The higher he rose, the colder and thinner the air became. It soon felt like ice in his lungs. The harness was starting to chaff and pinch under his shoulders. He blew into his hands and rubbed them constantly to try to keep the blood moving through his veins. His lips and face already felt completely numb. After a while, he unbuckled one of his harness pockets and released a chariot stone, which duly shot up and away to be lost forever in the heavens above. Maskelyne wondered how many there were, floating up there in the vacuum between worlds. He began to descend again, more rapidly than he would have liked, so he opened one of the sandbags and scooped out handfuls of ballast until his descent slowed.
On he drifted, over fields and hedgerows and hayricks, floating through the darkness like some strange wandering sorcerer. He passed over a farmhouse with bright windows spilling firelight across an empty yard. No one was around to notice him. He crossed the River Irya and followed a country lane for a short while, before the breeze carried him back out over the water and the farmland beyond. At one point he sailed above a clump of woodland, his boots skimming the tops of the trees, while he frantically bailed out more sand.
Eventually, he came within half a mile of the Crossing Inn, where the palace road crossed the river. The breeze was blowing him west, further away from the road and his arranged meeting place, so Maskelyne decided to land. He released another chariot sphere, controlling his quickening descent by dropping more sand.
He landed easily in a grassy field several yards behind the road, whereupon he rubbed his hands and set off for the inn.
His contact was waiting for him in a corner of the bar. Firelight played across the roughcast walls. A few long, dusty tables lined the walls, but the communal benches were all empty at this late hour. Even the innkeeper had retired for the night, leaving his single guest to pour his own mead. He looked up when Maskelyne entered, grinned and then shoved a clay goblet across the table towards him.
‘Cold outside?’ he asked.
‘Good to see you, Howlish,’ Maskelyne said, rubbing his hands fiercely. ‘Be a good fellow and put some more wood on that fire.’
The captain leaned over and pitched a few logs onto the fire. Flames snapped and crackled.
Maskelyne joined him at the corner table. ‘You’ve seen my wife?’
‘Recovering well, by all accounts.’
‘And Jontney?’
‘Fine, fine. They’re expecting us before dawn.’
Maskelyne took a sip of mead and leaned back in his chair. ‘I was thinking we might postpone our escape.’
Captain Howlish looked at him.
‘For a few days, at least,’ Maskelyne added.
The other man took a long draught of mead, then set down his goblet. ‘It’s your money, Maskelyne, but I think you’re making a mistake. News travels fast here. There are a lot of psychics on this island.’
‘Those psychics have taken something that belongs to me,’ Maskelyne said. ‘A man in my position simply can’t allow thefts like that to go unpunished. It’s a matter of my own survival.’
‘They’re not going to give you the girl back.’
‘No,’ Maskelyne admitted. ‘I don’t expect they will.’ He took out a scrap of folded paper from his uniform jacket pocket and handed it to the captain. ‘I wonder if you could collect some more items for me.’
Howlish unfolded the paper and read through it. ‘The rifles are easy,’ he said. ‘Cutting tools, brine gas, ichusae if you have the money. No problem.’ But then he shook his head. ‘Forget void flies. I didn’t even know there were any left in the world until you brought out that damned blunderbuss.’ He grunted. ‘And what’s with all these lanterns? Are you planning a war or a party?’
‘A little bit of both.’
‘It would easier to explain this without a pistol pointed at my head,’ Herian said.
Granger kept the pistol aimed at the old man. It was the same weapon Herian had tried to use on him earlier and, as far as he could tell, the only thing in this godforsaken trap he could be sure didn’t have a nasty surprise in store for an unwary handler.
They were standing beside the shattered pedestal in the transmitting station’s main chamber. It was reassuringly gloomy in here without the crystal’s radiance, however most of the trove around him now appeared to be defunct. Herian had assured him it wasn’t.
The old man threw up his hands. Then he wandered over to the nearest pile of trove and sat down. ‘There’s a story about a human who once made deal with the Unmer,’ he said. ‘He was a slave, of no real value to anyone, but he proposed something that piqued the interest of the greatest entropic sorcerer of the age. You see, the slave thought he had devised a method by which he might live forever.’
Granger listened.
‘He imagined that if he could trap his reflection between two mirrors,’ Herian went on, ‘then it would remain there indefinitely. And so some part of him would always be preserved.’ He shifted uncomfortably, frowned and moved some shiny piece of trove out from under him. ‘However, although he could place two mirrors so that they faced each other,’ he said, ‘the slave could never duck out from between them quickly enough to leave his reflection behind.’ He looked up at Granger. ‘But the sorcerer decided that if he could slow down light enough, the reflection might remain. He didn’t care about the slave, of course, only the problem he presented.’
Granger sat down nearby. He balanced the pistol on his knee.
‘So the sorcerer tried everything to slow down light. He filled the space between the mirrors with all sorts of gases, liquids and prisms. Nothing worked. And then he had an idea. He didn’t have to slow down light. All he had to do was increase the distance between the mirrors. If the light from the slave’s face took long enough to reach the mirror and rebound, the slave need not even be there when the reflected light returned. The hard part would be to create two perfect mirrors, and place them far enough apart.
‘After many years of labour he finally created the mirrors. But he knew that the distance he required between them would be phenomenal. There wasn’t enough space in all of Anea to place the mirrors far enough apart. So he put the slave and the mirrors in a chariot. And then he flew up into the void beyond the earth.
‘The sorcerer had constructed a suit to supply him with all the air and food and water he’d ever need, and to keep him warm during his journey across the freezing wastes. The slave didn’t have a suit, of course, and died quickly, but that didn’t matter. He didn’t actually have to be alive to cast his reflection. The sorcerer set one mirror adrift in the void, and then he took the slave’s body and the other mirror away with him deep into the unknown.’ Herian shrugged. ‘And nobody ever saw him or heard from him again.’
Granger grunted. ‘Is there a point to all this?’
‘The point is,’ Herian said, ‘don’t get involved with things you don’t understand. The artefacts you call trove were designed to study different facets of the cosmos around us. You are no different from the slave. You cannot wield any these weapons safely unless you understand the forces at work.’
‘So teach me.’
Herian shook his head. ‘It took me years to learn. It would take you a lifetime.’
Granger got up and walked over. He placed the barrel of his pistol against the old man’s head. ‘This gun turns things to ash,’ he said.
Herian snorted. ‘Ash? It increases entropy.’
Granger’s finger tightened on the trigger. ‘I don’t care what you call it,’ he said. ‘It’ll hurt just the same.’
‘You have no idea what you’re getting into.’
Granger shot him in the foot.
Herian howled as half his toes vaporized in a puff of grey-coloured ash. He clamped his hands across the stump, but there was no blood at all. His crown fell off, and he began to shudder and wail.