Chapter 8
Chapter 8
The panel sits snug in the floor. The table in its place. The mist, rolling in.
I lean back in a chair, my arms folded, staring at the artifact on the table before me.
It’s ... I don’t know what it is. It has a rectangular frame with filleted corners, made of three different metal alloys, artlessly hammered in some places to make the pieces fit. The frame supports a translucent spherical core in the center made of some kind of acrylic, with a weighted bottom that always faces down. Perfectly balanced. A few other doodads and coils connect to it. It’s the most complete artifact I’ve ever seen of this size.
And I have no idea how it got into my house.
It’s not like other Ancient work I’ve seen. The gyroscopic elements and the build of the frame don’t resemble anything from the tower. And it’s very piecemeal. Enough so that I don’t think it is Ancient work, but Ancient scraps someone conglomerated into ... whatever this is.
It makes absolutely no sense, but ... I’m the only person who could have made this. No one else in Emgarden takes an interest in this sort of thing, and they certainly wouldn’t have cut up my floor and dug out a cavity to hold it without my knowledge. Moseus might know, but I’m not sure how far his knowledge extends.
Machine One in pieces at my feet, strewn across the stone floor, sprockets and gears and coils, bent and misshapen and—
I close my eyes as a sharp pain lances through my skull. I’m in over my head. I have always prided myself on simplicity—simple work, simple life. These ... things ... I see are complicated. This is complicated. And nothing makes me more angry than needing answers to questions I don’t understand.
Sighing, I push the artifact away and grab the edges of the table, shifting it off the panel in the floor. If it’s supposed to be hidden, I might as well keep it hidden until—
The door snicks shut. His feet pad across the floor—
Every hair on my body stands on end as I whip my hands from the table and turn around, heart racing. But the house is empty. It’s a one-room house; I can see every nook of it from where I stand. My lungs collapse on themselves with every strained exhale. No. No. I heard someone in this house. I just heard it, just now. Someone was here.
Mouth dry, I march to the door and rip it open. No one loiters in the street. Slam that shut and check the windows. No one. I can see every corner, but I physically walk to each one, listening to my footsteps on the floorboards for the sound of other hollow compartments. There are none.
Chills course over my arms. I’m losing my mind. A bird must have landed on the roof. Thamton must have closed his door across the way, and it’s so quiet, it sounded like mine. That’s the most plausible explanation.
Crouching down, I force more air into my chest. They’ve never followed me. All these weird lapses I’m having ... they’ve only ever happened in the tower. Not here. I’m losing it.
No, it was just Thamton. My mind strains and my body tenses and Thamton lives too far—
No, he doesn’t. He closed his door hard. That’s all.
I shove the table aside, pull up the weird panel, and snatch the fake artifact, wanting it out of my sight, only to notice something that freezes me to the floor. There, engraved on its metal edge, small and precise, glints a rhombus with one line cutting through the top, and two smaller, parallel lines in the center. It’s not an Ancient symbol. It’s the same one I scrawled on the bottom of my plans for the water rover.
It’s mine.
Heartwood is sick again.
I arrive at the tower a little early, eager to get my mind off the machine in my house. My attention latches on to him, desperate to focus on anything besides my discovery. Heartwood withdraws when I arrive, but the hunch in his shoulders and the straining of his breaths give him away. After he’s gone, I ask Moseus, “What’s wrong with him?”
“He’s too long from home,” the older man replies. I don’t know that he’s older; he just seems it. Though perhaps his illness ages him. “It happens from time to time. Nothing for you to concern yourself with.”
“I didn’t intend to.” I wince at the defensiveness in my tone.
Moseus doesn’t seem to notice. “Good.”
He makes no comment about my absence the last two mists, so neither do I. “I’m looking more at Machines Two and Three this cycle,” I offer. I haven’t explained my numbering system to him, but it’s not hard to figure out. Machine One is on floor one, Machine Two on floor two, Machine Three on floor three. By that pattern, there should be a machine each on floors four and five, but who knows what the Ancients might have crafted up there.
He sighs. “There is much to do. I can’t ... I don’t understand enough to put the third back together.”
After I get to work trying to unstick that arm beneath Machine Two, I realize I lied. I do concern myself with Heartwood. Namely after he leaves his room and descends the stairs, steps light, brow drawn, eyes focused. Extricating myself, I follow like a scorpion tracking a beetle, until he exits the tower. I stare at the door, debating with myself, but return upstairs and look out the window instead, his silhouette just discernible in the mist. Heading off the same direction as before, not to a privy or a well.
Arthen’s knife feels heavy in my pocket. Where are you going, Heartwood?
I mull over it until I successfully pull a lever—more like a brake release—for the hinged arm, and as I suspected, Machine Two shifts away from the wall. Not by much, but enough for a person to get back there. I follow the seams, positive they outline a door in the wall. They’re perfectly square, each a meter long. But if this is a door, its hinges are on the reverse side, and there’s no handle or knob. The only other marking is a natural divot in the stone near the top seam, without real shape or meaning.
I push, knock, and attack it with an array of tools. The stone doesn’t even chip. Did the Ancients make stone alloys, too? More uncertain questions with no feasible answers.
At least nothing in this tower assaults me with waking dreams.
Frustrated, I climb the ladder to the third floor and the mess of mechanics there, my thoughts insufferably pulling to Heartwood once more. Why did he try to stop me before?
Trying to shake my confusion, I organize what I can. Rivets here, gears there, bars that could be one of a dozen things over there, by size. By the time the mist nears its end, I haven’t gotten very far, and Heartwood hasn’t returned.
At least Moseus rewards me with another scrap bag.
The sun burns through the last of the fog as I get to Emgarden, but I pause on the way home, seeing several people out in the streets, shouting and milling about. I hop the broken stone wall around town and spy the doctor, Amlynn. I wave her down.
“What’s going on?” I ask, lowering my bag of goodies to the earth.
“Casnia,” she explains, and my spine immediately stiffens. “She’s missing.”