Chapter 29 #2
Fola gasped in sudden excitement. At first, Llewyn was unsure what had drawn such a reaction.
This courtyard seemed little more impressive than the strip between the palisade and curtain wall: a field of tamped earth and sod, some fifty paces across.
The castle keep at its heart was only a plain cylindrical tower, with machicolations protruding near the top to give it the look of an inverted bell.
The watchman guiding them, seeming amused at Fola’s reaction, told them to wait while he went to announce their arrival to the count.
‘Take all the time you need,’ Fola said, walking slowly across the field towards a patch of courtyard where a strange design had been worked into the ground with stones and pieces of cut glass. Above it, something shimmered.
What Llewyn took at first for a heat mirage—or, he thought with a spike of fear, like the glamour of the raven fiend above its altar—was in fact an armillary sphere made from perfectly translucent crystal, like ice formed of purest water.
It hovered above the strange design of glass and stones.
The same intangible force that held it aloft also moved it.
Its uncountable components swept past one another silently.
Rings and discs orbited a central globe the size of Llewyn’s fist, some bearing arms that themselves held smaller globes with their own satellites.
These, too, held even smaller re-creations of the armillary sphere, some no larger than the head of a pin.
And even these contained smaller re-creations, each subordinate sphere an impossibly precise imitation of the whole.
All worked of the same perfectly translucent glass, so that each component could be perceived with perfect clarity through all the layers that contained it.
At first the deeper layers moved too quickly for him to track, but as he studied them, they slowed.
Time itself bent to the need of his eye.
It was only a matter of focusing one’s attention to the proper speed and distance.
A sudden vertigo seized Llewyn. He felt that the thing had swallowed him, burying his awareness in a puzzle too vast for his mind to contain.
No matter how long he stared, another, deeper layer presented itself.
Globes riding the orbital arms of globes, every satellite the heart of its own system.
Impossible, surely. There must be a base layer too small to be further reduced.
Desperation pressed in on him from outside—a need to find that foundation, to reduce dizzying regression to something tangible, some outflow from some first mover.
A hand fell on his shoulder and returned him to his body.
He stood in an unfamiliar courtyard, but beneath a sky he knew, on solid ground.
The shimmering armillary was no larger than his head, not the all-devouring, all-encompassing infinity he had perceived.
A grounding fact that only made it stranger, and in its strangeness horrifying.
‘Are you all right?’ Siwan said, squeezing Llewyn’s shoulder. ‘You went pale for a moment. Paler than usual, I mean.’
Damon doubled over and retched. Siwan moved to comfort him, but he waved her off and wiped at his mouth.
‘What is it?’ Siwan wondered aloud, turning back to the thing. She knitted her brow, but did not become lost in it, as Llewyn had been. Likewise, Spil, Harwick and Colm examined it with a detached interest. An odd curio, to them, and nothing more.
‘An aleph,’ Fola said. She gazed into its depths, unfazed.
‘After the First Folk roads, perhaps the second most common sort of artifact they left behind. There is one in the City itself, and a few dozen more that the archivists have catalogued based on rumours and reports. This one will be a new addition to that list.’
‘Hardly an answer,’ Spil muttered, annoyed. ‘What’s an “aleph”, then?’
‘I wish I knew.’ Fola took a step closer to the thing and reached out to it. As her hand neared it, her flesh distorted. Damon retched again. Fola’s fingers seemed to bend backwards, as though she were made of cloth, and partially folded.
‘It’s all right,’ she said, pulling back her hand and returning it to normal.
She laughed in delight. ‘There are volumes written about them. Countless studies done. We don’t know why the First Folk made them, or to what purpose, though many speculate they held some spiritual or mystical significance.
And they’ve many strange effects. For instance, something tossed into an aleph will shrink away to nothing, then emerge on the other side after some time—just how long seems to vary enormously, according to no pattern yet established. ’
Damon groaned and slunk away from the thing. ‘Imagine falling into it.’
‘One archivist by the name of Saw Ansa tried that,’ Fola said.
‘He jumped from atop a ladder into the aleph in the City, with a cord tied around his waist in case he needed to be pulled out. Those observing him reported that his body seemed to twist and distort as he drew near the thing, but he fell at a normal rate and passed through to the other side, unaffected.’ She bent, picked up a clod of earth, and tossed it into the heart of the crystal armillary.
It bent and shrank, one end stretching like putty and pulling the rest after it, until it vanished from sight, then reappeared on the far side, landing in a puff of dust. ‘Even a universe can only contain things smaller than itself.’
‘I’ll thank you not to toy with that,’ the Count of Glascoed called down from atop the stairs to the gate of his keep—a young, dark-haired man dressed in a finely cut woodsman’s coat. He wore a sword in a black leather scabbard at his side.
Fola started, turned away from the aleph and dipped her head.
Llewyn followed Spil’s cue, bending nearly double at the waist. Spil had some experience with lordly types, having spent a few years of his youth as a court tumbler for the mayor of some town along the coast in Afondir.
A position he had left to join the Silver Lake Troupe, for reasons he had never shared with Llewyn.
The count paid little mind to their obeisances. He regarded them each in brief turn. His left hand rested on the pommel of his sword—a decoration of twisted iron and worked enamel shaped into the head of a charging stag.
‘The World Clock,’ Ifan went on, nodding towards the aleph.
He descended the stairs, neither relaxed nor coiled to strike, but balanced on the edge between.
‘Supposedly the druids in service to my ancestor, Barwon of Glascoed, could glimpse the future in its turning. Little good it did them. My grandfather told me all sorts of tales. He was the one who placed that mosaic on the ground beneath it. A means of telling the time—not only the hour, but the day, month and year—by the way the light plays on the stones there. I’ve brought folk in to check the timing of the thing, and it stays true enough, needing only slight adjustments each year to the pattern of stones.
A sign of a wobble in the World Clock itself, maybe. ’
‘Or a wobble in the sun,’ Fola offered.
Ifan chuckled. ‘Just as likely, I suppose.’ He studied her, then Colm, who loomed behind her, as poised and ready as the count.
Foolishness, though deeply in-trained foolishness, Llewyn assumed.
If this encounter turned violent, here in the heart of the count’s castle, not even Colm would leave alive.
Ifan went on: ‘The foreign sorceress and her bodyguard. And her bird.’ Frog chirruped, as though grateful to be recognised.
‘Not dressed in as much finery, though, and looking rather worse for wear. Do I not warrant the same ostentation as my friend the prince?’ This last he said with a bemused smile that did not touch his eyes.
‘Did you travel all this way on a rumour of the World Clock? Surely your Starlit Tower holds far greater wonders.’
‘It was a delightful surprise,’ Fola said. ‘We came seeking you, My Lord, and our simple dress and sorry state is only a product of our urgency.’
‘Then I’ll not waste any more of your time,’ Ifan said. ‘And I’ll thank you not to waste mine.’
‘Of course,’ Fola said. ‘Simply put, I have devised a solution to the haunting that plagues your kingdom. One based upon a theory that I think only you, and perhaps a few other nobles in the kingdom and their trusted advisors, will be able to corroborate. I am here to secure that corroboration, and your assistance.’
‘Oh?’ Ifan paced nearer to Fola, until she was within reach of his sword. Llewyn tensed and exchanged a glance with Colm. ‘You have seen, now, the differences between Parwys and Glascoed,’ he went on. ‘Why think I could help you better than the prince, or his mother?’
‘Because I think there are truths you know that they refuse to face,’ Fola answered, ‘or have been kept from knowing.’
Ifan’s fingers drummed the hilt of his sword. ‘What truths?’
Fola cocked her head, her mischievous smile widening. ‘There was no Beast-King of Galca, was there?’