It took me a while to understand how it all worked. That is, what exactly my service to the Viceroy really meant, and how it bound me to both the Caliphate and the Mooncircle Throne.
As a wearer of the greenstring, I was allowed to move freely through the Inner City, or High District as some called it, and all the other city districts. As one who served only one master, I was also permitted in the upper halls of the citadel. But I had to be careful. There were those who regulated the duties of the Mooncircle service, of course, but there were also the guards. These were the citadel “black-capes” of Captain Mondric’s Fortress Guard, all of them quick to cane any servant who stepped out of line. The backs and legs of all the greenstring servants were a webwork of scars, the children’s too, and in the mornings I’d hear the cracks and cries of pain from the underpass roads where they took beatings. The guards didn’t look down on those they punished, or so it seemed to me anyway, and the servants didn’t hate them either. At other times, servants and guards would talk and laugh with one another! It was, I soon learned, the Vedish way. It wasn’t kind.
There were exceptions. If seen wearing the swathes, or tailored jackets that came of working for just one master, a servant could often escape the guards’ notice. I was one of these few. The swathes took getting used to, but eventually I could put them on without help. Their itch did wear off and soon I was wearing them wherever I went. They were a blessing in the sun.
Other servants refreshed my washpot every morning after breakfast, but I washed my own clothes. To clean myself, now that the bathtub had been removed from my chamber, I used the steams where all the servants went to bathe. There wasn’t much privacy there. But the others were wary of me: with most of my time spent underground ‒ or at least, under the surface of the city ‒ my hard-won desert tan was fading. And as I became the pale-skinned Elmine that I was rumoured to be, they gave me space to bathe alone.
From the uppermost halls of the citadel, it was possible to reach some of the towers. Curious about the tower with all the scaffolds around its dome, I went exploring.
Whatever work the scaffolds were there for had since been paused, or even cancelled. Musty from disuse, and dim inside, I found the winch that worked the skylight in the dome; except it kept on sticking with rust or lack of oil or something, and opened less than halfway. The light that shafted from the gap revealed a spiral of murals in pinkish stone that climbed the full height of the tower’s interior walls. By taking to the sloping, winding walkway I was able to study the sculpted tales they told of Vorth’s history. Or try.
There were no written descriptions of anything here; only mute, graven figures of the Vedans from the past. So I guessed. As I climbed alongside the murals, I marked instatements of satraps and caliphs, with thrones and mapped regions to tell which ones were which. The maps consisted of little more than jagged borders and chiselled textures of sea or sand or hills or rolling dunes. Scenes grew more detailed near the top, as if events were clearer in memory but now a challenge for sculpting tools. After another map of Vorth’s coast came the scene of a throned man who pointed to another man, who knelt. The kneeling man was on the side of the coastal map, and his hands were raised. As if begging. In the next scene, his head had been cut off – that was very clear. And in the next, a great host of people could be seen walking away from the throne and the pointed finger; away from the coast and from the dunes, northward it seemed, to judge by the squiggles of the rivers I counted. Yes: the Empty River and the Elm.
These scenes felt angry, somehow, and stayed with me for days after that. Why had no one written down, in words, what they seemed so eager to tell?
Abandoning that mystery, I went back down to look more closely at the murals near the floor. These were the earliest tales. Scenes showed, quite clearly, an early fortress being built up on a hill. They showed some structures, old machines and early pipes as they were laid. But most enchanting of all were scenes where groups of early Vedans stood facing another, stranger folk. These strangers were sculpted as if far larger than the Vedans: great square titans of men with huge eyes and even huger hands. Another scene saw them raising bricks of huge size from the desert and placing them atop the hill. Ancient Antissans of legend, I knew. The Builders.
Had they been giants, then? It was thrilling enough to imagine. But if so little was known about the Builders, then was it not simply more likely that these sculptors had guessed? Or made it up? I knew how stories worked, I realised, and thought about the more fantastic of Sarah’s tales: like the mysterious Blue Man and some of the things that he was meant to have done in Naemia. And now I wondered when exactly my love of hearing those stories had left believing them behind.
I dared to explore a little further from that tower of murals. Not far, on the same floor, was a grander hall, floored all in marble, that looked out onto the city from tall windows. Servants in the steams had talked about it as the “Dynasty Hall.” Along its windowless wall was a long display of regalia. No crowns, but sceptres and staves with coloured jewels; lustrous cloths, bright golden medals and links of chains. I even found the little hook under which the word VICEROY was engraved. Of course, no medallion hung there now.
Here were also likenesses of the satraps; largest being the four who had ruled under the name of Aysattah. The statue of Syphus the First, founder of the Aysattah Dynasty, reached almost all the way to the ceiling, raised on a plinth which one could climb by spiral steps, and there surrounded by four snarling lions. Near him, though smaller, were his sons: Hyphet the First, Hyphet the Second.
Last was the man who ruled today: Syphus the Second. Or at least, that was his royal name. His was a bust of head and shoulders, although I instantly thought his sculptor must have had nerves of stone as well. The face was warlike and cruel. If a mouth had been carved into it at all, it was invisible under the beard-cones that splayed outward from his sharp cheekbones and made his bald head look like an egg wrapped in a pleated napkin. The nose was big and fat and flat with wide-flared nostrils, like two tusks. Temples broad and sloped. Brow folding forward, a curling wave the moment just before it broke and crashed. And empty eyes that glared contempt. Hating me.
I didn’t go back to the Dynasty Hall for a while. Too close to the tower of the Satrap himself, and the blue-and-whites never far. For me at least, being overlooked by the Iron Shield wasn’t so certain. I’d learned first-hand what they were willing to do with half a chance, and for a while couldn’t shake the fear that they’d spot me on my errands and drag me back to their sneering Lieutenant. There were much fewer of the Shieldmen, and yet some days I saw them almost as often as the guards. So it was strange, unsettling too, that they ignored me every time. Soon, I stopped drawing my hood up or dodging behind the nearest pillar. Whether or not they did know better, which they did ‒ I knew they did ‒ I had become the Elmine boy.
Rusper’s personal living quarters were on the same floor as the steams, although at first I found it strange that a man who held the rank of Viceroy didn’t live in more . . .
‘More what? My rooms were here before the Viceroyalty was instituted,’ he explained, ‘and I’ve no desire to move them now. Just how much sleep do you think I’d get with the Sanhedrin for neighbours!’
They were comfortable, if simple. He slept in the smaller of two rooms, reserving the larger as a study. Unlike the cluttered, low and lantern-lit workshop, it was bright and airy. A window overlooked a fully ivy-coated wall above the courtyard underpass. There was a writing desk he never used, and a bureau. A sheepskin chair. A plain rug. A very boring tapestry. A pipe-fed triglycerate oven that shone shallow green at night-time and, somehow connected to its pipes, a tall brass samovar that he used to boil his coffee. He had no wife or children. Nor did I believe any of the gossip I heard in the steams that he courted a harem-senah from the lower districts. I never saw a woman in his rooms.
He would invite me here sometimes to eat with him in the evenings. Sometimes we’d talk, and sometimes not. When we did, he would ask about my duties and tasks and was I not overworked? Was I comfortable in my lodgings? Was I eating enough and did I like Antissan food? Was I aware that I was not held as a prisoner in the Deep and could freely return to see my people at their shelter? I’d nod to that, but say nothing. He didn’t know it wasn’t true.
Piece by piece, he told me of how the Guild had been founded, describing some of the greatest feats of engineering of the past, and how a famous mathematician named Albastra Azal had been involved in some of them. In turn, I did my best at reciting Sarah’s stories as she’d told them to me: great King Saremar and his reign and his knights, the holy Celestri of Fallstone Bastion, the untamed druids of Culn Forest. The ones I told best were of the Blue Man: that weird, wise hero of our lore. He’d been over a hundred years old, the legends said, had advised the great princes of Naemia and even held conversations with the Celestrian Archons.
All these stories entertained him, but to me they still weren’t right. Not anymore.
On other evenings the High Commander would be there, delivering reports and conferring as the aide to the Viceroy. To begin with, Plamen showed reluctance to speak in front of me, as if disapproving of my presence or worried about what I might hear. So when he was there, and they were talking, I’d simply play with his dog Tazen. That gave him reason enough to ignore me, just as he would wherever else we crossed paths.
Captain Mondric, as unlike Plamen as it was possible to be, was rough but good-natured with me, in his way. Every time we met anywhere he’d grip my neck in one hand and screw my hair up with the other, booming out, ‘If it isn’t our little Elmine tool-boy!’ Heads would turn.
It was better, I realised, to stay in the Deep and eat by myself in the workshop. A meal in the morning and another meal at night, always brought by the same bug-eyed, bald girl with the yellow jacket. Her name was Zeek; she smiled sometimes, but never said anything to me.
The food was simple: stewed ramsons, spiced asparagus, or yams with sesame tahina. Beef kibhin on a good day. And in the mornings always tashi, that bowl of sweet and frothy oats, currants and caraway seeds. The Vedish ate no poultry, keeping chickens, ducks and geese only for their eggs and feather down. The meals were good and I was grateful; just like my clothes and nice warm bed with its red-bird quilt, a better fare than that afforded to my people.
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News of the Rath came through the High Commander’s scouts out in the desert. Under the Satrap’s decree, which forbade the deployment of martial forces, the use of these scouts had somehow upset the viziers of the Sanhedrin. This in spite of strict orders that the scouts engage no enemy; not to mention the fact that the council seemed only too happy about parties still risking fishing journeys to the coast. That arrangement didn’t last though, and before a full month was out, there was no fish to be bought or eaten anywhere in the city. Things were changing.
Western Verunia, in the northernmost caliphy of Vorth, was overrun, and the people of its “shen” villages crammed between the Southeast and Mercantile Districts. All the borderland settlements were now empty as well. Unless a pocket of Naemians survived somewhere else, away from the desert, then the ninety in the North District were the last of my people in the world. That was strange to think about sometimes. And I found myself feeling sorry for the Verunians too, all the more when I worked out that they’d been the ones who had helped us, sending seed and livestock and coal over the Elm those years ago.
I listened closely to Plamen whenever I could. The Rath, who would only ever attack in small groups, never occupied the sites they laid to waste, but instead moved back again to greater numbers every time. As to where those greater numbers were, there were no reports.
The scouts were led by a soldier called Kathris ‒ an “Artabh” of Antissa’s regiment, whose soldiers were called “vortans” ‒ charged with observation of the Empty River’s banks for any sign of southward crossings by the Rath. Kathris, I heard, had erected a flag-line from the coast in the west, all the way to the edge of the Lack in the east – some fifty miles. But the flags had not long stood up to the shredding night winds of the desert.
Heavy, intricate sparts from the stockpiles of the Deep had been positioned at the flagpoles after that, and Ratheine movement tracked by where and how often the items were disturbed. Rath moved by night, ranging through the north. And soon enough, as revealed by the reports, their groups began to breach the flag-line. Kathris and his party would sight up to thirty at a time on the dunes of the Northern Erg. Growing bolder, it seemed. And although, as an enemy, Plamen said they showed no clear purpose or direction, the image of the Rath at city walls was never far from my dreams.
Those on the border could do it . . . mount an advance on Antissa. Even without the thousands yet to cross out of Naemia, through the mountains . . .
To my comfort, I’d also heard Plamen’s outline of defence in the event of facing greater numbers. Since the retreat from the northern border, the Mooncircle Army was garrisoned here at Antissa, again under the Satrap’s high decree restricting defence to the fortress alone. East and west of Antissa, Plamen explained more than once, a front could be formed that would stretch from the coastline of the gulf to a place called Calvallagh in the east: a front fully manned and provisioned from the fortress. This, he advised, was the Viceroy’s best chance of holding back siege of the fortress, or worse an invasion of the middle caliphies. The Bronze Coast, then Laudassa, Methar after that . . .
The Sanhedrin, I understood, was watching the Viceroy very closely. Everyone knew only too well that before a single soldier was prepared for deployment beyond Antissa’s sandstone walls, the Satrap himself must lift decree. Any less would mean high treason.
But the Satrap, high up in his tower, remained silent. And the Viceroy’s hands tied to that decree.
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When I remembered Meck’s scroll, I spent more nights poring over it. And the harder I tried to make sense of that weird diagram, the more intrigued I became by what the former Chief Engineer had been doing in his time heading the Guild, and the more fascinated about the ancient Builders of Antissa. I asked to see their parchments; the originals Meck had copied for the Transcripts, but Pintle said that those parchments had been the property of the throne for more than a generation. That was annoying. It made me only hungrier for what was known about the Builders.
‘Precious little,’ Rusper told me. Nestled in the big sheepskin chair of his quarters, there was a mood of sedation about him tonight. Stars stood clearly in the window behind him while the triglycerate oven cast green shadows on the rug. One of the shadows was mine. I sat at his feet, my legs crossed under me, and snapped my magnets together.
‘But why?’ I said, showing my frustration.
‘Because,’ he said, fluttering his eyelids, ‘once you’ve separated all the mechanical and architectural engineering, Antissa’s written records are scant at best. That makes our history obscure. And even then, what we have now is only what survived the great onslaught.’
‘You mean the fortress was attacked?’
‘`2760. Four hundred years ago,’ he replied. ‘Sacked by Lackish barbarians, and their shamans of course. The city was left so devastated that now true Vedish nationhood is only taken from that date. The barbarians were repelled, but at the price of many lives. And much history.’
‘So that’s what happened to the Builders? Barbarians killed them?’
Rusper pondered. ‘No account of their disappearance links it to death by any means. But it’s possible. We don’t know how many there were, after all.’
‘Barbarians?’
‘No, Builders,’ he said. ‘A thousand, a hundred . . . a mere dozen perhaps? Little more than speculation exists about them now. That and their works.’
From my rapt gaze he must have clocked my true interest in the subject. He sat forward.
‘Whoever the Builders really were, what has always been clear is that they were regarded as superior by the people of the desert. It may be that they ruled here, and yet to claim a fortress by the sword and then abandon it does not make much sense. Yet that is the lasting belief.’
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‘That they left?’
He sat back, yawned and nodded. ‘Legend has it that they followed the river and never came back to Antissa. The clerics, however, believe they did return some decades later to erect their monuments in the desert. The stones at Calvallagh, Laudassa and Methar are the sites of their temples.’
‘I thought you didn’t have gods.’
‘We don’t,’ he said. ‘The temples stand to venerate the Builders themselves, in the form of the gryphon: a sigil gleaned from the stones, though winds have worn them away now.’
‘I’ve seen the gryphon.’
‘Of course, hard not to. Gryphons have obsessed our sculptors ever since the old days.’
‘So what do the clerics believe about them?’
‘About the gryphons?’
‘No, about the Builders.’
He picked and brushed lint off his thobe. ‘They are devoted to the Builders’ legacy, as they see it. That and the prospect of their future return. Few have any use for such ideas in our time, you understand, even if the first clerics are supposed to have been engineers themselves. Nevertheless, to this day, the ergish Vedans of our desert retain ties of deep trust in the clerics. Ironic, perhaps, that such should be what most divides us from the southern communities now.’
‘Do you think they’ll come back?’
‘The clerics?’
‘The Builders.’
‘Ah.’ He gave a wistful smile. ‘Flint, it’s a legend. We know they were masters of engineering-craft. We have the proof all around us. We also know that, after their time, the inevitable occurred here. A population, which may or may not have been as Vedish as they were, took governance of the city and pursued the engineering that had been practiced behind its walls. One cannot deny that it is the pivot on which Vorth’s identity now turns.’
Frowning , I thought how that hadn’t really answered my question. And I was disappointed because none of this was helping me at all. ‘Was Vorth even called Vorth back then?’
‘Probably not.’
‘And does . . .’ I began. But shook the question away; it was only going to sound stupid to a man like Rusper Symphin.
‘Out with it,’ he said, resting his cheek on his knuckles.
‘Does the gryphon exist?’
My magnets snapped together sharply, and the engineer simply smiled. ‘The clerics hold it to be the ultimate Arbiter of Justice. A beast with the body of a lion, head and wings of an eagle by most depictions. I’ve never seen one!’ he laughed.
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I’d wander.
Surrounded by masters and tasks almost all of every day, the hours I could claim for myself were somehow sweeter. I wouldn’t stay in the High District. Stately dress and clopping hooves reminded me too easily of my place as a servant, so I would venture away from the Inner City altogether.
Fascination overtook the fear I’d felt on first peering out of that bright warehouse doorway. Slowly, I grew more at ease with the noises and smokes of the bustling North District. With coins from my pouch ‒ the small stipend of seven kopechs a day that I’d been promised ‒ I bought handfuls of nuts, bags of dates and currants, salted jerky. Before they cut off the coast to the fishing parties, I ate pot-crab right from its shell. A meal that was once the common Vedish man’s fare, it cost ten kopechs—almost a tallan. I drank cups of frothy goat’s milk and a few tankards of braehg, the weak beer made out of oats that the lay Antissans all drank. I didn’t like it very much, realising to my surprise that I’d got used to the city water’s metal tang. Maybe even liked it.
Hood drawn, I breathed Antissan life on the fumes of the streets; listened to the whine of duduk flutes, pluckings of the rebab and the zither. I thought how human the crowds looked now; made of families like I’d had. People who lived, just as we’d done, day to day and chore to chore. People who maybe only now started to fear for the future. They’d been so frightening to me before – so hard and rough and unlike us ‒ and they still were those things, I guessed. Dismissive, brusque and unkind. It wasn’t easy to like them, even now. But did I hate them? Vedans had been kind to us once, when we’d first reached the borderlands. Perhaps not these Vedans, alright, but just how different could they be?
Those had been Verunians, I remembered. Far northern Vedans. Probably very different.
When the bustle got too much, I’d go up to the citadel gardens and stroll among the hedges that overlooked the districts. There I soaked in aloneness and the peace of green things under the sky. Often I saw the clerics there too, at least often enough to know that they remained at the fortress for no more than two weeks before returning to their temples in the desert. And whatever fate awaited them there when the Rath moved further south. Their fat Caliph Omran, I heard, did stay behind.
Steps from those gardens led down into the Citizen District, where some evenings I would walk between the better, white-walled houses. I watched the women and girls from the capital harem-houses: dark, outlandish creatures from southern caliphies, arrayed in silks and speckled gems. They sang and danced, enticed, but never broke their nymphish charm. I had my own giddy ideas about what wonders of the body awaited their suitors behind the closed doors of those secretive houses, though in time would learn that this was not the way of the harem. They were not whores.
A crust of sandstone fortress wall was now the edge of the world. From the eastward walls, I’d sometimes watch the practice-fire of war machines; the catapults and trebuchets that flung great loads of broken masonry and rubble over the heads of the Verunians in the Mercantile District, to smash into the sandstone of other, long-ruined buildings below.
To the south were the farming quarters that clung to the crags like shelves of crops. Built to fit the ledge of each rising crag, they climbed the hill like shallow steps toward the rearmost gate of the fortress; soldiers always on patrol along the lower walls that hemmed each one from the drop. I’d stand above them, looking down, watching the labour and the beasts. Or close my eyes and let the warm, still, bleating air take me somewhere else. Far from the fortress and the desert. At least until some watchman came to tell me off and jostle me away.
More often, I’d stand on northern walls and let south winds blow dust and powdered brick and chrozite out of my hair; face to the borderlands. Overrun. So full of memories that hurt. No going back there, now I knew. No home to go to. I thought about returning to the warehouse; a piece of me knowing that I still belonged among those people, and not with strangers. Did they have enough of what they needed, as Rusper always assured me? Were they warm when they went to sleep? Were they safe, and were they treated, if not kindly, then not too cruelly by those wardens?
Who was there for me now if Jerome had died that day? Dewar, maybe, and Mother Far. A grumpy butcher and an old woman. Even so, the dread of just how disappointed they’d be in what I’d done made me feel sick.
Not that it mattered. Plamen couldn’t have made his rules more clear on that day without threatening the removal of one of my fingers himself. And I knew he was watching. Whether or not by the grace of the Satrap of Vorth, I was a citizen of Antissa now and couldn’t rejoin my people.
But then one evening, just as the dusk light was starting to fade, I climbed the steps from the gardens to spot a face I recognised. A name leapt straight out of my memory. Shamak. The warden. He’d been at the shelter on the day when they’d knocked the warehouse wall down, dismissing Dewar’s request for food. I caught him up.
In a cool silence he listened to me as I described the boy I hoped still lived among the refugees at the warehouse. Bulging eyes and lots of freckles, sandy hair . . .
‘If he’s a borderlander who did not die of his injuries, the shelter is where he will be,’ Shamak replied in clipped tones. Daringly, I offered him a tallan in the hope he’d double-check, but he snorted at the coin and stalked off.
And then it came to me—Hetch. The little man with the sandrat sent by Plamen to rescue me. I’d thought him the Iron Shield executioner that day, and maybe he was. But he was more than that. He seemed to be everywhere and doing everything, probably the reason Plamen found him useful. And if he was useful to Plamen, he could be useful to me.
For a man who was everywhere, however, Hetch proved a challenge to find now I was actually looking. But after three days of keeping an eye out for him, I found him loafing in the steams.
‘You were there that day, in the courtyard,’ I said, addressing the half of his head that was visible above the water of his bath. ‘You saw my friend escape those boys, the boys who killed Con.’ The hairless head too deep in water to nod, the eyes widened. So I described Jerome again.
Frog lips surfaced: ‘That’s more like it.’
‘More like what?’
‘More Naemian. More than you look, Naemian.’ The lips dipped. I stared blankly. Little bubbles popped in front of his nostrils, followed moments later by a larger bubble near the middle of the bath. I blinked back steam. I should correct him, say I’m Elmine, but the words wouldn’t come out. He knew the truth anyway.
The dwarf emerged, slopping water on the tiles. Looking away from his pink naked skin, I stepped back and nearly tripped over the sandrat as it scuttled behind my heels. I shuddered when its nude flesh brushed my ankle.
‘Watch it, Naemian!’
It wasn’t easy, this; getting any answers out of Hetch. He didn’t seem in the mood. But as he wrapped himself in towels, a beady eye peered at me sidelong.
‘Tomorrow I bear a missive to Senera Amyra’s estate. I shall go to the North District after, and seek this boy of whom you speak.’
He was as good as his word. The next day, when I got back with my drafts bundle from the foreman, a note was waiting on my workbench. The words were small, just like the man, but the message wasn’t a long one. My heart lay down as I read it:
Boy not there — h.
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Empty of ideas, I took to pacing the floor of the workshop, idly flipping and catching my Disc. For about a week now, I’d not been scared of its touching my bare hands, and when it had, nothing had happened. Nor was it going to break if I dropped it on the bricks.
I’d taken hammers to the thing and hurled it at walls with all my strength just to make something happen. Even the pain of that white blaze, I figured, would be better than this. But nothing. I’d almost started to hate it, but couldn’t.
Now I paced some more, flipping the Disc. Then flopped myself into Rusper’s chair and set the Disc down on his workbench. A minute later, I picked it up again and knocked it twice: once on the brick, once on the wood of the worktop. I ground my teeth and, in the mirror, watched my magnified jaw muscles clench.
Enough.
Yes it was late, all lanterns low, but now I knew these levels well. I took the winch-lift and a ladder up to the furnace rooms. All the foundrymen were gone, but forges gleamed as they would all through the night; some higher flames licking their overhanging canopies and baking the shadows around them. My fist was just as tight around the Disc as it had been the day the guards first marched me to the door of the Captain. Years ago that felt now, though it had only been a month I’d lived and worked here in the Deep.
The task of the Discs was separate. Even if Rusper did believe them to be the magic talismans of Lackish shamans, forewarning attack from the northeast, I couldn’t say why he even thought it important. I didn’t care. The riddle was so much more mine than his. It took root in the beginning of my life, it seemed, and was without a doubt what had brought me to this place. Not only was it why I found myself wearing Vedish swathes, an engineer and Viceroy’s hand—it was the reason I was alive. That it had power, that much was easy. But what was it for, that power? Why’d it been released, and why at me? These questions had always been the main ones, the most important of all, but now they bubbled to the skin of my brain on the heat of anger.
Give it to the fire. That’s the one thing I hadn’t done. The flames could peel back its secrets, melt them all the way down.
There’d be one left.
At a forge, I climbed brick steps and stood above a roaring fire. Like a caldera at my feet, it tossed up sparks. I held the Disc out. Its mirror became the flames below it, as if it truly contained them, and so bright it burned my eyes. I looked away.
Heat seared my fingers.
Something gave way—
—Had I just fainted?
I had fainted . . . from the heat?
My head was spinning. I was lying on my back, and it was sore. I let my eyes adjust; focus on the ceiling, but when they did it was . . . wrong, that ceiling. It had been all shadows when I came in, but now the buttresses were close. Too close.
I sat up on the floor.
They were too close because I wasn’t in the furnace rooms. I was back in the workshop.
How?
The Disc lay on the bricks between my legs, unscathed and perfect as always, reflecting my confusion. I put my hand out, watched my fingers growing huge inside its face, then disappear behind the gleam.
The Disc shone blue!
Jerking my hand back, I tried to scrape some of my thoughts back into order, but couldn’t do it, they just kept slipping and sliding out of focus. I could barely trust my legs to support my weight when I stood up. Something felt different; very different, in the room. Eyes dragging weirdly as I moved them wall to wall, worktop to worktop, I realised everything was in its proper place, just as I’d left it. Nothing wrong. Except that something was wrong, and how had I even got back here? Had the light dipped there? No. It hadn’t. Triglycerate shone cleanly behind a lantern’s partial shutter.
Was someone coming to the door? The door was closed . . . How had I got here? I watched the handle, which didn’t turn. Of course it didn’t! What was I doing?
I was exhausted, overworked, confused and who knew what else. I’d been at this too hard. But then, this was a result: the Disc still glowed there on the floor, that eerie aura even brighter than last time.
A little gingerly, I bent down to pick it up. Ignore the glow. Ignore the glow.
Ignore the—
YOU!
I keeled back into a stool and went clattering down with it, no sooner on the floor than I bolted back onto my feet. That voice! Same as before, like a clap on the shoulder in my head.
Someone was coming. I heard no footsteps, voices, movement: I just knew. The light had dipped. And something at the workshop door, I simply understood with some new sense, was going to happen. I stared and waited.
Waited until the wood’s grain warped and parted in front of me. An oval pressed in through its surface like hot wax through thinnest paper. The shape was pale and featureless but for two almond-shaped mounds embedded in it. The mounds both split then and peeled. Colourless circles looked at me. I looked at them too, willed them away. Willed away the whole shape—away and back into the door!
It floated forward instead. A head was birthed out of the wood, behind it a body. A figure, tall as a man, stepped onto the bricks without a sound. I wanted to drop onto the floor, hide my head under my arms and unsee it, but the muscles I needed to do those things were frozen.
The Disc was pure blue fire, no reflections.
The figure’s circles were still on me. It moved the line that was its mouth. Then raised an arm. And made words.
‘Little spark.’
I clapped my hands flat over my ears.
‘Little spark, come.’
The eyes, if eyes they really were, changed after that. The circles emptied, sank inward, then vanished altogether. The face-shape softened like so much butter and seemed to melt as if from heat. Heat from behind. The raised arm fell, dissipating, and then the body caved in on itself like a hollowed candle. And then it simply wasn’t there.
With an armful of papers at his chest, knitting his brows at the overturned stool next to me, Rusper stood where it had been. Door open behind him.
‘Productive evening?’ His voice was muffled, so I took my hands away from my ears. His frown zoned in on my face. ‘You look a bit ashen, boy.’
When I looked again, the Disc wasn’t glowing anymore. Sensing my muscles might obey, I ducked and grabbed it off the floor and slammed it back inside the cabinet with its twin. Turning the key, I looked fierce daggers back at Rusper. ‘It’s not Lackish magic.’
‘You’ve found something?’
Icy pebbles dropped and slid down the back of my swathes. ‘Something’s found me.’