Words darted importantly back and forth over my head while the Commander explained what had just happened at the warehouse. His story was fair, at least: the wardens had neglected both our morning and midday meals, and there had been a “heated exchange” when some of the refugees had complained they were getting hungry and thirsty.
Rusper Symphin grimaced. ‘Who’s in charge there?’
Plamen replied, ‘A man called Shamak.’
‘Dock his wage. Rations to be distributed at once, no more delays. Should the evening meal be late, I’ll see Shamak myself.’
He jabbed his worktop with a finger; I saw the fancy ring it bore.
‘It is done, Viceroy,’ said the Commander, and left.
For some moments, when he’d gone, the engineer seemed to look right through my body to the door. Then he got out of his chair, crossed the workshop and closed it. The busy sounds of the Deep were reduced to vibrations.
‘Well,’ he said, turning around and scratching his forehead below the propped goggles. ‘That’ll be another meal missed for you, er . . .’ He met my eyes, clicking his fingers.
‘Florian.’ I was starting to get tired of saying my name all the time.
‘Where are your shoes?’
I glanced down. Having now gone without sandals for several days, my feet were filthy. ‘I lost them.’
Rusper Symphin’s eyes narrowed; as he looked to be about to say something else, I waited, but whatever it was seemed to fold unsaid between his lips.
He took a juddering breath and left the door, passing me closely, to reach one of the lantern sconces. The tube of heavy-looking metal extended vertically, suspended some inches from the wall by a bracket. He slid back a pair of fibrous yellow panels, which widened its arc of greenish light. Through the glare I could see into the chamber; clearly enough, at least, to see that there weren’t flames burning in there. How did they work?
‘Say again.’
I had to stop thinking out-loud.
‘Um . . . how, how do those work?’ I repeated, but could tell by the way he squinted at my lips that I still mumbled and it irked him.
‘What, the lights?’ he said. ‘Triglycerate. Not something you’ll find much of in Naemia, I don’t suppose, or for that matter know what to do with in those parts.’ He gestured to the sconce. ‘Take a closer look if you wish.’
I started moving towards it, then stopped myself and held back. Although he wasn’t a large man, something about him felt strong. And the leather and metal of his engineering uniform looked more like armour than what the Vedish soldiers wore. Marking that the sconce was too high for me to reach, he dragged up a chair. Carefully, I climbed on top of it, my legs wobbling.
‘It’s not hot, you can hold it,’ he said.
So I tested the bracket with a touch and then gripped it, all the time trying to ignore how unnerving it was having him so close next to me. He felt vital, electric almost, as if at any moment he might pull the chair from under my feet. Trusting he wouldn’t, I peered in through the window of the lantern.
Inside, between two bolts, a copper bar ran down inside the bored-out centre of what looked like a crystal; branching laterally at either end so as to fix it into place. The light itself came from that crystal, a cold light, although less green without the pane in front of it. It shone more brightly in some parts, places it seemed more tightly trapped, highlighting traceries of cracks.
‘Conversion of energy,’ said Rusper Symphin.
‘Did you invent it?’
‘Hell-sands, no!’ he scoffed. ‘This desert’s been yielding up green halite for as long as there’ve been Vedans to dig it. We merely mine it and put it to use. Always have.’
‘What is halite?’
‘Green halite,’ he corrected. ‘A crude salt. Part of a very ancient compound. Broken down, mixed with a gritstone or loess—gritstone’s better, lives longer—added to an acid, then brought to boil, moulded, set and cooked. The result, triglycerate. Light from heat. Really a very old industry.’
‘So it . . . doesn’t burn anything?’
‘No, nothing.’ He cocked an eyebrow. ‘This amazes you.’
I risked a glance at his eyes—brown or green? But then he moved.
‘You’ll be hungry,’ he announced and strode over to a table; the only surface in the room not overwhelmed with mechanical parts or tools or works-in-progress. On it, instead, was a silver cloche, a silver ewer, a silver cup, a silver knife. He lifted the cloche, releasing a cloud of sweet-smelling steam; uncorked the ewer and splashed some water into the cup. Then he hooked one of the stools under the table with a shoe and pulled it out. He looked at me. ‘Come now, no need for such a face. A boy your age needs a hearty meal from time to time.’
My mouth stung to life. My nostrils almost quivered, the smell that filled them, salty and sweet. In spite of my distrust of the man, my legs moved me down from the chair and across the brick floor of the workshop. I sat on the stool and looked down into an earthenware dish through the steam. In it was stew. A hunk of marbled bread leaned into the thick mixture like an oar. There was a little side-dish as well, half-filled with a yellow liquid.
‘Not quite the delicacy you’ve been served at your shelter, I expect,’ said Rusper Symphin, who had sat down on the opposite stool. When I shook my head, he grunted. ‘Shaffan-ful most likely. A poor supper for even the poorest Vedish family. And if one is to judge from the good Commander’s report, you’ll have been lucky to have got so much as a flatspoon with which to eat it. This will be better.’ With a nod, he passed me the knife.
Lentils, I recognised those. And the scent of garlic. But that was all and it must have shown on my face.
‘It’s called ghutna,’ he said as if by way of a prompt. ‘Goat’s meat and gourd, some bitter root, cumin seeds, crushed ginger. Garlic, of course.’
I said, ‘The butter’s melted.’
‘Yes, that’s the way of butter in the desert. You soak it with the sangak.’
I looked up.
‘The bread,’ he added.
I examined the knife, a little dazed, wondering how best to start the task. Then, without thinking, stole a glance over his shoulder. There it was, that cabinet ‒ the tall one in the far corner. The Discs would still be in there, since Loquar had obviously made no attempt to retrieve them for me. Or maybe he had. Maybe this was simply a workshop too far for his fingers. Whatever the reason, my bargain had gone to waste.
I poked the bread, dislodged it from the stew and raised it to my mouth. The tastes were strange, but at the warmth, tears pricked the corners of my eyes. I closed them and let the flavours melt over my tongue. Let my teeth glide through that soft and tender goat’s meat, while seeds crunched softly with the gourd, filling my head with a spicy haze. The bread was freshly baked and warm, it tasted sweet, the butter salty. Such a simple thing, this act of filling my stomach, but it absorbed me completely. Nothing at all was in the dish when, jaws exhausted, I put the knife down and licked my fingers clean. ‘Thank you,’ I said.
The man had watched me in silence, but now twitched a finger at the ewer—‘More?’—and splashed some more water in my cup. I quaffed it quickly and wiped my mouth dry on my hand.
A minute later, Rusper Symphin pulled the goggles off his head and let them fall helter-skelter to the table. Then he rolled up the sleeves of whatever garment he wore under all the engineering armour, and rubbed the bridge of his nose. ‘I must apologise,’ he sighed, ‘for being so very short with you last time. It was an especially . . . problematic few days, my patience stretched thin as it was by the Sanhedrin and many more tempers than my own flying high.’ He exhaled. ‘And now Verunia has evacuated, with the caliphy of Laudassa looking likely to follow. As if my pipes weren’t tasked enough.’
‘Your . . . pipes?’ I asked, wondering now if he was sick or something.
Folding his arms, he cocked his head towards the worktop where he’d been sitting when I arrived with the Commander. Sheets of parchment lay banked up and scattered over it. From what I could make out from here, they all showed complicated pictures. ‘Something’s wrong with the pipeworks. Their pressure has dropped sharply, and just when we need it more than ever.’ As I tried to make some meaning of these words inside my head, he waved them away. ‘Never mind.’
As he shifted on the stool, some of the golden chain-links over his chest were set to glinting. I looked at the medallion they suspended: a thick, eight-sided shape of rich brown metal with an emblem etched into the front. It was like the emblem on the banner – a crescent with rays sticking out – but somehow not. Somehow incomplete.
I was waiting for it now; waiting for him to take the Discs out from hiding and ask me all those questions again. Why else should I be here?
‘It’s been over a week, I believe, since your settlement was attacked by the Rath.’ That hit me square in the belly. ‘Correct?’
I frowned, but nothing in his face showed any remorse for the question.
‘Ten days,’ I said.
‘My mistake.’ His fingers drummed. ‘Your group was the second to arrive here, in the city, but first attacked. Now I find that strange since, apparently, your settlement was that furthest to the south of the borderland region. That could mean that the Rath are entering Vorth through the mountains, the East Naemian Walls as you’d call them in your country, I think.’
I didn’t like this. The pipes were better; he should talk about the pipes.
Or did I owe him something now? Was that the deal here, why he’d fed me? My stomach felt good for the first time in days—ten long, hot days.
‘They did,’ I said.
‘Beg pardon?’
‘Yes, they did come from the mountains.’ I looked at him, saw how his features pinched with interest. ‘We were in the foothills, Con and me. Rath were hiding in the rocks and we could see them from up there. The people at our huts couldn’t see them, though . . . not till . . .’
‘How many?’ he interrupted.
Quick as I could, I thought about it, pulling those moments through the blur so I could look at them again. Con had said there’d been no more than a dozen of the Rath, but I could still see more than that. ‘Twenty,’ I said.
‘By night, by day?’
Orange rays across the plain. Shining river. Running dog. The screams, those screams, they filled my head and I spoke to silence them. ‘Sunset. It was sunset. Probably. It was still light before . . .’ I stopped. That was enough. I’d answered the question.
‘You weren’t injured,’ he said. I shook my head, even though it hadn’t sounded like a question. ‘Your . . . family, boy?’
I looked at his hands, that skin like leather browned with grease, hoping that if only held my eyes just there, their lids might hold the tears inside. The Deep’s low grumbles filled our silence. But in spite of my efforts, a hot line spilled down my cheek.
‘Hm.’ Just a tiny sound he made, but I hated it. Pity wouldn’t buy more answers from me! ‘What about—’
‘They would’ve been at the carts!’ I blurted as two more tears ran down my face. ‘They would’ve got there! To the river, in time! If I hadn’t gone with Con up to the farm then he’d have got his wooden fish and come straight back. It wouldn’t have happened the way it did! They’d be alive! Alive and here!’
I was only shouting because I was angry for crying in front of him in the first place. Now I folded my arms tight on my chest and kept my face off to one side, waiting for the feeling to stop churning.
In the corner of my eye, Rusper Symphin leaned forward on the table and crossed his fingers. ‘Did you incite this conflict, boy? Provoke the Rath to arms yourself?’
‘Course I didn’t!’ I huffed, but he raised his voice over my huff.
‘It prospers no one, your shouldering the blame for such misfortune. It is not a war you started, though I confess there are those in this city who believe it. That will change.’
The tears weren’t stopping. ‘We didn’t do anything!’
‘I know that.’ He was quiet then, and still, as if watching me try to squeeze in my whimpers; one of which then burst out all the louder for the fight. It took some time to get a hold of myself. His words went on: ‘Through the ages, all through this world, invasion is a fate endured by the innocent first. And it is a fate that has fallen upon you and your people, not once but twice now. There are no words you or I can speak to describe that injustice.’
Sniffing, I wiped my cheek roughly. I turned my face to him and—once—glanced up, but kept my arms crossed. His eyes were softer than his voice.
‘Whatever mistake you think you made on that night, it was a choice, no more than that. One choice among few choices, made few by those with intent to destroy you.’ He paused. ‘Going on, as you must, will only prove more painful if you do not let that be true.’
‘Let what be true?’
‘You were defenceless,’ he said. ‘Your family was a casualty of war. As you are, too.’
‘Doesn’t make it fair.’
‘No.’ He took a breath in, pushed it out. ‘But there’s no end to the list of what’s not fair in times like these. Trust me that far, if you can. Such things befall those least deserving, always, and take things from us.’
Us? What did he know of the terror and ruin we’d seen, sitting up here inside his fortress with his pipes and cranes and machines? Now I refused to look him in the eyes; it would mean accepting what he’d said.
There was a full minute of my noisy sniffing. Again, I looked at his hands, then tried to check his expression without raising my face. He had been looking at the floor, but then his eyes came up quickly. ‘What about the other you mentioned, this Con?’ he asked me.
With another sniff, I let my arms slowly unfold. ‘Con’s alright, I think. He got hurt in the leg but your healers helped him. He’s getting better.’
‘Good. Good.’
I scowled. What part of this was good?
Rusper Symphin straightened. I watched his hands as he twisted that fancy ring off his finger, reached out and set it on the edge of my dish.
‘That,’ he said almost brightly, ‘is known as the Guild-Ring-Most-Royal. I have worn it for as long as I’ve been Chief Engineer.’
I ran the heel of my hand over my nose and shrugged, ‘So?’
‘So,’ he said. ‘The signet-piece is wrought of a specialised alloy, very rare now in Vorth, but the band is base iron. Here.’ He rotated the dish so that the ring was right in front of me. ‘Take a look at it now.’
Deciding to go along with whatever he was trying to say, I picked it up. Heavy. The red-brown signet part was a cogwheel on top of a square. The band was dull grey. But what had clearly once been a perfect circle of iron was now an oval, all warped out of shape by years spent on his finger.
‘Why are you showing me this?’
‘Because iron is strong,’ he said. ‘Hard and enduring, as indeed your loss feels now. Time can prove stronger yet, as you see. It has the ability, sometimes, to alter the things we think the strongest and most enduring of all.’
I stared dumbly at the ring and shook my head. Thought of Sarah and Erik and how safe I’d always felt when they were there. Words made no difference to all this; not mine, not this engineer’s. I shook my head again: ‘I just . . . I . . .’
‘Always will, I’m afraid,’ he said.
This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.
He knew.
‘Even when hardened by the rust of your years, the fact will stand that they were taken, and too soon. That will never be untrue. The question, young ekhin Flint, is whether the pain you now feel will outlast the likes of iron.’
He gave me a moment longer to examine the Guild-Ring-Most-Royal, then took it back and slipped it on. Suddenly I realised I wasn’t crying anymore. I dared to look at him squarely. ‘Can I see it now please?’
‘See . . .?’
‘You know.’
He smiled ‒ the first real smile I’d seen from him ‒ and for some reason it made me wonder if he had a wife or any children of his own. As if ignoring my request, he stretched his arms and popped his knuckles, one by one. Then he stood up, went to the cabinet, opened its door with the key and took out two small objects. A crazy gratitude exploded inside me when I saw that they were wrapped each in a cloth of a different colour. ‘Red marks mine,’ he told me, setting both down on the table. ‘Green marks yours.’ He sat again. ‘I know you tried to steal them back, as it happens.’
My head shot up.
He raised a hand. ‘I’m not angry. A little bewildered that a boy as determined as you would choose to rely on a man like Loquar for his dirty work, but otherwise impressed by your creativity, I suppose.’
‘How’d you find out?’
‘Well he told me,’ Rusper Symphin replied, clearing his throat. ‘Loquar’s my assistant.’
Oh.
‘Come boy. You gave a shifty little molerat the choice between loyalty to the Viceroy or to a refugee waif. Which do you think is likely to offer the nicer reward?’
‘You rewarded him?’
‘I did,’ he said loftily. ‘With a placement on the task-team currently knocking its way through your warehouse wall.’
He half-smiled. I did too.
‘However,’ he continued, propping his elbows on the table, ‘the attempt made it quite clear how much this object means to you, truly. And now, if you don’t mind, I would like to know why.’
No. I heard the flat refusal in my head before thinking; before considering the request or what harm it could do. None of that mattered. The Disc was my last link to my family. It was private and it was mine. I stared at the green cloth on the table, Rusper Symphin doing the same, as if we were both waiting for the thing to speak up and explain itself.
Eventually, he took his elbows off the table, wiggled on his stool and filled his lungs.
‘When the Rath invaded Naemia’—he was going to punish me with a story—‘we knew. Not, of course, in time to give the support of Vedish armed forces, even if the Mooncircle Throne would then have deigned to provide it. Here in Vorth, you see, boy, those East Naemian Walls are far more than mountains. To the Vedish they represent a line between worlds – a wall between the secular desert and the old realms of Exelcia Minor. The Inwold, I believe your people call them.’ He seemed to wait for confirmation, but when he got none, went on talking. ‘The Long Erg in the south also separates us from those realms, but that is far from Antissa, and no bastion of so-called faith stands on the other side of that. We Vedans have never had a faith. We are a practical nation, always have been.’
I raised my eyes from the cloths. ‘So you don’t believe the castle really . . . ?’
His expression cut me off. It said, really. ‘Do you?’
I crossed my arms again. ‘Yes!’
A shrug. ‘As you wish. That’s neither here nor there.’ He sighed. ‘But what we knew then isn’t much less than what we know now, ten . . . eleven years later. The end of the Naemian principality was quick, the Saremin throne simply snuffed out like a light. The people of your nation had been wiped out already when word of the invasion reached Vorth. And then the doors of Celestrian Fallstone—your fallen sky-castle—were closed, for all time to come, according to the rumours that reached us from Ered. Naemian survivors seemed very unlikely after that. None expected refugees such as yourself to reach our borders.
‘But then, that was almost a full year later. It was barely a month after the news of the fall that we received a . . . visitor here. The man was strange in every detail, though even stranger is the fact that I would be hard-pressed to describe any of those details to you now. Except perhaps to say that he was tall. Attired in some exotic fashion. He gave no hint as to where he had come from and I don’t believe anyone heard him say his name. He simply arrived, lingered a week within our walls, and then was gone.’
There didn’t seem anything too strange about that until Rusper Symphin reached out to draw the red cloth aside. There were both our faces in the mirror, framed instantly by far too vast a wealth of detail.
‘He gave me this. Didn’t tell me what it was, or ask for anything in return. Did not explain himself at all. All he required was that I kept it safe until such time as he returned to reclaim it. An odd request, and yet I admit the thing intrigued me . . .’ His pause drew my eyes to his again. ‘You’ve no doubt noticed how unnaturally it mirrors everything around it.’
If it was a question, I didn’t answer.
‘No metal I’ve seen before possesses any such quality, to the extent that I must doubt it to be natural metal at all. All the same, I agreed. So small a thing, I could really think of no reason to refuse him. Duly, he left . . .’ He drew the red cloth back over the Disc; maybe to show that that was the end of his story, maybe to put the mirror out of sight again. ‘. . . and of course, has not come back.’
‘Where did he go?’ I asked.
‘Northeast ‒ on foot,’ said Rusper Symphin, before another thoughtful pause. ‘Do you know what lies northeast of Antissa?’
‘Ered.’
‘Not immediately. First come the Dustlands of the Lack. Those wastes stretch for leagues before even the outermost edges of the Empire. I was as decent a rider then as I daresay I am to this day. For a full five days I tracked him across those barren expanses and never once saw him flag. It was only once he’d bypassed the outer province of the Dunfinds, westernmost of Ered, that my own dwindling supplies forced me to turn back to Antissa. He travelled further northeast, into the unknown.’
Somewhere below us in the dark, moving intestines of the Deep, something groaned. The engineer took no notice of the sound. ‘Now,’ he said with a grimace, ‘there are new sightings of folk in the Dustlands east of here. By all reports, not Ratheine.’
‘Who are they then?’
‘Can’t say for sure,’ he replied. ‘Vorth has a long history of conflict against the Lackish barbarians, though we’ve not seen any of their tribes for more than fifteen years now. Most believe they’ve finally perished with the drying of the rivers. If that is not the case, however, and should they now re-emerge, Antissa cannot withstand them. A year of defending the northern border from the Rath has thinned our numbers too far.’
Confused, I asked: ‘What does all that have to do with the stranger?’
His shrug was shallow but pensive. ‘I know of no others but the tribes who might survive the far reaches, and that’s where he went. Furthermore, that is the reason I find this . . . thing—these things—so suspect.’ He narrowed his eyes at the cloths. ‘The shamans of the Lackish tribes practiced magics. Mind, not the high, noble arcanum you may have heard described of Ered. Savage, ancient sorceries that destroyed great numbers of our people in decades past. And we know that they wielded such magics through stones.’
‘So you think they’re stone?’
‘I don’t think anything,’ he said frankly. ‘I don’t know what they could be.’
I eyed the red cloth, then the green.
‘Well I don’t either,’ I stated.
‘You don’t what?’
‘Know what they are.’
‘Is that the truth?’
At that sudden sharpness, I met his eyes. Then pushed some words: ‘Sarah—she gave it to me, alright? It was in a box with lots of other things she brought with us from Naemia. I lost the others when the Rath came. This one’s all that’s left of them, the only one I saved.’
‘Sarah,’ echoed Rusper Symphin. Her name, in his voice, sounded more foreign to my ears than any crude Vedish word. Even though his accent was so much less Vedish-sounding than the others’, and though he’d said the word quite gently, it was wrong on his lips. ‘Was Sarah your mother?’
The world shifted. I’d never had to think about that; it meant so little. I’d always known it well enough, I had no memory of being told it. Ever. It belonged with the tremors I’d been too small to grasp ‒ the huge before ‒ and yet the part of the before that hadn’t mattered. Hadn’t made a stitch of difference. Sarah wasn’t my mother, nor Erik my father. Family, yes; the one I’d known as far back as that memory of winds on those Naemian beaches, the creaking of boats and shouts of native fishermen. But now, for the first time in my life, it wouldn’t do. A clever man with piercing brown or green eyes had asked one simple question, and the answer I’d always felt to be the right one wouldn’t fit. I shook my head to relieve the pressure building in it, and said: ‘She took care of me.’
‘Fair enough. What did she tell you?’
I blinked at him, feeling off-balance. Instead of pressing for something more or something better than what I’d said, he’d simply left it at that.
‘When Sarah gave you this thing,’ he prompted, ‘did she say anything at all about what it was or where it came from?’
I cast my mind back to the treasures, all gone, and heard her voice again. These things are for you, pieces of home. Yours as much as ours. You’re Naemian too. Just as she’d promised on that night when I was eight, Sarah had told me all the stories of the treasures; most at least twenty times over. I knew them well.
‘The things in the box,’ I told him, ‘were Naemian things. All of them were from Naemia. Except this one.’ His face fell by a fraction at that. ‘She never showed it to me, ever. She didn’t know what it was, she said. Only that it had come with me when . . .’
‘When . . .?’
‘When my first family brought me.’
‘Your first family,’ he repeated, face quite still now. ‘And what can you tell me of that first family? Do you know where they came from or where they went?’
I shook my head, no. She’d never said about that, I’d never asked. No one had until now.
It hadn’t mattered.
He picked at the table with a nail. ‘So, you never knew your parents, and your adoptive mother told you that only this, of all the things in her heirloom box, was not Naemian.’ When I nodded, he inhaled. ‘Surely that suggests your true family was not either.’ This was too much.
‘I don’t know,’ I said at him, letting Sarah’s voice fill up my head. You are Naemian. So often through the years she had said that to me, as if reminding me almost. Always, without question, I’d accepted that I was. But Rusper Symphin’s words had blown a piece of that away now, and suddenly, out of nowhere, I couldn’t unsee the fact that my father and mother could have been anyone at all. Anyone from anywhere. And so could I. ‘I’m Naemian,’ I heard myself thinking aloud.
‘Very young is what you are, Florian Flint,’ he countered. ‘Your time in Naemia was brief. So brief, in fact, that I hardly imagine you can remember much of it.’
‘I do remember things.’
‘Really. Like what?’
I sagged at the dubious look on his face, desperately wishing all those pieces of home didn’t have to be lost. They’d prove everything I was trying to say. I gaped at his doubt; this man who’d just turned my past over on its head. My whole life up to this moment. Forget it.
Reading my struggle, the clever face tilted. ‘You realise, boy, that few of us are moulded by our choices alone.’
‘What?’
‘Even before we’re born, most men are spoken for already, our destinies decided by other powers, decisions made on our behalf. Perhaps the most important decisions of our lives. Now you, of course, believe that you have lost your true home. Twice over, indeed. But home may be defined by other things. Some take it from blood, others from the land or the city of their birth, others their trade.’ He seemed to pause here for effect. ‘My own father and mother were Vedish, it’s true, but I am not of this desert. I was born on the mudflats of Elman, and raised there, only coming to Vorth in my twenty-fifth year.’
So that was it, he was Elmine!
‘I am Vedish nonetheless,’ he added firmly as if correcting my unspoken thought. ‘Others still lead lives that allow them to choose, as well you might.’
‘I’m Naemian,’ I repeated, trying for a firmness of my own and sounding every bit the child. Even to myself.
His lip puckered. ‘Very well, it’s your choice. But I think you’re old enough to know there’s no going back to your Naemia. Even if there were a reason to do so.’
‘Why not?’ I rebutted, getting annoyed with him again.
‘Boy, they said it was ten thousand that beset your coast in `3218. If you want my tallan’s worth, I think it was more. Much, much more. No one knows how or why the Rath resurged in such numbers, and so long after being scattered in ocean exile by Ered, but resurge is what they did. And now our border is choked. They are moving, so much is clear from your own account, but they are slow. It will be a long time, years perhaps, before Naemia is emptied again, regardless of the war it brings to Vorth. And it may be that you weren’t even born there. You see.’
‘It’s still my country,’ I said through gritted teeth.
‘You said you didn’t know who your parents were.’
‘I know what I said!’ I snapped. ‘Why do you care?’
‘Because it would seem that your heritage links you to these.’ He gestured the Discs. ‘And I wish to know what they are.’
‘Why?’
‘I’ve told you why.’
My heart thudded; he had no right to be saying these things, and his workshop, for all its otherworldly content, was stifling me. ‘I just want my one back.’
Rusper Symphin laughed, right in my face. ‘No, Florian. What you want is to keep this little mystery all to yourself as if it belonged to you alone. Which I understand. Yours was a gift from your adoptive mother, or so you believe. But I was once a boy too, so don’t think I can’t read your face like a blueprint. Your eyes were like weight-balls when I was talking about that stranger.’
How dare he. ‘You’re the one keeping it all for yourself. You stole mine from me!’
‘And you tried to steal both,’ he said, cool and unfazed by my outrage. ‘I’ve a right to my own half to treat as I deem fitting. That stranger clearly knew something we don’t, and it so happens that he elected me to protect his property. Your possession of this, though, is different.’
‘No it isn’t.’
‘Unless Sarah lied to you—’
‘Sarah didn’t lie!’
‘Listen. Assuming she told the truth, then it is likely she had none of the knowledge possessed by my stranger and none of the authority to place it in your care.’
‘It belonged to my first parents, I told you already!’
‘So are we to believe that they knew what it was? Is that reasonable? To the stranger the thing was important, so why should your parents part so easily with theirs?’
‘Because it’s not important!’
‘I know you don’t believe that, boy.’
‘It isn’t!’ I shouted and lunged over the table for the green cloth. But I caught my foot behind the crossbar of the stool as I did, and toppled forward, hit my chin on the dish and grazed my arms along the edge of the table, going down. My Disc popped free—I spun around on the floor, watched it hit the bricks and roll away. Underneath some gnarled, black machine I saw it wobble and go still.
Rusper Symphin kicked back his own stool and shot to his feet. ‘Dolt!’ he scowled. ‘Now perhaps you see some of my wisdom in keeping both of them from you!’
He swept to the machine, then stopped and froze in his tracks.
‘Did it break?’ I asked, unable to see it past his boots. ‘Is it broken?’ When he didn’t answer, I stood up and rubbed my arms. ‘Mister Symphin?’
He murmured vaguely, ‘Caliph Symphin,’ standing only a yard from where it lay.
I peered around him, almost scared of what I’d see. What I saw was the Disc, true enough. It lay just under the machine, reflecting the legs and black underside so fully and finely that, without the reflection of the bricks—just catching light—it could easily have been invisible. Maybe, I thought, if there were marks or fractures in it, the reflection wouldn’t be so perfect. Who knew. But the reflections weren’t the reason we could see the Disc clearly now. Even from here, I could tell that it was glowing, a sapphire blue, so faint a glow that had it not been for the shadow of the machine, we would have missed it. ‘It’ll squark.’
I glanced up at Rusper Symphin a moment too late to read his face. He opened the green cloth in his hand, crouched to reach between the under-spokes of the machine, and scooped my Disc up. He didn’t stand yet, and when I looked onto his palm the soft blue sheen had dimmed already.
‘Shutter the lantern,’ he instructed. Obeying, I climbed up to the sconce and drew all panels. The workshop darkened; I hopped down. The Disc, still flat on Rusper Symphin’s outheld hand, now gave so little of the glow it was almost . . . No. Gone.
‘It’ll squark.’
‘What?’ I said.
He shot me a stern look. ‘You saw it too, yes?’
‘I saw a light,’ I said, confused. ‘A blue light. Didn’t you?’
He nodded surely. ‘Just the same.’ He stood and took it back to the table. There he set it down again on top of its cloth, beside its twin. Completely ignoring the toppled stools, we stared at it, silent, waiting. I felt strange, a little nauseous, but twice as curious. ‘Do you think . . .’ he began, ‘if you dropped it again . . . ?’
‘Maybe.’ Lifting the corner of the cloth, I tipped my Disc off the table. Despite its weight, there was a bounce—only a small one—that sounded densely on the surface of the bricks, before it rolled over the floor and wobbled still. I dropped onto my hands and knees, almost startled when Rusper Symphin did the same right next to me. But there was nothing of that glow. Just too comic faces staring back in the reflection. My chin was bleeding from the dish and the engineer’s nostrils were flared wide. ‘It’ll squark.’
‘It’ll what?’ I said, looking at him.
‘If not the impact,’ he suggested, ‘possibly—’
‘The angle?’
‘Exactly. Try it again.’ He covered it with the cloth, handling the thing like some silver scarab that might escape and scuttle free, and gave it over to me. We went back to the table. ‘It’s sure to fall differently. Go on,’ he said. And again those silly words, ‘It’ll squark.’
‘What does that mean?’ I demanded irritably, hand primed. But when all he did was frown back, I shook my head. ‘This is so stupid.’
‘They’ve called me worse. Come. Again.’
For a third time I dashed the Disc from table to floor.
Bounce, roll, wobble and stop.
And still no sapphire-blue glow when we went to stand above it. ‘What about the other one?’ I suggested. But when we lifted the red cloth to examine its twin, nothing about it showed signs of having changed in any way. As if that would have made some kind of sense!
‘I know what I saw and so do you,’ said Rusper Symphin. ‘Two pairs of eyes don’t make the same exact mistake.’ He sighed a little breath and went to right the toppled stools.
His words still hanging in the air, I stooped to pick up the Disc, but what I saw in its face was far too much. That reflection too full. More than complete, the picture pulled into its curve corners and sections of the room it couldn’t rightly see or know or frame. My hand filled up its mirror and magnified even the thinnest line of sweat in my palm. Which made contact.
A sound like metal tearing open filled my ears. White crackling light lanced out at me and wrapped my fingers, hand, then arm. My muscles seized. The blazing light shot up my arm, leapt to my shoulder, coiled my neck. It took my other arm and bathed it. My body burned as it took hold, the whiteness going into me. It spun round both of my legs, then seconds later I was blind. It had my head! All I could hear was metal screaming.
That and the voice inside my brain—
LITTLE SPARK!
It was going to kill me. I knew that totally, even as the whiteness sucked my body to its knees.
And disappeared.
My head went soupy. Murky spots and squiggles bloomed over my vision like rotten floaters on my eyes. And then it took me again—by the shoulder! No . . . it was Rusper Symphin who was holding and shaking my shoulder, looking hard into my face and saying something. His eyes were green. I watched his lips.