Quintessence Sky (16 page)

MATTHEW laid out the pieces of the broken
bell-box. The mechanism wasn’t the important part. What really made
it work was the quintessence connection, and that he couldn't break
by throwing it against a wall. He separated the jawbone and
positioned it so he could see the glowing quintessence pearl
nestled in the delicate whorls of bone. Carefully, he tipped one
drop of vitriol out of the vial onto the pearl.

The glow vanished. It didn't just fade; it
winked out, leaving a gap of black nothingness in its place, as if
the pearl had been cut out of the world. As far as they knew,
that's more or less what had happened. Since Aristotle's day, men
had argued about whether the material world was continuous or made
of tiny atoms whizzing and colliding through empty space. Their
study of quintessence—the fifth essence that alchemists had written
about for centuries—more or less proved the atomistic theory. They
were able to pass material objects through other material
objects—impossible if matter was continuous—and see the underlying
void first-hand.

The void grew, first to the size of his eye,
then to the size of his fist. Left unchecked, it would continue to
grow, destroying everything in its path, until it lost stability
and the surrounding matter rushed into and collapsed it. Men had
died experimenting with voids, before they knew what they were
doing. It wasn’t something to rush.

Matthew selected two beetlewood planks and
used it to control the void's size, pushing it back a little here,
a little there. Just as manticores and compass beetles couldn't
pass through this particular type of waxy wood, so the void was
confined inside it. Matthew had even built special compartments
with voids trapped between two layers of wood, allowing him to
conduct experiments inside the compartment with no quintessence
field, just as things would be back in England.

The quintessence thread, which had been
emanating from the pearl, now seemed connected to the void. The
thread didn't pass into the void, or stop at its edge; instead, it
seemed to thin out and expand, like a cone, to envelop the void,
almost as if the void was the thread itself, being stretched
open.

It's like we're looking inside the thread,"
Blanca said, echoing his thoughts. "It's like the interior of the
thread is the void—a black tunnel, with no view of the other
side."

"The space inside is huge, though," Matthew
said. "Just an infinite nothingness, as far as we can tell. A man
could fall into the void and just keep on falling, and never
return." That very thing had happened to Maasha Kaatra. He knew it
didn't invalidate Blanca's suggestion, though. Concepts of space,
of interior and exterior, didn't necessarily hold when dealing with
quintessence concepts. The interior of a thread might very well
be
an infinite blank space, for all he could say.

"What happens if you throw something into
it?" She picked up a broken piece of wood from the bell-box and
tossed it accurately, straight into the void. It was like throwing
something off a cliff. It dwindled into the distance until it
disappeared.

Now that Matthew was staring into the void,
the prospect of trying to feed his own spirit thread into it seemed
more reckless. If opening a void at one end of a thread really did
create a tunnel to the other side, why couldn't they see through
it? No, a void was simply non-existence, the absence of reality, as
it always had been.

The void was becoming harder to control,
growing more quickly and in odd directions, escaping Matthew's
ability to push it back with the beetlewood. He clapped the planks
together through its center, and it disappeared. The material that
had been inside the radius of the void—the jawbone and its pearl,
pieces of the broken box—were all gone. Air rushed back into the
area with a sharp pop. Even a small circular depression was cut
away from the workbench.

Matthew shrugged, despondent. "I should have
known."

"What happened to the bones?" Blanca
asked.

"Gone." Matthew fluttered his hand in a vague
way. "Out of this world." That's why he hadn't tried this on the
pair to Catherine's bell-box. He knew it would destroy it.

"Then what happened to the end of the thread
that was connected to them?"

Matthew hesitated. What indeed? Aided by the
skink tears, he could see hundreds of threads criss-crossing
through the room, passing through the walls without difficulty. At
first he couldn't see the one they had been working with at all—had
the void completely unraveled it? But no, there it was. It had been
hard to spot because, as the thread approached the point where the
void had been, its brightness smeared, becoming less distinct. The
void had done something to it. But it was still there.

He leaned close to examine it. There were
thousands of tiny, bright particles, like dust, clinging to the
outside of the thread like a halo, diffusing the light. It reminded
him of the way shavings from an iron bar would cling to a
lodestone. Was it a similar concept? Were these quintessence
particles attracted to the thread's quintessence field? And if so,
where had they come from?

"Blanca, do you see these?" he said. At his
words, the tiny particles danced, like sand on a struck sheet of
metal. Some of them skittered down the length of the thread and out
of sight. Matthew gasped.

Blanca leaned down to peer at them, her hair
brushing his face. "What are they?" The particles jumped again for
her. The moment her voice stopped, they stopped moving, freezing in
strange and beautiful patterns.

"One. Two. Three. Four," Matthew said,
pronouncing each word sharply and waiting a moment between to let
the particles settle again. There was no question; they were
jumping in response to his voice.

Then the particles jumped again, although
neither Matthew nor Blanca had opened their mouths. A man's voice
emanated from the thread, as if the sound was produced by the
jumping particles instead of the other way around. "Hello?" the
voice said. "Hello? Who's there?" The voice was oddly muffled, as
if spoken by someone with a jar held over his mouth.

Matthew looked at the open door to make sure,
but they were alone. The night was as still as ever, and there had
been no noise on the stairs. He leaned close to the thread. "My
name is Matthew Marcheford," he said. "Who are you?"

"My name is Ramos de Tavera."

MATTHEW and Blanca stared at each other.
Tavera? It had been a Diego de Tavera who had tortured and killed
his way through the colony a year and a half before. So who was
this Ramos? Whoever he was, he must be one of
them
, an agent
of Spain and the Roman Church, who wanted to conquer and control
them. Which meant their technology was in enemy hands.

"How did you get a bell-box?" Matthew
said.

"From the ship," the voice said. He sounded
excited. "Are you part of the Horizon colony?"

"You answer first. Where are you?"

"In Whitehall Palace. In London,
England."

Matthew took a breath. At least he was far
away, not somewhere on the island. But it confirmed what he
thought; if he was in the palace, he worked for the king and the
queen.

"Are you related to Diego de Tavera?"

The quality of the voice, already poor, was
deteriorating quickly. The man on the other end responded, but
Matthew couldn't make out the words.

"What?" Matthew said. "Repeat that."

"Yes," the voice said, though Matthew had to
lean his ear close to the thread to make out the words. "He was my
brother. He . . ." The rest of the message was lost.

"What else did you get from the ship?"
Matthew asked, but the response was too garbled to make out. He
tried several more times, but the voice connection was gone, along
with the particles that seemed to transmit the sound.

Matthew was torn between elation and shock.
He had sent a
spoken
message across a quintessence thread!
The implications of that were overwhelming, though of course, as
with everything they discovered, it only revealed more that they
didn't understand. What were the little particles? How did they
transmit sound? Could they transmit anything else? Had he somehow
created them with the void? Or had the man on the other end of the
thread created them? It chilled him to think that their enemies
might somehow have learned more about quintessence than they knew
themselves.

"That was amazing," Blanca said, her pretty
face flushed. "You were amazing."

"Just luck," Matthew said. "Like most of what
we discover." He jumped to his feet. "Let's try it on Catherine's
box. If it works the same way, we could talk to her, even just for
a moment, and she could tell us where she is."
If she's
alive
, he didn't say.

"How did it work?"

"I don't know. I had no idea that could
happen. Somehow those particles transmitted my voice through the
quintessence thread. I can't begin to guess why."

"And did you smell that musty odor?" Blanca
said.

Matthew raised an eyebrow. "You smelled
something?"

"Yes, it was damp and earthy, like a cellar.
Didn't you smell it?"

Now that he thought of it, he had smelled
something like that, but it hadn't really entered his
consciousness. "Are you saying you think the
smell
came
through the connection?"

She shrugged. "Why not? If sound can come
through, why not smell as well?"

Matthew was about to tell her how different
the sense of sound was from the sense of smell, but he stopped
himself. What did he know? Both traveled invisibly in the air, and
for all he knew, both traveled through that invisible realm between
the atoms that made up the material world. Perhaps they
could
both be transmitted along a quintessence thread.

He broke open Catherine's bell-box to reveal
the bones inside. Blanca bit her lower lip. "I hope she still has
her box with her."

Matthew touched a drop of vitriol to the
pearl in Catherine's bell-box and used his beetlewood planks to
keep the void in check. What had he done before? Nothing really: he
had simply closed the void again. He didn't know if it took a
particular amount of time to create the effect, or anything special
in what he had done. There was nothing for it but to try. He
snapped the planks together through the center of the void, closing
the gap. As before, the bones were gone, but the thread remained,
its end smearing out where the void had been.

A strong smell of swamp pervaded the room.
Not just rotting plants, but rotting meat as well. Blanca, who had
been leaning forward to peer at the thread, recoiled and covered
her face.

"Catherine!" Matthew shouted, leaning close
and trying to ignore the stench. "Can you hear me?"

Oh, but it reeked! It was enough to make him
feel a bit dizzy. "Catherine! Just talk near the bell-box; we'll be
able to hear you."

They waited, holding their breath. Nothing.
Utter silence. The particles on the thread didn't move.

Then Matthew tried to step back and found
that he couldn't move either. His legs were stiff, weighted to the
floor like blocks of stone. He tried to change his weight, to make
them lighter, but nothing happened. "Something's wrong," he said,
twisting to look at Blanca. "I can't move."

She rushed to him. "No, stay back," he said.
"I think it's something with the connection."

"What's wrong?"

"My legs won't work." He tried again to take
a step. He found he could lift them, but it was like walking with a
statue's legs. He couldn't bend them at the knees.

She knelt down to examine his legs, and
jumped back up with a cry. "It's on the floor."

"What is?"

"Something wrong. I could feel it. Let's get
out of here."

"Wait. We have to stop it, cut the
connection."

"How are you going to do that?"

She was right. They should get away and then
figure out what to do from a safe distance.

"My legs are getting stiff, too," she
said.

"Quickly then." They stumbled toward the
stairs, leaning on one another. They reached them and started down.
This far away from the workbench, Matthew discovered he could bend
his knees again, and stiffly managed to navigate the steps. At the
bottom, he and Blanca stopped, and he bent to massage his legs.
They felt like flesh again, and he could change their weight just
as before. They seemed to have escaped the reach of the
problem.

They paused, exhausted and breathing
hard.

"What happened?" Blanca said.

Matthew didn't know. Something had come
through the connection, something that made their legs feel like
lead. Some kind of gas, or spirit, or miasma, he supposed. Whatever
it was, they couldn't see it, only feel its effects. And whatever
it was, it came from the place where Catherine was, or had been. A
place with the smell of decay and death. Did that mean that
Catherine . . . that her body . . .? He couldn't believe that.
Wouldn't
believe it, not without more proof than a bad
smell.