bells. We could set them in the woods around the palisade and trigger them from the settlement."
"What sort of things?"
Matthew shrugged. "Gunpowder charges, for instance."
"We don't have all that much gunpowder to spare."
"Other things, then. Poison darts. Or even voids."
Parris shook
his head. "I don't even like you experimenting with those. We don't know how to control them."
A slow grin played across Matthew's face. "Let me show you something." He led Parris up the stairs to his living quarters. A cot pushed against one wall was the only furniture except for a table strewn with experimental paraphernalia: wooden boxes, feathers, horns, claws. Bundles of various plants hung drying from the ceiling. Sawdust carpeted the floor.
"First . . ." Matthew held up a small box. He opened it and threw in some twigs, pebbles, seedpods, and some sawdust. It was about the size of a bell- box, with a lever on the side, but it was made of beetlewood and had no bell.