by Jay Lake
Perhaps a hundred yards up a collar was set that extended to a four-footed frame grounded at the edges of the meadow. Another hundred yards above the collar, just below the frost line where the air changed, whirled a set of weights. These were four brass balls, each larger than Master Bodean’s shop building back in New Haven, which must serve to balance the shaft.
Hethor could not see upward past the weather, but he could easily imagine the shaft towering as high as the Equatorial Wall. In the endlessly bright polar summer it must be a brilliant reminder of the last withdrawal of God’s finger from His Creation.
“We are here,” Hethor whispered.
“This is the end of the world?” asked Arellya as the few surviving correct people crowded around them.
“The end, the beginning.” Hethor shrugged, feeling the weight of his borrowed days of life as though they were years. “God has spared me to come to this place that I might descend beneath the Earth and pursue my errand.” The thought filled him with dread. “I …”
“No one ever wants to walk into the fire,” Arellya said softly, her fingers entwined with his. “But someone must, if only to save the ashes.”
Hethor had to laugh. “What does that mean?”
Arellya laughed as well, the correct people joining in. “It is something mothers tell their children to quiet them.”
“Mothers are fools, too,” said Hethor, but his fey mood had broken.
Then the correct people began to run, eight young males who had voyaged to the bottom of the world for him, a stranger, capering and shouting as if they had come home. They raced for the shaft. They bounded through the flowers. They stumbled together to wrestle and push in the manner of young men of every race and species.
Hethor stood with Arellya and smiled. He might in that moment have been a little specimen of God, and these his little men.
“We are old,” she said.
Had she read his mind?
“Your stories of the garden and the snake, these are the history of our people.”
“God created you first,” Hethor said.
“Perhaps. We do not tell it that way. You might, were you to write our words in your tongue.”
“What of the giants in the earth that the Bible speaks of?”
“The other hairy men. The ones who live upon the cliffs of the Wall. Brothers to you, almost, save that they think with their noses and eat like antelope.”
“We of the Northern Earth think with our manhood and eat like wildfires,” said Hethor.
She poked him in the hip. “That is not all a bad thing.”
Hand in hand, they ran after their little army of boys, Cains and Abels dancing in a flowered Eden in the dark heart of winter.
THEY CAMPED near the shaft. This was the end, in more ways than one.
“I fear we shall not return from here,” said Hethor.
“Surely you are not surprised in thinking that, Messenger,” replied Tiktiktee.
“Do you want your soul to linger at this pole, once the snow closes in again?”
Tiktiktee ate a mouse, thinking over the question. As he swallowed, he smiled. “If your stories are true, there is a paradise of sunlight and beauty here half the year. What is this but the long night that comes before the bright day? My soul would rejoice for the change.”
“Every season a day,” said Hethor, “and every day a season.” Not that it was that simple, but Tiktiktee was not far wrong, either. Hethor went on. “I must carefully examine the shaft, and possibly the legs of the collar. Somewhere here there will be a route downward into the heart of the world. This is where my journey takes me.” He looked significantly around the circle of correct people, finally resting his gaze on Arellya. “I will go alone.”
She simply smiled at him. The other correct people nodded or grunted.
“I cannot counsel you further,” Hethor went on. “There is no return from here.” The last of the flowered road had closed behind them when they entered the meadow around the shaft. “When I descend, the snows may come immediately. Or if I am killed. Even if I survive and make my return to the surface, I do not know how to leave this place.”
Tiktiktee touched Hethor’s arm. “Enough, Messenger. We know these things. You owe us no apologies.”
Hethor glanced down. “It is the custom among my people to make a speaking when we set out for great danger or certain death.”
“Then speak all you want,” said Tiktiktee. “We will listen. But it is for you, not for us.”
“And I am going,” said Arellya, “though the others will stay here and watch for us until the snow takes them.”
“No!” Hethor jumped up. “It is too dangerous!”
Arellya looked around at the wall of dark and freezing night bordering the meadow. “More so than here? Our place is with each other, Hethor.”
“I won’t have it.” He began to pace. “The Key Perilous is my business, the Mainspring a job given me by Gabriel. I know it will end badly. I can’t be responsible for what will happen to you.”
“The time for avoiding responsibility passed many days and miles ago,” said Arellya.
“There may be fires, devils, or demons. Winged savages.” Hethor could feel his voice rising, pitching toward stinging frustration and the tears that had brought him only ridicule at New Haven Latin.
“I have faced all those things with you already on this journey.”
Arellya’s calm reminded Hethor of Librarian Childress. The old woman had been unyielding in a strange way, something that still bothered him. She had upset his sense of the female kind for good, it seemed. Here Arellya was bent on shattering what remained of that upset sense.
“No,” he said. “There is no more arguing.”
She just smiled.
He lay back in the poppies and stared up at the sky. What was left to argue?
“I rest now,” he announced, meeting no one’s eye. “To be ready for my journey below.” He lay for hours, flowers tickling his face, as the correct people moved around him, murmuring among themselves.
“THE YOUNG males have found your entrance.” Arellya lay in the poppies next to Hethor, tickling his face with her hairy fingers.
“I told them … ,” he began, then stopped.
Had he slept?
He must have.
“You told them not to come below with you. Not a one of them has set a foot upon the stairs that lead beneath the world. They merely found it for you. Are you rested, Messenger?”
“Yes,” he said, surprised to find that it was true.
She handed him the bulb from some unlucky flower. “This will help hunger. I have meat for later.”
Meat meant mice, and an occasional rabbit, but Hethor had long since lost any pretense of being fussy about his food. “Thank you,” he said. Sitting up, he split the bulb. It tasted like a mild cousin of garlic or onion, with little strips of fiber that caught between his teeth. The food made his lips and tongue tingle as well. He paid that no mind.
It was a short walk across the poppy meadow to the shaft. Up close, the brass was like a wall. The curve was so large that it was shallow almost to the point of flatness. The shaft spun with a whirring noise that was much quieter than he had expected from the rumble he’d heard several days distant. Rotating rapidly, it stirred the air like a spring breeze. There must be a massive reduction gearing deep within the world, he realized, to translate that speed to the stately revolutions of the Earth in its orbit around the sun. Cold radiated off the surface before him, doubtless conducted downward from the immense length of the metal that protruded into the long polar night not far above his head.
Hand in hand with Arellya, Hethor followed the shaft clockwise around its curve. The great column of metal fit into a little lip of rock where it emerged from the flower meadow. Given the immense size of the thing the tolerances were miraculous. Which by definition had to be true.
Hethor smiled upward as if God or His angels were watching.
A clust
er of the correct people waited ahead of him, Tiktiktee and the other young males crowded around the entrance. As he approached they stepped back, flowing away in a hairy tide.
The stairs were simple enough, descending into a hole in the flowered turf that resembled an open grave. It was set a few feet back from the shaft. Perhaps to provide clearance, Hethor thought, though why divine Creation would need an inspection access was beyond him.
There was no marker to indicate the access way, though with the shaft close to hand, one was not needed. He stopped at the head and stared downward. Stairs led into the earth, their well gloomy but not impossibly dark as it curved to follow the shaft. The spiral ran counter to the rotation of the axis, heading to the left. Hethor could see where it bent out of his vision, following the curve.
“This is it,” he said, resisting the urge to make another speech.
One of the young males stood and walked over and touched Hethor’s hand. “Luck, Messenger,” he said, “and may your soul rest in the easiest of places.”
“And yours,” he said.
Then another, with a simpler message. “Luck.”
Tiktiktee hugged Hethor, the correct person’s strong arms tight around his waist. “Our world is yours, Messenger.”
One by one, the rest of Arellya’s eight surviving tribesmen came forward to Hethor. Each had a word or two. Each took a moment to let their touch linger. Each walked away into the flowers without a second glance.
After a few minutes, only he and Arellya remained. She held one of the last of the correct people’s spears in her hand.
“You cannot come,” said Hethor.
“You cannot stop me.”
“Don’t. Please.”
She smiled again, though the smile wavered. “I will not stay here to die of cold, wondering what finally became of you.”
Hethor didn’t want to be apart from her, not for a minute, but he couldn’t take her into the Earth. It was akin to inviting her to stroll with him in Hell. “The men of your tribe will protect you.”
“From the storms? No.” She tugged free of his hand to set foot upon the first of the steps. “I can run ahead of you to make you chase me.” She pulled her foot back up. “I can hang back to follow you like a shadow cut free from its source. Or we can walk down together. Partners. Mates. Woman and man.”
“You are from Creation’s dawn,” Hethor said. “I am from its noontime.”
“Or sunset,” she replied, “if you fail. That is no argument against me.”
He opened his arms and she stepped into them. They hugged for a long time, him breathing in the sweet scent of her hair, mingled with poppies and the tingly bulbs they had eaten and the slightly raw odor of mice. Hethor imagined the world shuddering to a halt on its track, the sun’s light boiling some oceans while others froze in eternal darkness. Would the Chinese Empire suffer in eternal night? What if the turning of the Earth stopped on the other side, with London facing the stars? Would anyone’s interests be served?
Master Bodean, Librarian Childress, the farmers who had helped him, that girl with the hearse, even the crazed and foolish candlemen, Her Imperial Majesty’s sailors, the Jade Abbott—all their lives hung on him. If Arellya chose to walk by his side, who was Hethor to deny her? Perhaps she, too, had been called by God. Perhaps he was her angel, her Gabriel come from the sky to awaken her people to their peril.
Just as someone else might have sent Gabriel to him.
Hethor felt an unaccountable longing for the late Simeon Malgus, though the man was half a traitor and fully arrogant. The navigator had possessed a way with words and a willingness to explain things. Sometimes, at least.
Hethor could no more explain the world to himself or Arellya than he could explain love.
Arellya shouldered her spear. Hand in hand, facing the darkness, they descended beneath the Earth little more than an armspan away from the spinning wall of brass that drove the world.
TWELVE
THE BRASS stairs spiraled slowly through layers of rock. The wall of spinning brass that was the main axle of Earth’s rotation was always on their left. Hethor could glance over the brass rail of the stairs and see something like infinity receding until perspective folded the view into itself. On the right, the differing strata. They told a history of the Earth’s Creation, the careful folding of layers into one another by the hand of God.
Always there was light. Vague, sourceless, as though stars shone overhead even in the depths of the Earth.
“How deep do these stairs descend?” Arellya asked as they made their way downward.
“Farther than we can journey before we starve, I fear,” said Hethor. The mathematics were simple enough. If he truly had to descend into the clockwork heart of the Earth, it would be a walk of thousands of miles spiraling ever downward. No man, or correct person, could survive that. “We must as always trust to faith.”
“You have come far on trust until now, Messenger,” she said with a squeeze of his hand.
After a time the rock gave way to gear trains and layers of metal clattering just to their right as they descended. Walls of machinery and spinning fields of brass extended into the gloom. They walked among it all like flies on the windowpane of a machine shop.
This was the balancing mechanism within the Earth, part of what kept it on God’s track. Hethor tried to imagine what sort of interrupter gear would allow these devices to function tied to the central shaft, while also permitting his descent via the stairwell. Perhaps there were spiral reliefs cut through the shells of the inner spheres of the Earth. Or the stairway itself was discrete, a section that descended like a worm gear regardless of how rapidly or slowly he and Arellya walked.
As well to imagine flights of angels buoying them toward their destination. Yet this was all the work of God, somehow.
In time, the gearwork gave way to crystal caverns extending into the depths of the Earth. These spaces glittered like the captured stars of Hethor’s imagining. Their right-hand wall vanished utterly, so that the brass stair wound onward seemingly unsupported. On the one side it wound around the spinning shaft like a lover’s hand. On the other, empty void, their clanging footsteps echoing from the star-speckled depths. Everything had the clean, cold smell of an icehouse in winter.
It was here, lulled by hours of walking without need for rest or food, that their first test came. Wooden statues tumbled out of the surrounding darkness—the tall, flat-faced servant-automata of William of Ghent. In a clattering moment, Hethor and Arellya were trapped upon the stairs. Two wooden men blocked them below. There were three more above.
Hethor had no fire with which to fight them this time. No weapon at all. He had not thought to need one here.
Of necessity, he raised his fists. “You will not bar me from the heart of the world!” he shouted.
Then the creatures were upon them. Splintered arms slashed toward him only to bang against the brass rail of the stairs as Hethor ducked the blow. Arellya slipped to his back, shrieking a ululating war cry of the correct people. He felt her move, bumping against him as she jabbed with her spear.
It was like fighting a house. He would land a blow only to shock his knuckles. One of the wooden automata would strike back, nearly shattering bone in Hethor’s shoulder or arm. All that stood between him and final ruin was the crowding of the stairs. Only two at a time could face him.
Behind, Arellya shouted and jabbed some more. She did not scream in pain or fear. He trusted her and instead concentrated on what stood before him.
You’ve been among sailors and tropical warriors, Hethor told himself. He must have learned something. He stepped into an incoming blow, set his weight against the wooden automaton’s chest, and shoved it into its neighbor. The two toppled and spun, trying to untangle and carry on the fight, until one tipped against the rail and fell silent into the pit that spread below them.
Hethor rushed the second, which was still off balance, before its fellows could close. He got it over the left-side ra
iling. There he pressed his advantage to slide its head into the spinning brass wall of the axle. Splinters and sawdust flew amid a burning stench and a strange buzzing noise. Blows rained down upon his back in a sort of vengeance.
Arellya screamed.
Hethor heaved the suffering creature over the side, where it would bounce splintering against the whirling shaft, and turned to duck another swinging blow. Arellya lay on the stairs. Her spear was braced to keep two of the wooden attackers at bay. They loomed over her, jostling one another for the chance to stomp her.
Hethor tried to leap, but the one survivor above him grabbed at his ankles. He fell, striking his face against the wrought metal of the steps.
In a moment his legs would be smashed. Just ahead of him, Arellya cried out again, blood matting her lovely, lovely fur.
It could not end like this.
Hethor closed his eyes and reached for his sense of the underlying reality of Creation. The wooden automata were masses of gears, eerily regular in their formation when compared to the wild naturalistic designs within Arellya or himself. He reached back with his power, working against the pain in his legs, to crumple and scatter the gears of one of his tormentors.
His ears reported an explosion as splinters hammered into his body. He turned to face Arellya’s attackers. The image of fire came to his mind. In his holy sight it was an unbound chaos in this version of the world, a chaos that destroyed through reduction, making unstable structures of breathtaking beauty that collapsed in a moment in a shower of springs and parts, each in turn another world of complexity.
Hethor made a gift of this chaos to Arellya’s two. They each erupted into billowing heat and flaring madness—an unraveling of the orderly world of Creation.