Quintessence Sky (35 page)

The tunnel was black with smoke and
barricaded with blackened corpses. Frightened whinnies and shouts
could be heard from the other side. Juan Barrosa emerged from the
passage where he'd been hiding with the
Ignis Dei
for the
better part of the day. "Right on schedule," he said. "Lucky I had
it primed."

Elizabeth still stared at the destruction. "I
had no idea," she said. "You told me what it could do, but I didn't
realize . . ."

"We can't wait," Ramos said. "Let's go."

Barrosa lifted the
Ignis Dei
onto his
own horse and jumped into the saddle. They galloped the rest of the
way to the end of the bridge toward Southwark. The top of the south
gate bristled with pikes on which human heads were impaled,
gruesome and covered in tar. These were all that was left of
criminals who had been convicted by the crown of high treason.
Ramos couldn't tear his eyes away.

If this went poorly, it would be his own head
grinning down from there before the end of the day.

As they hurtled through the gate, it suddenly
became clear why the bridge was deserted. At least a hundred
soldiers stood solemnly in ranks, guarding the gate. They were
facing south, away from the gate, though some of them turned as
Ramos, Elizabeth, and Barrosa bore down on them. Philip and Mary
must have feared a rebellion, that someone would mount an assault
on the city to rescue Elizabeth, so they had posted soldiers here
to guard the bridge.

The soldiers hadn't been expecting anyone
from the bridge, so they were slow to act. Elizabeth spurred her
horse on, charging right past them, and Barrosa followed just
behind.

"That's the princess!" an officer shouted.
"After them!" Soldiers ran to their horses to give pursuit.

Elizabeth, Barrosa, and Ramos turned a
corner, out of view for the moment, but knowing it wasn't for long.
This was not good. They needed more time, time to board a coach and
leave the city without the king knowing which way they had gone.
The coach would bring them to Gravesend, where they could board the
ship for the Netherlands.

Ramos had never been on this side of the
Thames before. He barely saw it now, jostled on the back of the
sweating horse as Elizabeth urged it ever faster. It was an ugly
part of the city, a place for bear-baiting, gambling, and whoring.
Taverns and brothels whisked by along with cheap tenement housing
and the occasional playhouse. Finally, they reached an inn on
Tooley Street, where the coach was waiting for them with fresh
horses.

They handed their mounts to the men who had
risked their lives to make this escape possible. "Bless you,"
Elizabeth said. "Get out of sight now; there are soldiers
coming."

"Quickly," Ramos said, and ducked inside. He
breathed a prayer of thanks at the sight of Antonia, already
seated, mumbling rapid nonsense to herself. He gave her an embrace
that she neither responded to nor seemed to notice, but that was
all right. She was safe. All the way from the Tower, he had worried
that their plan might have been found out, that Antonia would be in
a dungeon, or worse, already dead, a victim of the king's
wrath.

Elizabeth climbed in across from him, and
with a cry from the driver, the horses broke into a run, and the
carriage lurched forward with the clatter of wooden wheels on
paving stones. The friends who had helped them scattered.

As they drove east out of Southwark and into
farming country, Ramos kept checking behind them for signs of
pursuit. Cows meandered near the road, and sheep dotted the grassy
hills farther south. Could they really have made it away safely?
His heart began to slow down, and he dared to hope.

"They say that a star disappeared from the
sky, and some people went mad," Antonia said.

Ramos whirled to face her. "What did you
say?"

She didn't meet his eye or acknowledge his
presence. "They started babbling nonsense, and many of them were
killed, at least in Spain. I think
we
are the mad ones
they're talking about," she said.

A rush of heat flooded through Ramos's chest.
Antonia spoke from time to time, and occasionally her speech made a
kind of sense, though never in context. But this was the first time
he had heard her actually refer to her own condition, or to the
nova.

"Our spirits left our bodies behind and came
here. Our loved ones may even be hearing what we are really saying,
only it doesn't make any sense to them, so they call it babbling,"
Antonia said.

This time, Ramos couldn't help it. He started
to cry. He snatched up her hands and squeezed them. "I'm here,
Antonia!" he shouted. Elizabeth and Barrosa watched in
astonishment, looking back and forth between them.

"She is aware," Elizabeth said. "She is alive
and thinking and interacting somewhere, just not here."

Ramos passed a hand in front of Antonia's
eyes, but she didn't blink. "Could she be in another body? Living
somewhere else in the world, but unable to return?"

"Perhaps she is in heaven," Elizabeth said.
"Perhaps her soul has passed on to the blessed realm, but something
has prevented her body from being severed completely from it."

Ramos remembered Antonia's terrified
screaming from the night the nova had first appeared. "I don't
think so," he said.

"Do you hear that?" Barrosa said, suddenly
tense.

"What?"

"Hoofbeats."

Ramos concentrated. Yes, he could make out
another set of hoofbeats, faster than their own. He leaned out of
the carriage and looked behind. A plume of dust billowed in the
distance.

"We're being followed!" he shouted to the
driver. "Hurry!"

The driver cracked the reins, and the
carriage picked up speed. Without a carriage to pull, however,
their pursuers were faster. It was hopeless, Ramos knew. They could
never outrun them, now that they had been spotted.

"We need to stop the coach," Ramos said.
"Your Grace, you must take a horse and ride. On your own, you might
elude them."

"No. I will not abandon you," she said.

"Please. It is to save you that we risked
everything. If you, at least, were spared . . ."

She held his gaze, her eyes green and clear.
"What kind of ruler would I be if I left my friends to die while I
saved myself?"

Matchlocks fired behind them, and Ramos heard
one ball thud into the wood of the carriage. There were empty
fields around them in every direction, with nowhere to run and
nowhere to hide.

"Thank you for your loyal service," Elizabeth
said.

Ramos grimaced. "Don't give up hope quite
yet. I have one last desperate trick to pull." He pulled a chicken
bone out of his pocket and began to talk to it. "Matthew," he said.
"Are you there?"

MATTHEW followed his father out of the cave,
with Parris wandering distractedly behind him. Ferguson and
Craddock flanked them, making sure they didn't speak with any of
the other colonists on their way out. Matthew suspected the others
were being given salt only to the degree that they were loyal to
Ferguson. Those closest to him were the most powerful; those
suspected of disagreeing with his leadership were given short
rations, if any at all. It was the feudal system back again: a
single lord who controlled the natural resource (in this case, salt
instead of land), and thus controlled all the people as well. In
retrospect, Matthew realized they'd been foolish to overlook this
kind of power grab as a possibility.

Out of the caves, they headed north, higher
up into the mountains. Matthew didn't know where his father was
leading them, if anywhere. They were three humans in a vast
wilderness, driven out by their own people, their home destroyed,
and with enemies on every side. They had nowhere to go. They made
camp in the shadow of a large rock jutting out of the mountainside,
though with no supplies and without quintessence, their shelter was
damp and exposed, and all they had to eat was a meager collection
of roots and greens that Parris scavenged for them. It demonstrated
how dependent they were on quintessence for everything.

Matthew sank to the ground and put his head
in his hands. "What are we going to do?" he said.

"God will provide, as he has always done. We
will pray and wait on his goodness," his father said.

It was something Matthew himself might have
said two years earlier, before coming to Horizon, but a lot had
changed since then. He was no longer afraid of his father, nor
afraid of disagreeing with him. "Always provided? What does that
mean? Catherine is dead. She's not coming back, and I don't know
what I'll do without . . . I don't know how to live without . . ."
Tears flooded into his eyes, but he gritted his teeth and didn't
let himself cry. This was no time to grieve.

"Thanks to me, the colony is totally
destroyed," he continued. "Ferguson thinks we need new leadership,
and maybe he's right. With your passive piety and my wild
experimentation, we haven't done very well by them, have we?"

"We did the best we could, by God's grace.
And will continue to," his father said.

Matthew hurled a stone into the trees, where
it cracked against a rock and then bounced soundlessly through the
foliage. "Continue how? Ferguson threatened to kill us if we come
back, which he would be very able to do, since he controls all the
salt. The Spanish would kill us for sure, or worse, torture us and
make us tell them how to find and kill everyone else. We can't get
home, and our best allies are a tribe of manticores who are less
than hospitable and only agreed to help us when they thought we
could provide help in return."

"For someone who worships reason and logic,
you're not thinking very clearly," his father said mildly.

Matthew raised an eyebrow. "No? I think I
laid out our situation pretty plainly."

"That's because you're so focused on
yourself. You think it's your fault that Catherine may be dead."
Matthew tried to object, but his father held up a hand. "I say
may
be dead, because we only have the word of one who did
not see it happen. But that's not my point. My point is that you
feel like you should have stopped her from going or should have
protected her better. And you think it's your fault that the
settlement was destroyed."

"It was my experiment!"

His father gave him the sort of glare that
had sent him scurrying when he was young. "Close your mouth and
listen to what I'm saying. It's not all about you. You're so
wrapped up in your inventions that you think the only way a problem
can be solved is if you do it yourself."
"So I should sit around and do nothing?"

"You just finished telling me how powerless
we are. So instead of despairing and blaming yourself for what you
can't do, acknowledge that life . . . that reality . . . is a lot
bigger than you are. That there's more to life than you can measure
or control."

Matthew stood up, annoyed. "I don't
understand this. Didn't you teach me to take responsibility for my
actions?"

"Yes. But not to take responsibility for
everything that happens. God is telling this story, not you. No
matter how much power or knowledge you have, you can't write the
ending."

"So you want me to give up."

His father sighed. "I think you know what I'm
telling you. You just don't want to listen."

"I am listening. I know what you think; I
always have. I just don't agree."

Matthew wasn't sure his father would ever
understand. What he saw as the best hope for the future of mankind,
his father saw as an obsession with the unnatural and a rejection
of the Almighty. His father blamed him for the decreasing
attendance at Sunday worship services and the colonists' increasing
self-reliance where they should be sensing their need for God. Most
people believed in God out of a fear of the supernatural. Storms,
lightning, and disease were all ways that God showed his
displeasure with the sins of men. But what if those things could be
understood and controlled? What was left for God?

Parris stood up. "Something is happening," he
said.

They both looked at him. Matthew had almost
forgotten he was there. "What do you mean?"

"Among the manticores," Parris said.
"Something big. Loyalties are changing. The tribal structure is
being overturned. And something else . . ."

The ground heaved under Matthew's feet,
throwing him sideways. He landed painfully, twisting his wrist
under his body. The rock they were sheltering under split with a
deafening crack. The mountain seemed alive, like a giant waking up.
It reminded him of a year ago, when the island had been sliding
over the edge of the world.

"What's happening?" Matthew shouted.

"The lords of the earth are rising!" Parris
shouted back.

"What does that mean?"