The Spark

by David Drake

  I switched the shield on at twenty percent, though I figured I’d just throw it down if I had to move fast. I knew I wasn’t in any shape for a fight, but going straight at the other fellow like I had with Easton was my best bet.

  We walked forward. There aren’t any hills or curves in the Road, but there’s only so far you can see anyway.

  I thought about Guntram suggesting that somebody had made the Road. I wondered if I’d ever see the old Maker again.

  We came onto a Beast, a creature of Not-Here. It was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen in my life, worse than the drawings I’d seen of them.

  I guess that was partly because layers were vanishing and reappearing, into Not-Here I suppose, while the creature tried to escape. It wasn’t going to be able to do that because it was a small one of its kind, about the size of May or a boy of twelve, and the Shade had it firmly.

  There were supposed to be things that lived in the Waste, neither Here nor Not-Here, but I’d always supposed they were fancies like ghosts and angels. This had to be what they called a Shade, though: as lovely as blond sin, and as haughty as the Circuit Bishop when he passed through Beune every third year.

  Maybe I’ll apologize to Mother Gurton for laughing when she talked about seeing angels dance on the church roof the day she was confirmed. Of course that would be if I ever got back home.

  The Shade was touching the Beast with the spread fingers of both hands. If you looked close, you could see that maybe a couple of the fingers were longer than they should have been in order to reach the victim’s back. She must have come out of the Waste behind the Beast and gripped like a hawk with a rabbit.

  I say “she.” I didn’t know what sex the Shade was or even if it had one, but it looked so human that I couldn’t help how I thought.

  “Pass on, human,” the Shade said in a low, pleasant voice. I was hearing her in my mind; I wondered what Buck heard or if he heard anything. “Leave me to eat, and take pleasure in there being one fewer enemy to your sort in the universe.”

  That was sort of true. Like I’d said to May, I didn’t figure that all the things from Not-Here were enemies—but when you found a copperhead in your barn you had to kill it, even if you don’t mind snakes and you know it eats rats. If you don’t, you come out in a hurry one day and grab the handle of the hayrake that the snake’s curled around. Then your arm swells up like you’d felled a tree onto it, and maybe you never get all the feeling back in your hand. That happened to Breslin about five years ago.

  And that’s how I felt about the Beast: I was fine with never seeing one, but the chances were it was going to go for me as quick as it could. I’d be best off just slipping past while the Shade was holding it and neither of them could get at me.

  “Let’s get ’em, Buck,” I said. We went for the Shade.

  With a dog all the paths are clear. You move faster, into the Waste if you like. The Shade was a thing of the Waste so that wasn’t a choice here, but we sure could’ve gone back the way we came. Her hands were anchored in her prey, and I didn’t think she could get loose in time to grab us if we cut past her and her victim in the direction we’d been going.

  Thing is, the Shade was the enemy of all life. The Beast might well be my enemy, but if I’d been by five minutes quicker the Shade would’ve had me instead. The first I’d have known was that my limbs didn’t work and everything was getting blurry as the Shade sucked my life out. Buck wouldn’t have been able to do anything but bark; if he wasn’t quick, she’d have had him for dessert.

  I’d never heard about fighting a Shade. They picked single prey on the Road, never going after groups. You found the shrivelled, crispy skin, or you came on a kill in process and ran the other way in all the stories I’d heard.

  I didn’t figure the shield would be any good, so I switched it off. I went in close.

  The Shade’s face was as smooth as marble. Her hands were withdrawing, but they wouldn’t be clear before I could hit her.

  The perfect mouth opened and a three-forked tongue extended. The tips touched my cheeks and the underside of my jaw. I was hooked as sure as I ever had a crappie in the pond at the bottom of the big field. The Shade’s right hand was lifting, already clear of the Beast and reaching for my chest.

  I triggered my weapon. There was a white flash.

  I wasn’t really conscious of what I was doing. I think my finger twitched just because it was all part of what I was doing, get in close and strike—a single thought.

  The Shade deflated, just shrank in on itself like a snowflake in the sun. There was nothing to see: no blood, no pool of liquid where the creature had stood; but it stank, stank worse than a dead mule.

  I couldn’t move my head or even blink, and my body was cold down to mid-chest. I stepped backward and tripped because my left foot was dragging and I didn’t know it.

  The Beast stared down at me. It had three eyes but mostly they didn’t all show at the same time. It’d be five minutes for my weapon to recharge.

  It’d worked on a Shade, though; they could be killed. I wished there was somebody I could tell that to.

  The Beast went on around me, giving me as wide a berth as it could. Buck was barking his head off, but he stayed close to my side.

  The Beast disappeared, and after a while I got to my feet again.

  CHAPTER 7

  Home Sweet Home

  I was deep into the artifact I’d decided to fix. I’d added in silica to extend the existing structure; now I was trying to form the other bits.

  I was assuming that the portion beyond the break was identical to the piece that I had. There wasn’t any evidence supporting that; but if it wasn’t, I had nothing at all to go on.

  I’d been working on the piece all morning, coming out of my trance only to change to a different selection of raw materials and to take a swig of water from the bucket by the door. When Mom was alive she’d have had a piece of bread and some fruit set out beside me, whatever was in season. I could have done that for myself, but I never seemed to get around to it.

  Buck was mostly curled up in the sunshine of the barn’s open doorway, but occasionally he’d wander over and take a look at what I was doing. He didn’t exactly get in my way inside the work piece, but it always confused him and that was likely to put me off my stride.

  I hadn’t gotten my stride yet on this and I wasn’t sure I was going to, so his nosing me mattered even less than usual. Still, when Buck began to tug my trousers with his teeth, I decided I’d best come out.

  I came back into the present, lying on the floor of the barn with a straw-filled bolster under my head and the pewter tray holding the workpiece and my raw materials beside me. I said, “What’s the matter, boy? Hungry?”

  From the short shadow outside the door it was just past noon. Buck shouldn’t need to be fed.…

  Somebody—my eyes focused: Guntram—sat on the upturned wheelbarrow just outside the door. He nodded and said, “Good morning, Pal. I wasn’t going to disturb you, but I’m afraid I disturbed your dog.”

  “I’m glad he woke me up, sir,” I said. I wasn’t completely back in the present yet; I’d been real deep in a structure I didn’t even half understand. “And I’m very glad to see you. Will you stay with me? It’s not fancy, but you’ll have a bed and food.”

  There wasn’t any place on Beune that was fancy, which I guess Guntram knew already. From the night I’d spent with him, he wasn’t a man who cared any more about fine fabrics and rich food than I—or a shepherd—did.

  “If it wouldn’t put you out,” Guntram said, rising when I did. “Your neighbors found me a basket for my hedgehog, and the little boy and girl brought a handful of worms for him. Also some bread and ale for me, though I didn’t really need it.”

  “Gervaise has been a good friend,” I said. “He’s my landlord, I suppose, though it isn’t anything so formal. He’s letting me use the buildings that used to be my mom’s, and he gives me food for helping around the farm. We’ll have to figure
out something more formal soon, I guess, but I’m still finding my feet since I came back.”

  I felt my mouth twist when I said that. Me using the house and barn was nothing to Gervaise, but I really hadn’t done enough to justify my keep. Food wasn’t short this year, and I’d make up for it when it was time to bring the crops in.

  I cocked my head. “Your hedgehog, you said, sir?” I said.

  “I use a hedgehog to guide me along the Road,” Guntram said, smiling. “They’re not fast, but neither am I. Nor do I intend to fight.”

  I walked out into the sunlight. “Ah, sir?” I said. “Did you have guards, then? Because there can be trouble on the Road out here.”

  If Guntram had come with an escort, I was going to have to make some arrangements. There aren’t any inns on Beune. I suppose a squad of troops could sleep in my barn, but feeding them was going to be a problem; we’re not set up for that on Beune, either.

  “There’s just me,” said Guntram. “I don’t care for company at most times. And I seem to make other people nervous.”

  He nodded to the house across the barnyard and said, “Do you have a table inside, Pal? I can show you things more easily on a table.”

  “Sure,” I said and led him in. Buck came with us for curiosity, but he padded back onto the stoop when he saw we were just standing by the table.

  That was a makeshift I’d knocked together by fitting stake legs onto a length of pine log I’d adzed flat. It was narrow but there was only one of me. Though I hadn’t bothered planing or sanding the surface, I’d done a pretty good job with the adze.

  Mom’s table was a wonder that could pull out to take eight people along the sides. It had come from her family and it was way too big for our house—she never stretched it out. I think she’d have sold her right leg before she did that table.

  Gervaise bought the table along with the rest of what I had, and he’d rightly taken it to his own big house. His wife Phoebe was as proud of it as Mom had been. I didn’t think of asking for it back, and Gervaise would’ve turned me down if I had. At least he’d have turned me down if he had good sense.

  Guntram set down his leather scrip and opened it. The first thing I noticed is that it was full. It wasn’t huge, but even with its broad strap it would’ve been a good load for an old man to haul all the way from Dun Add.

  There wasn’t room for food, either. Guntram had money or I suppose he did, but having a full purse wasn’t safe for an old man at most inns or on the Road generally.

  “This,” said Guntram, touching a silvery half-dome with a strap attached, “is why I didn’t need guards. On the Road, I can’t be seen while I wear it on my head. It doesn’t work Here, and it doesn’t work in the Waste—but it doesn’t have to because I didn’t go into the Waste.”

  “I wonder if it would work in Not-Here?” I said, just because I was curious. There’d be no way any human could test that, but if Guntram understood the mechanism he might know the answer.

  “The device came to me almost complete,” said Guntram. “Which is good, because I don’t think I could have repaired any major damage.”

  He shook his head, smiling ruefully. “As it was,” he said, “I was lucky that there was cadmium in the sample of zinc that I added as my last try, and the cadmium atoms filled the gap where lead had not. I wasn’t deep enough into the piece to get any idea of the mechanism, but it seems to interact with the structure of the Road itself.”

  I felt my lips purse. “I’ve never been able to find a structure in the Road,” I said.

  “Nor have I,” said Guntram. He smiled wider and handed the cap to me. I probed it lightly, marvelling at the delicacy of its structure, but I didn’t spend any real time in it.

  Even a peek showed me that Guntram had downplayed his accomplishment by a lot. His repairs were lacework, almost indistinguishable from the original, and I was pretty sure he’d suspected that cadmium or another of the traces in powdered galena might be the needed extra in a chain of lead with occasional zinc crystals.

  “Sir,” I said. I set the cap on the table. There was nothing I could say to do justice to the work. “It’s an honor to know you.”

  “I’ve had a long time to practice,” Guntram said. His smile was slight, but I’m pretty sure he understood the praise and liked it. “I wonder, Pal…? Would you take me to some of the places you find objects? I’m particularly interested in pieces from Not-Here—a whim—but I understand completely if you want to keep your sites private.”

  I shook my head. “I wouldn’t understand hiding them from you, sir,” I said. “I think giving a Maker like you all the help I can is the best thing I can do for Mankind.”

  It still hurt, what’d happened to me in Dun Add, but I don’t argue with the way things are. I said, “About all I can do for Mankind, I guess, but I’ll sure do it. You want to go out right now?”

  “Not right at the moment,” Guntram said. “I’d sooner not walk anywhere for a while. I wonder—in Dun Add you said you had a variety of pieces that you hadn’t been able figure out the use of. Could I see some of them? A fresh pair of eyes, you know. And in the morning, we can go prospecting.”

  “You sit right down,” I said, pointing to the closest thing I had to a chair: the round of tree bole I was using as a stool. “I’ll be back with a load from the barn as quick as it takes me to walk twenty feet!”

  * * *

  We wound up sitting cross-legged on the floor with the table and stool pushed back against the north wall. We were working on the third load of pieces that I’d stored in the barn because I didn’t know what else to do with them. To me they were just so much ballast, but to the Ancients they’d been—I couldn’t even guess with most of them. But they’d been wonders, that I knew.

  I was using the linen tote that I used for hauling split wood to the fireplace in colder weather. I’d picked up more artifacts than I’d realized over the years, and some of them I hadn’t looked at in, well, years.

  “Do you gather these pieces personally?” Guntram said as he set down what might as well have been an acorn for any use I could figure out for it. “Or do most of them come from specialist searchers? Almost all of what we see in Dun Add is brought by people who make their living searching for artifacts instead of farming.”

  I laughed. “This is Beune, Guntram,” I said. “Nobody’s a one-trick pony here. There’s people who’re blacksmiths and weavers—and there’s me, who’s a Maker. But we’re that and farmers. Come harvest, you’ll find everybody pitching in, and if somebody decides to raise a new barn it’ll be him and all his neighbors.”

  I gestured to the spread of items Guntram had been sorting. “Three quarters of this I found myself. A few pieces travellers brought in, things they’d noticed as they were walking along and they were close enough that they brought it here. I trade them a meal for what they found, and maybe once or twice I’d go beyond that if something looked like it might count for something. I gave a fellow a brand new tunic once, for…”

  I fished around and found the piece I’d been working on when Guntram woke me out of my trance.

  “For this. Which, seeing that piece in your room at Dun Add, I thought might be a color projector too.”

  “Did you?” said Guntram, turning the piece around in his hands. It was a round rod about the thickness of my index finger. “Did you indeed!”

  He set the piece back on the pewter tray I’d taken it from. “You identified this from a glance at the piece in my collection?” he said.

  I stiffened at his look. Well, I stiffened the best I could sitting crossways on the floor in a litter of things that I’d brought from the barn; I couldn’t even straighten my legs.

  “Sir,” I said. “I thought I saw similarities, yes. It gave me a direction to go with my repair. Though I haven’t gotten very far.”

  “You have a good eye,” Guntram said, “but this is a far more complicated piece. The projector in my collection puts a hue on a wall. I can set it not to color othe
r objects on the basic surface, but nothing more difficult than that.”

  He touched the piece again but continued looking at me. “This creates images,” he said. “It would take me months to determine even the sort of images, but I suspect it has many options. Many, many options.”

  “That’s wonderful!” I said. After I found I couldn’t make head nor tail of the piece, I’d felt a bit of a fool to have given the peddler a new tunic. It seemed I’d made a good bargain after all. “Sir—Guntram? Will you accept it as a gift from me? I’d like to watch you work on it to learn, but I sure would never be able to do it justice without help.”

  Guntram cocked his head at me. “We’ll discuss that later,” he said. “For now, though…”

  As I brought odds and ends out of the barn, Guntram had been separating them into two groups. There was sort of a third group: an arc which I suspected was a continuum. Sometimes he’d commented on what he was doing, more often he didn’t.

  Now Guntram chose a hollow tube about four inches long—broken on only one end, but I still hadn’t been able to figure it out despite the relatively good condition—and with his other hand pulled a short spindle from the items in the tote which we hadn’t gone through yet. “Have you considered these pieces together?” Guntram said.

  “I picked up the little one ten years ago,” I said. “I haven’t thought about it since.”

  I grimaced, embarrassed at the situation. “I need to go over everything,” I said, aloud but really speaking to myself. “I keep learning things, but I need to go back over all the stuff I got earlier when maybe I didn’t understand what I do now.”

  “We’re looking at them now,” Guntram said mildly.

  I placed the spindle close alongside the tube and in a trance entered both at the same time. I had a hazy view of the tube’s structure extending, though probably not very far. I was sure that it didn’t connect with the spindle.

  I’d been planning to work on the tube, though I didn’t know what the device’s purpose might be. I hoped that if I completed the gross structure—silicon with a dusting of metals that I mostly had available—I’d get a notion of the purpose so that I could approach that afterwards.