Quintessence Sky (7 page)

Ramos ignored him, escorting Antonia toward
the door, but the jailor grabbed her by the arm and tried to wrench
her away. With a ringing sound like a tiny bell, the officer's
rapier jumped suddenly from the scabbard at his belt to a point an
inch from the jailor's throat.

"Release her."

The jailor dropped his hold. "The
Inquisition'll burn you for this."

The officer gave a tight smile. "Let them
try."

CHAPTER 4

THE BLIGHT was spreading faster than
Catherine could escape it. The stiffness and burning pain had crept
up her torso and into her arms. It wouldn't be long now. Her legs
were completely immobile, now, and she couldn't feel them anymore.
Her frantic attempts to inch herself out of the circle got little
traction in the mud, and there was nothing to grab onto.

The rain drenched her clothes and spattered
mud into her face. The smell of rotting plants and putrefaction was
overwhelming, gagging her. With a desperate heave, she managed to
move her body enough to grab onto a slim tree, but now her muscles
weren't working. She could hold on to the trunk, but she couldn't
pull herself any closer.

"Look what we have here," said a voice.

She nearly cried with joy at the sound. It
was a manticore voice, speaking in their language; it must be
Thomas or Paul. "Hello!" she called. "I'm here."

The speaker stepped into her field of vision:
a large, gray manticore. The gray's pincered hands were raised and
two of his tails slid sinuously over his shoulders. "The star-bird,
caught in a net," he said. The sharp sounds his mouth made were
punctuated by movements of the pincers and tails, adding specifics
to the imprecise ideas that the sounds alone communicated.

Her joy disappeared. This was not a rescue.
The gray's manner was challenging, triumphant. Many of the
manticores had referred to Catherine as "star-bird" since the
manticore attack the previous spring, when she had used a flood of
quintessence power to drive them away. It was generally spoken with
wary respect, but this gray used the term mockingly.

Still, this was no time to be shy. "I can't
move. I need a rope, or something I can hold onto, so you can pull
me out."

"My brothers died on your wall," the gray
said.

"I'm sorry. I'm going to die right now, if
you don't help me. I'm not sure I can even hold on to a rope.
Please."

The gray gesticulated and chattered briefly
at a lower volume, apparently to other manticores she couldn't see.
It was all she could do not to cry out from the pain. All the salt
she had eaten, the fresh sea water she had drunk, the bread made
from sand: it was all changing back. Her tissues were turning into
salt and sand, and it
hurt
.

Something fell near her head. She focused on
it. It was a vine, still green and supple, but dying fast. At the
other end, a half dozen manticores held on, ready to pull her out.
She wrapped loops of it around her stiff fingers and grabbed hold
as best she could. As they dragged her away from the circle, the
pain receded, and first her arms, then her legs, became loose and
movable again. She lay weak and panting at the feet of the big
gray, too exhausted to move.

When she could speak, she said, "Thank
you."

They hauled her upright, but the pain now
surged back into her legs, and she couldn't stand. She tried to use
quintessence to make her body lighter, but it was still out of
reach, and she slumped back to the ground when they let go.

"Catherine Parris," the gray said.

Catherine frowned. "Who are you?"

It lashed its tails through the air,
irritated. "Don't play games."

"Should I know you?"

The gray hissed. "I am Rinchirith, as all
know. But perhaps you truly do not remember. A failing we shall
soon remedy."

Catherine thought fast, remembering Thomas's
warnings about Rinchirith. Was it coincidence, he of all manticores
appearing here to rescue her? She didn't think so. "This was all
your plan, wasn't it? You arranged for Thomas and Paul to bring me
here, so you could capture me."

Rinchirith made the manticore equivalent of a
smile. "Are you surprised? They are my memory brothers. Their
loyalty to earth and sky runs deeper than their devotion to this
Christ
."

"They're dead, aren't they?"

Rinchirith's pincered hands shut with a snap.
"They are as alive as I am. I do not kill my own."

In any other circumstance, Catherine could
have leaped over them all, could have run away before they knew she
had moved, could have blinded them with a blaze of quintessence
energy that set the forest on fire. Now, weakened by the blight,
she could barely lift her head. "What do you want from me?"

He laughed, a kind of clicking sound deep in
his throat. "I don't want anything from you, star-bird."

"Then why am I here? Revenge for your
brothers?"

Rinchirith bent and thrust his face into
hers. "They are all my brothers. They all cry out for blood. But
that is just the dew on the grass, not the ocean. The dreams of the
earth snakes are rising, and you do not understand them."

The "earth snakes" were a common concept
among the manticores, whose mythos seemed to associate the
underground as the place of gods, rather than the sky. They
referred to snakes and worms under the earth in mystical tones.
Catherine thought it was hardly surprising, given the power of the
shekinah flatworms as sources of quintessence. In this context,
however, she had no idea what Rinchirith meant.

"That blight is a danger to all of us," she
said. "It's growing. I need to get back to my friends, so we can
figure out why."

"We already know why," Rinchirith said.

The other manticores seized her arms with
their hard pincer-grips. She struggled, but they were too strong.
Rinchirith pulled her wrists together behind her back and began
wrapping vine around them.

"And we know how to stop it," he said.

THE STORM that night raged like only a
Horizon storm could. Towering black clouds whirled through the sky,
thrown against each other by unpredictable winds. They struck with
sounds like buildings colliding, sending out billows like exploding
masonry and hurling lightning like spears of falling flame. In such
a storm, most people had the sense to stay inside, Matthew thought
wryly. Instead, he stood precariously on the peaked diamond roof of
the church, the tallest structure in the colony, drenched with
rain, and holding up an iron rod.

"Matthew!" Stephen Parris, Catherine's
father, stood on the ground below, bellowing up at him. Matthew
could barely hear him over the pounding of the rain and the
crashing of thunder.

Parris leaped, making his body lighter, and
flew the several stories up to join Matthew on the roof. His
lightened body was more easily tossed by the wind, however, and he
had to grab hold of the gold cross on top of the church to keep
from being blown clear out of the settlement. He quickly made his
body heavy again to anchor himself down.

"You're going to widow Catherine before you
even marry her," Parris said. He had to shout over the rain to be
heard.

Matthew was busy lashing the iron rod to the
cross, and didn't look at him. He didn't want to lose track of what
he was doing. "We have to understand why the salt is disappearing,"
he said.

"How is standing on a roof in a thunderstorm
going to answer that question?"

Matthew straightened and leaned toward Parris
to be heard more easily. "How long has it been since we noticed the
change in salt levels?"

"About five weeks."

"And how long have we been having these
thunderstorms?"

Parris grunted. It apparently hadn't occurred
to him that the start of the wild, nightly storms corresponded with
the beginning of the salt shortage. Matthew didn't know which was
the cause and which the effect, or if they were both the result of
some deeper cause, but he was trying to find out.

"What are you doing?" Parris asked.

Matthew showed him. He had strapped the iron
rod to the cross to hold it upright. The bottom end of the rod
rested in a glass flask filled with salt water. The water flask was
set inside a slightly larger flask filled with mercury, so that the
mercury was trapped in a thin layer between the two flasks. He had
covered the outside of the mercury flask with black scales from an
opteryx.

The storms had plenty of lightning, and they
had seen lightning striking the ground, the trees, even the roof of
this church. What if the lightning was destroying or using up all
the salt? If a lightning bolt hit the iron rod, whatever
quintessence effect it had would be transferred into the water. If
it used up the salt, the water would glow, and the opteryx scales
would measure the amount. Mercury, however, reduced the strength of
quintessence, so the mercury would act as a filter, dampening its
power before it reached the opteryx scales. That would allow him to
measure quintessence on a level far greater than what a single
opteryx could store in its body.

"Two fingers of mercury means a thousandfold
decrease," Matthew said. "If it reaches violet, that would be
around 7000
Q
, which would mean that if lightning strikes in
a particular acre of ground once a night, forty percent of the salt
in its soil would be consumed."

Matthew was doing what he always did: suggest
a hypothesis to explain a phenomenon, then perform experiments to
see if the hypothesis was true. It was a strange way of thinking to
many, particularly those of the older generation. For centuries,
learned men had relied on the ancients for their knowledge: the
writings of Aristotle and Hippocrates, Galen and Ptolemy. They
didn't see the point of his experiments. After all, who was a
nineteen-year-old young man to disagree with the ancients? It was
radical thinking, and it was Protestant thinking—rejecting
authority in favor of self analysis and understanding. Which was
why so many of those who thought this way had fled from England
when Queen Mary took the throne.

"Say your experiment works," Parris said.
"Lightning hits this rod and registers in the violet."

"That would explain what's happening to the
salt," Matthew said.

"Then how would we stop it?"

Matthew shrugged. "I don't know. But at least
we would know where the problem was coming from."

It would actually be encouraging, he thought,
if the current shortage was due to the lightning. Thunderstorms
didn't last forever. That would suggest it was a seasonal thing, a
regional event that occurred once every several years and then
recovered its balance naturally. If they could ration what they had
left until the storms abated, they just might survive.

He opened his mouth to say so when the
lightning struck the iron rod.

Fire exploded in his vision. He fell
backward, off the roof. He made his body lighter just before he hit
the ground. Parris clung to the edge of the roof above him, then
clambered up again. Matthew joined him.

"That was close," he said.

"Maybe you should have found a safer way to
test this," Parris said.

They looked at the flask. The opteryx scales
had barely turned a dark green.

"It's not enough."

Matthew shook his head. "It's a lot of power,
generally speaking, to blast through that much mercury. But it's
not enough to account for the salt reduction on the island. Not
nearly enough."

A strong breeze blew across the rooftop.
Matthew grabbed the iron bar to steady his balance, then realized
what he was holding, and hastily released it. A light from above
caught his attention, and he looked up. At the same moment, he fell
to his knees, crying out and clutching his leg. The pain in his
thigh had increased a hundredfold.