Quintessence Sky (8 page)

Parris leaned over him. "Are you all
right?"

"Look!" Matthew pointed up to the sky. Some
of the black clouds had blown away, opening up a patch of night. A
few stars shone through, huge because of how close Horizon was to
the celestial sphere. Light trailed away from the stars like
ribbons, spiraling into the black chasm where a star used to
be.

They had noticed it weeks earlier, just
before the thunderstorms came and obscured the sky. Most of the
familiar constellations were skewed this far west, and barely
recognizable, but the Zodiac constellations, the ones that passed
over the center of the world, were the least affected. So when a
star had disappeared from Gemini, a gap that seemed to suck the
light from the surrounding stars, they took notice. It had been a
curiosity, although a spectacular one, one of thousands of
unexplained mysteries they had encountered since coming to Horizon.
Remembering it now, however, the timing of its appearance with the
salt shortage didn't seem like a coincidence. Perhaps it was more
important than they had realized.

A bubbling noise drew their attention back to
Matthew's experiment at their feet. The water in the flask was
aglow and boiling furiously. The opteryx scales on the outside were
a bright violet edging toward white. The white color became
brighter and clearer, the violet less prominent, until it was such
a pure white it was hard to look at. The flask rattled violently,
and then the scales burst into flame.

AFTER tying her hands and legs, the
manticores wrapped Catherine in a net made of vines, like a hammock
rolled around her body. Her limbs were no longer petrified, but she
was wrapped so tightly she could barely move.

She could just barely feel a warm glow in the
center of her body that meant her quintessence connections were
coming back. The manticores had taken her salt pouch, but even
without it, she should be able to break out and escape, given a
little more time to get her strength back.

"Where are you taking me?" she said.

Rinchirith sat on top of her and leaned into
her face, his breath nearly choking her. His eyes burned with
hatred. "Only where you deserve," he said.

He shoved a pincered hand into her mouth and
forced her jaw open. She screamed and struggled, but the sharp ends
of his pincers dug into the soft flesh of her gums. Another
manticore approached with a the hollow, cylindrical stalk of a
plant. He bit open the top and poured it into her mouth.

She choked as the thick, metallic liquid
filled her mouth. Mercury. She tried to spit it out, but Rinchirith
clapped her mouth closed, and she swallowed painfully. She couldn't
breathe. She writhed back and forth until he released her, and she
lay on her face in the dirt, gasping and coughing.

Her quintessence connections were gone.
Mercury acted in the opposite way from salt, scouring her clean of
quintessence instead of increasing the flow. She was completely in
their power, and as long as they kept forcing mercury down her
throat, she would stay that way.

Two manticores lifted the ends of her vine
hammock and leaped up into the trees, carrying her between them.
She was jostled and yanked back and forth as they effortlessly
climbed through the branches, sometimes facing the sky, sometimes
spinning around to face the ground. After a while, the skink tears
wore off as well, and she couldn’t even see them.

She was terrified, but after an hour of this
kind of travel, she just felt battered and exhausted. She couldn't
imagine what they planned to do with her. They could hold her as a
hostage to force the humans to some concessions. They could cut her
up piece by piece and send the pieces to the colony until they
agreed to his terms. Only, Rinchirith didn't seem to her like the
bargaining type.

What did he want? Catherine realized that
they had never understood the manticores, not even the ones who
claimed to be their friends. The humans were the trespassers on
this island, a place where a hundred generations of manticores had
lived and died without knowledge of humanity. Maybe it was
arrogance to think the manticores should welcome them with grateful
respect. Maybe humans didn't belong here at all.

And now, what would happen to her? She tried
to distract herself from fear by thinking about the blight. She had
found it in a swamp, a low-lying area compared to the higher ground
around it. It was almost as if the blight had been spreading like a
flood, seeping up from the ground and filling up the low areas.
Would she have been safe from it if she had climbed a tree? There
had been flying animals among the dead, but she didn't know how low
they had flown before succumbing.

The whole concept of quintessence
transformation was something they still didn't really understand.
Quintessence turned salt water into fresh and sand into bread, but
in some sense, the salt and sand were still there. In a
quintessence field, her body could digest it and pass the nutrients
to her tissues and keep her alive. Outside the field, the salt and
sand would reappear, suffused throughout her flesh. So which was
real? Was her body filled with fresh water and nutrients, or with
salt and sand? Was quintessence just an illusion? How could both
realities exist at the same time?

The manticores gave her neither food nor
water, though every few hours, they stopped and forced more mercury
down her throat, an even more terrifying ordeal since they were now
invisible to her. Her stomach cramped and her vision blurred, but
she tried to keep track of where they were going. No human had ever
explored this deeply into the island, and she saw new kinds of
foliage everywhere. Mostly, though, she looked for landmarks that
might help her get home again.

When they reached the foothills of the
mountains, the mossy trees thinned and were replaced by stout
shrubs like umbrellas with sprays of root anchoring them to the
bare rock. Herds of a mouse-like creature with multiple grasping
trunks scattered from the shade as their troop passed through. She
saw goats, too, with hooks on their hooves that could pass into
solid rock and latch on. In this way, they could run up cliff faces
or even upside-down on the roofs of caves and overhangs.

They were moving in a general northeasterly
direction, toward the center of the island, with the tallest
mountain always somewhat to their left. Several times they had
circled far out of their way to avoid a low-lying region of ground,
and she wondered if these were more quintessence blights.

Where had the blights come from? Were they
related to the dwindling availability of salt? Manticores were
quick to blame the humans—and not without reason—but the humans
were also the most likely to be able to figure out what these
blights were and where they had came from. If the manticores would
just tell them what they'd seen and give them access to the sites,
Catherine was confident they could discover the reason behind them.
Did they always form in the areas of lowest altitude? Could it be
caused by a miasma, something heavier than air seeping up from a
chasm underground? Given the chance to experiment, they just might
find out.

At the rate it was spreading, though, it
might cover the island before they got a chance. But no, she didn't
have enough information to estimate that. Without knowing the
cause, she couldn't tell if the rate of spread should be measured
by distance on the ground, like a moving object, or by volume, like
a spreading flood, or even if the rate was constant. It might be
months before it reached the settlement, it might be only weeks, or
it might never get there at all.

The manticores brought her higher, up steep
slopes where there were no more trees, sometimes actually climbing
up cliff faces. Her precarious litter lurched as invisible hands
dragged her higher, and more than once she thought they would lose
hold, and she would fall to her death.

By the time they stopped for the night, she
was exhausted and crying with hunger. She begged Rinchirith for
food, or at least to untie her hands, which were still lashed
painfully behind her back. His voice came out of the darkness,
speaking in English. "You do not need food. Food comes from the
earths, and they will judge you. They can feed you just as easily
as they can kill you."

"What do you mean, the earths? You're not
making any sense."

"Because your language is a child's language,
with no way to say what must be said." He switched to his own
language, and rattled off a clatter of sharp syllables too fast for
Catherine to understand.

"What are you going to do with me?"

He switched back to English. "Me? I will do
nothing. It is not for me to decide your fate."

She closed her eyes. Whatever was to come in
the morning, she wanted to have her full senses working for her.
She hoped she would be able to sleep despite her hunger and
discomfort. Moments later, however, pincered hands closed around
her arms and yanked her to her feet again. They untangled her from
the netting and forced her to walk forward. Apparently she was not
yet allowed to rest.

It was never entirely dark on Horizon. As the
stars drew close in the western sky, they grew enormous, casting as
much light as the full moon in England. The place where they'd
stopped, however, was high on the eastern face of a mountain, and
the peak blocked most of the western stars. It was darker outside
than she had seen in two years, which, combined with the
invisibility of her captors, made her suddenly very afraid. She was
led forward, but she couldn't see where she was going.

The manticores jerked her to a halt just as
her leading foot felt air instead of ground. She felt forward with
her toes, but could feel nothing. In front of her, a deeper
darkness seemed to suck the air from around them, breezing her hair
gently forward. It wasn't a cliff. It was a hole in the
mountain.

"Mighty lords of the earth," Rinchirith said
in his own language. He spoke slowly and gravely, so Catherine was
able to make out the words. "We have seen your wrath in the deep
places. Judge if this creature and her kin are the cause. We
sacrifice her to your pleasure, that your anger may abate, and your
life power spring up again from the earth."

He shrieked, a long, ululating cry that
echoed far below her feet, gradually more distant until the sound
faded. Then, without warning, he pushed her over the edge.

CHAPTER 5

IT TOOK a week to travel from Valladolid,
landlocked in the center of Spain, to the harbor at Cádiz, and
another several weeks to make the trip to England. They sailed on a
huge galleon at the head of a small fleet. Ramos was uncomfortable
for much of the time, appalled by the language and manner of the
sailors, and sickened by the poor food. Nevertheless, he cared for
Antonia's needs, feeding her and changing her and continually
speaking to her in both Spanish and Latin in the hopes that she
might understand. Many on the ship, seeing his priest's cassock,
came to him for confession or spiritual advice, and he was glad to
listen to them.

He was free from the Inquisition, summoned by
the greatest monarch in Christendom to do a great work, but he grew
more melancholy as the trip progressed. Of all the Geminis Ramos
had found, only King Philip had escaped the madness. If he had been
spared, why not Antonia? Was he more righteous than she? Perhaps
Philip was vital to the Lord's work, and had thus been granted
special mercy.

He brooded on the meaning of the nova, what
had caused it to appear, and why it had brought such grief. Most
people considered it a harbinger, merely a portent of the madness,
rather than its direct cause. Ramos didn't think that way. When two
unlikely things occurred at the same time, he assumed one was
probably the cause of the other. That or both were the effect of a
third cause, as yet unseen. He wasn't content to shrug and blame
the whims of an unknowable God. Instead, he spent his days in
prayer and meditation, following the spiritual exercises taught him
by his mentor years before, and asking God for insight.