“The rabble rouser, man!” said Demion.
“The philosopher? That weren’t Goodman Holdean, that were a new man. Only been here a few weeks, but he had big ideas. Made us think we could get something. More fool us.” He looked to the floor.
“I promise I will look into it. I will listen to your grievances.”
“You won’t be listening to his,” said Alanrys. “He’ll be hung in the morning. Take him away!”
“Please look to my children!” called Etwen as he was dragged off.
“I will,” said Katriona.
“How very large-hearted of you,” scoffed Alanrys. “Here I am putting down a gross act of civil disobedience for your benefit, and you are offering to tend to their hurts. You should throw them out on the street, or others will follow in his footsteps, mark my words. But you never did know what was good for you Katriona. Perhaps next time we meet, you will learn your lesson properly.”
Demion stood straight, chest out. “Look here! I think you better leave. If I see you near my wife or our business again, I will personally see that you are brought up on charges. The name of Morthrock carries weight in powerful circles, Alanrys. My father is owed many favours still. Do not provoke me into calling them in.”
Alanrys slapped his gloves into his hand. Both gloves and hands were caked in blood.
“The lapdog barks,” he said. “Very well, I shall leave your factory in your hands, courtesy of the 3rd Karsan Dragoons. I expect thanks shall be forthcoming later.” He snapped a bow, and went to gather his men.
People ventured in from outside, searching for sons and husbands. Fire engines arrived, four teams from different firehouses. Their firechiefs ignored the carnage around them and began arguing about who would take the job.
“Oh for the love of the departed gods! All of you, put out the godsdamned fire and you’ll all be paid!” shouted Demion. “Get on with it or we’ll lose more than the two mills!”
He left Katriona for a moment and went to remonstrate with them. By now both factory sheds were fiercely ablaze. An explosion sent a mushroom of fire into the sky. Her heart was as heavy as stone.
Demion returned.
“Alanrys is right,” she said. “Father is right. This is what happens when a woman steps outside the bounds of her rightful station.” Katriona wept freely. Demion embraced her and she sank into his arms.
“That is not the case, my love. This is what happens when the established order is challenged. The sex of the challenger has nothing to do with it.” He cupped her face in his hands. “The truth is, you are brave enough to do it, I am not. We will triumph over this adversity, you will see.”
She nodded. She opened her mouth to begin speaking of improvements in the workers’ conditions of both races but surprised them both by kissing him passionately and deeply.
He pulled back, astonished. “I...”
“Don’t say anything. Please.”
He cleared his throat. “We should get you home. I must call in the physics to tend to the wounded, and the Guiders or we will have a second disaster on our hands. So much violent death...”
“I am staying with you,” she said.
“Are you sure, my dear?”
She took his hand. “We shall do this together.”
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
The Twin and Mansanio
THE COUNTESS OF Mogawn sat in a high leather armchair in the centre of her orrery. The heavenly spheres clicked overhead, round and round and round, dancing in a wooden sky.
The fires of the Twin were growing in frequency and anger. There was an answer why. Why could she not see it?
Am I to be alone forever?
She chased the thought away angrily. Now was not the time. She stared at the Twin. Was the model correct? While she had sat there, hundreds of years of celestial movements spun by. The gearing was complex. Each model world was designed to follow a path as the real spheres would, changing their cycles gradually in reaction to the proximity of others. This incremental stacking of variables produced complex patterns that she could not have predicted. That was why she had built the machine. She had laid out the pieces of the puzzle and set them in motion, now she watched it for hours, trusting it to solve itself.
The precession of the Earth, perhaps? The subtle wobble of the axis under the influence of the other spheres? Twenty times the Earth went around the bronze sun. A sun cast at her bidding! How droll, she thought rancorously. The Earth shifted slightly in its gimbals. She stared down at the equations scribbled over the papers in her hand. That might make a difference to the weather, the net input of energy from the sun to various quarters of the polar regions would vary. So much heat, it had to go somewhere. But how could that lead to the downfall of two, maybe more, civilisations in the flush of their art? A global shift? She thought no. No evidence. Nothing empiric or magick to suggest something of that scale.
With each accelerated year described by the orbs, the Twin came closer and closer to the Earth. It clunked as the chains propelling it shifted on its gears. Of course the machine was limited but...
Everything was limited. She was limited. How could she hope to hold the dance of the spheres in her mind? Some men respected her for her mind. She had learned early in life that was no substitute for a pretty face. Wealth and beauty were what men craved; succession was what the parents of men craved. These things could meet in happy confluence. Happy for the suitor, and sometimes the bride. Mind rarely came into that. Best to be beautiful and rich. If one were stupid or narrow of vision, so what? If not rich, then the next best thing was to be beautiful and poor. Then it paid to be intelligent. A pretty, clever women could go where she would with a hatful of empty promises and the occasional distasteful compromise, no matter her initial station. Poor, beautiful and stupid was a bad combination, and ended in misery. A man could forgive an intelligent, beautiful woman her own opinions, especially if she added her wealth to his. If ugly, rich and stupid, nobody cared. A prize chased solely for advancement, doomed to an unhappy life, but never alone. Ugly, rich and intelligent?
That was no good at all.
The grand irony of it that she wasn’t so clever after all. She laughed loudly, resentfully. If she were truly clever, she would have solved the issue of the spheres. Or she would not trouble herself at all with it, but play the genteel idiot, keep her wits to herself. Or was that wisdom? Was it wisdom she lacked? No, she scolded herself, it was neither! To play the fool would be a betrayal of what she was. She was cursed, clever enough to see the world as it was, too limited to do anything about it. Clever enough to know how stupid she and every other human being was.
Her thoughts went around and around her mind as relentlessly as the planets clacked overhead, problems orbiting the irresolvable issue of her face. Her father’s face. Where was the justice in the world that she had to look at the man she hated in every mirror?
Her hand rumpled a sheet of paper as it clenched. Focus! This is not relevant. The worlds. Think! Where is the answer? She went to the orrery’s controls upon the central column, and increased the speed. The glimmer engine within glowed blue white. This was a purely magical device, bound about with expensive spells wrought into silver by magister artisans. No intermediary steam device propelled the orbs, but the power of the glimmer applied directly. It had cost her a small fortune.
Acceleration seized the track of heaven. The orbs proceeded faster and faster. Five minutes, and one hundred revolutions of the sun were made by the Earth and its dark twin. The moons sped along their paths between the louring worlds, fugitives before them both.
Am I pretty?
Stop it. Shallow thinking. Stupid. Unimportant. This. The world, that is a problem worth thinking on, and solvable.
The Twin, the answer is there. So large an object, close enough to touch, dark enough to hide an eternity of nightmares. The fires. The tides. The Twin.
The burnished, blackened bronze of the Twin followed the track she had designed, circling the Earth
like a duellist. If she had designed it poorly, she would not know if she were wrong or right, she would not know, she would only see what she thought she should see.
Not like when she looked in the mirror.
Focus. If she were wrong, the orrery would teach her nothing. A reinforcement of preconceptions. Do not become fixated upon it. To solve a problem, look beyond it, not at it. Her face... Was that why Guis rejected her? She smiled ruefully.
Plenty more out there. Plenty more who were attracted by her reputation, by the scandal of it. Plenty who did not care, so long as she were available.
She wanted to be loved. She yearned for it as much as the idea made her laugh. To be trapped with one person for the duration of life. Another face to look at daily and grow sick of.
The Earth and the Twin were the same, opposed, drawn together and pulled apart—she was sure it was a pull now, and not a mutual repulsion as Hool, Toskin and others had it. A firmly discredited idea. Nor was it a building resistance through some theoretical cosmic medium. Why was the air thinner atop a mountain? Why did a weight fall at a constant speed no matter the thickness of the air? She had seen the feather and coin experiments at the Royal Institute last year. The vacuum tube, ingenious.
There was nothing between the worlds.
“The aether is void,” she said aloud.
There was something inherent to the celestial bodies that drew them together, the same force, one inherent to all objects, pulled them apart. Nostron was correct. If one could calculate that, she was sure she could calculate the size of the sun. She already suspected it was far more enormous than any other astronomer believed. If only the magisters could penetrate the energy enveloping the world, and leave the confines of this Earth! Perhaps then, they might be useful to her.
She looked to a huge tome balanced atop several smaller. The collected writings of Everian Andor, a mage from before the time of Iapetus. What he said bore out her own work. He had journeyed beyond, so he said. Only a mage could do that. But they lived in an era of magisters, not mages, and she had the power of neither.
All she had was her mind. That would have to do.
So, she thought. A great influence upon this world. The tides, the shakings of the earth, perhaps also the fires upon the Twin, a reciprocal influence. Did that account for the 4,000 year cycle suggested by the historical record? Surely not on its own. The Twin drew near far more frequently than that, superpositions of both moons, sun, Twin and Earth occurred every roughly every 400 years, with a drift of one year per 1,300 years. None so close as the 4,000 year conjunctions, but was it enough of a difference to cause calamity?
She watched the Twin going around and around, coming closer, drawing away, each loop bringing it nearer and nearer. There was a connection.
But there was something missing. Some other factor that she had yet to see. Look beyond the orrery, look beyond the problem.
The one thing her father had told her that she valued.
Look beyond the problem.
She went to Andor’s book, shoved the sheafs of paper balanced on it to the floor. She opened it and flicked through the pages. Woodcuts of impossible scenes leapt out. The pages stuck. She licked her finger to turn them more easily and tasted the paper. Must and years as pronounced as any spice.
“Here,” she said to herself. The spheres whirring overhead could not hear her. She spoke for her own benefit, to remind herself of her physicality, lest she disappear into her own thoughts.
She read, finger to her lips.
“‘Upon the black were tall towers, desert and broken. Dark on dark, unknown until they were upon me and I could not escape their regard. Glassless windows gaped on prospects running with fire. A ceaseless abundance of this vomited from the Twin, as the Three Sisters do in Farthia and Ostria. I witnessed ruination wrought long since, yet felt unwelcoming eyes chase me through over liquid flame. And then I was driven on by my fear, fearing the undeniable call of Andrade to pull me back to Earth before my journey was done, and the city fell behind me.’”
Andrade, guardian of the world’s order, a tutelary spirit banished with all the rest by Res Iapetus. An allegory, or an actuality? One never knew with mages. A consequence of their power, some said a function of it, was that they were nearly all insane. At least when regarded from the confines of the objective consensual reality as experienced by others. But who was to say if the mages were insane, or if they were sane and everyone else mad?
A digression. Ruined cities on the Earth. Why not ruined cities upon the Twin and every other celestial body? Perhaps they also felt the turning wheel of history, the rise and fall and rise again.
Outside the window the brightest stars outshone the glimmer lights of her hall. Maybe something from beyond this system of heavenly baubles? There were those that maintained the stars were suns, and about them turned their own worlds, on and on into an infinity of night. Perhaps it was nothing to do with the familiar worlds at all, but an influence from further away.
In which case, she was entirely wasting her time with this very expensive toy.
Guis. She had expected better of him.
“What the fucking hell does it all matter?” She threw her arms wide and shouted her challenge to the stars outside her windows.
She was no longer sure if she spoke of astronomy or of the more pressing and equally mystifying social dance they were all forced to perform.
The spinning mechanism had no answers for her. The rattle of it suddenly irked her. She shut it off and sank into a battered armchair, placed her thumb and forefinger either side of her all too prominent nose, thinking of nothing, enjoying the pressure of her fingers on the bone.
“Goodlady?” Mansanio spoke timorously. His footsteps were timid; a mouse creeping from its hole. “Goodlady Lucinia, are you troubled?” He put a hand upon her shoulder.
She placed her own hand upon his. His was warm, hers cold. She squeezed it, smiled and looked up at him. “When have you known me not to be troubled, Mansanio?”
His face brimmed with concern. “Never, goodlady. You should not worry yourself with these questions so much. Live your life easily.”
“I do.”
He tutted. “Not like that. I mean, to go outside, take the air. Ride your coach along the shore road, find other interests to occupy your fine mind, goodlady.”
“I would find problems in all of them, Mansanio. In history, in astronomy, maths, geology.”
“I was thinking more of painting or the pressing of flowers.”
“I would find problems there too! The matter of true perspective always bothered me, for example. Or perhaps I would occupy myself with the chemical and alchemical synthesis of brighter colours, or with an exploration of the divorcing of form from essence in order to discover the true shapes hidden in all things. Flowers need classifying, sorting. What goes where, why does this grow here, and not there? How do they reproduce, what makes their faces shine? How do they draw sustenance from the ground, do they depend on the sun? What use is there in killing a plant simply to have it? I never saw the sense.” She saw his hurt and became gentler. “Mansanio, my dear Mansanio. I am so sorry. You must think me the most diabolical mistress.”
“Never, goodlady,” he said softly. “You are a wonder to me.”
“You a true friend, my rock of permanence in a life of storm-tossed uncertainty.” She squeezed his hand again and released it.
He did not remove it from her shoulder as expected. He crouched by her chair.
“Mansanio, why are you quivering so?”
“Goodlady Lucinia, the others, they do not understand you as I do. I have watched you since you were young, so graceless, so isolated, but such a mind! No one else knows you as I know you.”
He slipped his other hand around her neck. He licked his lips. His eyes were wide, moon-caught.
“Mansanio,” she said warningly, “what are you doing?”
He clutched at her, harder, his embrace turning from one of comfort to someth
ing else entirely. He pressed at the back of her neck, pulling her face towards his. She pulled back.
“Stop it!”
Mansanio was past listening. He kissed her cheek and her always furrowed forehead. He breathed hot words of affection into her ear. “I love you, I love you, I have always loved you. Do not be sad.”
The countess wrenched Mansanio’s arms from about her neck and shot to her feet. Mansanio rose slowly after her, his arms out imploringly. “Goodlady, please.”
“Get out now, Mansanio. We will discuss this in the morning.”
Mansanio reached for her again. “What is the use? I have told you how I feel. There is nothing for it but to admit how we are bound together, you and I. Be with me. It will be difficult, but you are no stranger to difficulty.”
He grabbed her and went to kiss her again. She turned her head, but he grabbed her face and planted his lips on hers. His limp moustache brushed her. She made a moan of disgust as his tongue poked into the corner of her mouth.
“Get off me this instant!” she shoved him back hard.
“My Lucinella, I cannot bear to see you hurt again...”
She slapped him as hard as she could. His head snapped around and he cowered. When he faced her again, blood trickled from his nose, and his cheek was an angry red.
“How I am hurt and by whom is entirely my own affair. How dare you! I am the Countess of Mogawn, a woman of high blood whose claim upon this castle goes back to the time of King Brannon. You are...” She glared at him with outright disgust. “You are a servant and a foreigner! How dare you think that there might be something... Get out! Get out! Get out now before I call Aldwyn’s boys. As young as they are they will prove more than a match for you. Get out, or I swear by the Drowned King and his sodden horde that I’ll have you put over the side of the castle to join him.”
“Goodlady, I am, I...” Mansanio grovelled. “I am so sorry, I thought—”
“Whatever you thought, Mansanio, you thought wrong. You will leave as soon as the next low tide uncovers the causeway, and you will never return to Mogawn again.”
The Iron Ship Page 45
