Quintessence Sky (15 page)

Blanca's face turned grave. "What are you
suggesting?"

"Sinclair brought Catherine's spirit back by
pulling her thread out of the void and tying it back to her body.
What if I opened up a void in the end of this thread, and sent my
spirit through it. Would it come out on her end?"

Blanca's eyes were wide. "Or would you just
die?"

"I have to try something."

"No. Suicide won't help her, Matthew."

"I won't be reckless. It's a good idea. We'll
just try it a little bit at a time."

He pulled a vial of vitriol from a shelf.
Vitriol was made from sulphur, which was the most dangerous of the
three alchemical substances. Salt and mercury merely altered the
flow of quintessence through the world. Sulphur opened up a hole in
the world itself, a void of pure emptiness that could be difficult
to control.

Rather than risk experimenting with
Catherine's bell-box, Matthew crossed the room and picked up the
broken bits of the orphaned one he had thrown against the wall.

CATHERINE approached the square of light
hesitantly.

"A bheil Gàidhlig agaibh?" a rough man's
voice spoke out of the darkness.

Catherine jumped and backed away. She
couldn't see anyone, and yet the voice had sounded right in front
of her.

"Que parla català?" said a different
voice.

"Spreekt u Nederlands?" said a female voice
behind her. Catherine whirled, still unable to locate a
speaker.

"What about English?" the female voice said
again in a lilting accent.

"Where are you?" Catherine said.

"Do not be afraid," the voice said. "My name
is Griele. I come from Flanders. I am a weaver. I have two
daughters, Anke and Ilesabet. What is your name?"

"Where are you?" Catherine said again. "I
can't see you." She took a slow step forward, toward the square of
light. As she did, she heard other voices, fainter and more
distant.

"No, of course," the voice said. "We can not
be seen. You are new here?"

"Yes."

"We are—how you say? Ach, not good
English."

"I speak Latin, too," Catherine said.

"Ah yes? That is good. Pietro!"

At this, the voice of a young boy spoke out.
"Sì?"

"The Latin, please," Griele said. "Introduce
yourself."

"I am Pietro Morosini, son of Girolamo
Morosini, Captain of Brescia," the boy announced formally, in
Latin. "I am held prisoner against my will. It is proper for you to
address me as 'lord'. It is also proper for you to tell us your
name."

Catherine's head was spinning. She was
surrounded by a crowd of invisible voices. "My name is Catherine
Parris," she said. She reached the square opening and stepped
through. On the other side, the cavern was even larger than the one
she had left. This one had a high ceiling, invisible in the
darkness. All around, as far as she could see, there were smears of
light—not enough to actually illuminate anything, nor seeming to
come from any source. Just thousands of diffuse patches, some
gathered together in great bright auras, some set apart on their
own. They were all moving.

She heard all kinds of languages, most of
which she didn't recognize.

"There are so many of you," she said.

"This is only one room," Griele said. "There
are many more."

"Are you . . ." Catherine cringed to ask it,
but she was, after all, deep below the ground. "Are you the
dead?"

"That is the question, isn't it?" said yet
another voice. Catherine had trouble telling how many people were a
part of her conversation. There were lights all around her—were
they all listening to her? This new voice was a man's, deep and
old, with a native speaker's command of English. "You see, we all
came here on the same day. On the evening of the August the tenth.
If it were one at a time, here and there, maybe. But all at once?
No. I am Hayes, by the way. From Sussex. At your service."

"What are you saying?" Pietro demanded
irritably in Latin.

Hayes explained in Latin.

"We could have died on the same day," Pietro
pointed out.

"True," Hayes said. "But from every country
in the world? All at the same time?" He switched back to English.
"Pietro insists we're all dead. He won't stop talking about
it."

"Perhaps the Lord came for us," Griele
said.

Hayes made a coughing noise. "Does this seem
like heaven to you?"

"Please," Catherine said. "Why do you all
look like lights?"

There was silence. "You can see?" Hayes
said.

"Of course. I see little patches of light
that seem to represent each of you. There's a great crowd of you in
an enormous cavern of rock."

"We're underground?" Griele said.

"Wait," Hayes said. "Do you still have your
body?"

"Yes."

"How did you get here? Did you just wake up
here like the rest of us?"

"I fell down a hole." The details seemed like
too much to explain.

"A hole . . . from where?"

"From Horizon. An island to the west. At the
edge of the world."

There was a stir at the far end of the
cavern. Lights began to swirl and eddy upward, as if they were
motes underwater. She heard distant screams.

"They're coming," Griele said. There was a
sudden note of panic in her voice.

"What's coming?" Catherine said.

"We don't know what they are," Hayes said.
"But they—"

"Flee!" Griele shouted.

The disruption surged toward them with
incredible speed, lights scattering toward the roof. Catherine saw
a giant pink body, moist and glistening, that ran and leaped high
in the air, a creature twice her size, with splayed feet on the
sides of its body and a mouth gaping wet and wide. Its mouth closed
around a fleeing light—Catherine couldn't tell if it was one of
those she had just been speaking to—and snapped shut. It landed,
yawned, and licked its toothless mouth. The light it had caught was
gone.

Its pink skin was hairless and translucent,
like a salamander's, and it pulsed with the effort of its exertion.
It had no ears or eyes. It leaped again, and she caught sight of a
fat tail balanced on the ground. It closed its jaws around another
light and brought it down.

It had happened so fast, Catherine hadn't
even moved. She backed slowly away, hardly daring to breathe, until
she had reached the square entrance through which she'd come. She
slipped through and pressed herself against the wall on the other
side, hoping the entrance was too small to admit the monster, but
doubting it. There were no other exits from the cavern except for
the sheer, vertical shaft down which she had fallen.

CHAPTER 9

"I'M telling you, it rang," Ramos said.

"It couldn't have." Barrosa picked up the
bell-box and looked at the bottom, as if he might find some answers
there.

"More than that. It rang in a pattern. Three
rings quickly, then a pause, then three rings again. It did that
same pattern twice."

Barrosa narrowed his eyes. "That doesn't make
any sense."

"I know. You can see, the lever and the bell
aren't even connected, and I wasn't touching it. And don't tell me
there was an earth tremor; there was no such thing."

"I believe you," Barrosa said. "But that
pattern—I didn't even think this one worked at all."

Ramos stared at him. "What do you mean,
worked?"

Barrosa touched the jawbone. "When you press
the lever, this bone changes material. It becomes very heavy, like
metal."

"I've noticed that. But it's not connected to
the bell."

"It's connected to the fragment of bone on
this box's twin. When you pull this lever, the
other
bell
rings."

A chill ran down Ramos's arms. "And . . .
when you push the other one, this one rings?" The implications of
such a device flooded through his mind. "But how do you know
this?"

Barrosa shook his head. He put the bell-box
back on the table and crossed to a corner of the room. He brushed
some dirt away from the floor to reveal a plank of wood which, when
lifted, revealed a small locked chest. He lifted it free and
brushed off the dirt.

"You've been keeping secrets from me," Ramos
said.

"The king wanted it kept quiet. You didn't
need to know."

Barrosa produced a key and soon had the chest
open. Inside was another bell-box.

"We thought the others were broken, or that
their pairs had been lost at sea," Barrosa said. "The pair to this
box, however, is on
La Magdalena
, one of the ships in the
Armada, off the coast of Portugal."

Ramos was confused. "So what—"

"Just watch." Barrosa depressed the lever
with attentive precision, first once, then twice, then three times,
then four. Nothing happened. He waited. Then, without anyone
touching it, the bell on top of the box rang. It didn't ring as if
it had been jostled; it rang once, then twice, then three times,
then four.

"I don't understand. There's a delay?"

"No."

It came to him. "Someone on
La
Magdalena
. . . "

"Yes. When I pressed the lever, the bell on
La Magdalena
rang. Someone there just responded to my
message by doing the same thing I did. That's our initial greeting.
We use the same pattern every time, to show that it's really
us.

"Wait a moment." Barrosa used the lever
again, this time with a varying number of strokes. He consulted a
tiny book along the way. Once again, an answering series of rings
returned, and Barrosa wrote down the numbers: 3, 5, 2, 1, 3. 6, 1,
1, 2, 4. When the bell finally fell silent, he paged through the
book again, looking for the numbers.

"It's a code," Ramos said. "You're actually
talking with the captain of
La Magdalena
, even though he's
at sea."

"We could have done a lot better. The code is
very limited, mostly a set of key phrases rather than a true
language. It's sometimes frustrating, because the captain tries to
communicate something more complex, but we can't figure it out, or
the king wants to ask a question we have no way of encoding. Today,
however, he reports that the wind is fair and their heading
true."

"So what does three rings, pause, three rings
mean in your code?" he asked.

"That's the thing," Barrosa said. "It doesn't
mean anything. Not only that, we never had a pair for that box. We
assumed it was lost at sea, along with all the other worms."

But if
La Magdalena
hadn't been the
source of the ringing, where had it come from? Ramos's thoughts
drifted to the island where, so it was said, a group of renegade
Protestants still survived. Someone had made this box, after all.
Was it really possible? Could the other half of this box be half a
world away?