Quintessence Sky (45 page)

RAMOS was the leviathan. His body was gone,
crushed and digested within seconds, but he still remained. And he
was not the only one. He knew now that the salamanders throwing
themselves over the cliff were sated with the spirits they had
devoured, all of which now vied inside the leviathan's mind. Ramos
fought, hardly knowing how, his spirit battling instinctively for
dominance.

Most of the spirits were passive, resigned to
their fate, but one was strong and wild, the spirit of the
leviathan itself. It was not an intelligent creature, not aware of
itself as an individual, but it was young and fierce and full of
life. Ramos fought to keep his sense of self, waging a war with no
weapons, no strength of arms, just the power of his spirit
struggling to survive.

He was himself, and he was the leviathan. He
saw what the leviathan saw, felt what it felt, swam where it swam.
But he could not overcome its instincts. It was a fish, not a man,
an animal driven by the need to eat and reproduce and survive.
These needs drove its actions, and so Ramos—the leviathan—
continued his feast, feeding on the bodies of salamanders living
and dead. With each bite came a rush of fresh spirits, and yet
Ramos maintained control.

It was the quintessence, not the spirits
themselves, that this creature craved. And yet, there was more to
it. Just as the manticores' minds could connect through a
quintessence bond, so this great beast was connected to every
salamander it had ever devoured, and through it, to every shekinah
flatworm those salamanders had devoured in their turn.

In fact, this act of grasping and chewing and
swallowing and digesting was not really feeding at all. It was a
stage in the life of this extraordinary creature, as it developed
from a host of shekinah flatworms to a handful of salamanders into
a single leviathan. Through its mind, however simple, Ramos could
see the whole picture.

It began as a shekinah, just one of many,
born of starlight in the trunks of the beetlewood trees. Its light
shone out, generating a quintessence field that affected many other
plants and animals. Over time, however, as its starlight poured
out, a residue of salt built up in its body, and its light waned.
Finally, it migrated to the mountain caves, leaving trails of salt
behind it on the ground.

Deep within those caves, its overheated body
cooled by the rock, it excreted salt and starved for lack of
starlight. Finally, unable to live without the light, it devoured
its neighbor. Eating the neighbor did not mean the neighbor's
death, however. The two merged flesh and mind. Combined, it grew in
strength, but also in need, and soon ate a third, and a fourth,
vying with other devourers and eating them in turn.

Thus it entered its second stage of life,
that of the salamander, eating shekinahs for the little light that
remained in them, and excreting the extra salt that had built up in
their bodies. This is the salt that made its way through streams
and rivers into the earth, where plants drew from it, and were in
turn eaten by the animals who needed the salt as well.

The salamanders were more mobile and could
roam the caves, seeking quintessence that had become trapped in
rocks or pools. But soon they began to devour one another, merging
yet again. As one gained ascendency, the other salamanders
submitted to being eaten, eager to join their minds and strength
into the greater whole. Fully developed, now, with fins and a tail,
the leviathan would splash down into the deep mountain streams that
emptied, at long last, into the sea.

The part of Ramos that was not the leviathan
struggled to make sense of this. Why would such a complex
multi-stage being exist? Why the move from the land to the sea?
What benefit did it gain?

Then this, too, became clear to him through
the leviathan's memories. The ocean abounded in quintessence. All
the quintessence that flowed into the world from the stars and
filtered, unused, through land and water, eventually found its way
here, to the edge of the world, where it collected and reacted with
the salt, making the water fresh and giving it its power to heal.
Here the leviathan could glut itself on the quintessence it could
find by sifting the water through its jaws, or by eating sea
creatures smaller than itself.

And this was the truly remarkable discovery
for an astronomer: quintessence was not infinite. The stars did not
generate an unending supply. Quintessence had to be
returned
to the sky as part of an ancient cycle, one that combined the
actions of sun and stars and land and animals.

The leviathan surfaced. Its deep bellow
echoed against the cliffs. Then it began to glow.

It was nothing like the simple glow of a
shekinah. This was a spotlight aimed at the stars. Quintessence
flowed thick and heavy, like liquid gold, pouring out of the
leviathan and into the sky. The spirits, except for Ramos and the
leviathan itself, flowed up with it. They were returning to their
constellation, perhaps even following the quintessence threads
right back to their own bodies in England and Spain and Africa and
Cathay.

And Ramos knew, too, why the island had been
covered by storms that blocked the stars, why the salt deposits in
the ground were running out, and why a miasma had been seeping up
into the lowest spaces where quintessence no longer reached. Maasha
Kaatra had interrupted the cycle. He had usurped the place of the
leviathans and torn quintessence down from the sky. He had broken
the connection between the human spirits and the stars under which
they had been born.

The leviathan knew nothing of the great
cycle. It felt no need to replenish the heavens with quintessence.
It was just a beast, following its own instinctual behavior. As his
beam of golden light illuminated the sky, Ramos could see other
beams, farther away, blazing up out of the sea.

Driven by instinct, Ramos swam towards these
with great strokes of his tail. The lights converged, hundreds of
them, and soon the water seethed with leviathans. They swam over
and under each other, each demonstrating the strength and color of
its quintessence light, trying to attract a mate. Before long,
Ramos's leviathan had paired with another, and the mating
began.

Ramos began to drift. He was not a leviathan,
and had no wish to live like one. Perhaps now he would die. Perhaps
he would rise and become part of the heavens. He didn't know. Part
of him noticed that now, as the leviathans mated, the rays of light
were speckled with thousands of tiny specks, drifting up into the
sky. Ramos had no doubt that, in some fashion, these specks would
find their way back down to Earth in beams of starlight striking
the beetlewood trees, from which tiny shekinah worms would begin to
grow.

Relinquishing his hold on the leviathan,
Ramos floated up with them, born aloft with the force of the golden
river. He could see the whole island and, beyond it, the sharp
curve of the edge of the world and the desperate empty blackness of
the void beyond. Then he ascended past the clouds and into the dark
sky.

And now he knew what quintessence was. It was
spirit-stuff, the material of souls, of life itself. He could see
the threads passing through the stars and back, around the world,
toward the people who lived in Europe and Africa and Asia. The
quintessence that returned to the sky here, near Horizon, spread
out over the whole world. It fell to Earth as starlight and fueled
all living things. He saw the glowing spirit lights flit down those
threads, flying fast toward home. But Ramos had no home, no body to
return to. His physical body lay crushed and digesting in the
leviathan's stomach.

He flew higher still, above the stars. He saw
the intricate way they turned and spun, exactly as Copernicus had
predicted, driven by the quintessence that flowed into them. It was
a revelation greater even than those he had seen so far: the stars,
the very heavens, operated by the same natural rules as things on
the Earth. The world was, after all, a machine. Even the stars were
part of the same mechanism that made water freeze or boil, dropped
objects fall to the ground, wood burn and wax melt, rocks hard and
flesh soft, and blind seeds break to send shoots springing out into
the light.

He had always been taught that the stars,
closer to heaven, were heavenly in nature: unblemished, flawless,
traveling in perfect circles. But here he was in the heavens, and
he couldn't see God. All he saw was a self-winding watch, a system
that ran itself. Quintessence—life itself—was a natural cycle,
self-perpetuating. The stars were ultimately no different than
rocks or centipedes.

He flew even higher. The great machine of the
world dwindled to a single point of meaning, surrounded by looming,
infinite void. It was transient, a device that would exist as long
as its gears kept turning and then submit to the darkness. But no.
Ramos refused to accept that there was no more purpose to his life
than as a tiny cog in the churning of a great machine. He wasn't
ready to die, nor was he willing to let Antonia and Elizabeth go
helplessly to their deaths. Their persecution wasn't just the
meaningless shifting of a gear; it was evil. There was right, and
there was wrong, regardless of how the machine ran.

And suddenly, he could see something new.
There was a fabric, light and strong, twined through everything.
The world was made of the fabric. The rocks, the water, the air,
the humans and manticores, the animals and plants, the stars, even
quintessence, was simply painted dye, and the fabric, the fabric
was everything, so finely woven as to be nearly invisible. Even the
void
itself, the very darkness, was woven from it.

Ramos touched it. It thrummed and sang. He
ran fingers through its strings, and knew that every one of them, a
thousand thousand thousand, had a name. The choices of kings, the
rise and fall of nations, even the throw of a pair of dice, was in
the strings. The fabric held the machine together. The sun rose and
set, animals were born and lived and died, because of the shape and
weave of the fabric.

If the fabric shifted, would the machine
change? Would the natural laws of the universe reverse themselves
and take new shapes?

Ramos had asked for a sign, and here it was.
He couldn't see God, but he could see what God saw. He could see
that the machine was not a machine in truth, but merely an
expression of the shape of the fabric. And what could the fabric
itself be but an expression of the will and character of God? Here,
at the end of everything, Ramos found his faltering faith gaining
strength again.

He had been so concerned about the machine,
but underneath it, all the time, was a deeper layer. He might study
the clouds and the sun and the wind, and understand why the rain
fell on a particular day, but underneath that was another reason,
governed by the shape of the fabric. And who was to say that under
the fabric was not a deeper layer still, and underneath that, still
more?

And now, he had a choice. Above him, in the
distance, he could see a light. The light called to him, promising
beauty and goodness and rest. He could drift away, continuing this
journey to where it ended, and perhaps see God in truth, in all of
his glory. Perhaps, there, he would see all the layers, and
understand them all.

On the other hand, he could take hold of the
strings. He touched them, feeling them vibrate, and knew that, for
this moment at least, he had power to command, more power than any
human before had ever held, save one. All of the quintessence in
the world was nothing compared to the power of these strings.

He looked up again, and the light flooded his
eyes, so beautiful it made his heart ache, so right and whole that
he nearly let go. But it wasn't time yet. He had work to do.

CHAPTER 27

THE FIRE under Catherine was slow to spread.
Her father fought to reach her, to stamp out the flames, for all
the good it would have done. Torres would simply have lit it again.
But the soldiers held him back, laughing, and the flames steadily
grew.

She felt the heat of the fire, but no pain,
not yet. She wondered how long it would take for her to die. Hours?
Could
she even die from fire, or would her body burn and
burn and then heal itself only to burn some more? She was trying to
be brave, but she didn't feel brave, not facing this.

Matthew was holding her gaze, and it felt
like a lifeline. He wasn't leaving her alone, though there was
nothing he could do to save her. Her concerns about marrying him
seemed baseless now; she knew he would listen to her and respect
her. It was who he was. It was why she loved him. Though now she
would never get the chance to find that out.

His mouth moved in the shape of a word. What
was he saying? I love you? No, it hadn't looked like that. The
crackling of the fire under her was making it hard to think. He
tried again, and this time she understood the word:
substitution
. She knew what it meant, of course. It was the
basis of the heat exchanger, and a memory of that day on the bay,
when they had kissed and traded the sensations of their bodies.