Quintessence Sky (22 page)

Before he could do so, King Philip stood and
raised a hand, his raised position on the dais making him clearly
visible to everyone. The torch bearer stopped short. Everyone fell
silent. Woodruffe looked as astonished as everyone else.

"Douse the fire," Philip ordered. "Remove the
wood from around the stake."

By the time they did so, Ramos knew what was
coming. The screen underneath the dais, where he had seen Barrosa,
had a small hole cut in it, and Barrosa was now nowhere to be seen.
Ramos pushed his way into the crowd, trying to make it to the royal
platform before it was too late.

"These are troubled times," Philip said in
his rich and commanding voice. He was not a tall man, but his
presence arrested every eye. Woodruffe looked surly; this was his
show, and he hadn't been expecting an interruption.

"The poison of heresy has leaked into many
corners of the world," the king continued. "In this land
especially, many doubt the True Church and fall into wickedness and
treason. Yet God has not changed. Bear witness, all you who gather
here! So that there may be no doubt that we rule by divine order,
and that Charles Shiveley stands under condemnation not just by
man, but by God, we will not light the fire today. Instead, we look
to God to bring his own judgment. If this man has sinned, let God
himself light the fire!"

Woodruffe looked stunned. His head swiveled
comically between the king and the piles of logs, uncertain how the
show should proceed or if he had a part in it any longer. The crowd
stared at the stake, hushed and expectant.

Ramos started running, shoving people out his
way, knowing he couldn't get there in time. This was wrong, a far
worse deception than the fake pardon. Philip was fabricating a
miracle on the scale of Elijah's fire from heaven before the
priests of Baal, but it was nothing more than a charlatan's trick.
Worse, he was using Ramos's discovery to do it. Ramos wanted no
part of this hoax.

In the center of the clearing, Shiveley
suddenly cried out. He looked around, trying to find what had hurt
him, and then screamed, twisting his body as if to escape some
invisible fire. His face bore the terror not only of the pain but
of its apparently miraculous cause. He screamed and writhed, while
the crowd looked on in silent awe. There was no fire, and yet he
burned.

"Stop this! Turn it off!" Ramos said, still
trying to push through, but his shouts only broke the silence,
prompting the crowd to erupt into noise again. Those who loved
Shiveley wailed and begged God for mercy, while others railed
against heresy and spat at him.

Shiveley lived for a horribly long time. When
Ramos finally reached the platform, it was too late to save him. He
found Barrosa behind the screen, aiming the
Ignis Dei
through the hole and peering through to view his handiwork.

"For the love of mercy, add more salt!" Ramos
said.

Barrosa looked up. "The king's orders were .
. ."

"He will burn in Hell soon enough. Give him
more fire and end this charade."

Barrosa still didn't move, so Ramos grabbed
the jar himself and poured salt into the pearl compartment.
Shiveley's clothing flared up in a rush of bright flame. The smell
of meat filled the square, familiar from a hundred
inquisitions.

As Shiveley's screams fell silent, so did the
shouting of the crowd. They watched mutely as the impossible flames
devoured the flesh. There was no need for Philip to say any more.
They knew a miracle had taken place.

Ramos slammed the barrier down, blocking the
prism from the quintessence light and thus turning off the fire.
"This is vile deceit," he said. "Do you think you are God? Can you
stand in His place and bring fire from heaven?"

Barrosa didn't flinch. "Apparently I
can."

"It's a lie. This is Aaron, forming a golden
calf and giving it to the people to worship. You have called God
what is merely a work of man."

"Is it?" Barrosa flushed and his voice rose.
"Is this your work, Ramos de Tavera? Did you create quintessence?
Did you bottle it up in this pearl? This is fire from heaven, if
ever there was."

"Lies. You stretch the truth until it breaks.
This is a natural force, found by men, brought home by men, and
directed by men. By me. And you use it for falsehood."

"It's God's work, Ramos. Why do we burn
heretics? To terrify the rest into contemplating the just and
miraculous and very real, eternal fire of God. Isn't that what I'm
doing? Just a little better than most."

"Look where you are. Out in the open? No. You
hide here like a thief, hidden from view, and you tell me your
motives are just? If this is God's work, then stand in the light,
for all to see!"

Barrosa bit back a retort and spun away. When
he turned back again, his face was set in hard lines. "Do you think
I had any choice? This was neither my invention nor my idea. Maybe
you should have thought of the consequences before you showed this
to the king."

"I gave the king a weapon to fight the
Protestants, not a tool to gull the simple into believing they'd
seen a miracle," Ramos said. He would have gone on, but Barrosa was
looking past him with a grim smile.

"I
am
using it to fight the
Protestants," said a commanding voice behind him. Ramos whirled. It
was the king.

"Your Grace," Ramos said, dropping to one
knee.

"You object to this charade," Philip
said.

"I do, your Grace. It puts false ideas in the
people's minds."

"And will you leave this place and tell the
English I am a liar and a fraud?"

Ramos gasped. He bowed his head lower, almost
touching the dirt. He was acutely aware of the power of the man
before him, and the command he held over life and death. It would
be nothing for Philip to make him the next victim tied to that
stake. "No, my lord. I beg pardon."

"Will you destroy this weapon or refuse to
make more like it?"

"No. It is not my place to question. And yet,
I dare to ask, as your spiritual advisor, whether it is wise—"

"Good. We are agreed." Philip crouched beside
him and placed his ringed hand on the back of Ramos's neck. Ramos
could see his embroidered shoes and smell his perfume. "For those
who are faithful, we accept certain irregularities. The presence in
a household, for example, of one possessed by a demon, can be
overlooked. This is not the case for those who fall from
favor."

Ramos struggled for breath, thinking of
Antonia sitting innocent and unprotected in his apartment. Though
who could protect her from a monarch's will? "Your Grace," he
finally managed to say. "I am your humble servant."

The king stood and walked away, leaving Ramos
shaking. He lifted his head and caught Barrosa's eye, who gave him
a look of pity. "We have no choice, you and I," he said.

CHAPTER 14

THE VOID grew larger, and Catherine beat at
it frantically with the beetlewood planks. "I can't control
it!"

"Yes, you can," Sinclair said. "I'm almost
done."

Vibrations thrummed back and forth along the
void's edges, forcing her to take a step back. She tried to slap
the planks together and close the void entirely, but it was too
late for that. She could no longer reach the center.

Sinclair saw. "Run!" he said.

She stumbled backward, dropping the wood.
Sinclair abandoned his work and ran. Maasha Kaatra, however, stood
transfixed by the glowing vibrations, not seeming to hear.
"Father?" he said.

Catherine tugged at his arm. "Get back!"

His unfocused gaze snapped to her.
"Murderer," he said in a terrible voice. "My daughters. You killed
them." He gripped her wrist painfully.

She tried to pull away, but he was too
strong. "Maasha Kaatra!" she shouted. "It's me, Catherine!" The
void was enveloping them. She could see nothing in its darkness.
"Let me go!"

She screamed and pulled again, this time
yanking her wrist out of Maasha Kaatra's grasp. The vibrating
strand reaching into the void blazed like the evening sun and then
broke.

The whole room lurched, and she fell. She
looked up from the floor in time to see Maasha Kaatra toppling
backwards like a crumbling tower. Where he should have struck the
floor, the void was there, and he kept falling, tumbling farther
and farther, like a rock into a bottomless well. The void collapsed
with a pop, and he was gone.

THE SCENE had repeated itself over and over
in Catherine's mind for the last year and a half. She had hardly
known Maasha Kaatra, though he had traveled with her the whole
journey from England. He had been a dark shadow at Sinclair's side,
a silent threat, rarely speaking. She didn't know his history
beyond the fact that he had been freed from Portuguese slavers by
Christopher Sinclair. He had lived a whole life before that, as a
prince in Nubia, with two daughters of his own. They were dead now,
she thought, though she knew nothing about the circumstances. All
she knew for sure was that she had been responsible for his death.
And yet here he was, standing on a stone platform deep underground,
looking about a hundred years old.

"How can you be alive?" Catherine said. "What
happened to you?"

"Look," Maasha Kaatra said.

She followed his pointing finger to the large
pool into which the underground streams were all pouring. It seemed
to be extraordinarily deep. At first, she couldn't tell what she
was supposed to be seeing about it. Then she saw that at one end,
where overhanging rock left the pool in deep shadow, a familiar
shimmer hovered over the water. It wasn't a shadow at all. It was a
void.

Even after all these months of working with
them and learning to control them, Catherine found voids
disturbing. Aristotle had taught that matter was continuous, but it
wasn't. It was made of tiny particles they called atoms, and behind
those particles was the void. Nothing. The absence of reality.
Opening windows into that void was terrifying, because it
demonstrated how tenuous reality actually was. What appeared to be
solid was only the interactions of tiny particles at a distance.
Change the interactions slightly, and you could slip right through.
Lose control, and you might lose reality altogether. Sometimes,
Catherine wished Aristotle had been right.

"So, more than a year ago, when you fell out
of the world . . ." She struggled to understand what he was
implying. "You fell back in through that void right there? Have you
been here ever since?"

"I do not know how long I fell." Maasha
Kaatra's expression grew distant. "Days? Years? But at the end was
water, deep water, and drowning, until finally, I emerged on this
shore. I wandered through endless caves, exploring, losing my way,
but always finding myself back here."

"What is this place?"

"Hell, or Purgatory, or whatever name men
might choose. The place where all paths lead. I thought I might
find my girls here, but I have called long and searched deep, and
have not found them. Perhaps they went to another place, a happier
one, where there is laughter and good food in the perpetual bright
sun."

"You've survived all this time, just
wandering in the caves?" Catherine said. Is there no way out?"

He arched a scabbed eyebrow. "Out?"

"Out. Back up to the surface."

He was silent.

"This isn't Hell, not really. We're
underground, deep in the mountains. It's very far down, but perhaps
there's some way out."

Maasha Kaatra looked up, and she followed his
gaze. Directly above them, high in the ceiling where the spirit
lights gathered, was another cave shaft. It led upward, straight as
a line. It was very high, but since it was also very wide, she
could see the opening far, far above, and through it, the stars.
Not more spirit lights, but the real stars—she recognized the
constellation Aquarius.