The Fire Opal Mechanism

by Fran Wilde

  “Those are books that survived the silvering,” the innkeeper said, proudly coming up behind her. “We saved them by putting them in a lead case.”

  “What’s the silvering?”

  “A while back, someone noticed words disappearing from paper—a new kind of moth or something. There was no stopping it. Some of our books were completely ruined.”

  “Moths caused this?” Jorit held up the book from her room to show she understood completely. “It’s been happening in the Far Re—where I’m from too.” She realized that if she said Far Reaches and someone were to check, there would be no evidence of it. Not yet.

  But the innkeeper nodded. “It’s the only logical explanation. There have been reports from nearby lately, and I know you came in town on foot. It’s not rare anymore.” He shrugged. “Not a lot of people read around here, so it’s not too noticed. But I read, sometimes to the guests. They like to come to the hall, or trade gossip and then listen to the stories.”

  “What about books in the upstairs rooms?” Jorit asked. “Did any survive?”

  A creak on the upstairs hallway, and the early morning quiet was broken. “No books in the rooms. They’d be used for”—he frowned—“waste paper.”

  “These must have wandered, then,” Jorit said, handing The Visitors’ Guide and the dictionary to the innkeeper. She kept the blank book. Ania had wanted to make copies.

  The man grumbled about needing more help keeping order, but put the books into the case and then headed into the kitchen.

  Ania descended the stairs, the light catching her clothes and the clock she carried in her hands.

  “I had the strangest dreams,” Ania whispered, glaring at the innkeeper’s back.

  Jorit looked at her, the truth waiting behind her teeth.

  Ania continued. “But I haven’t slept so well in a long time.”

  “You talked in your sleep, Ania,” Jorit finally said. “You don’t remember anything?” She wasn’t sure if she wanted Ania to remember or not.

  Ania shrugged, as if talking in her sleep was a silly thing. “Only dreams. Of the valley, long ago.” But her brow wrinkled for a moment. Jorit wondered if she was holding things back.

  Now’s no time for keeping secrets, Jorit thought. But Ania didn’t want to discuss it, so she wouldn’t press. Jorit stayed silent.

  The innkeeper returned and absently handed them each a stiff piece of toast—still stale tasting even with the crisp heat and a thick layer of butter applied—and took another coin from Ania. “Our serving woman was curious about the books too, a while back. Don’t come from nearby, do any of you?” He made a small, almost disapproving sound with his tongue against her teeth.

  Ania shook her head. “A long way away.” She sounded fierce.

  “You’ll want to be getting on soon, then,” the innkeeper whispered. “There’ve been a lot of fights here. Disappearances. No place for women traveling alone.”

  Jorit’s face turned red. “That’s rather archaic—”

  But Ania stepped on her foot. “All right,” she said. “We’ll take our payment back, then.”

  The innkeeper gladly gave it, and they went to pack their bags.

  When they were out on the street, Jorit fumed. “The nerve, the assumption.”

  “The times.” Ania shook her head. “And that innkeeper. I’m old enough—” She stopped. “Unless—look.” A handwritten poster on the wall described local thieves . . . two women, last seen traveling together. A reward for the return of a missing timepiece. Also described.

  “The shopkeeper,” she said. The innkeeper had done them a kindness, not turning them in. But others might have. “We have to get out of here. Before we can’t any longer.”

  It isn’t safe, she thought.

  “But the books here survived the first erasures—there are clues here,” Jorit said.

  The clock in Ania’s hand seemed to tick louder as they argued. But the ticking was unsettled. Off kilter.

  Finally, Jorit put her hand on Ania’s shoulder. She wouldn’t let anything happen to the librarian, not until she understood more. “We need to leave in our own time. Deep breath.” She began walking, pulling Ania along.

  Ania took a deep breath. Then another. Finally, the clock’s ticking slowed.

  It’s not me the clock is keeping safe, Jorit realized. It’s Ania.

  10.

  Xachar

  With a new supply of ink and books, the gem continued to grow. The new Pressmen regime reveled in this. “It is a sign of our better leadership,” they announced to the barracks. They didn’t mention Xachar.

  Occasionally, a team would return from abroad and bring pieces of the emerald back with them. They’d pass the ink-laden gem sections through the door and Xachar would lay these atop the rest of the gem overnight.

  The next morning, the pieces of gem would be incorporated into the whole, and the entire gem would darken by several shades.

  Each time this happened, on the room’s far side, the Midnight Emerald overtook more of the press. A facet gouged a whole in the wall. Xachar dreamed once that the gem grew over him while he slept.

  That’s when Xachar stopped taking naps near the press. He stopped sleeping well in the dorms either as the press began to creak under the weight.

  If you keep it running, it won’t hurt you.

  Xachar couldn’t think of his family. He thought hard about the mess he was in to avoid remembering his aunt’s face, her mind wiped clean like a blank page, imagining the others lost somewhere in the bowels of the Pressmen’s camp. He tried to look for them, had asked once and been laughed at. Everyone thought he was strange. No one of consequence.

  Worse, he had a much more immediate problem than the fear he felt for his family.

  The bigger the Midnight Emerald got, the more ink it required. And as far as Xachar could tell, there wasn’t much ink remaining aside from the Universal Compendiums of Knowledge themselves.

  Xachar attempted once to explain to the press that ink was a finite resource. He felt ridiculous talking to a gem. He tried mixing more ink himself, requisitioning new ink from elsewhere. But nothing worked the same way as ink that had already formed a word on a page. The press rejected it.

  The day a book on the history of gems made its way to the pressroom, Xachar had tried to read up, to discover how to logic with the gem. He only got to the part where they whispered, where they controlled minds, before the second captain caught him at it.

  “You don’t need that,” she said. “We have the manual and the Universal Compendiums of Knowledge.” As Xachar watched, she fed the book to the press herself. Her long fingers grazed the press’s intake wheel, and she yelped. Pulled her hands away just in time.

  Xachar hadn’t believed a word he read of the now-lost book. Still, to spite the second captain, he tried to remember what the chapter he’d been reading had said. He decided that if they could whisper and control minds, gems could also listen.

  So he started speaking to the Midnight Emerald again. On long, cold evenings in Quadril when the rest of the squad was in the barracks, Xachar told the Midnight Emerald all the news from abroad.

  He began reading to the press, and the gem, from books before he fed them in.

  He spoke so much, his voice grew hoarse, which was fine because he didn’t have anyone else to talk to. In the dormitories, other Pressmen avoided him. Said he was too sallow, too odd. Not a real Pressman, even though he did the hardest of jobs.

  And to his great delight, the gem stopped growing, stopped working its way over the press’s struts, stopped growing like a hornets’ nest underneath.

  But the gem’s low ebb-and-flow thrum never stopped.

  When Xachar was out of the room, he longed for the sound. He took a spare cot down to the pressroom so he could tend the machine and its gem night and day. The gray canvas and wood sling fit against the far wall, out of the gem’s reach.

  Dangerous, sure, but Xachar didn’t want anyone else tending the pr
ess.

  Soon, he slept there all the time. He was no longer nervous.

  When the captain learned of Xachar’s new habits, he entered the pressroom without knocking. “Are you certain? Even after what happened to the others?” He caught Xachar bent over the press, fixing an intake cylinder.

  Without rising, Xachar nodded. “No one’s spent as much time with the press as I have. And I’m not ill.” On the contrary, both he and the press were doing better than ever.

  His clothes were sweat stained, and his skin had taken on the sheen of an ink drum, but operations were moving faster than ever.

  So fast that they were once again running out of books for the press, and out of the ink that the press needed. The captain noticed. And Xachar noticed him noticing.

  But the gem had yet to pale.

  “We’ll double Compendium production tonight,” the captain said. “The gem can take it. The new Pressmen territories need copies.”

  Xachar straightened, wiped his hands on his pants, and frowned. “That will require more books in the end.” Were there more books somewhere?

  “We’ll do another pass through the territories,” his captain said. “There are surely still some that people have been hiding.” The Pressman glared at the emerald. “Greedy thing.”

  The press and the emerald that bore it seemed to list toward the door. Xachar found himself with his hand on the knob, his back against the heavy oak, blocking the Pressman’s exit.

  “No,” he whispered. The room turned dark green. Ink shadows curtained his eyes.

  Xachar woke in the room with the press. His hands bloodstained. Gore in his hair. The sound of pounding on the door outside.

  “Locked! The madman’s locked it. He’s in there with the press.”

  “Where’s the Pressman?”

  “Xachar, where’s the captain?”

  A whispered “You won’t believe it when you see him—like the color’s drained right out of the man. Spooky.” Then, louder: ”We should break open the door!”

  Xachar looked at his hands again. They were pale, but stains dark as ink ran beneath his nails.

  And the press—the Midnight Emerald nearly covered half of it, and was much darker. What had happened? Had he finally gone as mad as the others? Xachar felt fine.

  Keep it running.

  No. Xachar felt better than fine. He could sense things now—ink and paper. He could hear the rustling of treasured books hidden throughout Quadril.

  The Midnight Emerald whispered too, and Xachar could hear its hunger.

  He wanted books and ink for the press. For the campaign. For the Midnight Emerald. But they were outside. And between him and outside were several Pressmen.

  How to get out and find what he needed, without being caught.

  Many days ago, in the main square of Far Reaches University, Pressmen had blown ink dust in the faces of those who disagreed with them.

  Xachar remembered the blank looks on professors’ faces. He checked the bin where printing dust and lint collected. Nearly empty. That wouldn’t help.

  But. The press itself. The books were stripped blank when they ran through the machine.

  Could the press work on other kinds of knowledge? Xachar wondered silently, and the answer came loud and clear. Yes. All kinds.

  The press smelled of grit and grime, blood, ink, and memory, all tied together, all enough to bring a thing alive.

  Xachar slowly unlocked the door. He looked out at the Pressmen on the other side.

  “I need to show you something,” he said. “Please come in.”

  And he and the press waited for the others to enter.

  11.

  Ania

  The clock’s ticks sounded strange to Ania. Weaker. Tick-tick, pause. Tick-tick, pause. The first tick slow and sibilant, as if the mechanisms were struggling. The second, fast and short. Then she heard the whisper. Si-ma. A cadence much like the ticking.

  Sima. Sima Sima Sima. A rhythm, not a whisper.

  She put her hands to her ears, but the sound continued. Jorit looked at her, worried. Tugged on her sleeve. “We have to go.”

  Sima. Was it a word? She’d asked the clock a question back at the inn—was it answering? What did that word mean?

  Ania blinked. She’d seen the word somewhere. In The Book of Gems, the catalog of names of all the jewels and their lapidaries?

  As Jorit led her away from the market and the inn, and down a shadowed lane, Ania pulled the catalog from her satchel and looked. Yes, the youngest lapidary. The last one to have her name recorded by the Valley Jewels: Sima.

  Ania couldn’t find any more information—other lapidaries were connected with a major gem, their skill with it documented. Ania paged through the book as she and Jorit walked toward the town walls. The whispers matched the crunch of their footfalls on the paving stones. Sima.

  Ania replaced the book in her satchel and covered it again with the scarf. Jorit kept tugging her forward, the clock beneath her arm, fingers firmly wound around Ania’s dark sleeve.

  As they sped away from the town, Ania thought about her heritage, about the stories of her grandmother: so many times the family had fled before the Pressmen and, before that, other armies. She’d witnessed the beginning of one such wave, with the Pressmen’s parade. And she couldn’t change the course of those marching feet. She could only try to run before them.

  And Ania knew she was tired of running.

  How her ancestors had been the last family to leave the Jeweled Valley. How they’d always been careful of who they’d taken into their confidences, preferring books to people. She’d once heard her grandmother whispering and listening to nothing and no one. How she’d hidden a handful of broken gems in her pocket and the family had locked her away in a spare room.

  You have the look of a lapidary, the shopkeeper had said. She’d ignored him.

  Now Ania stopped, pulling Jorit to a standstill. Was she a lapidary? Or what passed for one now that all the real gems were gone or broken? She could hear a voice. She’d talked to herself and ignored the answers that sometimes came since she’d begun working at the university library.

  But now she knew. “This is one of the last gems,” she said to Jorit.

  “It’s a strange one,” Jorit said. “A powerful mix of stones. Could you find it in the book?”

  Ania shook her head. “But I can hear it whispering,” she finally admitted. “It has a name, and it can move across time. It could at least. Maybe never again.” Her head ached with ticking.

  “Ania! Don’t slow down, not yet.” Jorit pulled her and the clock farther from the town. Ania’s braid fell around her shoulders. Their feet scuffed the rough pavers that were slowly transitioning into gravel and stone. Ania’s toes caught a gap in the road. She faltered.

  She could go no farther.

  A stand of trees huddled at a bend in the road just ahead. Ania leaned that way. “I need to sit.”

  Jorit let her veer off the road, and soon Ania crouched in the shadows. She stared at the opal within the broken clock’s sides.

  She looked at Jorit. “I think this gem is more than air moving through crystal structures. I think . . .” She was trying to recall the Jeweled Valley’s myths, among the books she’d memorized while trapped in the library. “I’m afraid.”

  “It’s all right,” Jorit said. “I’ll keep you safe.”

  Ania strained to remember, but couldn’t quite—something about the defeated kingdom, the sacrifice a lapidary had supposedly made for her Jewel.

  Sima.

  Jorit pulled the travel guide from Ania’s pack. “‘The Jewel and Her Lapidary’—I remember that formation from childhood,” she said. “There was a lapidary named Sima. She was the last of them.”

  “Okay,” Ania said, sweeping her long braid back over her shoulder. She lifted the broken gears from the stone and looked over the places where the gem had been altered to smooth the mechanisms, the escarpment. Her fingertip brushed the divot where a small pie
ce of the opal had been cut away. Then she examined the break from the drop in the marketplace. “You’ve been through so much.”

  “What are you doing?” Jorit said, concerned. “Who are you talking to?”

  Ania ignored her. She put her hand on the fire opal, whispering, “Sima. Is that your name?” Instead of the gem calling her, Ania called the gem. She held it in her mind and for a moment felt the pull through the needle’s eye, but then she became the needle and the thread. She felt the gem encompass her mind, and she bound it, tightening the space between the crack, sealing it. “Sima.”

  When Ania opened her eyes, Jorit gasped. “Your eyes. They were brown, I’m sure. Now they’re the color of opals. All colors.”

  For a moment, Ania saw her fellow traveler’s face in facets, as a child and a young woman, as an old woman too. Jorit was beautiful.

  Ania reeled. The trees spun around her dizzyingly, as saplings, as a bare meadow, as an ancient grove. “What is happening?”

  A heartbeat later, she answered herself. “Time. I can see it.”

  A moment after that, she shuddered. “The gem can see it. Not me. I can see through the gem. And it’s more than a gem. She—had a name—Sima.” She paused, hoping Jorit would understand. “I was right. She was once a lapidary too—partly. The opal is a compendium.” She caught her breath for a moment. “It’s alive.”

  She looked at the books they’d carried from the library, The Book of Gems, the travel guide. The books shifted beneath the opal’s lens: they were so many things at once, a tree, a river, the blood of a child, the pages blank then inscribed with words, the gems inside all coming down to a secret Ania could not see, but the pages, the pages blurred and aged. . . .

  She shook her head to clear it. Felt Jorit’s arms around her shoulders, supporting her. The once thief, now friend, future—

  Ania caught her breath.

  Her friend now. Keeping her from toppling over in the dirt.

  “What is it?” Jorit asked.

  “I can see what the gem sees. I can understand, and it’s difficult.” Ania clutched her head as it began to ache. “But I understand better what happened to some of the books. They’re being erased, the ink pulled right from them. I saw it at the university, but didn’t understand. The Pressmen are using their gem to feed off the ink, the knowledge inside. The gem was trying to show us how the Pressmen are doing what they’re doing, but it couldn’t control when it was going any more than we could.”