Quintessence Sky (25 page)

He grunted angrily. It was just what he
wanted to believe, but he knew it wasn't true. "I experimented with
something when I had no idea what it would do, without any help or
advice. It's exactly how Sinclair killed his servant and nearly
destroyed the island. And it's only by the slimmest of luck that I
didn't kill you."

She pressed closer to him. "Hush. I'm all
right. Besides, I was there, too. I'm just as much to blame."

He shook his head dismissively. "I was the
one who—"

She laid a finger against his mouth. "We had
no way of knowing what was on the other side of that connection.
We'd never seen or heard of anything like that miasma. Catherine
hadn't either, or she wouldn't have gone into it."

"You think—"

Her finger against his lips again.
"Hush."

He shouldn't be here, alone in the dark with
this young and beautiful woman while his fiancée was missing. She
was telling him everything he desperately wanted to believe: that
this crisis wasn't his fault, that he was worthy of admiration,
that the future was bright with promise. Holding her, he could
almost feel that everything was all right. But none of it was true,
and he knew it.

He pulled away. "Catherine is still alive,"
he said.

There were tears in her eyes. "I want that to
be true as much as you," she said. "She was my only friend."

He felt exhausted, too overcome with sadness
to speak anymore. He shook his head. "I can't," he said. He left
her and circled to the other side of the building, where he dropped
down and sat in the dirt, ashamed and overwhelmed. What if
Catherine really was dead? What if they never even knew for
sure?

A memory surfaced, down at the shore of the
bay with Catherine, unchaparoned. In England, it would have been
impossible to spend time with her like that, at least not without a
great scandal, but on Horizon it was easier. The two of them were
so often exploring in the forest that their absence caused little
notice.

It had been before the storms started, and
the bay was still, the weather cool. They sat together on some of
the soft moss that was more common than leaves in Horizon forests,
and watched the sand tortoises lumbering along in the surf. When
they used their tongues to kiss—something he was sure his father
had never done and would denounce as lewd behavior—they traded
enough quintessence-infused saliva that the principle of
substitution came into play. For a few minutes, he could feel what
she felt, and vice versa. If he brushed his own arm, he felt
nothing, but she could feel it clearly. If she licked her lips, she
felt nothing, but he could feel the sensation on his own mouth. It
didn't last long, but it was deliciously intimate, and the thought
made him flush with guilty pleasure. He missed her so much.

A hand clasped his shoulder, too large and
strong to be Blanca's. It was his father. Bishop Marcheford didn't
say anything, just sat down in the dirt next to him and squeezed
his shoulders in a tight, one-handed embrace. At first, Matthew
felt a flare of anger—he didn't want to deal with his father right
now—but then it left him in a rush and he found that he was crying.
He had felt so superior to his father, so certain that he knew what
was best.

"I'm afraid she's dead," Matthew said. "I was
just trying to find her. I was supposed to rescue her, and instead,
I destroyed everything."

The anger came back again, as fast as it had
gone. Why was he saying this? His father would just tell him that
he shouldn't have messed with quintessence in the first place, that
if Matthew had just listened to him, it never would have happened.
He would spout platitudes about Catherine being in a better place
and about submitting to the perfect will of God.

"We have to kill them," his father said.

Matthew gaped at him. "What?"

"The Spanish. At the very least, we have to
force them off the island. If quintessence gets into the hands of
King Philip, then the Papists will sweep across the world and the
fledgling Protestant churches scattered throughout Europe will
perish. Another thousand years may go by before someone else has
the courage and conviction to stand against them again."

Matthew hardly knew how to answer. "Father?
There are maybe sixty of us left alive. The Spanish will have
hundreds of armed soldiers and heavy weaponry. With the colony
intact, with a large store of salt at our disposal, we might be
able to do it. But now? We have no homes, no salt, no store of
weapons. We couldn't take twenty paces away from this spot without
being killed by a manticore sentry. How do you expect us to drive
off the Spanish? We should be begging them for mercy."

"Mercy? You saw the kind of mercy the Spanish
showed the last time they were here."

"And what do you want me to do about it?
Don't look to me for a miracle."

"I've seen what you can do. If Catherine were
here, you wouldn't be sitting in the dirt licking your wounds.
You'd be mobilizing for war."

"She's not here. She's either turned into a
statue in a pool of miasma, or she's lying dead at the bottom of a
cave shaft." Matthew let all his bitterness show, all his
frustration and helplessness. "And there's nothing I can do about
it."

His father released his shoulders and turned
to meet his eyes. His voice was hard. "You don't know that. You're
giving in to the devil's lies. You're believing that there's no
hope, that you're a failure, and it's just not true. Wake up! Your
enemies are
out there
, not in here."

"You don't know what I did. This whole
disaster, it was—"

"I don't care what you did. It was the gray
manticores who took Catherine. It wasn't me, and it certainly
wasn't you. And it's the Spanish who are going to kill anyone the
grays leave behind, and then use all your inventions to enslave the
world. Take all your anger and pour it where it belongs—not into
feeling sorry for yourself and reliving your mistakes, but in
destroying the evil that's all around us."

An idea wormed its way into Matthew's mind,
taking shape despite his fury. There was a way. There was still
salt in the soil—a lot less than there should be, but it was still
there, all around them, underneath the hooked feet of their
manticore enemies.

"Tell everyone to be ready to go," Matthew
said. "We head for the mountains."

EVER since the snow lilies' salt production
had waned, salt farmers had been forced to find better methods to
meet the needs of the colony. Their latest technique had been
invented by Catherine's father using fire buffalo bones. A buffalo
jaw and a connected piece of its skull were separated to make a
long quintessence thread. These threads were stretched out radially
from the cluster of buildings, through the soil, to form a large
circle around them some two hundred paces away in every
direction.

When fire buffalo grazed, they drew salt up
out of the ground through the roots of the grass. The grass itself
had salt content, like the rest of Horizon life, but they needed
more to fuel their daily pyrotechnic displays. Inside one of the
buildings, a circle of buffalo jaws could be manipulated to perform
the same function, drawing the salt up out of the ground along the
line of the quintessence thread that normally connected the jaw to
a portion of its skull. The only difference was that the colonists
had stretched that line to be two hundred paces long.

The salt farmers would manipulate the jaws in
the morning, which, once the dew dried, would leave a crystalline
layer of salt across the ground like a gigantic white wagon wheel.
They spent the rest of the day collecting it, then unearthed the
skull bone fragments and buried them slightly farther along the
circle, so as to draw salt from different lines of earth the next
day.

Of course, salt-drawing was not the only
thing a fire buffalo could do. For safety, certain portions of the
jaw had been removed, but Matthew knew how to get at those spots
anyway. He prepared each one, having no way to test it, but fairly
confident he had it right. If he was wrong, then even more
colonists would die, but he couldn't let himself slip down that
mental path again. He thought about Catherine, dying alone in a
black pit, and his anger grew hot again.

"Tell them all to go," he told his father.
"Run due north and don't look back." Then he pressed all the jaw
mechanisms at once.

Lines of fire erupted from the ground in
every direction as the salt was consumed. This was quintessence
fire, white and bright. It gave off little heat, but it was deadly,
and caught on any quintessence-formed material with uncanny speed.
If any manticores had been patrolling, they were likely already
dead, or at least trapped between two walls of silent flames,
unable to cross to see where the colonists were escaping.

Matthew pushed out of the building just as
it, too, erupted in flame, and raced north after the others.

CHAPTER 16

FOR the second time, the king and his
officers gathered at Ramos's request in a field outside London.
Carillo was there again, his cream doublet laundered, as were a
dozen others of the king's trusted men.

"On your left are six trained soldiers,"
Ramos said. "Veterans of many wars. As you can see, they are
armored and hold weapons with which they have killed before. I do
not know these men, and they were not told ahead of time what to
expect. We are going to stage a melee. These six men . . . "—he
paused for effect, then drew an ordinary carpenter's hammer from
his belt and brandished it—"against me."

He expected laughter and was not
disappointed. He was not an imposing figure. He was neither strong
nor tall, and to be honest, he had developed a bit of a paunch from
eating the king's food. But that was the point. They were meant to
understand beyond doubt that what they were seeing wasn't the
result of skill or physical strength.

The men ranged about him in the traditional
tournament style, laughing and readying a variety of weapons:
sword, mace, and axe. Ramos removed his priest's robe, leaving only
a long undertunic.

"This is a farce," Carillo objected. "He's
paid these men to take a fall for him."

"Ten gold sovereigns to any man who spills
the priest's blood," the king said calmly. It was much more than
Ramos could possibly have offered them.

Ramos's adversaries grinned broadly. Ramos
swallowed. This had better work. "Begin," he said.

Generally, this kind of fight was staged for
entertainment, to show off the prowess of a champion who could
defeat two or three men at once. No one man could defeat six,
however strong and skilled. As his adversaries approached, sneering
and clearly enjoying the idea of being paid a fortune to beat a
priest bloody, Ramos started to have second thoughts. If this went
sour, he doubted these men would let him go with just a
scratch.

The first approached, a square-jawed brute at
least two span tall, and drove a spiked fist into Ramos's gut.
Ramos flinched, but as intended, the blow went right through him as
if he were made of smoke. The soldier, off balance, fell on the
ground, and Ramos struck him on the side of the head with the
hammer. It was an awkward blow, but hard enough to make him howl in
rage and pain.

In an instant, the others were on him. Ramos
swung the hammer with abandon, heedless of the other men's weapons.
Swords and axes passed through him without harm, but his hammer
blows fell with crushing force. His biggest danger was that the
hammer might be yanked from his grasp, so he held onto it with all
his might.

The fight ended quickly. Wiser men might have
regrouped or even run from such an invulnerable adversary, but
these soldiers had been trained from childhood that cowardice was
worse than death, and unyielding, savage onslaught was the only way
to survive. They battered futilely away until Ramos had five of the
six lying unconscious on the ground.