by James Comins
Ignoring the guard, who added a few polite and respectful remarks, skekTek lurched back toward the labs, carrying the squirming insect. The old cage was broken--the twigs were evidently little match for the serrated black claws--but luckily skekTek had a variety of secure metal cages which were far less likely to get cracked by an insect. With a click, the bug was restored to the lab and skekTek's attention turned back and forth between that heavy not-gold object and the possibility of invading the Slavemaster's kennels. No, he'd need some time to study the Slavemaster's habits, when he left his rooms and when he arrived . . . Yes, it would be best to begin examining the properties of the metal thing, whatever it was. Locking the outer door to prevent any more outlandish interruptions, skekTek lifted the thing from where it lay on one of his workbenches.
"Erm, not to be much of a bother," the insect said aloud, "but you might examine that spinning handle thing that opens the big door."
SkekTek's eyes turned reluctantly to the bug, and a drip of orange blood appeared in the corner of his vision. Oh, yes. The wound that the Slavemaster had given him was still weeping, untended. Odd that the guard hadn't mentioned it--almost as if he'd been distracted. File that thought away, along with the bug's suggestion about the door to the Dark Crystal. First, some sort of bandage. A brief probe of the forefinger showed that his beak was punctured. Cloth wouldn't do the job. Something stronger, then. Rummaging in his scraps, skekTek found a likely piece of shredded steel and a pair of barbed pins. Holding the tiny metal plate against his wound, he sized it, braced it in a vise and cut it to length with a single muscular snip of enormous shears. Laying the newly fitted plate on a workbench, he struck two holes, top and bottom, with a nail and mallet. A fine file buffed everything smooth. Sitting before a mirror, he squeezed the steel over the savage cut into the keratin of his beak and took a deep breath.
The sensations of the body are nothing. Only the mind matters.
A gargled sound, and another, as two long barbed pins broke the hard but giving material of his beak and caught inside his flesh. Then it was done.
He would punish the Slavemaster for that. A beak wound wouldn't heal, not completely.
"That other Skeksi had a real interest in the purple thing behind the door. Talked funny too, not funny to laugh at, you unnerstan'. Talked about a Dark Crystal, he did," the bug said. "But I always heard that it was the Great Crystal."
What was that? A slow realization bloomed. "Other Skeksi," skekTek hissed, approaching the cage. "Had an interest in the Dark Crystal. Did he wear a steel frame over his robes?"
"Yeah, he did," the insect said.
Sprinting, skekTek turned the capstan and wrenched the door open, peered into the light of the Dark Crystal. The frequencies were the same. The crack was the same. The color was the same. Nevertheless, skekTek felt a distinct sense of violation, as if a thousand dirty wings were buzzing throughout his space.
"You saw all this," he murmured. The bug lifted his antenna stubs expectantly. "I," said skekTek, "would like quite very much to know if my colleague should return. Or anyone else. Should you choose not to escape again, and keep track of anyone entering my labs, you may find me willing to overlook past errors, and perhaps even repair your carapace."
The bug glanced down at the two pieces of shell in its claws and faced the unyielding bars around him.
"No more pins?" he asked.
"Hm. None," skekTek answered with a certain pleased smile.
The bug flicked the cracked shell pieces with a claw. "Yeah, well, seeing as I'm not occupied with much else." A puff of a sigh. "No pins."
"Excellent." An unexpected problem, spun into solutions. Engineering a new guardbug. Perhaps, skekTek mused, this slavery affair was not without its . . . practicalities. No matter.
The brassy blade consumed all of his attentions now. What was it? What did it do? It was unusually heavy. Its shape . . . familiar . . . yes, oddly familiar. Could it be? . . . but no. No, that was quite improbable. A likelihood that did not even register. A partial impossibility.
And yet. SkekTek's long fingers rotated the blade and its handle and prongs. Words were written underneath. It was not a language he recognized. The temptation was to show it, to share it with someone who knew the language, but the Skeksi who was best with languages was . . . the Chamberlain, naturally. Thus the risks of specialization. Best keep it to himself. Yes.
Upon closer inspection, the yellow metal appeared to have been smelted directly onto the odd, misshapen blade. Materials, materials. Taking a file, he removed a small fragment of the off-white stuff of the handle. Turning on a grindwheel, he took off a quick wire's worth of the metal and brought them both to a small forge in a dank backroom of his shop.
Reagents. Reactions. Strange, stranger, and again strange. And increasingly suspicious.
* * *
"How long have you been hiding there?" Loora shouted.
"Who? What's happened?" Cory whispered.
He lurched forward, drawn by his arm as Loora pulled it. The lingering sound of Worshippers making all kinds of shocked noises and chattery conversation continued, but Cory stumbled past their voices, past the low crackle of burning nut-oil, to a frigid world outside the circle. His eyes saw nothing; however, the sounds, the temperature, even the smells had already started to solidify around him. Loora drew him beyond the thing that had been screaming. Probably they weren't too far from the cliff he'd shot past, now, or maybe they were. Hard to say. He was really just inventing landmarks in his mind to still the nervousness.
"How'd you know we were here?" spoke a completely new but oddly familiar voice.
"Who--?"
"Cory, shoosh. You bunch have been watching us from the edge of the forest since we arrived. You helped Raunip escape, too. Twice now. He doesn't really have any magic stuff. He's just got friends. Who are you?"
A rustle, as if hoods or masks or robes were being unveiled.
"Oh," exclaimed Loora. "You're from a different clan, aren't you? You don't seem too different--"
"We ARE very different so," said a young female voice. It was almost . . .
"Gelflings?" Cory asked.
"Spritons are invisible until we choose to be seen," a male Gelfling said.
"No you weren't. I saw you," said Loora. "You were just wearing a big hat."
"You didn't see us, you just saw the hat. Maybe you're a good hat-spotter, but if we put hats on all the trees and hid among them you'd have no idea which one was us."
The ground moved, and Cory plunged straight down, letting out a vague "guh." He stopped short with his feet suspended inside loose, sucking soil. Some kind of giant worm had him by the ankle. The Hunter was coming--
"Sorry there, sorry there, didn't think anyone was above me!" a muffled voice said. A firm force shoved Cory back to the surface. A moment later, the soil broke beside Cory's feet and an elderly male voice, no longer muffled, said: "Ho there, young Gelflings! Or transpassers, I'm supposed to say. Yes, that's right. Hold, child varmints, for you walk the woods of the Spritons! Nobody wh--Skymother's sneezing stormclouds, what's got into your eyes?" he exclaimed.
Cory blinked and faced the voice. "I'm blind," he said.
"But we're going to fix him," Loora said quickly. "I'm Loora, he's Cory. He can see the future. You let Raunip trespass," she said abruptly, accusingly.
"No need to take me too personal, miss, we've had to tiptoe around the Worshipper village ever since Brin became Great Priestess. I was young when it happened, if you can believe it." The elderly man laughed a charmingly elderly chuckle. "Am I right that the Priestess is gone?"
"Is that what happened?" Cory whispered to Loora.
"Of course that's what happened. Just stop. Cory, I wonder about you."
Cory felt hurt and lost even as the old Spriton chuckled along and murmured, "Wonderful, wonderful! Been too long. Hope we'll all be friends. And is that--? Aughra! My stars and planets, it's been trines untold!"
The powerful hand of Loora p
ulled Cory backward, and the blindness provided him no sense of where he was stepping. She stopped and her arm encircled his chest and she was right behind him, pressing against his back; he felt her breath on his shoulder and he still felt like she had hurt him, just a little, and he was mad at her touching him, especially when he had no one else to rely on.
Aughra's voice: "Uncle Embling. You're taller than you were when you were Nephew Embling. Not going to raise a fuss about the Woodland Clan marching around your land, are you?"
"Me? No, not for friends of yours. And a welcome to you. Hope you'll be pleased with our progress, Madam Aughra. We've gotten quicker in our landswimming since the last time you were here. Learned fast. Glad you taught us."
"Mm, my landswimmers. Yes! Getting better. Brought Raunip with you, Loora said? You can bring others underground with you now?" Aughra asked.
"Yes!" one of the younger Spritons said. "I brought him out. He's back at the village--or was, when I dropped him off."
Loora's face brushed the back of Cory's hair. Her hand held his arm, a controlling force. He felt, he wasn't sure why, both very safe and very frightened by her. They'd hardly spoken, really, didn't know each other from the village, but she'd led him out of the tree and guided him around since then, and she seemed to be pleased to be near him, but he still preferred solitude to her company. There was something unsettlingly electric about Loora and the way she was comfortable being in charge of things.
"How deep can you travel now?" Aughra asked conversationally.
"How deep--well, we haven't been practicing for depth," Uncle Embling said. "More for distance. How deep do you need to go?"
"UrNol?" called Aughra.
Somewhere to the back, the chastened voice of the Mystic was approaching: "We must travel to the Netherway, and from there to ur-Kalivath, to attend the purifying song of my brother urIm, the Healer."
Uncle Embling smacked his lips nervously. "Netherway? I can't do it," he said. "The outer leg of the Nethercroft ends twenty thousand trors from here. Almost straight down, through rock. I can go about fifty trors on a good day, if the soil's plush enough. Meter?"
"Not me," the Spriton boy said. "I can landswim a thousand through soil, and I've been practicing. Ormellia?"
"I think we should ask Skeleton Kid," the Spriton girl murmured without much enthusiasm.
* * *
It is a rare secret indeed that never goes uncovered. The uncovering can happen many different ways. Sometimes it's uncovered by curiosity--the curiosity that plagues all thinking creatures on all thoughtful worlds. Other times, a secret desires to be found, almost as if secrets themselves have voices. Such secrets can call and call until they find an uncoverer.
Rarest of all is a secret that locates the one who will find it and pursues. Then there is little you can do except follow the course laid out for you.
Pebbles must fall together to begin a landslide. Drops of water must gather to form a cloud, and more still to make the rain fall. Many hidden things must gather to push a big secret to the surface.
The Storyteller lifted her hood and revealed her face. It was blue and furry. The skin under the fur was stained brown in places, especially around her legs, but the blue fur was fierce and alive. Her eyes were black with still-large whites.
Things pull together. Not even the strongest can hold things apart forever. Secrets always come revealed. And we grow.
* * *
The Chamberlain took no time in learning to use the shiny purple crystal. He knew there was a piece of glass that was needed, so he purchased a small rectangular piece of glass from skekLach and tried holding it over the eyes of a Podling slave whom the Slavemaster furnished him with. As the trick progressed, the Chamberlain noticed that there was much less of that mess on the floor than he was expecting. Scraping it up resulted in a slightly orange slime, hairy, since he was testing it out in a filthy hallway, and only a drop or two came out at a time from the slave's underarms. He imagined it was a matter of patience. SkekTek seemed to have oceans of spare patience. The Chamberlain was busy, and standing still holding a rapidly dimming purple rock in front of a worthless Podling was not of any interest to him. Impressing the Emperor, on the other hand, was. So he persisted: a toll and a half of shining the light, a minute to scrape up the slimy drips from the floor, and then another toll of shining the light. Every three tolls he shouted for the Podling to bark like an animal, and each time the slave shivered and tried to make itself small and refused to bark. The eyes didn't change, either, and this worried the Chamberlain. It was all very frustrating.
There was also the nagging suspicion that, if he couldn't imitate the good success that Tek demonstrated, there would not be an opportunity to insist on the return of his metal gift thing. The Emperor would not be pleased with failure, nor with a grubby cup of floor-slime, no matter how rejuvenating. Patience. Another three tolls of this, and maybe there would be some real results. SkekTek's results only took a quartoll, but he'd had practice, obviously. Oh--and he'd only covered one of that slave's eyes. The Chamberlain instructed his slave to hold the glass rectangle to the side, then waited. After another four tolls, there was a grubby half-cup of slime scraped off the floor, and the purple light had faded so much that it was just raw crystal. Conked out.
Broken. Failure. Tek had obviously used some kind of trick. This shining stone was nothing now.
Scowling, the Chamberlain took the skittish but still rebellious Podling by the collar and walked the winding ways down to the kennels.
"Look," he squawked nasally to the Slavemaster as the sound-locked door slid open. He didn't even feign being in control of himself. The Chamberlain presented the unlit crystal chunk, the cup of reddish-yellow slime, and the scowling slave. "It didn't work. Tek did something. He's trying to humiliate us."
A slowly cresting rage began to grow on the Slavemaster's face. He grabbed the slime and dipped a finger in and tasted it. Twitching once involuntarily, he threw the cup aside and struck the Chamberlain. "You were told to produce rejuvenating liquid!" he roared. "This is just Podling sweat. There's hardly a drop of that precious, precious essence in it. The Emperor will skin you. Skin you." A gargled roar of raw hatred boiled out of the Slavemaster.
The Chamberlain thrust the crystal and the slave into the Slavemaster's hands. "You try. HmmmMmm. It's your responsibility now. We'll see how well you do," he sniffed, and exited.
He had been defeated by Tek's clever self-draining crystal. Humiliated. Unable to decipher these technologies or the industriousness or the precision. But the Chamberlain had something that skekTek would never have: connections. Friends with power. Ways to control, manipulate, persuade. And even if the Slavemaster was no longer his best connection, there were others. There were always others.
Others.
His feet shuffled him away from the kennels and toward the outer doors.
The Castle of the Crystal's front hallway was crooked, angular, and full of looming bright radiances: chandeliers, braziers, sconces, all creating a thousand crooked shadows. The high doors opened at his gesture, and limpid light poured through to the cracked ridge of the road and over the solid bridge that crossed the narrow moat. The candlelight fell through, fighting the dark that soured the land beneath the Perpetual Storm. It lit the black filth of the Swamp of Sog, it cut jagged fingers into the moat's fog and mist and steam. The light was limited, and vanished just a few dozen trors beyond the front hall. Wishing briefly that he'd thought to bring several layers of extra warmth with him, the Chamberlain marched onto the sunless road out of the castle.
* * *
"Hurry up."
In the near distance, the Spriton village was laden with garlands, laurels, blossoms, leis, wreaths, long strands of boughs and flowers, all circling a concourse of woven huts of varying heights and widths. It was not deeply camouflaged, but was set within a cloud of moist forest. Bare limbs of trees were tied into a second roof above the huts, and rivulets of condensed dew dripped down curr
ents carved into the branches. The village felt much more festive than Quillpine, Loora thought. This was a town of perpetual holiday. Smaller, too, and the homes were closer together. Loora found herself liking the Spritons. They seemed much more direct and far less interested in who was famous or important than Woodlanders were.
Cory was hanging off her arm, barely keeping up. She kept an eye on his feet, pointing out exposed roots and layered erosion steps that the Spritons liked to set into the topsoil. This new village was far more interesting to look at than Cory's feet, however. Loora was consumed. The weaving and knotting techniques that kept the houses together were new to her; the roofs had spiral posts at the corners, like the horns of mounders; and the people! Coming out to greet the newcomers, smiling, sarcastic, with bright accessible expressions and no Woodlander pomp or arrogance at all. They didn't take themselves seriously at all.
She was too shy to speak to the adults, even the adults she'd yelled at earlier. It was different, now that she'd met them. Funny how things change when you know someone personally. And the kids here were wild, running, crazy, bothersome, even the ones close to her age, and she held herself apart from them, too. Her hand guided Cory, and the other was thrust into the pocket of her heavily pocketed workpants. The globe--oh! It was still in Brin's pod throne room.
"Cory," she whispered.
"Mm?"
"I have a--" but for some reason she scowled and couldn't make herself say a present for you. It just sounded . . . it sounded like something she was not going to say aloud. She required a different angle, she decided, an excuse to give the globe to him. Maybe as a reward for regaining his sight. Or no, not a reward, just as a celebration of his getting healed. Hopefully in the meantime the globe would stay safe and unbothered on the floor of the pod, under her morning coat.
"Yes?"
"I have a question. Who dragged you away from the ledge outside Aughra's house? We saw the path where you got pulled down--"
"I didn't get pulled anywhere, I just slipped."
"You just slipped? Slipped? And everything after--the tree cracking? Brin? Aughra's nose getting shot off? Because you slipped?"
