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Authors: David Walton

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Quintessence Sky (2 page)

BOOK: Quintessence Sky
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RAMOS spread a full sheet of printer's paper
on a table and weighted its corners with chips of quarried stone
from the chapel above. An arc of votive candles illuminated the
blank surface. He began to draw.

The boy's name was Luis. He had been born on
May the first, under the star Ceginus.

Ramos dipped his quill and inked a large
circle, the celestial sphere, which he followed by lines dividing
the ecliptic into the twelve houses. With practiced ease, he
consulted his astrolabe, converting coordinates in his head, and
paged through his almanac for the tables of oblique ascensions.

"Do they keep an unauthorized Bible
translation hidden in the house?" Valencia said in a calm monotone.
"Or perhaps a Talmud? A secret book of any kind?"

"No book, no book," Luis said.

"If they did have a book, where would they
hide it?"

"Luis don't know," the boy said, rocking.
"Luis don't read."

"But you've seen it, surely. Is there a
secret box? A secret place where they store it?"

"Luis want to go home."

"Where is the book, Luis?"

"Papa read to me sometimes. Not Mama. She
don't read neither."

"Where does your papa put the book after he
reads to you?"

"No, no, no. Luis is a good boy. Not allowed
to touch it."

"Did you ever touch it, Luis?"

"No, no, no."

While Ramos listened, he calculated, and
could almost forget the horrific circumstances of this casting. He
had figured countless horoscopes in his professional career, and
the steps came easily. At the University of Valladolid, he trained
medical students in horoscope-casting to diagnose diseases or
determine auspicious times to mix their medicines.

His figures gave him trouble today, however,
which was unusual. Detailed horoscopes could take hours to
calculate, but Ramos was experienced and quick. Something bothered
him about this one, though he couldn't quite put his finger on it.
The equations just didn't seem to line up the way they usually
did.

He persisted, however, and soon certain
associations began to emerge. "Ask him about any letters his
parents may have received or written," Ramos said.

"With whom do your parents correspond? Are
there friends abroad to whom they write?" Valencia said.

"Luis don't touch the letters. Luis don't
read."

"Do they read them to you?"

"No, no, no."

"Where are they from?"

Luis looked suddenly frightened. "Luis not
tell. Luis keeps a secret."

Some inquisitors were shouters, bellowing
threats at the accused to intimidate them into speaking. Valencia's
subdued questioning seemed more effective. Ramos suspected that
even if the questioning moved on to torture, he would maintain his
serene demeanor, posing questions in calm, conversational tones
while those he interrogated screamed and wept.

"We already know the answers to these
questions," Valencia said soothingly. "It is for your sake that we
ask them. If you are honest with us, it will spare you pain."

"From far away," Luis said. "Many days
travel." He had a transparently mischievous expression, as if he
thought he had answered the question cleverly without giving his
secret away.

"From where, exactly?" Valencia said, and
Luis's mischievous expression vanished.

Another association materialized under
Ramos's pen: "philosopher" and "demon". Philosopher demon? No. The
Demon Philosopher. "Ask him about Martin Luther," Ramos said.

At the name, Luis's eyes bugged out and he
tried to stand, though he was still strapped down. "Luis not tell,"
he wailed. "Luis is a good boy."

Valencia nodded appreciatively to Ramos. If
Luis's parents were corresponding with Luther's followers, that
implied they were much more than simple Protestant sympathizers. It
meant a network of Protestants, sedition, underground worship
services—exactly how the unrest had started in the Netherlands.
They may have just uncovered a serious cancer in the pure flesh of
Spain, one that would have to be ruthlessly excised. Ramos was a
Jesuit, devoted to the Church and to the Pope. He knew it was
important to root out heresy, and yet he didn't feel proud of his
contribution here.

Luis became more and more agitated, until his
eyes rolled back, and his body went into convulsions, rattling the
chair and knocking his head against the iron bands.

"Unstrap him," Valencia said to the guards,
who quickly obeyed, allowing the convulsing boy to slip to the
floor. They wouldn't get any more information out of him if he
battered himself unconscious in the chair.

While they waited for the convulsions to
subside, Ramos perused the horoscope again, partly just to take his
eyes away from the child's distress. Something still bothered him
about the shape of the calculations. He looked back and forth
between his paper and his astrolabe, turning the sphere slightly,
and then he saw it. He stared, disbelieving.
Surely not
.

Ramos knew the heavens as well as he knew the
doctrines of Holy Scripture, as well as he knew his own name. For
thousands of years, the fixed stars had turned in their courses,
while the five wandering stars—Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and
Saturn—cut across them in their own complex patterns, more dynamic,
but utterly predictable. If there was anything he knew about the
heavenly spheres, it was this: they didn't change. What he was
seeing was impossible.

Yet it was true. A star was missing. It
wasn't pictured on his astrolabe, though he knew it always had
been, knew it had been there only minutes before. He snatched his
almanac and flipped through, but the star was missing from the
tables as well. Was he losing his mind?

He glanced back up and saw that, although
Luis's fit was over, Valencia himself was staring slack-jawed, not
speaking. Something was happening. The air felt thick, the
pervasive smell of blood sickeningly strong. Luis laughed from the
floor, a maniacal sound. Valencia turned to Ramos, his face a mask
of terror. He raised an arm, reaching out, and tried to stand, but
his legs buckled and he collapsed. On the floor, he began to
convulse, his eyes wide and startled, his mouth gulping like a fish
out of water.

Ramos leapt to his feet, overturning the
table and sending the ink splashing onto the stones.
Witchcraft
. Somehow, the boy had sent his demons into
Valencia. The guards were staring at the convulsing inquisitor,
stunned. Luis, looking like a frightened rabbit, bolted for the
stairs. No one moved to stop him. Ramos began to tremble. This was
wrong, all wrong. He took one more look at Valencia's body spasming
on the floor and ran.

He raced up the stairs, tripping twice, and
stumbled out into the air behind the boy, who disappeared into the
night without looking back. Ramos tilted his head and spun,
scanning the sky. He saw it at once, in the constellation Gemini.
There was a hole in the sky where a star had been before. It was,
if anything, blacker than the night sky around it, a chasm where no
stars could be seen. Streaks of light from the surrounding stars
trailed into the hole in a spiral shape, like water swirling down a
drain, as if the hole were sucking the very starlight out of the
sky. Ramos had never seen anything so terrifying in all his
life.

In the city around him, lights appeared in
windows, accompanied by shouts and cries and curses. Antonia. Ramos
started running again. He had to get home to Antonia.

Valladolid was the capital city of Spain, but
at night, its streets were as black and muddy as a country lane.
Lanterns illuminated snatches of a city gone mad. Shouts and
weeping echoed on all sides. A man lurched out into the street
chased by a woman. He stumbled toward Ramos, eyes wide, then fell
down and convulsed on the road. The woman pulled at his arm, trying
to drag him back into the house. Ramos hurried on, keeping to the
middle of the street.

He ran northeast along the Calle de la Madre
de Dios, toward his home. Another shout came from a house across
the road, and a first-floor window shattered. A woman climbed
through the broken glass, and then she, too, collapsed in the dirt
in violent convulsions. Ramos recognized his neighbor, Señora
Cabezas, a graceful mother of three who insisted on the old
Castilian manners.
Please God, let Antonia be safe.

When he reached his home, lights already
burned inside. It was a two-story structure of brown stone, large
enough to teach students and house his library of books, but not
much more. He burst through the door and found Carmela in panic and
Antonia, her face and shift bloody, lying on the floor,
screaming.

"She fell out of bed!" Carmela said. "I heard
her cry, but when I came . . . I didn't know what to do!"

"Tío!" Antonia screamed. "Where are you?
Carmela! Tío Ramos!" She seemed utterly terrified.

Ramos wrapped his arms around her and lifted
her back into bed. "I'm right here," he said. "There's nothing to
fear." Though he wasn't at all sure that was true. "Carmela, bring
water and a blanket."

Carmela rushed to obey. Ramos stroked
Antonia's hair and spoke into her ear, but she didn't seem to be
able to hear him, or even feel that he was there. She kept crying
out for him, urgently at first, then with a kind of pitiful
despair.

"I don't know," she said. "Do you?"

"Do I what?" Ramos said.

"I don't remember," she said. "Home, I
think."

"Antonia, can you hear me?"

"Thank you. My name is Antonia." She said it
politely, as if she were meeting a guest at their home. "What's
yours?"

Ramos clutched her head to his chest, and a
painful knot formed in his throat. He thought of Luis and madness
and the zeal of the Inquisition.
Please God, may she not be like
that. Protect my little girl.

Carmela returned, and they draped the blanket
over Antonia, as if it were her body that was sick and not her
mind. Ramos held the glass of water for her to drink. She couldn't
seem to tell that it was there. When he tipped it and poured into
her mouth, she drank readily enough, but then she started to speak
in the middle of a swallow, causing her to choke and spit water up
onto the blanket.

"There, dear, just hush and drink it,"
Carmela said, and started to cry.

Ramos took Carmela's chin and turned her head
so she could see the seriousness in his eyes. "We need to keep this
secret," he said. "You must tell no one what's happened here."

Carmela nodded, the terror evident in her
eyes.

 

 

CHAPTER 1

 

CATHERINE Parris stepped through the
invisible barrier that kept the manticores from invading the
Horizon colony. They knew better than to trust their safety to a
physical wall anymore, as they had in the early days of the colony.
The old wall had been made of beetlewood— the only known substance
that manticores could not simply pass through like air—but that
hadn't stopped the manticores from scaling it and killing them.
Like the manticores themselves, the new barrier operated on the
quintessence plane, and thus could not be seen by normal light. It
couldn't be felt, either, and Catherine walked right through to the
other side without noticing anything different.

Two manticores were waiting for her. They
were from the red tribe, as close to friends as it was possible for
manticores to be. They were her guides and bodyguards on this trip,
protection against the dangers of the forest, and particularly
against those manticores who were not as friendly. They were
visible, as a courtesy to her, but when she nodded to them,
acknowledging their presence, they disappeared.

Catherine was hardly defenseless—she could
heal instantly from any wound, could outrun any animal in a race
across open ground, and at need, she could channel such a large
flow of quintessence that she would shine like the sun and
incinerate anything within a few meters. In fact, she would have
preferred to go on this trip alone, but Matthew had insisted. As
her fiancé, he had become inclined to make pronouncements about her
safety. He hadn't wanted her to go at all, but they had worked out
this bodyguard as a compromise.

She used the quintessence in her body to make
herself lighter, which would allow her to sprint for miles without
tiring, and took off toward the interior of the island, not caring
if the manticores followed or not. They would have no trouble
keeping up with her through dense forest, and she had no doubt they
were there, invisibly flanking her or scouting ahead. She had a
bottle of skink tears which would allow her to see them, if she
wished, but the colony's stores of that commodity were getting low,
and she needed to conserve her supply.

The manticores were named Paul and Thomas.
They were among the first converts to Christianity that Bishop
Marcheford had made when he lived in his little house among them
during the early months of the colony. When a manticore
converted—as more of them had been doing now that the human colony
was strongly established—Marcheford gave it a Christian name. It
seemed a shame to Catherine, who loved the beauty of manticore
names, however difficult they were to pronounce. These two had been
called something like Hakrahinik and Lachakchith, the sound of the
names accompanied by motions with their tails that were just as
much a part of the manticore language as were the spoken syllables.
Catherine had learned to approximate those motions with her hands
to communicate in their language, but she had to admit, the
Christian names were easier.

BOOK: Quintessence Sky
13.81Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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