Mota’s voice shouted from the Red House, and Iliana braced herself for some of the man’s so-called rats to come running down the wooden bridge. Nothing yet.
“Doubtful,” Iliana said, when it was clear that they’d be waiting some more. “But I’m willing to listen.”
“The cabalists and Quinta lords come from the same source,” Thiego said. “It wasn’t just the Luminoso that was created to bring about the Fourth Plenty, it was the Quinta as well.”
Chapter Nine
Before Thiego could explain, five men came trotting down the swaying rope bridges that led from the Red House to the Wood Road. One was bleeding from a cut on his face, and another clutched his shoulder, face gray and wincing with pain. They carried bundled clothing, spare shoes, and sacks containing apples or potatoes or some other lumpy food.
From a distance, their skin seemed to be glowing yellow, but as they approached, Iliana thought it more like a sickly sheen. What a strange bit of magic from Thiego’s device. The men—well, two of them were overgrown boys, really—came up to her panting, darting glances behind them as if afraid there would be a pistol aimed at the back of their heads.
One of them hooked his thumb back at Mota, who had thrown open shutters on a second-floor window to watch them with a hard gaze. “That devil said we got some black coins coming to us.”
“Give me your names, first,” Iliana said. “Then the coins. Then you take your jaundiced hides up to Captain Plata at the wall.”
“Yeah, he told us that already,” another said. He held out his arm and looked it over. “This gonna leave me marked forever?”
“No. Either you go up top and it fades in a day or two, or you stay down here and it turns into leprosy. First your nose and ears fall off, then you’ll start to lose fingers and toes and anything else that sticks out.”
There were groans and curses at this. The younger of the two boys, perhaps fifteen or sixteen, looked like he would throw up. The one with the injured shoulder looked like he would break into tears. Soon, they were off, hustling even faster than before as they raced down the Wood Road in their haste to find their way to the wall.
“Oh, I know,” she said in response to Thiego’s raised eyebrows. “But they don’t know what your artifact does. It very well could cause leprosy. Not that it would do much to decrease their overall fitness for battle.”
“You’re right there,” he said. “Too young, too old, too feeble looking, too drunk . . . I don’t know what de Armas thinks he’s going to get with most of these recruits.”
“Warm bodies, mainly. He’ll be trying to muster the local villagers, too, make allies where he can.” Iliana shrugged. “De Armas knows what he’s getting when we send men from the dumbre. A mixed bag, to say the least.” She studied Thiego’s face. “How does that artifact work, anyway?”
“If I knew that, I’d be one of the Elders, not a lowly cabalist from a fallen age. Right now, I’m still struggling to figure out the what, let alone the how. But I’ll tell you one thing—it’s not magic. That’s where Salvatore was wrong. That’s what Naila doesn’t understand, either.”
“Explain, please.”
“Magic comes from the gods. From the spirits of the earth, that sort of thing. Like the Dianans, who believe that every strange-looking rock has a demon living in it, and that rivers are filled with the souls of beautiful women. It can’t be explained, it just is.”
“That’s what the artifacts are,” she said.
“To you and me. Not to the Elders. They made these things using rules. Do this, this, and that, and you will create an object like this.” Thiego reached into his pocket to retrieve the artifact, which now looked like glossy black stone in the shape of an egg, with no light—blue, yellow, or otherwise—emerging from its surface. “You could make twenty of these if you had the right devices to do it. Something like the artifact at the bottom of the Rift, for example.”
Iliana still didn’t understand. “So you’d need magic to make more magic?”
“It’s no more magic than the coal you dig out of Carbón’s mines. Remember when I was running your calculations? You burn one pound of coal and you get an exact amount of heat, depending on the grade of coal.”
“Since coal is a rock that mysteriously burns, I’m not sure how that’s a good example. Rocks don’t burn—everyone knows that. Except for coal. So isn’t it a form of magic?”
“You can duplicate it,” Thiego said. “That’s a critical point. You burn the same weight of coal, you get the same number of thermals.”
“So you can duplicate these things,” she said with a shrug. “But if you answer one question, don’t you get another one at the bottom of it? It’s like how they tell you that tiny bugs live in dirty water, and that’s what makes you sick. But where do the bugs come from?”
“That’s not superstition, by the way. Knowledge about those tiny bugs is wisdom straight from the Elders. The bugs come from somewhere. I can find that information in the vaults if you’d like.”
“So the invisible bugs come from somewhere,” Iliana said. “Where did that substance come from? Sooner or later it’s like trying to explain the Elders. Where did they come from?”
“From people who were not the Elders, of course.”
“And before that? The earlier plenty, and so on? You still have to find some time when they sprang into existence. Point is, sooner or later your explanation sounds like magic. Same as that black egg in your pocket that somehow has the ability to stain people’s skin—or maybe it’s just changing our vision. It might have some fundamental explanation, but we sure can’t understand it.”
“But that’s what I’m telling you. We can. There’s enough knowledge in the vaults—”
Another group of young men hustled out of the Red House trailing a smear of yellow that seemed to leave an afterimage in Iliana’s vision like looking directly at the sun and then dragging her gaze away. She studied them as they approached, and was surprised to spot some promising ones. More serious sorts. Closer to twenty years old than to forty or fifteen.
After that, Iliana and Thiego’s conversation was further interrupted by a dozen soot-stained men who emerged from the Wood Road and said that they’d got off shift in the mines and heard there were openings in the army. Thiego marked their arms blue as Iliana took down their names and told them they’d get an escudo bonus when they reached the wall. Another group came out of the Red House and needed to be paid and listed.
A half hour passed before she could press Thiego for more information, and it was nearly dark. Gas lamps marked the occasional rocky ledge or larger building, with minimal light flickering from candles in windows and glowing from the stream of oil lamps that bobbed along the Wood Road.
“The Luminoso and the Quinta were once the same,” Thiego repeated when they were alone again. “Same organization, two different skills. The Quinta wasn’t a ruling clique, and the Luminoso wasn’t a holy sect of cabalists enforcing respect for the ancient ways. The Luminoso were charged with maintaining the theoretical knowledge base, and the Quinta were practical appliers of existing machines and knowledge, like your Basdeenian friend with her gears and winches and steam engines. The Quinta wasn’t hereditary in those days—they had schools to train them. The Luminoso, too. Anyone could join if they had the interest.”
This was completely new to Iliana. And fascinating. “Is this knowledge from your temple?”
“Not everything is open down there—there are still hidden sources of artifacts and locked vaults holding books of wisdom. It is all meant to be recovered in time, when certain milestones are reached. Like the artifact in the Rift. Salvatore thought he could control it when the wanderers were in the sky, but we only had enough to wake it, not enough to master it. The information was down there, mostly in the old tongue, but decipherable. The whole Luminoso has forgotten that our point was to maintain knowledge, and we instead took it upon ourselves to worship magic that isn’t really magic.”
“
So that’s what you were going on about earlier,” she said.
“But at least the cabalists remember that our purpose is maintaining the knowledge of the Elders and bringing about the Fourth Plenty. The Quinta has forgotten its entire point of existence.”
“Yeah, what’s this about the Quinta? How do you mean machines and knowledge?”
“There were five schools in the Quinta. Each school was responsible for a different discipline: chemistry, computation, military technology, mechanics, or communication. Can you figure out which was which?”
“Lord de Armas is military, of course. Torre was mechanics?”
“That’s right.”
“Carbón would be chemistry, wouldn’t he? We don’t only burn coal, we produce gas for the lamps, and know how to measure heat output. That’s chemical knowledge, isn’t it?” Iliana shook her head. “But I can’t think of the other two.”
“Mercado was communication. All the old tools have been lost, the ability to speak with people a thousand miles away. Some of her role has changed. But it’s closer than Puerto’s. He must have been computation.”
“Computation? What does that mean, counting money? Mathematics?”
“I’m not entirely sure,” Thiego said. “But I think it’s something like the mentabacus. Devices to increase the power of the brain, and that sort of thing.”
“The Quinta, the Luminoso . . . why form them in the first place?”
“During the Third Plenty, when the end was near, our ancestors—and that’s all the Elders were, our twentieth great-grandparents or whatnot—were looking for a way to bring about the next plenty as soon as they could. Bring back what they saw as normal. History had already delivered two major collapses, each followed by a lengthy period of chaos. Famine, war, disease. Superstition. They had studied the earlier dark ages, and wanted to change the trajectory.”
“So they made the Quinta and the Luminoso,” she said, excited to finally understand. “To preserve the knowledge and the devices that would make it return faster.”
“But there’s something else you should know,” Thiego said, and his voice had taken on a grim note. “Something troubling. The First Plenty lasted over three hundred years, counting from the burning of the first hot lead fire to the famine and changing climate that ushered in two centuries of misery.”
“And the Second Plenty?”
“A shorter period of glory. It lasted nearly two hundred years, rising almost to the heights of the First Plenty. That’s when the Great Span was built. Then there was a war—weapons that dropped hot lead fires and burned entire cities to the ground. The land was poisoned, including parts of this city and the land at the bottom of the Rift. The collapse was even deeper than the first time, and people forgot what had come before.”
“Like now,” she said.
“Yes, not so different from our abandoned age. For three hundred years, the city on the hillside—the site where Quintana now stands—lay abandoned.”
Iliana tried to imagine the Great Span stretching across the Rift when Quintana had been entirely abandoned, a silent witness to earlier glories. It made sense that when the rebuilding came, it centered around the bridge and the coal mines.
“And then the Third Plenty,” Thiego continued. “It only lasted a hundred years.”
“So short,” she said, dismayed.
“But this time, the Elders knew what was coming, and devised a way to lessen the impact of the collapse and enable the Fourth Plenty to rise as quickly as possible. And to preserve knowledge of the problems that led to earlier failures, and hopefully prevent the dangers that led to the earlier collapses.”
“How long ago was the end of the Third Plenty?” she asked.
“I don’t know, Iliana. Five centuries? Six? Maybe even seven. There’s no way to be sure, only that it was a long, long time ago. Our calendar only goes back ninety years, since we began our own rise.”
“If this is a rise,” she said, thinking of the squalor surrounding them in the lower terraces, “then I’d hate to see what came before. So, if famine caused the first collapse, and weapons of hot lead fire the second, what destroyed the Third Plenty?”
“I’m still deciphering the books, but it has to do with the Rift. It’s man-made. Did you know that?”
“Lord Carbón told me. It was caused by coal mining. Does that mean the coal ran out? That they couldn’t get enough and so trade dried up and they went hungry?”
“I’m not sure it’s as simple as that. But yes, they’d used up all of . . . well, they were running low on everything that could be taken out of the earth, even the ability to grow crops. The land itself was exhausted. And that brings me back to the message we found in the mines.”
“You have to tell me. I have to know.”
Thiego hesitated. At last, he nodded. “The message is simple enough. It says, ‘do not excavate past this point. If you do, there will not be enough coal to pull you back up again.’” Thiego nodded. “It’s coal that provides energy for steam machines and other machinery, at least in the initial stages of the climb. But there’s not enough left to burn to bring us all the way up and still provide for the future.”
“Provide for the future,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
So the Elders of the Third Plenty had been thinking not only about the Fourth Plenty, but about how to survive yet another crash and provide enough fuel for a fifth attempt. And if that failed?
Another group of men came out of the Red House, frustrating Iliana’s aching need to know more. There was so much information flowing out of Thiego, and she wanted it all. This must be what drove the cabalists. All this knowledge, all this power. A connection to the secrets of the Elders. It was staggering that even masters like Naila and Salvatore had failed to take full advantage of that ability.
At last they’d sent the new crop up toward the lower wall, and she could press on with what had become her burning question. “But we haven’t reached the Fourth Plenty yet. We need that coal to do so, and yet we’re being told not to mine any more.”
“But we don’t need it,” Thiego said. “That’s the whole point. We found the artifact in the mines, and then the words appeared on the coal face. The warning is deeper than the artifact was. Behind it.”
“Oh,” she said. And then, as a more profound realization staggered her, “Oh. Damn.”
“The artifact is capable of releasing staggering amounts of energy. Enough to power all sorts of marvels. Enough to bring about the Fourth Plenty, in fact.”
“But Salvatore woke it up prematurely, and now we don’t know what to do with it.”
“Worse than that, because the old fool botched it so badly, the artifact thinks we’re barbarians and is generating witherers to kill us so we don’t harm the device while its true owners complete their rise.”
“That’s what witherers are? By all the bleeding bones of the Elders.”
“It’s not entirely Salvatore’s fault,” Thiego said. “We’ve tapped out the coal, and technologically, we’re nowhere near where the Elders thought we should be. We’ve barely begun our rise, in fact. You can blame the Elders for miscalculating how hard it would be for the Quinta and the Luminoso to maintain the knowledge of the Third Plenty, or you can blame whoever it was who turned those two groups to superstition, to wealth and power, instead of maintaining the purpose for which they’d been established.”
“So much time has passed,” Iliana said. “Hundreds of years. Once the Elders were gone, once their children and grandchildren had died, wasn’t it likely that people would forget what they were doing? That the old ways would look like magic from a fantastical age?”
Thiego ran a hand through his hair. “But the books are there. They’ve always been there, waiting for someone to take the time to read them. Someone could have refocused our efforts. Anyone, at any time.”
She thought he was being unrealistic. What with the outside threats, the strange weather that ruined crops on the coast and brought f
amine to Quintana, the pestilence that swept through the city every generation or two, as likely to wipe out the wise holders of knowledge as to kill the poor of the dumbre, it was inevitable that there had been times when the practical outweighed long-term planning. To even try had very nearly been a fool’s errand.
And that meant she thought the Elders were wrong, too, or at the very least overly optimistic, which was a blasphemous thought.
“I have a guide to get us into the Rift,” Thiego said. “The girl who found the mentabacus knows her way to the bottom and how to avoid the dangers down there—and believe me, there are a lot of threats, and I don’t only mean witherers.”
“Wait, you still want to go down?”
“More than ever.”
“But the artifact will think we’re barbarians and try to kill us.”
“I’m hoping to be less of a barbarian than I was when Salvatore made his ill-fated attempt to control the artifact.”
“So you have a plan.”
He hesitated. “The beginning of one.”
“I hope it’s better than Salvatore’s. Otherwise, we’ll end up a couple of grease spots like he did.”
“That’s the idea, yes. To survive.”
“And your plan is, what?” she asked. “To command the artifact, to take control of its furnaces so we don’t burn any more coal? So we can then bring about . . . you understand.”
“Go ahead. It’s not blasphemy to say it. The whole concept of blasphemy is a twisting of what the Elders wanted, which was to maintain the purity of their scientific knowledge. It was meant to remind the Luminoso of their purpose, not to stop outsiders from voicing it.”
“Fine, then to bring about the Fourth Plenty.” Her face flushed to say it aloud in front of the Guardian of Secrets. “That’s what we’ll be doing.”
Chasm of Fire Page 9
