Chapter 4
Chapter 4
Heartwood looms on the second floor of the tower when I return at first mist. I see him as I approach, even with the descending brume. I feel him, the way one feels the first curls of mist, a whisper of cold before the vapors settle. He stands half in front of a narrow window, his arms folded snugly across his chest, watching the path to Emgarden. Watching me.
I meet his eyes. Though the mists are still young, a shiver wriggles its way down my back. Heartwood turns back into the tower, a ghost once more.
I left at late mist last cycle and didn’t give Moseus my update, so I knock softly with a single knuckle on the door of his room. If he isn’t here, I’ll wait for him to find me. I’d rather not explore the tower and run into Heartwood. The unease from his gaze still squirms beneath my skin, however much I try to disregard it.
“Come.”
The door creaks open. I hesitate in the doorway.
It’s so ... dark.
Blackness engulfs the entire chamber. No windows, no candles, no lamps. Just ... black. Impenetrable. I lift my hand in front of my face, and even with the dim light coming down the stairs, I can’t see it. I’ve never seen darkness this absolute before.
“Do you have a report?”
I push the door open, guiding the dim light of the first floor inside. I should have brought a lantern. I’m able to just make out Moseus’s pale skin and hair in the center of the small chamber. He’s sitting upright, legs folded, palms on his knees.
“Merely meditating.” He withdraws his hands and looks at me. I think.
Rubbing a sore spot on my shoulder, I give him my update: what I managed to repair last visit and what I intend to work on now. I’m sure he knows, but I add that the digging was unsuccessful. He doesn’t chide me or point out that he was right, which I would have done, were our roles reversed. Merely nods. I think.
“I will not hold you up,” he says. “Thank you, Pell.”
I wave away the gratitude. “A smaller lantern would be useful.” Candles aren’t. They drip on everything, and the wax is hard to come by, anyway.
“I’ll see what I can find.”
I close the door and start toward my machine, pausing halfway when a three-second quake shudders and then sleeps again.
Mymachine. It doesn’t feel wrong to think of it as such.
I start by running my hands up and down the metal loops and straps of its body. There isn’t much space to climb in here, but these are definitely loose helical gears and more of that damn wiring. Pulling out a slate and chalk, I do some quick calculations to estimate the supposed angle on that axle, assuming it connects to that ... hat-like thingy ... on top. I set aside the slate, shove the tools into my pocket, and get to work.
I have to take apart a few pieces to get to others, which feels like regression, but it is what it is. I find a gear literally attached to nothing, just wedged between an axle and a beam. Great. I glance around, clueless, before tossing it out of the machine. Future Pell can worry about that. Sure enough, the axle goes right where I want it to go, if I adjust said hat-thing, which makes it align with what looks like a rotary unit, though rotary units are for moving fluids, and I don’t see where any fluid would go. I bet the wiring over here goes up through—
I whip my hand back. Blood pools in my palm and trickles down my wrist. Damn it, I should have been more careful.
I blink, staring, a dull headache pulsing at my crown. The same wires. Glance at my hands. They’re fine. Dirty, but fine.
What in Ruin’s hell was that?
Leaning on one leg, I bring my right hand to my face and trace a pale scar. But this is an old scar. I got this at ... was it Arthen’s forge? Or digging Ramdinee’s grave?
My pulse thuds behind my eyes, banishing the train of thought.
“Nophe.”
Jolting, I jerk back and whack my head on that stupid hat-thing. Whirl around to see Heartwood there, his brows drawn together, a small, unlit lantern in his hand.
I’m breathing like I was digging. Rub the heels of my hands into my eyes.
“You weren’t responding,” he says softly. He’s in his leathers again. The braiding on the seams looks more complex than anything in this machine.
Shaking myself, I pull my hands down. “Sorry. Thanks.” I take the lantern, my index finger brushing his. The warm flash of his skin surprises me. In the back of my mind, I’d expected him to feel as cold as he sounds.
He regards me a moment before turning for the stairs.
Wait.
“What did you call me?” I ask.
Heartwood pauses.
I knead the handle of the lantern between my fingers. “You called me Nophe.” It sounds similar to the end of my full name, but with an error in emphasis. A long O, instead of a half-forgotten, soft U.
Heartwood glances back at me, expressionless save for a raised vein in his forehead. And because he is aggravating, he doesn’t respond.
My shoulders tense. Sharper than I mean to, I ask, “How do you know my full name? Moseus introduced me as Pell.” No one calls me Nophe. I’ve never even heard my name shortened like that.
A beat passes, then another. “Moseus and I converse outside of your visits. This is our home.”
Still. And now, to be obstinate, I don’t respond.
He exhales. “I will adjust my address if you prefer.” He walks away, taking the stairs up. I watch him go, just to make him uncomfortable.
Because I’m uncomfortable.
After lighting the new lantern, I hold it up, inspecting my right hand and the scar there.
Then I slap myself across the face and get back to work.
As if this cycle couldn’t get more annoying, I now find there’s a power switch on this machine.
But it’s in the middle of the machine. Hard to reach. Which is stupid.
And there’s nothing here that could possibly power this hunk of metal. Nothing to wind, no engines for steam, nothing.
It doesn’t make sense. Nothing makes sense.
“I hate you,” I mumble to the machine as one of its bearings rolls oil across my forearm. I don’t mean it. I love this gods-damned pile of garbage. That weird sentiment I get ... that subtle incompleteness ... it eases when I work on this monstrosity. Keeps my thoughts elsewhere.
But also, I hate it.
“Pell.”
“One second.” I tighten some cables before carefully pulling back, making sure not to cut myself on any loose parts. Moseus approaches. He’s removed his dark robe and wears a simple gray shirt and pants, like what I’ve seen Heartwood wear. It makes him look long and lean. His unadorned white hair falls evenly down his back, just to where his spine dips at the base. The dark cloth of his shirt makes his pale skin look even paler, though the lantern light lends it some warmth.
He’s not an unattractive man.
“There’s a power switch in there, but nothing to power it,” I report. “I don’t understand. Maybe if I took the entire thing apart, but I can’t promise I’ll be able to put it together again.”
That image from two cycles ago surfaces in my mind. Machine One in pieces on the floor. Not completely disassembled, but far less intact than presently accounted.
My head hurts.
“Are you well?”
Must have shown on my face. “I’m fine. Just tired. Thanks for—”
Moseus reaches forward and presses his palm flush to my forehead.
“—asking,” I finish. He doesn’t say anything, his deep green gaze unfocused. Tentatively, I reach up and grasp his hand, lowering it from my forehead. “Just overworked,” I assure him. “By my own choice. But I appreciate the concern.”
“You’ll sort it out.” Moseus retracts his hand and gestures to a gray sack near the door. “You may take that with you.”
I rise to my feet. “Scrap metal?”
He nods.
I smile. All the backstepping and questions seem, for a moment, unimportant. The decent-sized bag looks full. Enough for plenty of tools. “Thank you.”
“I appreciate your discretion. You need to leave now; the mist is lifting.”
I hand him the small lantern. “I’ll see what I can do.”
The bag of scraps shakes Arthen’s table when I drop it down. “Happy yearmark.”
Arthen sits on a stool in the corner, straightening old nails, and he immediately puts down his pliers and approaches. “What on Tampere did you find?”
Strangers who opened the tower.Biting back the confession, I say, “Frantess is right.” Though I’d practiced the excuse multiple times on my way here, saying it to another person feels like choking. I’m a terrible liar, so I had to practice this one. “I found these on my last dig.” I pull pieces from the bag, one by one, and examine each, wondering at its use. Most have no distinct purpose—a sheet of that, an ingot of this, something that looks like a handle off a tankard—but a few things catch my eye: narrow tubes connected by a gear that certainly belonged to something complex, bits of metal the size of dining utensils forged like little arrows.
Oh Ancients, if only I could speak to just one of you for a single minute, I would learn so much.
I push the metal debris toward Arthen.
“Where on the Serpent’s world were you digging?” he asks, his eyes wide. He picks up a piece of scrap and turns it over in his hands.
“Can you use it?”
“I can use all of it.” He grasps those utensil things. “I’ll need to get the forge very hot, but I can work this.” He wipes his free hand down his face. “The backlog, Pell, I don’t even know where to start.”
I grin. “From the top, I guess.”
He collects a few pieces that appear to be made of the same alloy and brings them to his forge.
“One request?”
Arthen pushes down on the bellows. “Anything.”
“Do you still have those plans I made, for the rover?”
He pauses. Tips his head toward a set of drawers sitting as far from the furnace as a set of drawers can get. Starting at the top, I open the drawers one at a time. In the third one, I find parchment with my scrawl. It depicts a three-wheeled vehicle, the size of a deer, that would transport water buckets to and from the well, helping out the farmers. It was fun to design with Arthen, but we’d never had the materials to build it. I’m sure, with enough resources, I could build a motor to propel it. It could carry a dozen buckets of water or more.
I’d scrawled all of this in smudged charcoal, along with a little symbol in the bottom right corner, a rhombus with one line cutting through the top, and two smaller, parallel lines in the center. My own version of an Ancient symbol, were I ever to craft something of my own.
“That,” Arthen grunts as he pushes on the bellows, “is at the bottom of the list.”
“And I’m guessing darts are at the top?”
It’s Arthen’s favorite game. Used to have a board inside Maglon’s alehouse, until Arthen melted down the darts last year to make Amlynn some needles for sutures and to repair her scissors. He snorts. “Only slightly.”
I close the drawer. “I’ll get the materials we need.”
“Will you now?”
I wiggle my fingers at him in a show of facetious mystery and head back toward the road.
Before I reach it, though, Arthen calls out, “I want my knife!”
“Oh, for the Serpent”—I reel back at him—“I do not have your knife!”
He’s focused on his fire. “Thirteen-centimeter blade, braided leather handle. It’s got sorghum leaves etched onto one side of the blade.”
Hand on hip, I reply, “It sounds beautiful, Arthen, but completely unfamiliar.”
He clicks his tongue. “I could have sworn I lent it to you.”
“So I could what? Stab the dead bodies I bury?” Rolling my eyes, I wave and leave. I’m not especially tired, so I consider heading to the farms to find Salki after I eat, but as I approach home, she finds me first.
“Pell!” She runs toward me from my front door. She’s lively and grinning, a flash of her old self. The eagerness in her voice brings relief I didn’t know I needed. Casnia lingers a few paces behind her, peering off toward the southern mountains. “Glad I found you! Look!”
She shoves something yellow into my hands. It takes me a beat to recognize it as Ancients’ work, and it’s covered in symbols.
My jaw drops. It’s unlike anything I’ve uncovered, and nothing like the machines in the tower. “Where did you find this?” It’s heavy, a flawlessly crafted circle about thirty centimeters across, with symbols carved on its face, close to its edge, framing about two-thirds of it. A right triangle protrudes from its center. Tarnish has given the metal a matte finish.
“We expanded a little last cycle, did some planting,” Salki explains. “Gethnen dug it up. Wants to melt it down for tools, but I wanted you to see it first.”
Before yet another argument about the use of my artifacts winds its way through town, she means. I turn it over in my hands. There are no signs of welding or breaks, no slots or rivets or holes to denote missing pieces. The artifact appears whole. And given how robust the thing is, and how close to the surface it must have been, I’m not surprised.
I rotate it in my hand. “I don’t know what this is, Salki.” There are O\ and /O symbols on either side of the protruding triangle in addition to the symbols—seventeen, to be precise—around the edge. That number is meaningless, but I do recognize some of the figures. They’re digits. They stop and start at five in both directions, and—based on my count—if they’re moving by ones, then the top number, across from the right triangle’s perpendicular side, is a thirteen. Which correlates with the hours in a cycle, but ...
“Your guess is better than mine,” she offers. “Thamton thinks it’s a fancy dinner plate for picky people. This”—she indicates the protruding triangle—“keeps the food from touching.”
“Eat,” Casnia says, kicking a pebble. “Eat.”
I laugh. “Well, that’s one theory.” I glance toward the tower in the distance. “Do you mind if I hold on to it for a bit?”
Salki rolls her lips together. “Gethnen found it. You know how he feels about this stuff.”
I consider this for a moment. “Tell him I gave it to Arthen to melt down. I already forked over some of my other finds, so it will balance out.”
Salki’s face falls. “Oh Pell, I’m sorry. I know you had plans for those—”
“Fair trade.” I offer a smile and heft the new artifact, running my thumb along its edge. It’s different from anything else I’ve seen ... and something in my gut tells me it’s important.