Wandering Star (The Quintana Trilogy Book 1) Read online

  “Dalph is a river port that feeds the interior. If there’s no interior to feed, if the inner country falls to lawlessness, then the port dies, too.”

  Pedro was quiet. “But that could never happen, could it? The Great Span is indestructible.”

  “You keep saying that, but how much is left from the plenties, anyway? Nothing from the First Plenty of Mankind, and very little from the Second. Even the Third is mostly gone, isn’t it, unless you count the artifacts and strange devices collected by the cabalists.”

  “We have the Great Span.”

  “And where’s the rest of it?” Torre asked. “If the magic of the Elders were so indestructible, where are all of their other bridges and highways? Their cities, their ports, their strange machines? The people must have built hundreds of them—not much left, is there? It must have all failed at one point or another.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea to . . . you probably shouldn’t mention this to anyone, Uncle. You don’t think that could ever happen, do you?”

  Torre thought of the piece of rotten, crumbling stone delivered in the night by his man, Aquino. A strange, artificial substance, like a concrete material, and yet with properties of a metal, as well. Nothing natural, that was for sure.

  One could walk onto the Great Span with a pick and strike away at the road surface. Do it until you collapsed from exhaustion and you’d have nothing to show for it but a few scratches and a dull point on your pick. So what had caused that chunk of crumbling stone?

  “Uncle?”

  Lord Torre made a decision. “Go to the kitchen, will you? Tell the cooks I’ll be attending Lady Mercado’s banquet tomorrow night. I’ll need them to bake twenty peach cakes, assuming they have enough dried fruit on hand. If not, send someone to the market and see what they can buy.”

  “But what about the Great Span? You don’t think it could ever fail, do you?”

  “Of course not.” Torre patted his nephew on the shoulder. “I’m an old man, Pedro, and old men worry. You are young, and should not.”

  Chapter Four

  A young man in robes stood on a ledge below the waterworks of the Great Span and watched the blasting waterfall roar from a shaft and pour into the Rift. Lord Torre’s demonstration was ending, and the bridge groaned like a living beast as it swung back around from far above the young man’s head. For several long minutes, it had been dangling over the Rift, unhinged from its anchors on the far side.

  Thiego was a geometer in the temple, and felt like he should understand the calculations behind the annual unmooring. He’d seen the Great Span unhinged from vantage points within the city, and had taken the miracle for granted before now. From the ledge below, the act seemed improbable, and it seemed impossible that it could be detached and left hanging over the chasm.

  The bridge seemed so much larger from down here, with none of the city visible. Impossibly large, in fact. It was a relic from a different age, so far beyond the skills of the current fallen generation that Thiego may as well have been an ant staring up at the works of the gods. The Great Span let out a final, thunderous clank as it shifted into place. Voices shouted above, Lord Torre’s engineers and bridge workers completing the demonstration.

  The waterfall that had driven the mechanisms to open and close the bridge slowed to a gentle shower, and finally a trickle. As the water cleared, a mist formed in the chasm to Thiego’s right. Struck by the sunlight overhead, it cast a rainbow, every color sharp and glowing for one long moment before it began to fade. The beauty of it caught Thiego’s breath and made him momentarily forget his purpose, as well as the danger about to confront him. And then, as the rainbow vanished, he caught a glimpse of the green forest several hundred feet below. A dizzying wave of vertigo swept over him.

  A rush of damp air gusted from a small secondary shaft that entered the cliff about twelve feet above his head, followed by a low rumble, and he flattened his back against the mountainside and grabbed the branches of a thick, hardy bush. The bushes here were mature stands, roots deep and firm, but just below Thiego’s feet lay a well-worn groove scoured of vegetation, where water had torn away whatever might have grown there, as well as any soil or gravel.

  A flurry of dark, leathery wings beat past his face. Giant bats, of the kind hooked by airfishers in the dumbre and sold in the markets, came pouring from the secondary shaft, eighty or a hundred in number. The last bat escaped the shaft just ahead of a gushing waterfall that burst under high pressure over Thiego’s head and ran in a roaring torrent down the well-scoured channel. Spray soaked his hair and dampened the rock at his feet. His heart pounded, and he clenched his eyes shut and held on.

  The water flowing from the secondary shaft was the residual from Lord Torre’s waterworks, that reserve that hadn’t been needed to open or shut the span, and was now being drained off by the engineers. It held a fraction of the strength that had come out of the main channel upon both the opening and the closing of the bridge, but more than enough to knock him clear should he lose his grip or his footing. This water didn’t go directly into the Rift, but it was still a drop of twenty feet before the slope flattened onto a ledge overlooking the cliff. Enough of a fall to break bones or even his neck.

  Thiego imagined the thin, crone-like figure of Lord Torre far above him on one of the opulent terraces of the Quinta and felt a stirring of resentment. Doubtful that the man even knew the workings of his own bridge. Doubtful that he cared, apart from the silver that flowed in a never-ending cascade of clinking escudos into his strongboxes. If Thiego died here, he would be unmourned, perhaps even unnoticed.

  When the water had finally run clear, and Thiego could be sure of his footing, he released his grip on the bush and worked his way along the ledge without looking at anything below his feet, afraid that the vertigo would return. After a childhood spent scrambling across the narrow wooden ledges, suspended bridges, and crumbling staircases of the lower terraces, that first terror as he descended the rusting ladder bolted into the side of the cliff had been an unexpected and unwelcome surprise.

  He returned to the ladder, which was slick with water and flaking rust after its drenching. Directly above, following a sheer rock face about twenty-five feet high, was a series of ruined foundations on a crumbling, weed-filled hillside—a long-abandoned segment of the Lower Terraces, where most of the buildings seemed to have shaken into the Rift in some long-forgotten earthquake or flood. Below him, the ladder continued after a brief jog and descended to a flat outcrop of brush and rock. There, the water had slowed as it passed through the vegetation, and even collected in pools before draining over the cliff edge.

  Thiego descended carefully, testing the strength of each rung of the ladder and checking to be sure that it was still moored to the wall, that the bolts hadn’t rusted loose, worried that the whole thing might give way and send him crashing to the ground.

  Finally, he was off the ladder and among the brush, and lost his view of the edge of the cliff entirely. His heart rate slowed, and he searched with interest among the pools carved into the stone along the channel. The flushing of Torre’s waterworks had stirred up the dry wash, and he spotted debris thrown over the edge or carried down from the Lower Terraces: rusting buckets, wooden handles, rags, broken crockery, the twisted barrel of a musket, and plenty of animal bones, as well as some that looked human. His eyes moved here and there.

  Before leaving the temple, a fellow geometer by the name of Kara had instructed him to lie on a bench with his eyes closed while she placed two discs that looked like a pair of brass pennies buffed smooth over his eyelids. The coins had been in her hand before she set them onto his eyelids, yet felt as if they’d been pulled from an ice chest, and seemed to grow colder the longer they remained in place. Kara had stood above him, pages of a book shuffling through her fingers as she looked for the right passage from the sacred book.

  “The mentabacus is a device shaped like a horseshoe,” Kara had said. She read from the book. “The prongs glow
blue when activating the parietal, the inferior temporal, and the prefrontal regions in conjunction with higher mathematical stimulation.”

  “What does that mean?” Thiego asked.

  “I don’t know. The holy arts of the Elders—it’s not like they always explain their incantations.” She shrugged. “Maybe someone versed in the physiological archives could help us.”

  “Probably not important,” he said. His vision was still dark. “I’m not seeing it. Is there anything else about its shape or appearance in the book?”

  “That’s it. Are the finders activated?”

  “Should be. They’re bloody cold enough. Feels like they’re going to freeze my eyeballs solid if I don’t—oh! There it is.”

  Suddenly appearing in his mind had been something that didn’t look so much like a horseshoe, but rather a U-shaped object whose ends more closely resembled the points of a deer antler. The antler tips glowed with a color that he wouldn’t have called blue so much as celestial—like the sky at its lightest shade. The center part of the antler—or horseshoe—was shaped into a hand grip.

  Now, picking his way among the pools, he could still see the object in his mind. It was distinctive enough that he should be able to recognize it as an artifact anyway among all the rubbish thrown over the edge of the lower terraces. But there was something in the finders that supposedly imprinted the pattern of the lost artifact in the mind and allowed one to pick it out from the background.

  Salvatore had told him that if he were especially vigilant, an object thus imprinted would even seem to emit a light of its own, like the halo around a candle. The Guardian of Secrets had determined through unknown means that an artifact from the Second Plenty would soon be exposed on the hillside below the Great Span, and had further calculated the timing of the incident to today. Which meant that it was likely that it would be flushed out of the waterworks or exposed by the flowing of the water through these old hillside channels.

  Thiego was one of the younger cabalists, his mind tasked with deciphering ancient mathematical secrets, and didn’t know (or particularly care) how the more secretive members of the Luminoso operated, but had no reason to doubt Salvatore’s words. Yet as he neared the edge of the streambed, where the water flowed off the edge of the cliff, without finding anything of note, he began to doubt. If the so-called mentabacus were meant to be found, surely it would have turned up already.

  The artifact was probably nothing, anyway. If it had been something good, Salvatore would have gone after it himself instead of turning the matter over to a pair of young geometers.

  “Or maybe the old schemer is just scared of heights,” he said aloud.

  Something moved in the brush ahead of him at the sound of his voice, and he gave a start. This wasn’t the plateau; there weren’t wolves down here. And it was the middle of the day, so it wouldn’t be a lemure or a witherer, either of which were far more terrifying than a wolf. The strange creatures weren’t known for making branches shake, in any event. Too big for a crow; it must be a person.

  “Who is it?” he said. “I see you moving—come out where I can get a good look at you.” He caught a glimpse of a face—not an adult’s—and felt more confident. “Come on, I’m not going to hurt you.”

  A girl of eleven or twelve emerged from the brush. It was obvious at first glance that she was from the dumbre, and not the reputable part, either. Her hair was matted and her dirty face was so thin that it gave her a rat-like appearance. She was barefoot and wore trousers that were too big, belted with rope.

  “What are you doing down here?” he asked. He cast a glance around him at the bushes that were just starting to flower. “Too early for black apples. Are you scavenging, is that what? You are, aren’t you?”

  She cast a glance over her shoulder, and he spotted the edge of a bag poking out of the bushes.

  “Leave me alone,” she said. “I got nothing you’d want.” She seemed to shrink in on herself as she said that, like a child who’d been beaten, or worse, but there was a spark in her eyes and a defiant tilt to her chin.

  “What have you found?”

  “A cracked pot and a broken chain,” she said, a little quickly. “And, um, a bit of clothing that I might sell for a penny or two. Now go away.”

  Under normal circumstances, Thiego would have felt nothing but sympathy born from his own wretched childhood. His father had sent a few coins from the army when he could, while his stepmother was indifferent at best, feeding her own children first and her stepson last. He’d gone through several lean years after his father died fighting Scoti in a brief and pointless border skirmish, and knew what it was like to feel hunger in your belly like a cold stone that seemed to grow larger every day.

  Falling ever lower in the dumbre year by year, he’d seen mothers smother their babies when they couldn’t give milk. He’d seen fathers starve themselves so their children could eat, only to have those same children thrown from their tenements when illness or hunger had taken their fathers.

  If not for some mysterious help that had arrived when Thiego was fifteen years old, he might not have survived the dumbre. That help had come from an invitation to study for the Luminoso. Now, at twenty-three, Thiego was not too many years removed from the age when he’d have looked nearly as pinch-faced as this girl.

  But the bag and the girl’s furtive manner had him suspicious. A single glance at Thiego with his temple robes and the Luminoso chain around his neck should have told her enough, that he wasn’t going to rob her. Well, that he wasn’t going to take anything that she had legitimately scavenged.

  “Show me these objects you’ve found.”

  “Why, so you can steal ’em? Nuh uh.”

  “I don’t think it’s just chain and a bit of old crockery and rags you found down here. You found something else, didn’t you?”

  “Didn’t find nothing. Go away.”

  He could see the mentabacus again when he closed his eyes, with its glowing tips and the hand grip. It was almost eerie, like he was half-asleep and dreaming it. When he opened his eyes again, his eyes were drawn as if by compulsion to the bush where she’d stashed her bag.

  “There’s a penalty for keeping an artifact. You might lose your hands, or you might be thrown into the Rift—it all depends on the mood of the cabalists who catch you with it.”

  Her eyes widened, and she licked her lips. But he saw desperation there. The girl thought she could sell it—and maybe she could—and was no doubt imagining the silver escudos that would flow into her hands. Might change her life. Or maybe she couldn’t imagine anything beyond having a full belly for a few days.

  He removed his coin purse. “I’m not allowed to pay you for it, you understand. I can’t buy something that already belongs to us. But I can give you a few pennies because you look hungry. And then, if you found something, you’d pass it to me because to do otherwise would violate the code.”

  “A few pennies? What good is a few pennies?”

  Thiego emptied the purse. A light clinking in his hand, hardly impressive. “I eat at the temple, I sleep at the temple. I only have six coins that I earned doing sums for a merchant of the Forty so I could pay my offering during the penance weeks. It’s all I have, and it’s all you’re going to get.” He hardened his voice and fixed her with a sharp gaze. “Or, I can take it from you, and denounce you to the Master of Whispers.”

  Her answer came quickly. “I’ll take the coins. Put them down on that rock, but don’t come closer.”

  He did so and stepped back a pace. “Now give me the bag. No, first the bag,” he added in a stern tone when she made to snatch up the money.

  “You can’t have my bag. Stay there, and I’ll put what I found on the rock by the pennies.”

  He wondered if she had something else she’d try to pawn off on him—surely she hadn’t found two artifacts—but guessed that she had more practical concerns than trying to defraud him. By the time an urchin of the dumbre was the age of this one, she’d have see
n and experienced all manner of terrible things.

  A look of panic crossed her eyes when he shifted his weight, as if she was afraid he would make a move at her. But Thiego was only stabilizing his footing on the uneven slope, and the glossy, hardened look returned to her face.

  Nevertheless, the girl didn’t take her eyes off him as she retreated to the bush. She reached into the open mouth of her bag, groped about without looking, and closed her fingers on something. For his part, Thiego’s own attention was drawn to the bag—he couldn’t seem to stop staring at it—and when she began to remove the object, he knew even without looking that it was the object Kara had described in the temple. The mentabacus.

  And yet when he finally got a look at the thing it was different than it had appeared in the vision. The surface had faded from a silvery sheen to a dull gray. The grip itself seemed to have partially decayed, and there were nicks and scratches on the curved elements that looked fresh, probably caused when it was flushed out of some cache in the mountainside and sent tumbling down the channel.

  He reached into an inner pocket of his robe and removed a white leather glove from the temple, imprinted with mathematical symbols—pi, obelus, lemniscate, and the golden ratio—which he put on his right hand for safety. He was eager to get hold of the artifact, but the girl hadn’t yet put it on the rock next to the brass pennies. She turned it over in her hand.

  “What does it do, anyhow?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “You can tell me something. If you want it. Does it control lemures?”

  “No.”

  “Witherers?” she asked.

  “It’s for geometers—calculating the movement of wandering stars and the like. You put the prongs against your head, and—no! Stop!”

  It was too late. He’d forgotten that he was dealing with a child, and though she was hardened by a grim life in the dumbre, she still acted with a child’s impulsiveness. As soon as he’d mentioned the prongs, she’d lifted the device to her head.