by David Walton
SINCLAIR stayed close to the faction of red tamarins he thought had been loyal to Chichirico. It was hardly safe, but it grew worse when he saw one, then two, then a dozen gray tamarins advancing through neighboring trees. In moments the forest was filled with them, hundreds of tamarins, and not just grays, but snow- white ones, black ones with bright yellow tufts behind their ears, short and stocky tamarins, and thin, spidery ones— tribes Sinclair had never seen before. It was the tamarin army Marcheford had warned him about.
Many of the reds seemed to be joining it, and he realized there would be no help for the colony. They were on their own. The colonists would kill a few, to be sure, but eventually they would be overrun. Catherine might stop the island from sliding off the Edge, but it wouldn't matter to the humans if they were massacred by tamarins. With a sinking spirit, Sinclair realized that if he didn't do something, he might soon be the only living human being left on the island.
He crouched in the shadow of one of the tamarin homes until the army passed overhead. Fortunately, none of them stopped or even looked down, and he remained unnoticed. He had little hope that the reds would protect him if he was seen. The time for hiding was over. He ran east, back toward the settlement, following the army. He couldn't keep up with them, but that wasn't important. He only hoped he could get there before everyone was dead.
PARRIS moved as slowly as he dared, not wanting to give quintessence powers to Tavera, but feeling like he had little choice. Everything he had hoped for this island was falling apart. Their best discoveries, in the hands of their enemies. Catherine's resurrection, failed. Even this unique and magical island itself was soon to be destroyed, unless he or Catherine died first. He hoped Sinclair and Matthew would prevent her from doing anything rash. If one of them had to die . . . An idea struck him. Perhaps neither of them had to die. Perhaps there was another way.
He steeled his face to show none of the nervousness he felt. He used his own strands to create the mesh, just as before, but this time he was careful to tangle them in Tavera's anchor. His idea would work; it had to. But the timing would be important. He would have to actually finish the mesh, which meant giving Tavera superhuman powers, at least for a moment.
Blanca wouldn't look up, though he tried to catch her eye. He didn't want to think about what horrors Tavera must have inflicted on her to bend her will so thoroughly. He concentrated on his work, guiding the strands around Tavera's torso, under his arms, around his fingers. The gestures were disturbing, almost intimate, but it was what Tavera expected, and it allowed Parris to get very close.
He tied the last knot in the weave. He was finished, but before Tavera could recognize it, he grabbed the pistol from Tavera's belt. He tried to raise it, but Tavera was faster. He caught Parris's wrist and twisted it, forcing the barrel of the gun away from his face. Parris was weak from lack of sleep and food, and Tavera was strong. The pistol began to turn, slowly but inevitably, toward Parris. His grip was slipping. As soon as the pistol's muzzle turned far enough, it would all be over. At least Catherine wouldn't have to die.
Blanca sprang into action like a statue coming to life. She snatched a length of the waxed rope from where it still lay on the floor and wrapped it around Tavera's neck. He roared and tried to jerk away, but she hung on. Her blank, subservient demeanor disappeared as she twisted with all her might. The thin rope bit into his flesh, and he choked, fighting for breath. Parris kept struggling for the gun, which kept his hands busy so he couldn't reach for the rope.
"You killed my sisters," Blanca said, her Spanish accent thick. "You killed my mother. You should be dragged into the pit of hell."
With a mighty heave, Tavera threw himself out of the chair, which toppled, dragging both Blanca and Parris down with him. The pistol clattered across the floor. Blanca shrieked and fell, the chair on top of her. Tavera rolled out of it, climbing to his feet. He kicked Parris once, twice, and then a blast of noise and powder erupted and Tavera collapsed, his face a frozen mask of shock, his chest spurting blood. Joan appeared from behind him, spattered with blood, the recovered pistol held in two hands, a triumphant look on her face.
Parris scrambled to his feet, thinking it was over, but Tavera was back on his feet, still fighting, the horrible wound healing fast. Parris grappled with him, but Tavera was pale and still losing blood. Blanca threw another loop of the waxed rope around his neck, and Joan joined her in pulling it tight.
It seemed to take an hour. Parris's face was inches from Tavera's. He could smell his sweat and see the stubble standing out on his chin. Tavera bared his teeth in a rictus of effort, his face turning blue. Finally, his muscles gave out, his face grew slack, and he slumped to the floor. Blanca and Joan kept pulling on the rope, their teeth gritted, their arms shaking, together ensuring with every ounce of their strength that Tavera was truly dead.
The skink tears allowed Parris to see the void when it appeared. It flared open briefly, and Tavera's soul, bright and writhing along a quintessence strand, was sucked into it before it snapped shut again. But Tavera's anchor didn't go with it. It was still connected to Parris. Quickly, Parris picked up the boarcat paw and used it to sever his connections to his own anchor. He cringed when he cut the last one, afraid it might kill him, but it didn't. His soul was still connected to the physical world through Tavera's anchor, which now snapped into Parris's body, while Parris's own anchor flew away, drawn by its connection to Catherine. If his understanding was correct, he and Catherine were now separated again, each with their own anchor. He was connected to Tavera's anchor, and she was connected to his.
Catherine's debt to the void had been paid, but by Tavera, not by Catherine. The balance of the universe should be restored. He only hoped it wasn't too late.
THE earthquake stopped.
One moment the ground was shaking hard enough to smash rocks and uproot trees; the next, it was utterly still and solid. Matthew and Catherine stared incredulously at the suddenly stable ground. Catherine laughed and danced and hugged him, then grew somber. "But how?"
Matthew raised his hands in joyful ignorance. "Does it matter?"
"It was happening because Father and I shared the same anchor," she said. "If I didn't die, then . . ." Her heart seemed to stop in her chest, and she clutched Matthew's arm.
"Your father," he said.
"Come on!" Together, they ran back east, toward the settlement.
Chapter Thirty-three
PARRIS hugged Joan, amazed that they were all still alive. When Blanca had gone to retrieve the boarcat claws, she had unlocked the door to the room where Joan was imprisoned, allowing her to escape. If she hadn't, there was a good chance Tavera would have reached the gun first, and both Parris and Blanca would now be dead.
Parris cracked the door to Tavera's house and peered outside. There were no soldiers guarding the door, nor any people to be seen. He heard gunfire, lots of it, not far away.
"Let's go now, before the soldiers come back," Joan said.
"Wait," Parris said. "There's something we need to do first."
Joan was reluctant, but Parris convinced her. "It's the only way we can survive."
Blanca went first, standing still while Parris used the boarcat paw to weave the quintessence mesh around her body. Next came Joan, complaining that she didn't want to have unnatural powers, but submitting to it all the same. Finally, he did it to himself, a somewhat tricky operation, but one he eventually managed.
As a test, he tried to walk through a diamond wall from one room into the next, but just walked stupidly into the wall. It took him several tries, but finally he figured it out, and after that it was easy. Blanca did the same, laughing, and Joan followed, more subdued. "It isn't right," she said.
After several failed tries, they all three turned invisible— Joan and Blanca confirming it, since Parris could still see them with the skink tears— and left the house. A cloud of smoke hung over the western curve of the palisade and rapid pops of gunfire echoed through the settlement.
/> Here and there they saw a gray shape appear on a platform, spinning and thrashing while the soldiers and colonists alike parried with bayonets and knives. Many human shapes lay sprawled on the platform or down on the ground.
"They're fighting the tamarins," Parris said. "And they're losing."
SINCLAIR heard the gunfire and knew the tamarins had reached the settlement. He sneaked close enough that he could see the fighting, and then returned, frustrated. He needed some way to get into the settlement, but how could he possibly do that with the gates closed and defenders shooting anything that approached? All he needed was a dead tamarin and a vial of mercury. The dead tamarin should be fairly easy to obtain, but the only mercury he could possibly reach was inside the palisade walls.
He heard footsteps and turned, ready to hide or flee, but it was Matthew and Catherine, both still alive. They must have run faster than he could, to catch up with him.
"Where's my father?" Catherine asked.
"I don't know any more than you do," Sinclair said. He studied her. "Do you think you could get into the settlement and back out again?"
"I don't know. Probably. Why?"
"I think I could stop this war, once and for all. All I need is a vial of mercury from the stores in my house."
She traded glances with Matthew. "How are you going to stop the war with a vial of mercury?"
"Don't worry about that."
She crossed her arms. "If I'm going to risk my life to get it, I want to know how you're going to use it."
"You remember the ironfish?"
Her eyes went up, considering, and then her mouth fell open. "You're going to cut a tamarin open to find its pearl. And drop it into the mercury."
Sinclair nodded.
"You'll kill them all!"
"Isn't that the goal?"
"I mean, all of them. Every tamarin on the island. The grays and reds both, and thousands more we've never even seen."
"Nonsense. We didn't kill every ironfish in the sea, did we? Just those in that one school that shared a quintessence bond."
"No, she's right," Matthew said. "The tamarin lineage is mixed. The young are captured by other tribes and adopted as their own children."
"You're guessing," Sinclair said. "They can't all be linked. But it doesn't matter. People are dying. Not tamarins. People. What ever the tamarins get, they've brought on themselves."
"There has to be another way," Catherine said.
Sinclair raised an eyebrow. "What is it?" When they didn't answer, he added, "They're overrunning the defenders right now. If we wait too long, there won't be any humans left to save."
"But it's murder."
"What the tamarins are doing right now is murder. Remember the bones we found in the church? You think that once the colony is massacred, they won't come after us, too? The Spanish and English are fighting shoulder to shoulder, but they won't last long. Your parents are probably in there. Matthew's father, too. The tamarins you're so concerned about are going to kill them. Are you going to stand by and let them die?"
Catherine wavered; he could see it. "Go," he said. "As quick as you can."
CATHERINE circled the battle and climbed the palisade far from the main action. A soldier saw her, but ignored her, firing instead on a tamarin in the other direction. She was inside.
She wasn't convinced by Sinclair's arguments. She knew the humans, including herself and those she loved, were likely to be killed, but that didn't make it right to murder the entire tamarin race, friend and enemy alike.
She would get the mercury. She wasn't sure yet if she would give it to Sinclair, but it would give her time to think. With every soldier engaged in keeping the tamarins out, Catherine entered the governor's mansion easily and found the alchemical stores. Much of them had been rummaged through, taken, or broken, but she found what she was looking for, a vial with a bead of a metallic liquid that shone dully in the light.
As she tucked it into a pouch, she noticed another vial filled with finely grained salt. The opposite of mercury, in alchemical terms. Where mercury decreased the effect of quintessence, salt increased it. An idea began to form in her mind. She filled a jar with water and poured in the whole contents of the salt vial.
AS Parris ran toward the palisade, Joan and Blanca right behind him, he saw the colonists and soldiers throw down their weapons and scramble away them the wall. A wave of tamarins crested the wall, overpowering those who didn't get away in time. Colonists jumped off the platforms, slamming hard into the ground, then running or limping away.
They weren't fast enough. The tamarins opened the gate from the inside, and the rest of the tamarin army poured into the settlement and circled in front of the fleeing men, cutting off their escape. They closed the circle, forcing the humans into the center, Parris, Joan, and Blanca among them. The tamarins advanced quickly, ignoring both weapons and cries for mercy, clearly intent on killing them all.
The air was acrid with gun smoke, and the ground was soaked in blood. Parris ran at an advancing tamarin and turned his skin to iron just before the tamarin drove pincers into his chest. The iron skin was so heavy it nearly knocked him down, but he found he could change the material further, making it light and still just as strong. He parried several tamarin blows and swung iron fists to drive them back.
Around the circle, Joan and Blanca started doing the same thing, trying to protect the humans who remained, but it wasn't enough. The tamarins flowed around them, too many to count.
Parris was almost surrounded himself when Catherine came running out of the governor's mansion, something clasped in her hand. She leaped clear over the tamarin mob, an impossible jump, and landed next to Parris. He parried a tamarin blow aimed at her head and knocked the attacker to the ground.
"Close your eyes!" Catherine shouted. She shook a jar filled with a cloudy liquid and drank it down.
THE salt was like fire, burning Catherine's throat. She reached inside herself and felt its power. She had never tried this before, but every other manifestation of quintessence had so far answered her command. If the Shekinah flatworms could do it, she should be able to as well. Catherine began to glow.
Just like the worms, she blazed out light, intuitively drawing on the salt inside her to increase it. Soon she was far brighter than any Shekinah flatworm. The tamarins shied away, wrapping arms around their heads to shield their eyes. The humans, too, dropped to their knees and hid their faces against the light.
Catherine blazed still brighter. Her own eyes seemed to adjust to the light, so that the world around seemed dark in comparison. She could feel the salt burning away inside her, and concentrated all her efforts on increasing the light.
They scattered, humans and tamarins alike, the tamarins rushing out of the gate as quickly as they had come. Catherine made her body lighter and jumped into the air, landing on top of the palisade. The tamarins, who had paused on the other side, ran into the forest.
The palisade burst into flames. It was a quintessence fire, and it burned white and bright, the flames shooting in a deadly arc all the way around the circular wall. She leaped down on the far side, as light as a leaf, and floated to the ground like a star come to earth.
She watched the tamarins run until they were out of sight.
EVEN from where he waited among the beetlewood trees, Sinclair couldn't look directly at the light that burst from the top of the wall like a second sun. What could it be? Had the tamarins brought some weapon?
Catherine hadn't returned. He feared she was caught or killed, and without the mercury, he could do nothing. Then the tamarin army went streaking past him through the trees, paying no attention to him at all. What had happened?
He ran toward the settlement and saw the fire. It had spread from the palisade to several of the surrounding buildings, which, though made of diamond, burned brightly. Outside the gate, he found Catherine, her clothes singed and her hair flying free, crying.
"What happened?"
She shook her head. "I
can't put the fire out," she said. "I don't know how."
He ran through the gate, where teams of colonists were throwing buckets of water on the fire. The roaring inferno was so bright they could barely look at it, but it seemed as if the water did nothing to douse the flames. Strangely, the fire was not hot, as though its energy were expended in light instead of heat, but when a colonist got too close, the flames shot up his leg and devoured him while he screamed, his friends helpless to save him.
Sinclair ran on. Farther in, the colonists were using shovels of earth instead of water, but he feared there would be no stopping this fire until the settlement was razed to the ground. Fortunately, all the colonists had been outside fighting the tamarins, so no one was in the buildings.
