Six days after my run-in with the Iron Shield, I stepped out into the sunshine of the courtyard. My blood ran cold, even in the heat, and when I saw the group of children playing around the citadel columns, challenging each other to wrap their arms all the way around each one, I nearly went back inside.
But they weren’t the wild boys.
Pigeons fluttered off the steps as I made my way down, under a wing of the great stone beast on its plinth. The creature had parts of both a lion and an eagle and they called it a “gryphon.” The shadow of its beak ended right on the flagstone where Con had been struck down by that boy, and bled to death; now scrubbed white and clean as if nothing had happened on it at all.
I looked around in the mid-morning quiet. The guards on duty barely saw me; just another swathed boy of the Mooncircle Service, and none of the passing viziers shot me looks.
I could walk without fear now.
----------------------------------------
In the weeks that followed, the workforce of the Guilds was diverted from the Deepworks. All digging stopped. For the first time in centuries, the Hub Chamber of Antissa’s famous pipeworks would be opened.
Even so, with the Sanhedrin pressing for progress, Deep preparations continued. The City Guild was now charged with the planning of advancements to be made to the Deep’s lower levels, and it was under this arrangement that my official duties began. I could read, I could write, I was good with my numbers. In Rusper’s words: ‘Now I can avail myself of four hands when no hands can go spare!’ Trusting my hands almost too quickly, it seemed, he assigned me the duty of checking drafts as they arrived from the city engineers. A job which anyone could do, he told me, but which took up precious time – time that could be put to better use by his more skilled engineering staff.
The City Guildhouse was at the centre of civic engineering industry, found at the edge of the North District’s upper quarter. Jumbled stone and timber buildings seemed to lumber over the downslope of the hill there, as if they were sagging out of bed, while a dome of loose and lifting tiles stretched to bind and hold them all together like a lumpy patchwork quilt. Business poured out of its shade into the streets at every hour of the day, and it was through that business that I elbowed every morning to collect the drafts from the foreman. In exchange, I’d bring him messages from the Royal Guild. If these weren’t yesterday’s amended drafts, they’d be routine manifests for materials and supplies to be sourced from the district artisans, signed off as royal quota by the city quartermaster, and later dispatched by wagonload to the Deep. Transporting such cargo wasn’t part of my duties ‒ at least not in the beginning ‒ and only when Rusper included orders of his own was I expected to return with them in hand. Sparts, as he called them.
His right-hand overseers, Pintle and Gudgeon, weren’t willing to squander their time on the basic flaws for which the city engineers, or so they told me, were famous. So it was my job to make sure that every draft that was submitted by that Guild was good enough for Royal standards before reaching their desks.
And so it went. Perched at my workbench every day, embanked by parchments, I’d scour for obvious mistakes, correcting whichever ones I could correct, sometimes copying whole diagrams from scratch when corrections simply weren’t enough. I’d redraw plans, table measurements, work out the figures called “controls” from a set of formulas I quickly memorised. There wasn’t place for invention; only precision.
It wasn’t hard, and I learned fast; becoming quick and methodical and a steady hand at drawing. Before too long the overseers were finding so little fault with my work that they started sending their own drafts to my bench from time to time. Halfway through the second week, I was sure, the odd scrap of Rusper’s work had found its way to my station as well! None of these, at first, helped with my curiosity about the Hub; little more than proposed scaffold plans for the entryways. Like the City Guild plans that made up the bulk of my daily bundle, they offered fragments, at best, of bigger things.
Soon my bundle was reaching the overseers by noon or before. But there was always more work to be done, and my hands easily put to more physical duties. After mornings spent alone among my parchments and pencils, I would fall in with the tasks of the novice engineers. Most days I’d reach the wagon depot in time to help offload the cargo. Then I’d push my wheelbarrow down along the underpass roads, then down the spiral of the rubble-shaft and through the levels of the Deep. All kinds of rounds I made with that wheelbarrow, loading it high with broken parts and used equipment, surplus tools; wheeling them to the smelters where the metal was melted down, reborn, remade. I collected buckets from utility rooms, to be emptied down the drainage ducts, stacked and returned. At this I also grew quick and soon was running other errands for engineers throughout the Deep; filling up their clepsydra tanks, ferrying their wood and their metal, their parts and tools, letters, replies. The sling-bag was handy for all these jobs, fitting lightly at my hip as if it wasn’t even there.
I was no one’s apprentice and didn’t pretend that I was. But as a hand of the Guild I became used to my routines, comforted by the rhythms of the labour. Not only did the screams from the borderlands go a little softer in my head, but when they were loud again at night, I wouldn’t have to try and muffle them under my red-bird quilt for long.
Sleep had never come so easy.
----------------------------------------
Given the evenings to myself, I’d watch Rusper at his work on the fusils. I’d seen first-hand the explosions that his chrozite could produce, wanting nothing more than to believe that some mechanical weapon could channel something like that against the Rath. Rusper didn’t often notice me sitting beside him at his bench, but he always muttered when he worked. And because I listened to his mutters, I knew he was still far from satisfied.
The weapon was too clumsy, he believed. The mechanism that he’d created to make it do what it must was complex; because of that, it got too easily jammed. As for the chrozite itself, it was still a far greater danger to the wielder than the target. Which was, I had to agree, not much use in the field.
‘The wrong amount and the whole erg-damned thing’ll blow up in your hands. Not to mention the fallibility of the catch-mech. See just there? Trap enough grit when that opens and the same thing’ll happen.’
The little balls of leaden “schot” had now been coated with chrozite. As far as I could tell, the weapon should work by drawing the schot from front to back on tensile cords, where a sort of spinning transmission thing made up of wheels, flint and hammers set them alight. A trigger squeezed by the wielder’s finger would then eject the schot at breakneck speed. But it was intricate mechanics to make all these things happen smoothly and, as he said, it did keep jamming.
Many mornings I climbed the steps from my room to find the workshop bestrewn with pieces of fusil underneath a settled storm of sketches. Rusper would be there, somewhere among them; hunched, half-sleeping on his arms. I’d always try to read the notes, but his writing turned all words into scribbles.
Other nights I’d lie awake, under my quilt, to the claps of chrozite far below. I’d imagine him down there in the gloom of digging level, firing away at granite walls, and be awake when he returned, muttering again.
And still I’d be up before the dawn to hot the lights.
----------------------------------------
It couldn’t have been more than a week before I opened the tall cabinet again. It took some time to admit it to myself, but now that the mystery of the Discs belonged to me, I didn’t know what to do with it. Or where to start. There they lay, their twin reflections perfectly mocking the spiky black mess that was my hair.
Had it been real, that blue glow and white blaze? Of course it had. Rusper had seen it too, he’d said so.
But he hadn’t heard that voice. He knew nothing about that, and I wouldn’t tell him. Not just yet.
Nervous of releasing the white blaze a second time, I never touched them with my hands. Handling mine only with its cloth, I repeated what we’d done on that day to make it glow; dropping it on the bricks in the same way, from the same height, reversing the pattern of knocks and trying others, mixing them up. I tried the same on Rusper’s one, eventually just dislodging one of the bricks from the floor to ease the task.
Strange forces existed, I knew. My knowledge of Ered was hazy, from Sarah’s tales, but I knew that there were men and women of that empire who could craft what seemed like miracles out of air and will alone. In Ered such things were understood as a kind of science, I gathered, performed by learned old men I always imagined with bald heads and spectacled noses.
There were the druids - the Wildmen - of the faraway Westreach, and their woodland magics that had been practiced once in Naemia too. Some druids even my family had known by name: men Sarah had said could command the earth at their feet, heal the sick and the dying with the warmth of their hands. Talk with the trees . . .
As impossible as such things seemed to me, they were real. I could accept that they were real because they were just as far beyond me now as the tremors of before had always been. And those tremors, too, had come from something that was real. Our home. I believed all Sarah’s tales. And I believed Rusper’s tales too. Neither brought me any closer to what I’d felt from the Disc.
If I sat completely still, I could still bring back how it had felt in that moment. It had moved inside me, through my body, even through the thoughts inside my head. Wanting something. To fear it felt right, but the more I remembered the blaze and the voice, the farther away I stepped from any kind of answer.
Would I recognise a magic? Did a magic feel alive?
The Discs weren’t machines, that much was clear to me, at least. And here in Antissa, where surely few things could be less real than a magic, I could understand why Rusper wanted them kept secret.
So I went looking for clues.
Up in the citadel there weren’t many maps to be found of the lands beyond Vorth, and those that showed the realms of the Inwold at large were sparing with names. Elman—that was commonly marked, I later learned because of the logging trade that Vorth had depended on for decades. Now ended. I found only one map marking Naemia and Norwynd. Together, these were the countries of the Inwold; known in Ered as “Exelcia Minor” because of the religion of Fallstone that had once bound them together. Parts of Ered, also, followed Exelcian beliefs and that, I guessed, was what made up the rest of “Exelcia.” Some of Ered’s western provinces were shown on those maps: Cless, Creach and Crippin, Nem, The Dunfinds . . . all these were parts of the region of Ered called “Lostor.”
I thought of my family’s little book of Exelcian proverbs, but none of the proverbs had stuck. Vorth, I remembered, had long ago broken away from Fallstone’s religion, becoming known by Naemian people as the desert “outland” because of that. Not that it mattered anymore which lands were in and which were out. Not with Fallstone’s doors closed for all time. Not in a world full of tremors.
The Lack was marked on all the maps I looked at; the cartographer always making it very clear that whatever bit of it he’d had space enough to add was but a scrap of the expanse that stretched away to the northeast. Barren and empty, rivers dry. I struggled to believe what Rusper suspected of those wastes and just how unforgiving they were: that because of one stranger who had gone there, the Discs proved the tribes were out there too. Roaming, preparing, re-arming. Did he believe that the stranger himself had been one of the shamans of those tribes; that he was watching the Vedish now through a magic window of that Disc? And how did that explain my one, then?
It didn’t make a lot of sense.
And yet it was my task, by order of the Viceroy, to find in them some kind of truth. I was a link, that much was certain, but a link that knew nothing.
Why did I have one? Why had Rusper’s stranger?
The task stared back at me, silent.
----------------------------------------
Adjustments to the aqueducts around the Inner City wall began only a day after my journey into the Hub. Cutting off water supply to the North District hadn’t been on purpose - I’d had no choice! Not unless I’d wanted to let the Hub Chamber simply flood. But now, for as long as Arterial-III remained sealed, water to the surrounding districts would have to be diverted and siphoned into other reservoirs. The work was swift though, and those reservoirs already rising by that evening. I told myself that my people couldn’t have gone thirsty for too long.
The engineers set about forging their channels through the green wall; masonry so old it seemed a crime to scratch a mark into its face. Or perhaps it would have seemed that way to a less practical people. Planning took a week, Rusper conferring with his architects and picking apart citadel maps in search of the safest place to weaken the very struts that held it up. It was under this unspoken threat of levelling a district and crushing everyone who lived inside the palace that I began to admire the true precision of the Chief Engineer’s work.
‘You’re sure Meck’s Transcripts were correct?’ he asked me at least half a dozen times. I could only shrug and repeat what I’d told him already: that what I’d seen by my small light had matched the charts. Except, that was, for what I’d found in the centre of the Hub ‒ the bridge, the cables and those vertical tubes. Those things were missing from Meck’s Transcripts, and they unsettled Rusper.
Frustration peaking, he began the work half-prepared.
I kept as close an eye on what went on as I could without getting in the way. Both entrances were to be located on the second level of the Deep, facing one another across the diameter of the Hub. Measures were taken to support the load from above, cavities bored into the top of both points, threaded with poles. These stuck out to allow for vertical posts to be secured underneath. New masonry was cut to make lintels above them in order to sustain the enormous pressure of the citadel bearing down. Only then could the temporary posts be removed, and the first green stones cut from the wall.
The tunnels would be wider at their openings, squared into rooms that extended just under a third of the full thickness of the wall. Great care was taken to avoid damage to the pipes in the process, but still the progress was crude. Often, I’d hear Rusper’s voice rasping above the chisels: ‘Don’t mind how it looks, we’ll border the boundaries—give me a hole I can push a barrow through!’
Surprisingly, the ancient green stonework ended after only five feet. Beyond was sandstone—and I hadn’t even noticed as I’d crawled my way through it!
‘The more we uncover of their works, the more the Builders amaze us,’ Rusper mused one night over his cup of black coffee. ‘Don’t you see, boy? We are built upon sandstone. It’s as if the Hub was constructed within unbroken, natural rock.’
‘Is that possible?’
He made a strange face at me.
The teams picked on through the sandstone. More holes were bored and more poles threaded, rough buttresses installed in the corners of the entry-rooms. I watched. The burrowing continued now at half of the original width. Then new tunnels were formed, bolstered in turn. Planning for the bridges was begun. As soon as they gained access to the Hub, construction would begin on a network of cantilever bridges: one bridge to span each of the zones that made up the column.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
Designs were sparing. I was consulted more often now, and even dared some plans of my own. These never met with approval, either from the Chief Engineer or his architects and overseers. Rusper’s disdain for imprecision made him a hard man to please, and it only took one botched measurement to set him off on a tirade.
‘You’ve muddled up all your formulae!’ he would complain, when in fact I’d only switched a pair or forgotten to add one in. Then it was my coding that was wrong: ‘Black ink for adjustments, wash for foundations!’ And when I’d mastered as perfect a draft as any City Guild diagram approved by the likes of Pintle and Gudgeon, he’d no longer want to see it at all. ‘A practical example is worth ten rendered plans, boy! You know were the scrap is. Build me a model!’
They were never accepted. But Rusper was always attentive to what I could tell him of the Hub interior, and always listened to me closely. As long as I could speak fairly quickly. The space inside, I knew, was easily as huge as Meck had claimed it was, and gaps between the pipes were impossibly wide in many places. A bridge to each zone, even built at speed, wasn’t going to be enough.
‘What of the clefts in the piping . . . the gills, as you call them?’
‘Too dangerous,’ I said.
‘Hah! You’ll recall I recently sang you that same song,’ he chided me. ‘Let me worry about dangers. Will the gills get my men to the haemorrhage or not?’
‘No. You’ll need ladders.’
‘That demands too much metal. And we can’t use timber in there. Air’s too wet, it’ll warp.’
‘What about rope?’
‘I’m listening.’
‘There’s heaps of it lying around down here,’ I said excitedly. ‘We could connect the pipes with nets while you work on the bridges.’
This plan he approved, almost at once, and I overheard his muttering about not having thought of it first.
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Eight days after the first stones were loosened, sandstone gave way to green again. We tasted moist air, close now. That tang I remembered. Then the ends of both entry-tunnels crumbled open, and the teams could call across the cold dark to each other. Hands were dispatched into the chamber with many lanterns, and behind them came Rusper.
And me, by his side.
We watched from the tunnel’s edge as the lights pricked their tiny ways into the huge hollow. Between the four giant arterials, the central pipeworks revealed themselves to us all with a kind of grudging majesty; far more than I’d imagined had been there while I’d been groping around in darkness. ‘An engineer’s dream,’ Rusper said on a sigh.
Some way down from our lookout was the bridge—that stone bridge I had discovered. From the southwest wall it arced inward towards the central tube cluster, and then stopped short as if severed. Around the tubes, at four points, a boundary of cables was suspended. So I hadn’t made them up. Those tubes ran all the way down through the lights of the lanterns; lights which now, far below, began to play on the water. It made me dizzy to look. ‘What now?’ I said.
‘Now we work, ekhin Flint,’ Rusper smiled.
Over a hundred triglycerate lanterns were needed to give shape to the sacred vastness, and even that was just enough. Many were pulled from digging level, which plunged the Deep floor into blackness and cut my morning rounds short. Others came from the citadel grounds and servant quarters. But Rusper also made demands upon the estates of the viziers, most of whom favoured open fires and scented lamps anyway. Assuring them all that the inconvenience would be short, he sent sappers back to harvest the green halite mine on fourth level.
But getting the workers through the Hub was a challenge in itself. The pipes could be scaled using the gills, I had done it myself. But my fingers were smaller than those of the men and women whose job it now was to carry tools and materials across a drop of nearly four hundred feet. On the second day of access, Pintle reported that a man had fallen to his death from Zone Three. Rusper must have seen something in my face when she brought that news; if more deaths followed after that, I never heard about them.
He doubled the workforce. Up and down the interior of the ancient green wall, lanterns were mounted on poles that reached inward through the half-light. In the concentrated triglycerate, pipes shone green. Faithful to my advice, everything that could hold it was covered in rope, trellises suspended across all zones, hammered to the wall with ten-inch pins and clamped to the iron pipes themselves. The Hub became navigable, if only just safe by the time we climbed down to Zone Six to inspect the damage.
Workers sank a lantern-pole through the surface of the lake and I knew, the second I saw it, that the hole had grown bigger. Now gaping out of the arterial’s side, it was wide enough to fit a man in a suit of armour. Full-plate Naemian armour, the way Sarah once described it.
‘It’s bigger,’ I said, squinting through the greenness of the lanterns. Their glare obscured all detail above and below the water; even Rusper’s gloved fist as it knocked on the iron.
‘Can’t be,’ he said. ‘You sealed it yourself. There’s been no pressure on this channel since you were here two weeks ago.’
I shook my head. ‘I’m sure it’s bigger.’
‘Trick of the light,’ he replied, clapping the glove on my shoulder.
But there was more than just the haemorrhage to inspect. Now more than ever before, it was clear to the Guild that Meck’s Transcripts of the Hub had been correct. Almost perfect, in fact, except for three missing features I had discovered myself: the stone bridge that extended from the wall of the chamber—so out of place—the cluster of thin, vertical tubes that descended from the ceiling, and the web-like vane of black cables suspended symmetrically around them. There seemed no explanation for these things, or even any purpose.
Pintle and Gudgeon, both experts in such things, examined the cables themselves and found them to be made of some material unknown to Antissa: a coarse yet malleable fibre that would stretch but never break. Each of its intersecting lines was anchored to the wall at opposite sides of the Hub, with closed hooks which wouldn’t—couldn’t—be loosened. Nor could any of the Guild’s industrial saws cut through the fibre, even slightly. So for the time, Rusper decided to simply leave them alone. There was other work to be done.
Fifty foundrymen and a score more hands were conscripted for the bridges. Sappers were mustered to drain the water from the bottom of the column. Cranes were installed at the edges of the tunnels to raise buckets on ropes, assisted by a conveyor-belt of hands along the gills. Deepworkers ferried the water in barrows to the reservoirs of the city. And after five days of steady labour, the haemorrhage I had found broke the surface.
Repairs on Arterial-III were begun.
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Meanwhile, my puzzle went on.
The Discs had to be something.
I turned to the tools of the workshop, often sharing it with Rusper in the working hours of the day. Though their smoothness made slippery grips of even the tightest of vices, I’d secure them in place as best I could and, with whatever I could find ‒ ratchets, chisels, files, scrapers and a growing bewilderment ‒ prize for any tell-tale, proud edge that could be hiding in their elliptical mirrors. Hands always gloved.
They couldn’t be perfect! But no matter how fine a tool I used on them, there were no edges to be found. Not anywhere, however small. I tried all strengths of magnets too. But magnets had no effect on them at all.
Something had to make them do what they did, or what at least mine had done to me. Was it inside them, trapped inside? And if it was, how could I reach it? Did the metal exterior open? It seemed it couldn’t be broken. Or maybe it was the metal itself, if it was metal. Magic metal . . . ?
‘Will you stop grinding your teeth, please.’
‘Sorry.’
That had turned into a nervous habit now, along with squeezing my thumbs or frowning so hard and for so long my forehead ached. But the Discs absorbed me so fully, even as their surreal mirror-images mocked my focused frown. Somehow I ignored those reflections, though it was much harder to ignore the two perfect copies of Rusper hunched over his fusils-in-progress. Without having to look up, I could watch every little thing he did; every snib and node his fingers tweaked, as if through the fingers themselves.
And what proved, after all, that there was anything behind or underneath the impossible faces of the Discs? They were heavy enough to be solid right through, so why did I suspect something hidden inside them? What, within a tiny metallic oval, could unleash a white fire and put a voice into my head?
Did I dare touch it, unleash it again? Would it work a second time? Would the other do the same, and if I risked it, touched it, would it—?
‘Flint—the teeth!’
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Work went on at a pace.
The Transcripts became indispensable to progress. Daily I was tasked by Gudgeon ‒ now in charge of Hub “Reconditioning” ‒ to search out old pages of codes or coordinates penned by Meck long ago. With the reclaiming of the original core of the pipeworks, the Royal Guild had now entered a new engineering era, so it wasn’t long before I found myself raking into Meck’s uncategorised papers: hundreds of drawings and notes without place.
Something about his material entranced me. Among the endless stacks of sheaves, were plans for things that seemed unlike anything the Guild had ever done. One drawing I kept coming back to ‒ graphite on water-damaged parchment ‒ showed a circular figure with a divided interior. The sections were shaped like the axle of a wheel, and yet it couldn’t be a wheel because the spaces within the axle opened onto heavier lines. It seemed to turn, and even open, as I looked. He’d put no labels on the drawing but left a side of it blank as if he’d meant to come back.
More obscure were the scribbles: entire notebooks full of scribbles. Most of them were meaningless shapes, mostly circles or variations. Over and over, they seemed to reach for a form just out of his grasp. Here and there I’d find a label or random number, rarely a word. And while his penmanship was flawless, his writing easy on the eye, on every few pages at least one word or figure would be looped in desperate whirls.
Had Gaspar Meck simply gone mad? In less roughed and damaged notebooks, the shapes were more detailed and the circles crossed with thin, bisecting lines. I delved on deeper, the figures becoming less and less like scribbles now, more like preliminary sketches. Bisecting lines more like pronged arrows: sometimes four, sometimes six. Most were haphazardly labelled with some kind of measurement or other, but never anything to tell me what it was that it measured. Nor could Rusper shed any light when I brought them to him with my questions.
‘Much of Meck’s material was never archived after he died,’ he said, regarding the mass of paper behind me like a chore he’d been quite happy to avoid until I’d gone and brought it up. ‘And that’s only because he himself left it unclear or unfinished. Most of what you’ll find there will be ideas that never worked. If there’s anything new of use, it’s not worth searching it out.’
But I was hooked. It was those circles. I relished every chance I got to leaf into the notebooks I hadn’t opened yet, too often losing track of the time. Gudgeon’s requests would reach him late, and on one such occasion he brought complaint to Rusper. Who gave me a stern dressing down.
The Royal Guild expected, and would accept nothing less, than full attention to the tasks with which I was charged. That’s what he said, quite cross with me. So, after that, I put aside my own time for chasing Meck’s circles.
And yet, just as the circles seemed to be floating away, becoming little more than doodles on the edges of discarded transcripts, I found the thing that they’d been floating towards. At last, hard lines at the end of the meaningless scribbles.
Someone had cleared away all his papers but left the scroll-tubes behind, thinking them empty. I’d thought so too. But when I looked into one, a sheet of rotten parchment was stuck fast to its inner lining. I pulled it gently, tearing only a narrow strip of its margin, and spread it out. Whole, I guessed it twenty inches by thirty, though a wider strip had disintegrated from the left side as well. Moisture had bloated the rest, leaving it brittle and brown with many patches of mould. But while the inkwork was cloudy, it was clear enough to me that I was looking at a finished diagram.
It showed a complex circle. Like the rings of a tree-trunk, it repeated itself in blurred double lines. Eight radial spokes in pitch-black ink sprang from the centre like horns. They gave it the look of a hoary old compass, but that wasn’t what it was. No. At the end of the spokes, I could make out the remains of more detail, now faded. Only near the top of the page had any true detail survived: a weird extension of one spoke, angled away. It was furnished with another, different shape and a few fine labels, although most of these had gone with the left-most edge.
I rummaged for a lens to magnify the script, took up a pen and found myself climbing right onto the table. Nudging the lens over the page, I copied fragments to my arm:
SPHERE FRAME / . . . using arms / Anchor claw [?] /
[NEUTRAL] / [REST + NEUTRAL / 90 degrees / . . . drical / . . . pipes
I threw down the pen. Claw?
What had Meck been trying to build—a machine or a monster? And had he built it or not?
Carefully, I rolled up the sheet, put it back inside its tube and slipped the tube under my bedframe. It would keep. Rusper was too busy anyway, and my own tasks piling on.
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The metal of the Discs was unbreakable, inflexible, reactive to nothing.
‘Rhaum,’ suggested Rusper. ‘Hardest substance I know. At least, before . . .’
I guessed it: ‘Those black cables in the Hub?’
He nodded vaguely as his thoughts were drawn back to that mystery. The “Polymer,” as we’d since taken to calling it. But he shook the thought away.
The Discs couldn’t be rhaum, he eventually decided, because rhaum had a very distinctive smell and the Discs didn’t. ‘Esmum?’ he offered, then changed his mind about that too. The colour wasn’t right: esmum was known for its yellow tinge. Haematite? No. They weren’t grey, or for that matter, any colour at all. They were manifest reflections, with no visible quality that belonged to just them alone, seemingly. They didn’t make sense to the eye or to the brain, and if I looked at them too long I’d get all anxious and giddy. It almost hurt, in a way, and I knew Rusper felt it too.
‘Lead?’ I ventured, not really serious about that idea at all. The weight was right, I supposed, but lead didn’t reflect. He didn’t bother to answer.
‘Glass would have cracked or shattered by now, we know that,’ he thought aloud, ‘and not even the artésans of Ered can forge unbreakable glass.’
‘What are mirrors made of?’ I asked, though I knew – for all their clarity – they were no crafted pocket mirrors. Even the word we’d been using all this time for what it did—reflect—was wrong somehow.
‘Here they are made from silver and brass, which we add to a substrate to stop them corroding,’ Rusper said. But he was doubtful of the theory. If the Discs had been made in the same way as Antissan mirrors, the outer substrate would be flawless and likely too hard. That presented a problem. Without flaws it would be difficult to test the substrate’s qualities.
‘Can we try anyway?’
He equipped me. I sat through the evenings with both Discs set before me, armed with wire brushes and jars sent up from fourth level. I caressed the perfect mirror faces with every possible catalyst ‒ liquids and powders with names so obscure that they might as well have been codes on piping charts ‒ coaxing them to speak. Say or do something. But they wouldn’t.
Some evenings into the process, Rusper suddenly exclaimed: ‘Have you tried water?’
I hadn’t.
Filling a bowl from the workshop’s tap, I dropped them in and, as I waited, Rusper watched me.
But . . . ‘Nothing,’ I pouted.
He pouted back. ‘Still, worth a try. Some metals do react with water. Aqualumium for example. Rare now, but once mined in Laudassa.’
I’d never heard of it before; at least I thought I hadn’t. He crossed the workshop, pulled off his Guild-ring and dropped it straight into the bowl. The reaction was quick. While the Discs played weirdly with the reflection of the ring’s band, the red-brown cogwheel crest transformed. Specks of yellow peeped through the metal and then suddenly the whole cog shone bright enough to light the interior. It was easily the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life. Rusper gave a smile at my amazement and fished it out with a shake. Back on his finger, the gleam faded.
What he had said those weeks ago about my loss and the pain, and the strength of iron, came back to me. I caught his eye. He caught mine too, but if we were thinking the same thing, he didn’t say anything about it.
Not long after that he sent down Meck’s “blister” catalogue, which detailed how to apply various chemicals to a metal, provoking reactions. It was done with delicate looped wires and special lamps, creating bubbles of solution from a subject. Or so we hoped. The bubble was held to the flame of the lamp and studied through the dark lenses of goggles for any changes to the colour of the flame. Colours would tell of all kinds of properties contained in metals, and Meck had made long lists of these. I tested hundreds.
‘Progress?’ nudged Rusper on the sixth or seventh night.
Slumped on my workbench, I looked up and rubbed my face, drawling, ‘No nyphon.’
‘Come, show me.’ He dragged the transcript page out from under my arms and skimmed it fast. ‘In that case, cross off copper and cobalt as well. Elimination’s half as good as discovery, Flint.’
No it wasn’t. ‘That’s if anything came off on the wire in the first place,’ I moped and sank back into my arms. My patience with chemical tests had run out. But then, so had the Deep’s chemical stores.