Spinspace: The Space of Spins (The Metaspace Chronicles Book 2) (15 page)

Chapter 36

Rochelle
: lore deficiency

“Every number is infinite; there is no difference.”

– The Book of the Law I: 4

She was tempted to hurl it at the floor, but knew it would solve nothing.  There it lay in the palm of her hand...and yet it was useless to her.  A sphere two inches in diameter, as silvery as a mirror of the ancients, but not glass.  It was not cold to the touch, so it could not be metal.  But when dropped on cement, it did not shatter, so it was probably not glass either.  What was it?  Her diggers had found a whole roomful of them.

One advisor had opined that it was a variant of the
plastic
of the Ancients. Was it merely a mirror?  What good would it be as one, so small and curved?  No, it could not be a mirror.  Was it hollow, and filled with quicksilver?  It was heavier than an identically-sized ball of wood, but not heavy enough to be mercury.

Another advisor had called it a 'ball bearing', a device the Ancients used to reduce friction in machines.  But he himself admitted that such were usually made of metal, and cold to the touch.  But this was not.

She could have dismissed it as some trivial bauble, a fancy paperweight or child's toy.  But she had senses her advisors did not, and when she felt it with her mind, there was some strange pattern in the space anchored to the sphere.

It must be one of the Gifts of the Tourists, but she had seen no descriptions of it.  Whatever it was, it was something beyond her current knowledge.  Therefore, it represented new knowledge.

And knowledge is power.

She had been tempted to summon Dog, her Librarian, to see if he had read about anything similar, but then she had remembered, with irritation, that she had dispatched him to the new school in Denver.  Drat!   If he had left only a couple of days later!  But the diggers had unearthed the buried vault only after the trade caravan had departed Californ.

Rochelle shook her head.  She supposed that if all the wizards could meet and examine her hoard of artifacts many mysteries could be solved.  But would it serve her purposes for the rest of them to know her secrets?
Power shared is power weakened.
  If she alone reasoned out the use of the various objects in her vault, then she would have power unequaled.

She shook her head.  Did the others have similar thoughts?  Did Xander have his own trove of mysteries, kept from her by a similar selfishness? 
We all have our ambitions...

She knew that the Earl of Francisco was happy with his superior harbor, but perhaps it was not mere commerce and the resulting taxes that he craved, but the chance of acquiring artifacts unknown to her.  She knew for a fact the the Duke of the Northern Forests was still intent on finding the lost Shrine.  His advancing years had seen the bills come due for the dissipations of his youth.  Now as his health declined his search for the Shrine had taken on the tinge of desperation.

He was a fool.  Yes, the Shrine existed.  Of that she had no doubt.  What a pity that the one tribesman her operatives had captured had died during his interrogation.

But the Duke had fared no better.  He kept sending out his raiding parties, poor devils.  They always returned empty-handed, and he would rage, execute them for their failure, and assemble the next doomed group of searchers.

Rochelle had decided quite some time ago that their failure was due to one of two causes.  Either the artifact he sought was portable, and forever carried out of the reach of his men, or else it was ensconced somewhere in a cave in the mountains, with the entrance well hidden, and not to be stumbled upon by mere luck.

It was like him to use such heavy handed efforts.  While his heavily armed men prowled uselessly through the forests, her own operatives, in the guise of hunters and peddlers, roamed in ones and twos, seeking to uncover by guile what his brute minions had failed to seize by force.

She could, of course, afford to be more patient.  She was much younger than he, and not imperiled by failing flesh.  And there were other mysteries she could concentrate on while she awaited results from her agents.

Such as this infuriating ball!  She made a sound of disgust and replaced it in the velvet-lined box on her desk.  From another container she lifted a metal cone.  This one she was having more luck with. 

As she concentrated, a brilliant blue-white line extended out of the point of the cone.  She turned to the work-in-progress at the side of her marble desk and flicked the cone in her hand, slicing a chunk of granite from the rough sculpture.  The metal of the cone remained cool in her fingers, but the line of blue light, now inches long, made the air above it ripple like that over a hot coal.

This one, at least, she was coming to understand.  An annoying triumph, however, because it taught her little.  The cone was obviously a variant of the everflame disks.  Whereas they produced points of heat, this made a short line of annihilation.  She was learning to make the line of brightness longer, but although it could obviously be used as a deadly weapon or a tool to cut through the strongest barriers, it was only another application of the space-weave of energies.  It did not broaden her understanding, but merely added another trick to her repertoire of energy spells.

Still, it was a handy tool, and you could never have too many weapons, in her opinion.

Chapter 37

Esteban
:
hic ego sum studere
(“here I am to study”)

“Wisdom strengthens the wise more than ten rulers of the city.”

– Ecclesiastes 7:19

He had seen a city before, but he had forgotten how startling and alien an appearance they could present after traveling down featureless roads.  You came over a hill or around a curve and there would be those huge monoliths of 'scrapers towering in the distance like the gravestones of gods.

The decay of Denver over the last two hundred years was not as obvious from a distance.  Only when the Coach began to enter the city proper did he begin to spot, here and there, the crumbled remains of older buildings.  More recent constructions still stood -  those built during the visit of the Tourists.  This gave the old city an oddly organic look, like a forest ravaged by wildfires, with the massive remains of old growth titans laying amidst the up thrust of newer trees.

He saw fresher destruction as they neared the city center. 

“The Honcho's tanks did that,” Clem told him, one hand on the reins, one on the wheel as he steered around a a pile of rubble.  “Blasted a bunch of buildings to draw out the Governor and her troops so he could finish her off.”

“What happened?”

Clem laughed.  “Her wizards happened.  Xander and the new one LeStar.” 

The coach turned another corner and suddenly he saw them, six of them on the left side of the street.  Those must be the tanks.  They looked like cannons on coaches, but the barrels were longer and more slender than the ancient monuments in Dallas.  They looked like an interrupted deadly caravan, lined up with each one's gun pointing at the back of the tank in front of it.

“All that damage was done by only six tanks?”  But as they drew nearer he saw a seventh tank, partly buried under the collapsed front of a building as if the driver had lost control and swerved off the road.

“Eight, actually.” 

He craned his neck looking in all directions but saw no sign of the eighth tank.  He supposed it must be nearby, but it was  long past sunset.  Someone had managed to get the ancient glowtube streetlights working.  From the light they afforded he saw that while winds or work crews had cleared the snow from this street, there was a square patch of street ahead that seemed shinier than the rest of the block.

Clem tugged at the reins, drawing the horses to halt on it.  “Here we are.  Watch yer step,” he advised Esteban. 

As Esteban stepped off the coach his feet nearly skidded out from underneath him.  He clutched at the coach's door in time and  managed to not fall.  “What's wrong with the road?”

“The eighth tank is under yer feet.  They dug a hole for it to fall into, filled it with water and froze it solid, with the Honcho inside.”

He stared down at the ice but there was not enough light to see inside it.  “You mean they just left him down there?”

“For now.  They've been too busy working on the treaty with Texas and setting up for the School that they haven't figured how to get him out of there yet.  But they will.”

Esteban shuddered.  “Before Spring, I hope.”

Clem grinned at him.  “Don't worry.  I hear Xander has the biggest coldbox spell you'll ever see keeping it cold.”  He handed Esteban his suitcase.  “Don't forget to tell the old wizard I brought you.”

He thanked Clem again and trudged carefully over the square of ice to the Governor's building.  There was no doubt whatsoever that it was the right building.  It had more lights on in the windows of its towering bulk, and a couple of guards with crossbows at the entrance.  They eyed him as he approached.

“I'm looking for Xander,” he said.  “I'm here to apply for his school.”

The guards exchanged a glance and the younger one  ducked inside for a moment.  When he reappeared he told Esteban to wait.  “Someone'll be here in a minute to take you up,” he said.

Esteban blew on his fingers and leaned against the 'scraper.  “Are you students too?”

The older guard grimaced.  “Hardly. If we were, we wouldn't be freezing our asses off out here tonight.”

“What are you guarding against?  I thought the war with Texas was over.”

The other man nodded.  “That's what they tell me, too.  But we've got over a hundred horses in there...and we can't just lock the doors.  You never know when a messenger might arrive.”

“Or a student,” Esteban suggested.

“Or that,” the younger guard agreed.  “Can't have potential wizards freezing to death just to stay safe from horse thieves.”

“Do you have a lot of students?”

The older guard shrugged.  “No idea.  We never get that far up in the 'scraper.  I guess you'll find out.”

The door behind him opened.  As a young woman in leathers emerged carrying a burlap bag, the two guards stiffened to attention.  She just shook her head.

“It's going to be hard to eat your dinner like that,” she said.  Relax, will you?”  When they obeyed, she handed the older one the bag and eyed Esteban.  “Welcome to Denver.  I'm Aria.”

The next Governor!  She came down to deliver meals to the guardsmen?  “I'm Esteban.  I'm here to apply for the Xander school.”

“Well, come in then, Esteban,” she said.  “I'll take you to him.”

Chapter 38

Jeffrey
: this delicate balance

“The people to fear are not those who disagree with you, but those who disagree with you and are too cowardly to let you know.”

– Napoleon Bonaparte

He gazed out the window of the room he still caught himself thinking of as his father's office, and thought about the letter he had dispatched to Denver.  But the memory of waves crashed over that thought.

When he was five the Honcho had taken them to a beach on the Gulf for a couple of days.  The strongest memory that stayed with him from that time was the castle.

His father had helped him build a sand castle, trying to use it as an opportunity to teach him about fortification. But he remembered none of the words.  What he remembered was that the incoming tide had swept over and around the sand castle, toppling the towers and crumbling the walls.

Everything dies.  Father died in his attempt to extend the Empire...and now I am killing his dream of unification by conquest, by joining Kristana's new Union.

That reminded him of the letter again.

Dear Aria,

I am certain you appreciate, as do I, the irony of the situation here in Dallas.  The only reason I have a chance of making the treaty work, of joining your mother's new democratic Union of States, is the fact that Texas is
not
a democracy.  If it were, ratifying the treaty would be difficult at best.  But since it is not, stepping into my father's legacy as Honcho, the sole ruler, will allow me to prevent any repudiation of the terms of our agreement.

But Texans have a lot of pride, and changing from an Empire to merely one member of a union of states will not be an easy sell.  I wish that I could be with you in person, helping plan our upcoming marriage, but the time being I must remain here.  If I do not, there could be a coup in my absence.

Only after I am sure that all of the top military and civilian advisors have accepted the treaty and our place in it will I be able to venture forth without losing this delicate balance.

His Holiness has surprised me by voicing no further opposition to the founding of Xander's school for wizards.  I know that will be hard for you to believe, and it puzzles me, too, but at least it means the objections I contend with here will be all political and military, and not religious.

How is Xander's new apprentice, Lester?  He seemed a decent fellow.  I regret that most of what I know about him comes from conversations we had while he was in my father's prison.

Most important of all, how are you feeling?  Have you had second thoughts about our engagement?  It was a clever way to take some of the sting out of the treaty, but we both know it will complicate things.  Nevertheless, I am committed to making it work, if you are.  I think of you often.

Sincerely,

Jeffrey