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Authors: David Walton

Tags: #england, #alchemy, #queen elizabeth, #sea monster, #flat earth, #sixteenth century, #scientific revolution, #science and sciencefiction, #alternate science

Quintessence Sky (4 page)

BOOK: Quintessence Sky
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It was as if everything that came within this
rough circle of earth had died. Plants drooped, wilted and brown,
and mossy clumps rotted on the branches of the trees. The smell of
putrefaction was thick and turned her stomach. What had happened
here?

She called again for her manticore
bodyguards, but got no response. Were they dead as well? Invisible,
they could be lying at her feet, and she wouldn't know it. She took
a step back and fished a tiny bottle from her pack. The bottle held
the tears of a seer skink, a blue liquid which the skink excreted
from glands around its eyes, and which enabled it to see and catch
its prey, the normally-invisible Hades helmet fly.

Catherine covered the mouth of the bottle and
upended it briefly, leaving a small drop behind on her finger,
which she smeared into her left eye. Pain seared her eye. That
always happened, but once it passed, the world would come alive
with light and color. Tiny networks of light would cross through
the air, connecting trees and rocks, some stretching out of sight
or into the sky. It was like clearing a film from your eyes that
you never knew had been there.

The threads of light were quintessence, the
foundation of the miracles they did every day: turning sand into
food, building homes of diamond and gold, communicating across
miles. The threads were everywhere, connecting every living thing,
reaching even beyond the grave. There was some disagreement among
members of the Quintessence Society about just what quintessence
was. Was it really the light itself? Was it something behind the
light, something intrinsic to the way the atoms of the material
world were stitched together? Or was it spiritual, a matter for
prayer and meditation rather than experimentation?

Regardless, it was closer and more powerful
here on Horizon. Some said it was because here, at the edge of the
world, the sun and stars dipped down close to the Earth. Some said
the quintessence came from the animals; some that the animals
simply benefitted from it. Sinclair had even suggested that the
animals used to be ordinary, and only became extraordinary when
their island had floated to the edge of the world. Whatever was
true, quintessence was everywhere you looked.

Except here. As the pain subsided, Catherine
looked around and saw nothing. No light. No quintessence. That
explained all the death, at least. She could picture the opteryx,
drifting close, then suddenly reverting to its true weight and
plunging to earth. Every living thing on Horizon, from the grass to
the insects to the giant bovine herds, relied on quintessence for
survival. Including her.

Catherine reached inside herself for the
familiar flow of quintessence that would allow her to run quickly
for safety or leap to the top of one of these trees, but it was
gone. She turned and ran, stumbling over roots. She felt clumsy
running without the help of quintessence. But no, it was worse than
that. Her feet felt heavy and her ankles didn't bend the way they
should. She knew what was happening. Without quintessence, the food
and water she had consumed over the last year was transforming back
into salt and sand.

She tripped again, and fell on her face. Her
legs were stiffening fast. She clambered up again, but she could
barely move her knees. It was like walking on stilts. Her legs were
turning to stone.

An image flashed into her mind, of Mad
Admiral Chelsey and the original explorers, their bodies stiff with
stone and encrusted salt. Their bodies had changed more slowly than
this on their return voyage, but they had only gradually moved away
from the source of quintessence, too.

She screamed for help, but with little hope.
Thomas and Paul must have already succumbed, dying before they
could alert her. They were, after all, native Horizon creatures,
even more dependent on quintessence than she was.

She fell into the mud again, and this time
she couldn't get up again. She couldn't bend her knees or get any
traction against the swampy ground. Her legs burned with pain. A
vine creeper next to her was still green and laced with purple
flowers. She knew the variety — an innocent-looking bloom with
sweet smelling nectar, safe for insects that would spread its
pollen, but bearing invisible poisoned barbs to kill any larger
animal (or human) inclined to touch it. Catherine had no intention
of touching it. The point was, it was still alive. It must be
outside the range of the blight. She was close!

She grabbed an exposed root and pulled
herself through the muck, trying to get her legs out of the dead
zone. As she pulled, however, she saw the creeper turn brown and
its bright flowers wither. Whatever was causing the circle of
death, one thing was clear. It was spreading.

She saw it spread past her to other plants,
too fast for her to escape. The stiffness crept up her torso, and
she cried out from the pain of it. Then, helped by her skink tears,
she saw a single quintessence thread burning, leading from her pack
back toward the settlement. Her bell-box. She pulled it out. At
least she could tell Matthew what was happening. She worked the
handle, beginning a message, but before she could say anything, the
bright thread snapped, and she was left with a useless wooden box
of bones. She cried out in frustration and flung the box aside.

The rain clouds above blocked the sun,
leaving her in near-darkness. She made one last, desperate attempt
to pull herself forward, but the ground was slick with mud, and
there was nothing to hold on to. The circle of death was spreading
too fast. It seemed that Matthew's fears for her safety would prove
warranted after all.

The dark clouds broke open, and it started to
rain.

 

 

 

CHAPTER 2

 

THE RAIN pelted down, drumming against the
invisible canopy overhead. Matthew bent and examined the broad,
white petals of the flowers arrayed around him like a field of
snow. These salt lilies were crucial to the Horizon colony's
continued survival, but their yield had been steadily decreasing.
He had hoped it was just the recent rainstorms dissolving the salt
crystals off of the flowers. He had devised the canopy overhead to
keep them dry without blocking the sunlight, but from what he could
see, it hadn't helped.

Salt was to quintessence like fuel was to a
flame, and every living thing on Horizon needed it, including them.
Animals used quintessence in a hundred different ways to hunt prey,
hide from predators, attract mates, and protect their young, while
plants used it to germinate, gather sunlight, and spread their
seeds. Plants like these salt lilies formed salt crystals on their
blooms to attract insect pollinators. All of the inventions that
kept humans alive on this island required salt, and planting and
harvesting these lilies had become their main source of it.

"They're completely dry," Matthew said.

The man in charge of tending the lilies, a
tall Scotsman named Ferguson, rolled his eyes. "Of course, they're
dry. I told you, didn't I? I watered the soil, just like you said,
but the blooms are dry as a desert."

"Then why aren't they producing?" Matthew
said.

Ferguson was oddly proportioned, with huge
feet, but a tiny head and sunken chin. He glared at Matthew. "Don't
look at me. I was a lawyer before we came here. I don't know
anything about farming."

Matthew wanted to tell him that it didn't
matter what he had been in England, he was a salt farmer now, but
that would only antagonize the man. Ferguson thought the work was
beneath him—in fact, he had been dropping hints that he would make
a better governor than Matthew's father—but he did the job
properly. It wasn't his fault there was no salt.

"You'd better tell your father to start
paying attention," Ferguson said. "It's just getting worse, and he
doesn't seem to care."

Matthew fought back another irritated reply.
"First I'll need to test the soil," he said.

The problem was, they didn't know where the
salt came from. The animals got it from the plants they ate, and
the plants seemed to pull it from the soil, but how did the soil
get replenished?

The water in the ocean around Horizon was
fresh, despite the fact that it continually flowed over the edge
and new water flowed in from the east. That implied that the salt
from the ocean was somehow captured by the island and used to feed
the local ecology, but how that actually happened, Matthew had no
idea. It was hard to solve a problem when you didn't know how it
worked in the first place.

"It's the manticores doing it," Ferguson
said.

Matthew raised an eyebrow. "How do you figure
that?"

He made a snorting noise. "Are you as blind
as your father? They don't want us here. They know we need the
salt, so they're getting rid of it."

"And how are they doing that?"

Ferguson shrugged eloquently, his shoulders
nearly reaching his ears. "You're the smart one," he said.

Matthew ignored him and bent to collect some
soil. As he did so, he felt a stabbing pain in his thigh. He
frowned and rubbed at the spot. His leg had been hurting him on and
off for a week now, and it worried him. Quintessence didn't prevent
pain—if he pricked his finger, he would still feel the jab—but it
quickly healed all wounds and diseases, even many that would have
meant death back in England. What could be causing this pain in his
leg to continue, day after day?

He poured the soil into a glass flask filled
with fresh, glowing water from the ocean. The outside of the flask
was covered with black scales from an opteryx, whose wings and body
scales changed color in response to a flow of quintessence. It was
part of a mating display, a way the male opteryx had of showing
females its strength and prowess. The scales changed from black
through a range of colors, sometimes to a pure white, depending on
how much quintessence the male had collected in its body. Males
with the brightest color attracted the most females.

For the inventors and philosophers of the
Quintessence Society, this provided a means to measure and compare
a quintessence potential. The salt in the soil would fuel the
quintessence in the water, causing it to glow brighter. The
quintessence glow would suffuse the scales, which would change
color in relation to how much salt had been added.

Matthew stirred the water, and the scales
turned a dull red. That meant about 20
Q
, which corresponded
to less than an ounce of salt. He did the figures in his head.
Forty percent less than last week. Not only was the salt
concentration still decreasing; it was decreasing at a faster
rate.

The numbers didn't lie. Matthew tried to keep
the dismay off of his face. Ferguson could be a troublemaker, quick
to complain about problems and get people riled up. Matthew wanted
to let his father know first, before Ferguson started a panic.

And there would be panic. At this rate, if
they couldn't figure out what was happening, all the humans on
Horizon would be dead inside a month, with the animal and plant
population following soon after. The next expedition to discover
the island would find only a colony of statues, petrified like the
corpses on Admiral Chelsey's ship.

Catherine had been right to go on her
expedition. He worried at the thought of her out in the wilderness,
alone, but they had to solve this before it was too late. It went
against all his protective instincts for her to be in danger while
he stayed safe at home. He had made the mistake of voicing that to
her, and they had parted on bad terms. The memory ate at him; he
couldn't stand being unreconciled.

Matthew headed back home, bracing himself for
a meeting with his father. He walked through the invisible barrier,
feeling nothing more than a slight buzz, and on into the
settlement. It was more like a city than a village, its buildings
tall and beautiful, constructed out of diamond, silver, and various
types of wood. Nearly all the homes had running hot and cold water
pumped from the river. Most of them were heated without the need
for a fireplace, and even cooled by a heat substitution device. It
was a tiny city of wonders, with daily comforts London had never
dreamed of, but all of those wonders used salt at a tremendous
rate. No one would be eager to give up their comforts, but
something would have to be done, and soon, if they were going to
survive.

The governor's mansion was not cooled by
quintessence, nor did it have running water. It could hardly be
called a mansion anymore, for that matter, since so many of the
newer houses exceeded it in size and grandeur. It was drab and
square, a emblem of the Protestant ideal of unadorned piety.
Exactly like the governor himself.

Matthew walked in without knocking. This
wasn't his home. He hadn't lived with his father since they first
arrived on Horizon, when his father had lived in the forest,
evangelizing the manticores. But his news was urgent, and he wasn't
going to wait to take it through proper channels. He made his way
through corridors to the room where he expected to find his
father.

BOOK: Quintessence Sky
7.21Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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