Ink, Iron, and Glass

by Gwendolyn Clare

  Leo leaned out to look over the edge and whistled. “Long way down.”

  “It’s Edgemist,” said Elsa, grabbing the back of his waistcoat to pull him away from the edge. “Concealed behind a bit of scribed fog for the aesthetics. If you fell, you’d never hit the ground—you’d simply cease to exist. So try not to fall, will you?”

  “You make a gentle death sound so ominous,” Faraz said lightly, while Leo tugged at his waistcoat to straighten it. He turned his tawny eyes on her with an inscrutable look, and Elsa turned away, feeling heat rise in her cheeks.

  “It’s all nicely done,” said Porzia appreciatively, “but I can’t say I understand what it’s for.”

  Relieved to have something else to focus her attention on, Elsa said, “Montaigne was obsessed with the idea of scribing subtextual humans as an emergent property of a worldbook. This must be one of his early attempts.”

  Faraz looked around, interested. “So why didn’t it work?”

  “Not enough arable land, and nothing to hunt. It was obviously designed by someone who’d never needed to grow his own food,” she said, not trying to hide her scorn.

  Leo shook the nearest ladder to check for structural stability and then started climbing. “We should take a look around anyway.”

  Up the ladder, they spread out, each taking a different cave to examine. Elsa’s was a single room outfitted as if a person might call it home. A fire pit just inside the entrance, where the smoke would be carried away by the breeze instead of pooling inside the cave. A rough woven blanket laid out along one wall. A neatly arranged collection of clay bowls and pots in a variety of sizes. A broad, flat stone for grinding grain into meal.

  The emptiness of the world began to seep into Elsa’s bones, and she shivered. It felt far worse than any abandoned place—this was not simply a place where people used to be and no longer were. This was a place where people never had been and never would be, and that pervasive absence of life seemed to emanate from the very walls.

  “We should go,” she called to the others.

  Leo clattered down a ladder to her ledge, a manic glint in his eye. “So soon? What fun is that?”

  Elsa folded her arms. “This world is a failed attempt. Montaigne wouldn’t have left anything important here.”

  Faraz edged slowly over a narrow strip of ledge to join them in front of Elsa’s cave just as Porzia made her way there as well. She held up her portal device and said, “Anyone care for a ride? I’m stepping back. This is lovely and everything, but we need to stay on task.”

  Against the rock wall of the cliffside, a portal irised open, as if an especially dark cave entrance were suddenly appearing before them. Watching it widen, Elsa felt a pang of regret that her mother had never altered the Veldanese portal dynamics. The way Montaigne had written her world, portals could only be opened at the Edgemist; perhaps if Veldana had been as flexible as this world, with portals opening any old place, Elsa could have caught up with Jumi’s abductors that first day.

  Elsa shook off the feeling. Self-pity and what-ifs would not save her mother. She had to stay focused, objective, unsentimental—this was the only way to help Jumi.

  They all stepped through the nothing-moment of the portal back into the comfortable warmth of the library. Gathering around the table, they looked at the array of worldbook candidates.

  Porzia chewed her lip. “Which one next, do you think?”

  Elsa fished around in the pile. “Montaigne had an office scribed somewhere … that’s probably our best chance. Now which one was that?”

  She picked up an older book to check it, but as soon as she cracked the cover open, she remembered it was the world scribed in an alphabet she didn’t recognize. This was the book she’d found lying on the floor beside Montaigne’s lifeless hand. Without the restoration machine, she never would have been able to repair this one, at least not until she’d mastered the language.

  “Where did you get this?” Faraz suddenly exclaimed, grabbing the volume out of Elsa’s hands. “Montaigne had this in his library?”

  Elsa blinked. “Yes. Actually, he was holding it when he died. What’s wrong?”

  He opened the book, intent on examining it. “The cover’s newer—it’s been rebound—but look at this paper, this ink. Don’t you understand? This is an original Jabir ibn Hayyan scribed world!”

  “Who?” said Elsa, baffled.

  Faraz, at a loss for words, cast a disbelieving look at Leo.

  “A famous eighth-century polymath from Persia,” Leo explained. “He revolutionized the science of alchemy. He also redesigned all the materials used in scriptology, which, I understand, provided the basis for modern scriptological technique.”

  Porzia stepped closer to take a look. “If it was important to this Montaigne fellow, I’d say it’s worth taking a look inside.”

  “We must be careful,” Faraz said. “Jabir was notorious for his use of steganography in all his treatises. There’s no telling what we might be walking into.” Somehow, though, the excitement in his tone failed to convey a sense of warning.

  Elsa had heard of steganography, the practice of hiding coded messages in written works, but she had never seen it in a worldtext before.

  “I’m afraid we’ll have to go in blind or not at all,” said Porzia. Then she raised her eyebrows at Elsa. “Unless you can read classical Arabic text?”

  Elsa shook her head. “It would take me a while to learn, especially if the scriptologist was prone to using idiosyncratic syntax.”

  “Blind it is, then!” Leo declared, grinning. He rubbed his palms together as if he were expecting to receive a treat.

  Porzia rolled her eyes. “You could at least pretend to be concerned for our collective safety.”

  “What’s the worst that could happen?”

  “Anything really,” said Elsa. “The walls might eat us. Or perhaps the atmosphere’s pure sulfur tetrafluoride and the acid dissolves our lungs. Or it’s a world where fluids can’t exist, so our blood instantly freezes in our veins.”

  Everyone stared at her. Leo’s mouth hung slightly open.

  “What? I’m not saying we shouldn’t go. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to scribe a world like that—it’s just possible, is all.”

  Very delicately, Faraz set the book back on the table. “Um, maybe this isn’t such a brilliant idea.…”

  Leo narrowed his eyes at Elsa. “Melting lungs, you say?”

  “I really think it’s very unlikely,” she said, flipping open the book cover to look for the coordinates in the front. “Faraz, can you tell me which of these symbols are numbers?”

  Faraz folded his arms. “I’m becoming increasingly certain this is one of those ideas normal people would know not to follow through on. You know, the kind that gets pazzerellones killed before their time.”

  Elsa was beginning to regret she’d said anything; caution could only impede the search for her mother. “Well I’m going. We’ll never get through this stack of worldbooks if we stand around wringing our hands all day. So read off the coordinates for me, will you?”

  With a sigh, Faraz reluctantly found the settings for the portal device and read them aloud. In the end, when the black oval irised open, they all decided to go through.

  Elsa stepped through nothing and emerged into a world with light, air, time, and solid ground beneath her feet. So far so good. She took a deep breath, just to be sure, and looked around.

  They were in a large square room with a domed ceiling. An arched doorway was set into the center of each wall, all of them leading to darkened alcoves. Everything was constructed of seamless stone, as if it had been hollowed out from a single piece of rock.

  The place felt old. It wasn’t just the spare lines of the cut-stone architecture—such a contrast with the intricate, fine detail of classical Italian design—or the thick swirls of dust settled on the floor. No, Jabir had imbued his creation with that indefinable something else: essence, or atmosphere, Elsa didn’t know wh
at to call it. Whatever the effect was, it took her breath away.

  “The Lost Oracle,” Faraz said. “I can’t believe it’s real. I can’t believe we have it.”

  Elsa gave Faraz a look, wondering if he was going to start jumping up and down with joy. What was it with Earth people and their history? The obsession with the past held no appeal for her—the present was all that mattered. She hardly needed historical context to appreciate the talent required to create such a fine world as this.

  It was Porzia who asked, “Lost Oracle?”

  “It’s said Jabir had a fascination with the oracles of ancient Greece, so he scribed a world with the property of divination,” Faraz explained. “In his treatises, he describes it as a temple with four alcoves representing the four directions, but the book itself has been missing for a couple centuries.”

  Elsa tapped a finger against her lips thoughtfully. “Well, that explains why Montaigne would have acquired it. The Oracle isn’t a person, but if it’s intelligent and aware, it would be something of a precursor to scribed humans. He must have studied it when he was working on Veldana.”

  “But is it?” mused Porzia. “Intelligent and aware, I mean. It seems a bit … like an empty room.”

  Leo waved his arms in the air and shouted, “Hello?” The sound echoed. He turned to Faraz. “So how do we turn it on, or wake it up, or whatever you want to call it?”

  “I can’t say for sure. I’d guess you have to step into one of the alcoves to receive a prophecy.”

  “There’s one way to find out,” Elsa said with a shrug, then stepped toward one of the alcoves.

  “Wait,” Faraz hissed, his hand darting out to grab her arm. “You shouldn’t. What if the Oracle’s functional?”

  Elsa paused, taken aback. “You think it can actually tell the future?”

  “It’s a Jabir ibn Hayyan—anything’s possible,” said Faraz. “What if the Oracle has the ability to dole out perfectly accurate self-fulfilling prophecies? What if accessing the Oracle changes the real world to fit its predictions?”

  “That would be dangerous,” Elsa conceded as she gently pulled away from Faraz’s grasp.

  “Sounds impossible to me,” said Porzia. “How could a scribed book affect the real world?”

  Elsa said, “There is one obvious solution—I’ll simply avoid asking about the future. Facts about the present only, no predictions. Just in case.”

  She walked toward one of the doorways, and as she moved closer, the dark alcove began to brighten. She stepped inside, expecting the light to have a source, but there were no sconces or lamps, only a directionless ambient glow. The effect was surreal, and she couldn’t help but wonder how Jabir had succeeded in so elegantly twisting the laws of physics. He’d been a master of his craft, no doubt about that.

  On the wall there was a single raised carving of a stylized hand, fingers pointing down, with a large eye in the center of the palm. The hand seemed to be shaped from the same stone as the wall, though the eye looked like colored glass, with a black pupil and deep-blue iris surrounded by white.

  Elsa leaned in to get a closer look. The eye moved, focusing on her as if it were alive, and she jerked away from it.

  “You have questions, young mortal,” said a deep, resonant voice. The voice, like the light, seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once.

  Elsa hesitated and glanced back at everyone else behind her, several meters outside the alcove. They wouldn’t be able to hear. She cleared her throat. “Where is my mother?”

  “She is with her abductor.”

  “Okay…” Elsa rested her hands on her hips, trying to think of a way to elicit a more helpful response. “So then who is this abductor?”

  “A brilliant man—a man intent on accomplishing great and terrible deeds. A man who crushes hindrances like cockroaches beneath his boot heel. If you pursue him, you will lose something precious to you.”

  “No predictions!” Elsa snapped. “I only want to know about events that have already come to pass. Why did he take my mother?”

  “Because she can scribe the book,” said the Oracle.

  “The book? A specific worldbook?” Elsa thought of the one that had gone missing from the cottage along with Jumi.

  The Oracle said, “The book that resides with the man who betrayed her.”

  “Betrayed her—you mean to say my mother knew one of the men responsible?”

  The Oracle paused. “I said precisely what I meant to say.”

  “Yes, of course,” said Elsa impatiently. “But did she know one of them?”

  “Certain events would not have been possible were it not for the betrayal committed by a man she knew.”

  Elsa glowered at the Oracle’s eye. “You aren’t overly fond of specifics, are you?”

  “The details are as grains of sand. One cannot perceive the desert if each grain must first be weighed and measured.…”

  The voice trailed off and the glass eye’s focus shifted to something behind her. Elsa turned to see Faraz standing uncertainly in the doorway to the alcove.

  “How goes it?” he said, torn between caution and reverence.

  Faraz had aimed the question at Elsa, but the Oracle answered for her. “The world has entered a time of flux. Much depends on the choices you make.”

  Faraz stepped closer, drawn in by a fascination that seemed to Elsa almost magnetic in nature. “‘Much’? What does that mean?”

  “I wouldn’t—” Elsa warned, but the Oracle cut her off.

  “I will tell you what I see, son of Allah,” said the Oracle. “The waters writhe with eldritch horrors. A plume of ash ten thousand meters high blocks out the sun.”

  Elsa shivered. The Oracle’s voice gave her a sensation like insects crawling down her spine. She had no idea what son of Allah meant, but Faraz’s eyes went wide and the color seemed to drain from his face as he listened to the prediction.

  She grabbed his arm. “Don’t say another word.”

  He nodded mutely. They both stood, transfixed.

  You will lose something precious. She’d already lost Jumi and Veldana; what else could she possibly lose? Alek, perhaps, who was the closest thing she and Jumi had to family, or maybe something more abstract, like her freedom. Or it meant those precious things—her mother, her world—weren’t truly lost yet, but could be.

  “Elsa?” Faraz prompted.

  She shook herself. “Yes, we should go. But … let’s not mention this to Leo and Porzia, all right?”

  He nodded, half-reluctant and half-relieved. “No use making them worry.”

  They stepped away from the Oracle’s eye, moving back toward the others. “We can’t even be sure the Oracle truly has prophetic abilities,” Elsa said, trying to convince herself as much as Faraz.

  “Right,” he agreed. “Nothing to be done about it now, in any case.”

  In truth he seemed as shaken as she herself felt, and sharing the prophecies would solidify her fears into something too real to be ignored. Better to pretend it had never happened and forge onward.

  She couldn’t afford to hesitate when Jumi’s life depended on her.

  10

  TO LIVE IN PEACE AND WITHOUT THE MARK OF HERESY AND EXCOMMUNICATION HE WILL HAVE TO RETRACT HIS STATEMENTS.

  —Paolo Sarpi, regarding Galileo

  They returned once again to the library in Casa della Pazzia, and this time Elsa forbade them any distractions. They would go to the office worldbook next, where Montaigne presumably had kept his notes and journals and correspondence. It seemed an awfully obvious place to hide something as important as evidence of his connection with Jumi’s abductors, but for the sake of thoroughness, they would need to eliminate it.

  Elsa found the book for the office and dialed the coordinates on her portal device, and they all stepped through. But instead of an office, they landed in an empty foyer facing three closed doors.

  Porzia rested a hand on her hip and said, “Huh.”

  Faraz said, “So are w
e supposed to pick a door?”

  “Montaigne did love puzzles,” Elsa said. “Couldn’t resist the opportunity to show off how clever he was.” This much she remembered from her limited interactions with him as a child. It seemed a good sign that he’d protected the entrance to his office with a puzzle; they might find something important in there, after all.

  She stepped closer to give the three doors a proper examination. The door on the left was flanked by columns, and the stone cornice above had leaves carved into it. The middle door’s frame had a rounded arch with a prominent keystone. The door on the right bore a circular stained-glass window and was set into a pointed-arch frame.

  “Greek, Roman, Gothic,” Porzia declared, pointing at them from left to right.

  The names didn’t mean much to Elsa. “So?”

  Porzia grinned. “France is known for its Gothic architecture.”

  Leo strode past them, declaring, “Door on the right it is, then.” He pushed it open and crossed the threshold.

  Elsa felt a flash of irritation at his impulsiveness. She would have preferred to go first with her stability glove at the ready, but she followed Leo through without mishap, Porzia and Faraz right behind her.

  For once Leo’s impulse to action didn’t lead them all into danger. On the other side of the door was a replica of Montaigne’s real-world study, so accurate that Elsa might have thought she was back in Paris if she hadn’t seen the original burned to ashes. A large writing desk sat in a position of prominence in front of two tall windows. To her left stood a pair of bookcases, and to her right was a standing case displaying an assortment of gadgets and trinkets behind glass doors. A grandfather clock ticked quietly in the corner, and Montaigne had even scribed a copy of the Pascaline mechanical calculator—this one flawless, unlike the original version Elsa had rescued from the wreckage.

  Disappointed, Elsa said, “For a genius, Montaigne wasn’t exactly overflowing with imagination. This is exactly like his study in Paris. What sort of person duplicates a room they already own in another world without any improvements?”

  She’d meant the question rhetorically, but Faraz answered, “Someone who likes routine and familiarity when he works. Someone who doesn’t trust that his real-life study is safe from prying eyes.”