Quintessence Sky (13 page)

"They died when they were separated from the
pearls?"

"Not at first. They were in agony if we took
the pearls away, and their limbs quickly became stiff as stone, so
we kept them in four cells, each with a pearl, while we
interrogated them. Once we learned what they knew—which wasn't
much—Philip ordered us to take the pearls for ourselves." Barrosa
pointed a finger at Ramos. "Don’t look at me like that. I was
following a direct command."

"They all died?"

"Some that day; some held out as long as
three days. It was like a room full of statues at the end."

Ramos nodded slowly. If it was Philip's
command, Barrosa didn't have much choice. A Christian monarch had
the responsibility to make hard decisions, decisions for the good
of Christendom and the spread of the True Faith, not just for the
good of individuals. It was not for men like him or Barrosa to
question commands from a holy ruler. And yet, the decision made him
uncomfortable. He wondered if he would have done the same in
Barrosa's place.

As any rate, it was now Ramos's duty to make
the suffering of those men worthwhile, by harnessing quintessence
to Philip's holy cause. If quintessence was worthless, they had
died in vain. On the other hand, if it increased the might and
influence of the Church, then they were martyrs who would be
rewarded in glory. It all depended on what he and Barrosa could
accomplish.

"Let's get to work."

THE FIRST thing Ramos accomplished was an
inventory. His predecessors had left the cellar room a shambles,
with miracles scattered underfoot and no organization. Ramos wanted
to know exactly what they had, what was known, and what was
unknown.

The large quantity of gold miscellany filled
a fish barrel. There were six kinds of animals, the names of which
Barrosa had recorded from interviews with the returning soldiers
before they died. The worm was called a shekinah flatworm, and
seemed to be the actual source of the quintessence magic, or at
least critical to its working. The eel Ramos had seen was called a
Midas eel, for obvious reasons, and the bizarre frilled creature
that floated to the top of its cage they called a puff weasel. The
creature that had killed Perez was called a sooty toad, and it was
still alive. It had appeared to immolate itself along with Perez,
but Barrosa had later found it in a corner, croaking lustily. He
had managed to coax it back into its cage with a scattering of dead
crickets. There was also a bird—or at least, they assumed it was a
bird. It sat on a perch, squawked, fluttered what sounded like
wings, and ate seeds from a dish. It was however, entirely
invisible.

Finally, there were the compass beetles.
These were the only animals of which they had more than one
specimen. The soldiers had brought back a dozen from Horizon, but
they ate any green leaves and bred readily, so that now they had
many more. The glass cage in which they were stored was a strange
sight, however, since all of the beetles were pressed to one side,
scrabbling to get through the glass. If Ramos turned the cage, the
beetles moved, too, so that they always faced to the West. This was
how the Spanish ship had found Horizon, Barrosa explained. The
glass had been waxed, since the beetles could fly right through
just about any other material.

There were plants, too, some with invisible,
poisonous spines. All together, despite the wonder of everything he
saw, Ramos was a bit disappointed. The collection had not been
gathered by scholars. There were no rubbings, no dried flowers and
leaves, no drawings, no written observational accounts. The choice
of what to bring back had been made based on what would most be
most impressive to look at, not by what would yield the most
understanding about quintessence and Horizon.

Barrosa and King Philip quickly became
impatient with Ramos's approach. The old trio of philosophers had
shown the king new wonders every week, sometimes every day. So far,
all Ramos had done was organize the room, make drawings, and write
long lists. As far as Ramos was concerned, however, it was the only
way to proceed. God had created an ordered universe. In the study
of the natural world, just as in the study of theology, the whole
could be comprehended only by understanding each piece.

Once everything was organized and labeled and
written down in Ramos's tiny, neat hand, he began to study it
systematically. The shekinah flatworm was the center of everything,
the source. As Barrosa had described, the power of the pearls would
gradually dissipate the longer they stayed away from the shekinah.
Their light and influence would increase with the application of
salt water, but that increased the dissipation, too. The farther
away the pearl was from the shekinah, the faster it lost its power,
and Ramos recorded that quintessence power had an inverse
relationship to both time elapsed and distance traveled from the
shekinah.

It occurred to him to wonder about the light.
Standard light, from the sun or a flame, had no healing or
transformative powers. The shekinah flatworm, however, blazed with
light, as did the pearls. Was the light different than ordinary
light? Did the light itself contain the power, or was it simply an
offshoot of it? In the Holy Scriptures, the glory of God was always
associated with a bright light—the face of Moses on Sinai, the
transfiguration of Christ, the appearance of the risen Lord. Was
this a heavenly light?

He began testing it. The first thing he
discovered was the light's ability to shine through most objects. A
piece of wood held in front of it cast no shadows. Metal was
similarly ineffective in blocking the light, as was ordinary gold,
although interestingly, the transformed gold did cast a shadow.
Which was a significant discovery: it meant the transformed gold
wasn't completely transformed. There was an aspect of it, not seen
or felt, that was different from real gold. The black pouches
effectively blocked the light of the pearls, but Barrosa said the
pouches had come from Horizon, and thus were probably fashioned
from the hide of some Horizon beast. If he placed a pearl in an
ordinary leather pouch, it shone through the material just as
brightly as ever.

Finally, he tinkered with the strange boxes
that had bells mounted on the top. It appeared as if the lever on
each box was meant to ring the bell, but when he pressed it,
nothing happened. He sawed carefully through one of the wooden
sides to see the interior and found, oddly enough, a set of old
bones. At first he thought it might be a fetish from an aboriginal
tribe, like a shaman's bone bag. But no, the bones were carefully
attached, one to the lever and one to the bell. The one attached to
the lever was a jawbone. Based on the shape, and the lack of teeth,
Ramos guessed it belonged to a fish of some kind, perhaps a herring
or a carp. But, no, that couldn't be. This was the jawbone of a
Horizon
fish, and thus it would be special in some way, just
like the eel or the other animals in the room. The other bone,
hanging from the bell by a string, was nothing more than a
fragment, and whether it had belonged to the same fish or not, he
couldn't tell.

He moved the lever up and down, watching how
the hinge of bone inside opened and closed as a result. Open,
closed. Open, closed. The odd thing was, the lever and the bell
were not attached in any way. So what was the point? Perhaps they
used to be attached, and the bones had broken apart during the
journey. That made some sense, though it still didn't explain why
someone would attach a lever to a bell through a collection of fish
bones.

Finally, he stopped playing with it and just
sat there, contemplating the mystery, but not touching it. It was
only then that, with his hands nowhere near the mechanism, as if
invisible fingers had grasped the bone fragment and pulled it
sharply downward, the bell rang.

CHAPTER 8

CATHERINE fell.

It took much longer than she expected. She
screamed and covered her face, expecting at any moment to smash
into jagged rocks.

She kept falling. The deafening wind
fluttered her hair and clothes, and she pitched dizzily end over
end. She wondered how deep this cave shaft could possibly be, since
even if she had jumped off the highest point of the mountain, she
would surely have hit bottom before now.

Then she noticed she was falling more slowly.
The air didn't buffet her as violently, and the blur of rock walls
to either side became easier to distinguish. She tried to control
her tumble, and found that she could, falling roughly feet
first.

Still she slowed. The experience was, if
anything, like throwing a ball high in the air. As it flew higher,
it would slow down, losing speed gradually at first, and then more
swiftly, until just at the peak of its arc, it stopped. She felt
like a ball thrown, but upside-down. When at last, below her, a
flat rocky floor appeared, she was no longer falling so much as
floating downward, and at the moment her feet touched down, her
speed fell to nothing, so that she hardly noticed the impact at
all.

For a moment of violent vertigo, her sense of
direction reversed, and she expected to plummet head first, back
the way she had come. Instead, she swayed slightly, regained her
sense of balance and gravity, and realized that, against all
expectations, she was still alive.

She couldn't see the top of the shaft. The
walls were rough and covered with what looked like a wet lichen,
but they rose more or less vertically until they met at a point far
above her. The walls stopped just short of the floor, however,
creating a low roofed cave that stretched in every direction, high
enough that she could walk under it if she stooped. Water dripped
from the roof, and jutting spikes cast eerie shadows.

In one direction, a dim yellow light glowed,
which must be the only reason she could see anything at all. She
ducked low enough to clear the ceiling and began to make her way,
bent uncomfortably, toward the light.

The light came from a doorway. An opening
anyway, roughly square, without a door. Before she got close enough
to make out any details, she heard voices. Human voices.

"Hello?" she said. Her own voice sounded thin
and weak in this vast underground space. "Who's there?"

A TREE stood in the center of the settlement,
and colonists used it to post notices, offer services, and
advertise needs. Walking by, Matthew saw a prominently placed
poster with a cartoon drawing of his father, bishop's hat on his
head, dropping his pants to copulate with a manticore. It was
crude, offensive, and shocking—such attacks on politicians occurred
in London, but he had never seen anything like it here.

Matthew tore the poster down and tore it to
pieces. There was no question in his mind who had put it there.