Quintessence Sky (14 page)

"Hey," said a rough, Scottish voice. "What do
you think you're doing?"

Matthew turned to find James Ferguson glaring
at him. "Removing a vulgar drawing," Matthew said.

Ferguson gave a mischievous smile. "That was
mine," he said. "Funny, eh?"

"It's not at all funny. It's crass, and it's
slandering a good man."

"Come on, though. Your father, he's a bit of
a prude, isn't he? Imagine him with his pants down. Can't do it,
can you? I don't think he even takes them down to piss."

Matthew wasn't in the mood for this. He
advanced on Ferguson, fists clenched.

"Whoa, slow down." Ferguson raised his hands
in surrender. "Your father's a good man. He is. Best man in the
colony; nobody doubts that. He's just in a bit too deep with the
enemy. Too kind for his own good, that's what he is. And for our
good, too."

Matthew shook his head. This was how Ferguson
won men's hearts. Not by railing against his father, but by making
him look ridiculous and weak. He never challenged him to his face,
nor did he put himself forward as a rival leader. He wasn't a
fighter; he was a poisoner.

Matthew pointed at the tree. "No more
pictures," he said.

"Okay, whatever you say." Ferguson raised his
hands again.

"And leave my father alone. He's your
governor. Show him some respect."

Ferguson shrugged. "He's not really a
governor. Just acting, as it were. He's got no royal writ."

"What difference does that make?"

"Well, if Princess Elizabeth shows up and
proclaims him governor, then that's what he is. Until then, he's
just filling a vacancy, isn't he? Anyone could do it."

Like most of the colonists, Ferguson thought
of the Protestant princess Elizabeth as the rightful queen of
England instead of her Catholic sister Mary. "Princess Elizabeth
isn't likely to pay us a visit any time soon," Matthew said. "That
doesn't mean you don't owe him your obedience."

"Spoken like a diligent son," Ferguson said.
"But come now. Haven't you ever thought someone else could do a
better job than your old dad?"

Matthew shoved Ferguson out of his way and
kept walking. He didn't want to hear any more. Ferguson was too
close to being right.

"The manticores aren't our friends!" Ferguson
called after him. "Either we conquer them, or they'll destroy
us."

Back in his rooms on the second floor of the
Quintessence Society building, Matthew fed the torn pieces of
poster into a candle flame, watching each one burn down until it
nearly singed his fingers. Catherine's bell-box lay silent on the
table in front of him. He'd rung it for hours, with no response. He
knew it was futile, but every time he decided to give it up, he
tried it just one more time, just in case. He needed to do
something, but anything else he could do was just as useless. He
could try searching for her in the forest, but there was little
point in that—the forest was vast, and he had no idea where she
was.

It was dark outside, though a single shekinah
in a jar provided him with plenty of light. In a distant way, he
knew he was hungry, but had little motivation to eat. He was
supposed to be so clever. The whole colony looked to him for daily
miracles. But when it really counted, he could no more alter his
circumstances than a child.

His only hope was that Catherine still had
her bell-box but was unable to answer it, or that her captors had
it and she might find a way to reclaim it. If so, he wanted to be
here when she called. It was his only link to her, and if it had
been destroyed or left behind, he had nothing. Not even hope. He
stood and paced to the window, looking out into the darkness,
waiting for inspiration.

A bell rang.

He whirled and rushed back to the workbench
on which Catherine's bell-box sat, but the bell sounded again,
once, like a chime, from his left. Where was it coming from? He
opened a cupboard and began pawing through it, knocking aside
pieces of gold, bones, and fragments of fur. It was full of
oddments, items he'd saved for some later use out of broken or
discarded inventions. The bell kept ringing, and finally he found
it, pushed to the back. It was an orphaned bell-box, one to which
the pair had long since been lost. He'd kept it to use for spare
parts.

His first thought was that Catherine had
somehow found its pair and was using it to contact him, despite how
ridiculously unlikely it would be for her to stumble upon a lost
bell-box in the middle of the mountains, farther away from the
colony than humans had ever ventured. He tapped a quick greeting on
it, using their code: three taps, then a pause, then three taps
again. Silence. The bell-boxes, including this one, had a damper on
them to allow the bells to make only short rings: lift the lever
up, the bell would ring, push the lever down, it would stop. This
allowed them to deliver messages quickly. After trying the greeting
again, the bell rang, but it was a single, continuous ring, with no
dampening. Which meant nothing.

Stupid. It was just a phantom, a random
fluctuation of the quintessence thread. It happened sometimes—an
orphaned box would ring for no reason, sometimes even when they
knew its pair had been destroyed. Perhaps it had been lost in the
forest, and an animal had gotten a hold of it. Or maybe the loose
thread, flapping in an extradimensional breeze, somehow wrapped
itself around some other thread that cued the ring. They had no
idea, really. It was just a mystery, one of thousands.

Matthew threw the box across the room, where
it smashed against the wall. They would never understand
quintessence. Not in any real sense. They were fish who, after
studying a sunken ship, thought they understood the world above the
water.

He heard footsteps on the stairs. A light
knock on the door. "Come in."

The door swung open to reveal Blanca's somber
face. "What are you doing?" she said.

"Trying to contact her."

Blanca eased the rest of the way into the
room. Even on Horizon, where many of the old world's social taboos
had disappeared, there would be a scandal if they were discovered
alone in his apartments at night, but he didn't ask her to leave.
He was despondent, and the company was welcome. She set a sunfruit
and a chunk of sandbread in front of him. "Eat."

He bit into the yellow fruit. It was
delicious, and he bit again, feeling guilty for enjoying food when
Catherine was out there, perhaps already dead. He ate it all
anyway, driven by hunger.

"Catherine is strong," Blanca said. "She
knows the manticores better than anyone."

Matthew tried for a smile. "You're right.
She's probably fine."

"I wouldn't put it past her to come walking
in tomorrow without a scratch."

It was just talk, but it made Matthew feel
better all the same. Blanca was an inherently empathetic person,
feeling the emotions of others sometimes more deeply than she felt
her own. Catherine would have told him to stop moping and do
something. She had no patience for melancholy. Blanca was so
different than Catherine in some ways: gentle where Catherine was
brash, quicker to listen than to talk, always understanding. Though
in other ways, they were much alike. They were both independent,
with a plan for their own lives that didn't take much stock in what
others thought they ought to do.

It was that quality that had put Catherine in
this situation in the first place, maybe even gotten her killed.
Why hadn't she listened to him?

"She'll come waltzing into the settlement
with a manticore entourage to tell us they've named her their
queen," Matthew said, trying to match Blanca's light tone, but
failing.

Blanca smiled back at him, and Matthew could
see that she was suffering, too. "Even so, isn't there anything we
could do"—she waved her hand vaguely around the room, indicating
the various implements and paraphernalia—"with this stuff? To find
her?"

Matthew slumped, dropping his chin into his
hands. "It's not sorcery," he said. "There are specific things we
know how to do. Finding a person across miles of forest and
mountains isn't one of them."

"You have her bell-box, right?" she said,
pointing. "There's a quintessence thread connecting the boxes, and
you can see it using the skink tears. Can't you just . . . follow
the thread?"

Matthew shook his head. "You'd think so. It
looks like a thread, and it seems to go straight, but it really
doesn't. It's not part of our world at all, not really. We tried
following a thread before, thinking we wouldn't have to bring the
compass beetles with us on expeditions—we'd just follow the
bell-box connection home. When the boxes are close together, it
works fine. But the farther they get apart, the stranger it gets.
The thread points off in a random direction, not toward the other
box. Trying to follow it takes you on a path that, while it may not
actually be infinite, might as well be. We walked for a full day
and never reached a box that we knew to be only two miles away on a
straight course."

"There's got to be a way," Blanca said. She
put a hand on his arm. "You're the cleverest person I know. You can
figure it out."

Matthew shook her off. "It can't be
done."

"Well, how does it work?"

"What do you mean?"

"Explain it to me. How does the bell-box
work?"

Matthew sighed. "We take a jawbone from an
ironfish and separate it from the skull, where the quintessence
pearl is. When we . . ."

"I know how you
make
it," Blanca said.
She tossed her dark hair. "Tell me how it
works
."

He was quiet for a moment, thinking. "Living
things are anchored to their spirits with threads of quintessence.
Horizon animals have pearls which link their thread to some part of
their body—a jaw, a leg, an eye—that allows them to tap into the
quintessence and use it."

"And the bell-box?"

"We simply stretch one of those threads and
make it work at a distance. The threads seem to stretch
indefinitely—as I said, they're not really part of our universe.
It's some kind of energy, like light or heat." He kicked the table.
"Or gravity. Or magnetism. Who knows what it is, really. We've
debated these things a thousand times. We don't have time for
philosophy."

"Could you look through a connection to see
what was happening on the other side?"

Matthew thought of the time, more than a year
before, when Catherine's spirit had traveled back from beyond the
grave on such a thread. He hadn't seen it himself, but her father
had described it sliding along the thread like an endless snake
swallowing its meal. Did that mean the threads had an inside layer,
like a tunnel? Might there be some way to connect to her now in the
same way?

He pinched his lower lip. "If you could split
open a thread . . ."

You couldn't cut such a thing with a knife or
a sword, of course. It was invisible and intangible. He had walked
through a hundred of them just by crossing the room. But was there
something which might?

He crossed to a workbench, put a drop of
skink tears in his eyes, and blinked past the initial burning. He
strapped a pair of boarcat paws to his hands. Boarcat claws were
unique in that they could actually interact directly with
quintessence threads, which was how they wrapped threads around
their bodies, enabling the special powers they enjoyed.

"What are you trying?" Blanca said.

"The obvious." He found the quintessence
thread emanating from Catherine's bell-box, grasped it firmly with
the boarcat claws, and picked at it, trying to find an edge or some
strand he could get hold of to unravel it. There was no such thing.
It was as pure and unbroken as a beam of light.

He sat back. "
Why
do they have an
inside layer?"

"What?"

"Things always have a reason. If quintessence
threads are like a tunnel, what's the purpose? What moves through
the tunnel?"

"Information?" Blanca said. "When you close
the ironfish jaw in the one box, the bones in the other box get the
message that they should turn to iron."

"More than that. The power to transform must
travel, too, because the other side doesn't need to have a pearl,
or even be in a quintessence field. The
energy
for the
transformation must travel through the thread."

Matthew snatched up another bell-box pair and
placed them one on either side of the long work table that
stretched the length of the room. In the center of the table,
between the two boxes, he placed a black opteryx scale. He pressed
the level on one bell-box, ringing the bell on the other. The scale
stayed black.

"Hmm. Maybe it's too small to register?" He
poured a little salt water on the scale and tried again. This time,
when he pressed the lever, the scale flared a dull reddish color
before fading back to black.

"So it's true," Blanca said. "Quintessence
flows through the thread."

"Not a lot," Matthew agreed. "But it
does."

"Unless it's the flow of quintessence itself
that makes the thread? Like a river in a stream bed?"

"No, then the scale would glow all the time.
The quintessence only flows for a moment." Matthew paced,
considering it. The thought of Catherine in danger and the need to
do something about it distracted him, making it hard to hold on to
a thought.

"We know a spirit can be sent this way,"
Matthew mused. Catherine's spirit had come back from the dead along
such a thread. It wasn't something they could do again, as it
required someone else to die, and risked destroying the world
besides, but at least they knew it was possible.

"What if spirits are made of the same
energy?"

Matthew sucked in his lips. "So this is
spirit stuff we're sending back and forth." A thought struck him.
"What if I could send my spirit to her?"