They passed through the door and onto a high balcony overlooking a great cave. William lifted his oil lamp to cast illumination far and wide. Hethor looked where the light led.
Not far below their feet was a great, spinning field of brass, moving so fast it was a blur. The first and outermost
of Earth's inner spheres, their rotation driven by the Mainspring of the world. And here William of Ghent had a private entrance.
William set down his lantern and wrote:
There are nine such shells within the Earth, each powered by the Mainspring. They are what keeps Earth turning, and captive to the mechanical heart of an absent God.
But God is not absent; He is in the world
, Hethor thought. Gabriel had come to him in New Haven, and twice golden tablets had been set before him in ways and places only an angel or divine intervention could have managed. Hethor saw something different than WilliamâHethor saw power, access to the workings of the world, an entry point through which William could sabotage the Earth's turning, only to cast blame Heavenward.
“You do not believe,” he shouted, or tried to.
William smiled again, then scratched out more letters with his pen in his gorgeous calligraphy.
Rational Humanists believe in the evidence of their senses
. He glanced up at Hethor a moment, then resumed writing.
We have had this argument before. God may have made the universe, but the Clockmakers made the world. You of all people should understand.
Hethor clenched his fists, frustrated. That remained a seductive heresy. William was indeed right, that he of all people should understand. Master Bodean had held little truck with God or the modern heresy of the Clockmakers, sticking instead to his tools and his trade.
What Hethor, too, would have done if Gabriel had not called him forth. He faced away from William to stare across the racing plain of brass gleaming in the light of William's lantern.
Lies. It was all lies. This man had never meant Hethor any good, whatever hopes Librarian Childress might have once nurtured.
He could believe nothing.
The movement below them stuttered. Walls shook, dust
and rocks dropping from the ceiling. The floor slid as though it were river ice in a spring thaw.
William smiled through the chaos, mouthing words Hethor could not make sense of.
Earthquake
, Hethor thought.
More of this bastard's doing.
He had seen William work no charms, but here was the evidence. Not a word the sorcerer had told him was trueâthis man himself was the architect of so much of the world's undoing as well as Hethor's own miseries. He had understood that in his gut since William's cold stare back in the audience chamber at Massachusetts House had first condemned him to the pit of the candlemen.
With the thought of the candlemen and what had nearly befallen Hethor there, his fear for the fate of the world was compounded by an immediate release of pained rage.
Hethor turned and rugby-tackled William in best New Haven Latin fashion. He pushed the great sorcerer to the balcony rail and onto the plain of brass below. Slowed almost to a halt by the earthquake, Hethor could see the complex surface of spikes and cracks and patterns, wrought in seemingly infinite detailâstark contrast to the massive featurelessness of the gears atop the Equatorial Wall.
William tumbled, mouth open as if to scream. The sorcerer landed in a crevice between two serrated formations just as the plain began to move again. The balcony shuddered beneath Hethor's feet. William was carried away, arms waving and mouth twisted into words Hethor could not hear, passing into the distant darkness beneath the Earth.
William of Ghent was gone. Hethor remained trapped within his citadel.
He ran, trying to retrace their steps up to daylight. It was this subterranean labyrinth Hethor feared mostâonce on the main level of the fortress, he could always escape via a window or over a wall if need be.
The dark hallways did not always lead up, and seemed
to twist more than he remembered, but Hethor kept moving through showers of dust and rock. Doors splintered open from within as he passed them. Light flared down the side hallways. He ignored the chaos that seemed to spawn in his wake and fled upward, ever upward.
Finally reaching the alcove of the oil lamps, Hethor found his way barred by some of William's servants. The tall, flat-faced statues had come to life, taking spears and swords from the walls to oppose him.
Hethor threw his lamp at the servants. He then grabbed clay oil pots from the alcove and followed his lamp with more fuel. The servants caught fire. Their narrow, thick-lipped mouths writhed in what must be terrible shrieks, while their wooden bodies burned with an ugly pork smell that had to be flesh.
For the first time, Hethor was glad of his deafness.
He ripped a tapestry from the wall, rolled it around him, and charged the flaming, milling mass, pushing his way onward by main force. The tapestry heated up within, and smelled abominably as it smoked, but Hethor fought through.
Soon he was in the main level, with its larger galleries and multiple entrances to every room. More of the wooden servants pursued him, while others fought amongst themselves. Hethor continued to run, seeking a door or window, when with a sudden turning he found himself in the courtyard before a gatehouse.
Animal skeletons danced in the yard. Palm trees swayed, and stranger plants twisted and turned, sending out green shoots that writhed like blind snakes. Howling, Hethor bolted for the gate. He found it unbarred, and dragged open one panel of the great doors. He darted through the opening to run across a short stonework bridge that spanned a shallow moat just outside the walls.
He turned back to see smoke billowing into the sky. It was not black but rather many colorsâred, brown, green, as well as more subtle hues. Faces swirled and dove within
the roiling clouds; shapes fought to assert themselves before being swallowed again. All the penned chaos of William's fortress was escaping in the absence of his magical influence. Hethor stumbled backward, eager to be away from the accursed place, when he tripped over something.
A third golden tablet.
“Thank you, God,” he said, his prayer silent in his own ears. Clutching the tablet, Hethor fled west into the jungle, hoping to strike for the sea and whatever destination Simeon Malgus had originally intended for them both.
“I WILL
not ⦠lose these words ⦠. I will not ⦠lose these words ⦠. I will not ⦠lose these words ⦠.” Hethor had been breathing the phrase for the three days since he left William's citadel. The sorcerer's magic-wrought boots and clothes had held up, much to his relief, but he'd found little to eat in the jungle. Hethor was certain that half the things growing, crawling, and flying around him were delicious, while the other half were deadly poison. Unfortunately, he could not tell the difference.
He was reduced to sucking on roots and shoots of small, inoffensive-seeming water plants.
“I will not ⦠lose these words ⦠. I will not ⦠lose these words ⦠. I will not ⦠lose these words ⦠.”
Each evening Hethor stopped before sundown. He would find a tree to sleep in away from whatever crashed heavily through the jungle at night and check it for snakes. Once settled he chewed on whatever shoots he'd found that day, then stared at the scratched writing on the golden tablet until the light stole his sight away from him.
Malgus would be at the coast, somewhere with or near the Southern wise men the Jade Abbot had spoken of. The hierophants of this part of the world would dwell in cities, which meant ports. It made little sense to come inland. Here was trackless jungle, and no settlement at all save
William's fortress. Hethor wished that he had asked more questions when the Jade Abbot mentioned the Relics of Christ coming over the Equatorial Wall.
Why?
Who brought them?
He did not care for Malgus in the first place, really, for all that the man had rescued him in Boston. Malgus had betrayed Hethor as well, in a sense, with the misleading trick of parachutes coming down from the Wall. Still Hethor did not think Malgus evil, as William of Ghent was. William had condemned Hethor to death, and sought to overturn the order of the world. Malgus simply worked at cross-purposes to Hethor's mission from Gabriel.
Where
had
the man landed in his great fall from the Wall?
“I will not ⦠lose these words ⦠. I will not ⦠lose these words ⦠. I will not ⦠lose these words ⦠.”
On the fifth day out from the fortress Hethor came to a wide river that blocked his way west. He could not begin to judge its depth, for it was muddy and apparently in flood. It seemed narrower upstream, to the south. Hethor picked his away along the bank in that direction, looking for a log or some other way to cross the flow. The flood had a ticking chuckle to it, different from any water he had ever heard.
Heard.
Hethor shouted, dropped his golden tablet into a stand of ferns, and reached up to gently stroke his ears. Insects flew from the left, and he dislodged a leaf from his right.
“Is it me? Can I hear?”
His words were still lost to him, but Hethor could definitely hear the river, though as a ticking, the way he'd always heard the turning of the Earth.
He fell to his knees, kissed his tablet, then looked up at another small noise to see a great, tawny cat staring at him from perhaps thirty feet distant.
Hethor walked away slowly, backing from the cat's gaze, but it sauntered after him. He turned to run. Over his
shoulder he caught a flash of movement as the cat sped up. Hethor spun back around, brandished his tablet, and shouted, “In the name of God, leave me!”
The cat pulled up sharply, eyes blazing in a bright reflection of the sheet of gold. It opened its mouth to another sound of clicking before walking back into the blue-green shadows of the jungle.
“I will not ⦠lose these words ⦠,” Hethor said, his voice at the verge of audibility now. They had saved his life, over and over again.
“I WILL NOT â¦
lose these words ⦠. I will not ⦠lose these words ⦠. I will not ⦠lose these words ⦠.”
Ten days into the jungle, Hethor still followed the river south. He was too weak now to attempt a crossing, so weak he crawled most of the day, dragging his tablet with him. He'd tried to eat other things, eggs and insects, but that just made him sick. There had been more earthquakes, more animals, and once something dark and large that howled its way across the sky, but his memory grew fainter and more chaotic. He had seen a white bird, a parrot perhaps, several times, but could no longer recall why that might be important to him.
He longed for cold chicken and corn liquor, a simple ride in a hearse over country roads, Royal Navy hardtack and rum. He longed for anything but this hot, moldering jungle with its smells of water and rotten flowers and the little clicking noises that always hovered just inside his hearing.
One hand, then another,
Hethor thought. One foot, then another. It was good that his boots were so stout, as the ground was tearing into his palms and knees as he crawled, making of them a painful mess.
With a loud clattering, a small hairy foot planted itself between his hands. The shin was almost pressed into Hethor's nose. He looked up, squinting, to green-tinged shadows of a familiar shape.
“I will not ⦠lose these words ⦠,” Hethor said. His voice sounded almost normal.
The owner of the hairy foot bent down, a spear preceding him, and jabbered in a clicking, whistling sort of language. This was one of the small hairy men, Hethor realized, that had forced him off of the southern ledge of the Equatorial Wall to fall after Simeon Malgus.
Straining, his every movement a palsy, Hethor fished within his coat for the golden tablet. Where was it?
“Have I lost ⦠these words ⦠?” he asked, but then it poked him, hurting his hand.
Hethor drew the tablet out and brandished it unconvincingly at the hairy-footed spear carrier.
More clicks and whistles, quite a few of them, accompanied by considerable running back and forth. A conference, then, of the little apes, as they circled around Hethor. Under their clicking and whistling, the clattering of gears, as if the entire world were nothing but automata within automata, every creature in God's Creation a thing of brass gears and rings.
Five or six of the little hairy men picked Hethor up and laid him on their spears stretched crosswise beneath him. Once he was balanced they began to run through the jungle, chanting to the rhythm of their steps. Hethor floated above them in the green-lit shadows like a small, almost-fallen angel making that final trip to ground.
THE NEXT
few days were a fevered blur of color and pain, always tinted green, though flashes of every hue in God's palette seemed to pass before Hethor's eyes. Once he awoke to find himself covered in long black tongues, as though his body were vomiting forth what lay within, only to realize they were leeches sucking him dry. He screamed himself back to sleep.