Quintessence Sky (32 page)

MATTHEW slept without dreams and woke later
than he intended. His father was already assembling a delegation to
visit the red manticores, whose tribal grounds were nearby. He
chose Matthew and Parris to accompany him, but not Ferguson.

"That's a mistake," Matthew said. "We should
bring him along."

His father raised an eyebrow. "The whole
point of this visit is to solidify our friendship and ask the
manticores for help. I have no desire to bring someone who is known
to hate them, and will only insult them, if not actually start a
fight."

"He'll cause trouble here if we don't. Better
to have him along, where we can keep an eye on him."

"I'm not taking that fool," his father said.
"I can't control what he does, eye on him or no. Our enemies are
numerous, and this meeting is crucial. If we have no allies, we
won't survive."

The three of them set off at a brisk run.
They hoped to find some of his father's Christian converts among
the red manticores. They hadn't seen them since the fire and could
only assume they had returned to their own people.

Manticore lookouts saw the humans long before
they saw the manticores. Matthew couldn't see or hear them, but he
knew they would be there, silently tracking them through the trees.
Finally, before they came in sight of the primary manticore
village, their escort materialized. Nearly a dozen manticores
surrounded them, two with English matchlocks.

"We come in peace to treat with your chief,"
Marcheford said.

Matthew recognized one of the gun-bearers as
Tanalabrinu, the son of the red manticores' chief. He was not
utterly hostile to the humans, but neither was he exactly a
friend.

Tanalabrinu snapped his teeth, a gesture of
annoyance. "Why should we treat with you? Your kind brings only
death."

"Because of the love we bear you," Marcheford
said.

"Was it love that killed Hakrahinik and
Lachakchith?" Tanalabrinu said.

Matthew's breath caught in his throat.
Hakrahinik and Lachakchith were Paul and Thomas, the two manticores
who had accompanied Catherine into the wilderness as her
bodyguards. If they were dead, that didn't hold out much hope for
Catherine.

"We know nothing of their passing,"
Marcheford said. "There was another with them, a human girl. We
heard she was taken by the grays. Have you news of her?"

"She was judged and found wanting."
Tanalabrinu's manner was dismissive.

Matthew couldn't help himself. "They threw
her into that chasm? They killed her?"

"She was judged," Tanalabrinu said.

A stone settled into Matthew's stomach. Even
after all this time, he had hoped for good news. Hatred suddenly
flared in him, hatred for all the manticores, both those who had
killed her and those who could treat her death with such
indifference. He wanted to fly at Tanalabrinu and scratch out his
eyes, but a shred of reason remained, enough to hold him back. If
he did that, he would be killed, perhaps even all of them would be
killed.

Some of what he was thinking must have shown
on his face, because Tanalabrinu raised his rifle and sighted it on
him. "Why have you come here? Give me the truth."

"We would speak with the chief," Marcheford
said.

"You are speaking with him. Tanakiki is
dead."

That was not good news. Tanalabrinu's father,
Tanakiki, had a complex history with the humans, but he had
generally supported them. He had been the brother of Chichirico,
the only manticore ever to see England and return again to Horizon,
the manticore who had brought Catherine into the memory family of
his tribe. Tanakiki had never converted to Christianity, but he
understood humans as well as any manticore could. He would have
almost certainly have helped them in this difficulty.

If his son was in charge now, however, things
would be different. The assumption that they would be met with
friendship no longer applied. They would have to work for his
trust.

"Our settlement is destroyed," Marcheford
said. "Our people are scattered. An enemy people has landed with
ships and weapons and men. They seek to kill us, raid this island's
treasures, and return home with as much as they can take."

Tanalabrinu seemed amused. They continued to
talk, but Matthew found it hard to concentrate on their words,
despite how important they were to the colonists' future. Catherine
was dead. It was impossible to believe. He tried to imagine her
body broken in the dark at the bottom of a cave shaft, and the
image just swam in his mind. What if it was just a trick by
Rinchirith? Just because he said he had killed her didn't mean he
had actually done it. Perhaps they were just holding her hostage.
Though imagining that was almost worse.

He felt like he needed to see her with his
own eyes before he could really believe she was gone. The problem
with that was, if the manticores were telling the truth, he would
never be able to see her. Her body would be unreachable. There
would just be long months of waiting, hoping, watching out the
window, hearing her voice on the wind, until hope finally withered
and died.

Parris was talking now. "We have knowledge,"
he said. "You have seen the things we can make. We would share this
knowledge with you."

Hadn't he heard? Didn't he know that his
daughter was dead? Matthew had a painful lump like an acorn lodged
in his throat; he could barely breathe, much less talk.

"I offer myself, as a memory bond between our
two peoples," Parris said. He approached Tanalabrinu and pulled his
tunic up over his head. He turned, crouched, and presented his back
to the manticore chief.

Only then did Matthew see the emptiness in
Parris's eyes. For a human to memory bond with a manticore was a
dangerous thing, risking madness and loss of self. Parris had done
it once before, briefly, to save his daughter's life. Only
Catherine herself had endured a prolonged bond with a
manticore.

Tanalabrinu grew thoughtful. "Your people are
not connected, as we are. This bond would be with you alone."

"Yet from me, you would learn much that would
benefit your people," Parris said.

"The rest of us would stand by this bond,"
Marcheford said, though Matthew doubted this part of the deal had
been planned ahead of time. "We are all red manticores now."

Tanalabrinu cocked his head for a moment,
then clicked his pincers. "Agreed," he said. With sudden violence,
he leaped on Parris's exposed back, wrapping his tails around his
torso, and plunged his memory tail, the one tipped with a sharp
spike, into Parris's spine. Parris grunted and arched his back,
though the tail was not piercing his skin, but merely passing
through it into the flesh beneath.

The tail would implant a tiny amount of
material from Tanalabrinu into Parris. This material, separated
from its source, would connect the two with a quintessence thread.
It would then act like a bell-box, only much more sophisticated,
sharing not just coded phrases but thoughts, senses, and memories
in a flood of consciousness powerful enough to overwhelm a human
mind.

Manticore tribes were formed as memory
families, in which all the members were connected in this way. This
ensured that knowledge was passed down through generations, even
when individual members died. Offering a member, usually a child,
as a memory bond to another manticore tribe was the strongest means
of forging an alliance.

Parris was sacrificing the very privacy of
his own mind for the sake of the colony, but Matthew felt
unreasonably angry at him. He was escaping his grief, drowning it
in the manticore consciousness. Parris was the only person who
could understand what Matthew felt, but now his grief would be a
distant thing, subservient to his role as spokesman between their
peoples. He was leaving Matthew alone.

By the time they left, the manticores had
agreed to a treaty. They would help the humans rebuild their
settlement near the caves; manticores and humans would fight
together against common enemies, whether the grays or the Spanish;
and the humans would admit red manticore youths into their English
school.

Parris was quiet as they walked back, and
stumbled along as if in a dream. Matthew knew he was seeing not
just the woods around them, but a host of images from the manticore
village as well, experiencing thoughts and memories that were not
his own. He wouldn't have volunteered if Catherine were still
alive. Though, Matthew had to admit: if Catherine had been here,
she would have volunteered herself.

They found the caves quiet. Too quiet. As the
returning diplomatic party wound their way through small groups of
colonists, the groups fell silent, casting uneasy glances their
way. Something was wrong.

James Ferguson stood waiting for them by the
largest fire pit, a smug expression on his face. Four thuggish men
flanked him, some of his most ardent supporters.

"How are your friends?" Ferguson said. His
tone was light, but there was menace underneath it, and something
else as well. Triumph.

"They remain our friends, for the time
being," Marcheford said.

"And what was the cost of this friendship, I
wonder?"

"Only what is just. That we should fight
alongside each other against our common foes. That their children
should be educated in our schools, while they teach us what forest
craft we do not yet know."

Ferguson spat. "You expect our children to
learn alongside those beasts?"

Matthew glanced at Parris. There was no
turning off the link; Tanalabrinu and the other manticores were
hearing all of this.

"I do expect that," Marcheford said calmly.
"They have offered us friendship despite many reasons to do
otherwise. I expect you to accept them as part of us and keep your
tongue civil."

A slow smile spread across Ferguson's face.
His eyes glanced behind them, and Matthew turned to see that many
of the other men of the colony had gathered around them. "We took a
vote while you were gone," Ferguson said. "We've got ourselves a
new governor now."

"Who?" Marcheford said, incredulous.
"You?"

Ferguson gave a mocking bow. "You had your
chance. You're finished now. Our way of life was falling apart, and
all you could think about was your precious pet manticores, getting
them to pray and parrot Bible verses like a bloody circus act. Now
look at where we are. Our homes are burned to the ground, the
Spanish want to gut us all, and you're still prancing around making
friends with their lot. They're our enemies, if you hadn't
noticed."

There were murmurs of agreement from the
others. Matthew saw that not all the colonists were part of this
mutiny; some held back, and others were absent or inside other
caves. The majority, however, seemed to have swung Ferguson's
way.

"They're not all our enemies," Marcheford
said. "Many of them are principled. Honorable. Trustworthy." He
turned his glare on those gathered around, and his implication was
clear.

"The only manticore I'll trust is a dead
one," Ferguson said, to a chorus of ayes from the men nearest
him.

"And what will you do? Kill them all?"

Now Ferguson was positively grinning. "If it
comes to that."

"With what? Your fists?" Marcheford said.

Ferguson didn't answer, and it was quickly
clear why. His skin was glowing, dimly at first, but then brighter,
until the light streaming from him illuminated the cave. This was
what Catherine had done to defeat the manticores in the battle for
the colony the previous year. It was a powerful display of
quintessence, and it required an enormous expenditure of salt. More
than Ferguson should have had at his disposal.

Ferguson gestured at the fire pit, and the
glow rushed out of him and exploded into flame, tripling the size
of the previous blaze into a white furnace that quickly vaporized
the remaining wood. As the quintessence fire died away and their
eyes adjusted, they could see that all of the men in Ferguson's
closest circle were now glowing, too, making up for the fire's
light.

"You've been hoarding salt," Marcheford said.
"Lying to us all."

Ferguson laughed. "If I had been hoarding it,
that would be more than you've managed to do. No, I wasn't
stockpiling my own supply. I was just making better use of my time.
While you were off befriending savages, I was working on providing
for our own people."

Matthew was losing his patience. "What are
you talking about?" he said.

Ferguson gestured at one of his cronies, a
belligerent Welshman named Craddock. "Show them," he said.

Craddock led them deeper into the cave,
through a complex of twisting passages, past remarkable rock
formations looming down from the ceiling or flowing like petrified
waterfalls over the stone. Finally, they reached a crack they had
to turn sideways to squeeze through, one by one. On the other side,
embedded in the rock face and glittering with reflected light, was
an immense vein of crystallized salt.

Ferguson was grinning. "This is what happens
when someone competent is in charge," he said.

It was a ludicrous claim, especially since
Marcheford had left instructions for the caves to be thoroughly
explored in his absence. But it didn't matter. This explained why
all the colonists had so willingly gone along with Ferguson's coup,
or at least not challenged him. He controlled the salt. He and his
friends were full to bursting with quintessence power. No one could
get to the salt without challenging him, and no one could challenge
him without getting to the salt.

Marcheford's face was grave. "I promised
alliance to the red manticores. They will fight with us and protect
us and give us aid, if we keep our promise."

"But we don't need their help. Don't you see,
old man? This is more salt than we gathered in a year mining
lilies."