De Mailhac swung herself down from her horse, skirts flying, and started across the yard toward Timenard. She carried a sword, Rathe saw, incongruous over the bright green silk, and there was a small pistol jammed into her sash. Clearly she intended to fight, and Rathe wondered if there was any way they could make use of that.
“We’ve lost our chance to influence the queen’s choice, can’t you see that?” she demanded. “We’re discovered, and we’ve no hope of further gain–of any gain at all. Unless we flee, and now, we’ll take Belvis down with us.”
Timenard ignored her, lifted his hand, fingers crooked, and the air thickened again, the light coalescing into a swarm. Rathe swore under his breath, glanced wildly at the magists behind him.
“Isn’t there something you can do?”
Denizard shook her head, and b’Estorr said, “I’m a necromancer, I don’t even know what he’s calling–”
“Timenard!” de Mailhac demanded. “We have to protect Belvis.”
“Belvis is expendable,” Timenard said, impatiently, as though to an importunate child. “Leave me alone, woman.”
With an inarticulate cry of anger, de Mailhac drew her sword. Timenard flung his hand back, not even bothering to turn, and the swarming light shot from his fingers, struck the landame with a soundless snap. Her arm hung in the air, her whole figure tensed, frozen in mid‑motion. Only her eyes still moved, burning with fury and fear. Not dead, then, Rathe thought, trying to make sense of what he’d seen, not a mortal blow after all, though who knows what it would have done to the kids–
Timenard sighed then, the motion of his shoulders obvious beneath his heavy robe, and swung himself down from his horse. As his feet touched the ground, the horse shimmered as though the air around it was warped by a furnace’s heat. The strands of its mane and tail seemed to fuse, become a solid sheet, and then its neck curled down and its hind legs buckled. For a confused instant, Rathe thought it was reaching for nonexistent grass or trying to sit, but its head curled further, its neck bending impossibly until its nose was tucked under its belly. The strong outlines of its muscles were blurring, too, fading, its forelegs curling under, and its color ran like water, shifting from sorrel to true gold and then to something beyond gold, an unearthly, shadowless luster. The last ghost of the horse‑shape fused and vanished, and in its place stood a set of nested spheres, impaled on a yard‑long axis. Rathe shook his head, trying to deny what stood before him. He had seen the great orrery at the university, both as a boy and at the ceremony that had confirmed the true time, and he recognized the form of the thing. But where the university’s orrery had been brass, solid and secure in its mechanical connections, this was delicate as filigree, the shapes of the rings and the planets outlined with a peculiar iridescence. It had to be made of aurichalcum–of pure aurichalcum, he corrected himself. Even the coin aurichalcum b’Estorr had shown him had lacked that unearthly color.
“Sweet Sofia,” Denizard murmured, and made a warding gesture. b’Estorr took a step forward, towards the entrance, towards the orrery, then stopped, shaking his head. Denizard closed a hand around his arm, her fingers white‑knuckled, but the necromancer didn’t seem to feel her grip.
Rathe looked at them. “What is it? An orrery like that–what can it do?”
“Entirely too much,” Denizard said, grimly.
b’Estorr nodded. “Something that size, with that much aurichalcum–made purely of aurichalcum…” He took a breath. “Instead of drawing its influence from the stars, it could, conceivably, reverse the process. Affect the stars themselves.”
“It can’t do that,” Eslingen said, but the protest was automatic. “That’s impossible.”
“Not anymore,” Denizard answered.
“I think we’ve seen it,” b’Estorr said.
“The clocks?” Rathe asked, and the necromancer nodded.
“To forge something like that, something that powerful–we’re lucky all it did was throw off all the clocks in Astreiant.”
Timenard stooped, lifted the orrery in his gloved hands. It was huge, the largest sphere as large as his torso, but he carried it easily. The iridescence played briefly over his fingers, and faded. “You, in the mine. I hold here the power to reorder the world, to compel the stars themselves to change and to change the world with them, to bring down the powers that are now and set up new powers in their place. You yourselves are commoners all–surely you can see this can only be to your good. Who has been blamed for the disappearances of these children? Leaguers and commoners. Unfair, but the way of the world. I give you a new chance, a new choice. Come out of there and join me. I can give you a better world than the one you live in.”
The words were like a spell, an almost palpable temptation. Rathe shook himself, made himself look past the magist toward the mine road and de Mailhac’s people huddled in confusion. Coindarel was on his way, but even if he arrived in time, what could he do against the power of the orrery? The mage‑light was fading again, replaced by the dimmer light of dawn, and against it the orrery glowed even brighter than before. Pure aurichalcum, Rathe thought, the words running through his mind like a tune he could not forget. Unpolluted by anything else, the purest form of gold.
“Come now,” Timenard called again, “come out and join me.”
Rathe could feel the words tugging at him, a subtle pressure against his knees, as though he stood in an invisible stream. Eslingen took a step forward, then shook himself, scowling, and took two steps back, deeper into the shadows.
“You see what I can offer you,” Timenard crooned. “What I can make you. A better, more just world.”
Rathe shook his head, took a step sideways and stumbled, almost tripped by the invisible current. “More just?” he called, hoping to create some delay until he, any of them, could think of something that might stop the magist. “Whose justice? Yours? And what about the law?”
“The law was set up by nobles to keep commoners like yourself in their places. Don’t be a fool.”
“I won’t,” Rathe said, but in spite of himself the current drew him forward. “I won’t see a world that sets one man up over all others.”
“You will have no choice,” Timenard answered, and touched the orrery’s outermost sphere. The air rang, as though with the aftereffects of music, though there had been no sound. Rathe took another step, and was suddenly aware of the pistol in his hand. It was loaded, and the ball was lead, he thought, lead which was the antithesis of gold to begin with, and which had been sitting in contact with the impure compound of gunpowder. He lifted it, bracing himself against the invisible current of Timenard’s will, and took careful aim, not at the magist but at the orrery itself. He held his breath, and pulled the trigger. The priming powder caught, and then, half a heartbeat later, the pistol fired, the sound shockingly loud, shockingly profane, in the close air. The orrery seemed to sob aloud, a weirdly soundless groan that shook the ground under their feet. Rathe stumbled forward, going to his knees in the muddy ground. Behind him Eslingen cursed and leveled his own pistol, bracing himself against the nearest timber.
“Timenard–”
Behind him, b’Estorr cried, “No, don’t, the gold’s unstable.”
Eslingen hesitated, and in the same moment they saw de Mailhac shake herself, as though the noise, the attack on the orrery, had freed her from her trance. She lunged blindly forward, continuing the move she had begun minutes before. Timenard tried to turn away, his eyes suddenly wide, mouth opening in the beginning of a horrified shout. Her sword pierced the orrery’s spheres, dissolving as it thrust, and the orrery screamed again, a wail of tortured metal. And then de Mailhac’s bare hand touched the axis. Timenard cried out then, his voice lost in the sudden yelling, and fire flashed beneath de Mailhac’s hand. Light surged with it, so that for a moment the two stood locked, their shadows and the orrery’s black at the heart of a ball of fire hotter than any furnace. The smoke came then, crashing back over the ball of light like an ocean wave, and then it, too, was gone. Where it had been, where Timenard and de Mailhac had been, there was nothing except pale ash and a handful of dull, twisted wires.