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___“Vellum is heavy,” grumbled Gaekwar.
___“So? Walk faster, the sooner to put it down,” retorted Portunista.
___Noon had been a difficult hour for the maga. Trying to decide what she should keep at hand or send away, while quickly sorting through the wreck upstairs, had gnawed her temper raw.
___Thankfully, a pentadart did not transfer much heat when striking; consequently books and scrolls deformed beneath the force of impact, rarely being torn unless their pages caught a shallow-angled strike. Ideally, what had been lost could be restored by following the records.
___If she kept the Tower.
___But, she couldn’t count on that. She had to save the most she could—and yet she had to keep at hand whatever might be useful in a fight!
___In the end, she packed up any reference to a jott she didn’t know and wouldn’t likely have the time to study soon—except for what she found that might involve defenses for the Tower. Those she kept aside, to study.
___Everyone had brought supplies in sacks, including Seifas; small enough to set aside for fights or moving fast, with nothing sorely missed except for traveling food thereby.
___All those sacks had now been packed with books and scrolls.
___“You should’ve gotten Othon,” mumbled Gaekwar as he tottered down the narrow stairs: one of the sacks had been the larger man’s!—and now held codices which wouldn’t fit inside the others.
___“You volunteered.”
___“To go to camp—not to be a packing-ass!”
___Portunista followed him across the ‘basement’. Jian was lying on his stomach, his arms stuck down the well and moving in a minor rhythm. She’d find out what that meant in a minute…
___“Gaekwar!” Portunista cut his next complaining short. “The troops should stay in place, until we’ve got a better notion of what’s happening. Make sure they post patrols and guards, double-thick; and have the sergeants keep their squads together, on alert. At any sign of fighting in the dell, the sergeants should advance their squads, attempt to contact one of us, and otherwise engage the flanks of enemies—for harrying only, unless they hear from one of us. If our soldiers march, the vendors must withdraw, back through the pass, and wait for a signal: so make sure that they’ll stay ready to move. That should keep them out of trouble for a while; they’ll also be able to freely flee in case a battle goes too badly. Squads should be assigned to act as scouts for them.” She rubbed between her eyes. “I guess that’s it. You’re free to make whatever other plans seem best within that framework.”
___“As you say.” He sounded somewhat dubious.
___“I’m trusting you with this. You’re the subcommander who can talk with them the best; and they’ll do what you command them to.”
___He rolled his eyes. “Mooooo…”
___“All right,” she smirked. “Go ready the herd, and then return. I need my best men here. And bring my other change of clothes!” Last night’s basement dousing couldn’t thoroughly clean her shirt and breeches from her sweat and aasvogel blood; and she flatly refused to wear those robes all day.
___“Midama.” He shortly bowed, and turned to leave.
___“Bye, Gaekwar,” Jian called out, his arms still in the hole. “Remember: green shirt!”
___“Don’t get too many grass stains while I’m gone!”
___“Jian!” Portunista called, hands on her hips, turning away from her subcommander as he left the Tower.
___“ah-hm?” he absently answered, still fixated on the well.
___“I told you to do something useful, not…what are you doing?!”
___“Checking something. Care to look? I think you’ll find this interesting.”
___Curiosity drew her closer.
___Jian, she noticed now, was lying upon the rope, so that it wouldn’t slip into the hole. The rope ran back beneath him, coiling briefly on the floor before it rose again back through the hole above.
___Most of the rope must already be below, she inferred; the seating plank as well. She carefully knelt and edged to peer into the pit, confirming her conclusions.
___Beneath the plank a lit torch hung, tightly tied at midpoint balance to the stapled short cord for the water pail. Jian was swinging the plank, and so the torch, back and forth.
___“It’s awfully dark down there: this way I can see the different parts…for about a moment at a time,” he sighed.
Portunista whistled up some wisps.
___“Oh! Hey, thanks!” Jian smiled. “Of course, we’ve seen those spindles down there grinding on that band of sigils…more precisely, grinding away at four discreet locations on that continuous band of sigils. Do you have any further notion of what that’s all about?”
___“No, not really. It isn’t like I’ve had much time to think about it recently.”
___“Well, I have; but I don’t know what I’m thinking of.” The maga chuckled softly at this somewhat absentminded statement. “Why a continuous band? Why not plates, like on the door upstairs? I’ll bet it’s making some effect in all directions—like that smaller band down there which generates the tesser. Yet it doesn’t seem to be affecting anything within its curve—not the torch and plank; nor us when we were down there. But the spindles are in constant movement. So, perhaps it’s generating something outwards. Careful, watch your face.” Portunista jumped a little—she had been attending so completely, she had never really noticed he was drawing up the plank while talking to her.
___“But,” added Jian, as he doused the torch inside the nearby pail, and started switching out the two below the plank, “the band is way down there below the level of the ground. Whatever those things do, it must be generated down there, too: below the Tower, out in all directions.”
___Something tickled Portunista’s memory… “Yes, that’s right! When I was Yrthescruting yesterday, I sensed an interference—at about that depth.”
___Jian arched his eyebrows; Portunista nodded, and began another scrution—but…
___“It isn’t any good,” she sighed, a minute later. “I can tell that something’s there, beneath the dell and centered on the Tower…but I can’t make heads or tails of anything else about it!” She flushed out bits of elemental Yrthe from beneath her eyelids.
___“Thanks for trying anyway.” Jian shrugged; then brightly added, “I’m betting you can figure it out eventually!” Despite her irritation, Portunista had to smile at Jian’s undauntable optimism.
___“Setting that riddle aside…” Jian leaned over the pit again; she followed after. “Look at how those other sets of gears are linking to spindles, leading up through the floor.”
___She nodded. “Up behind the walls.”
___“Right. Now, come hear this.” He swung himself around to stand, dusted off his knees—Portunista smiled again, at his vague and futile swipes to dislodge bits of wood-dust from his curly chest hair, too—and walked to one point on the curving wall. Following, Portunista saw a brass device, shaped like a forking branch, lying on the floor nearby. He picked this up and handed it to her.
___“If you’ll put those in your ears, and place the other end on the wall, you’ll confirm what we just saw.”
___She felt her eyebrows climbing up her forehead, as she heard a whirring clearly through the tube.
___“Where did you get this??”
___“From Pooralay, before he left. I asked him his opinion about the shape of the Tower, so he let me borrow this to test for confirmation. Here, there, there and there,” he pointed to different places on the wall, while he approached the door. “I marked the spots with talcum powder. Helps with chafing, too,” he winked.
___“So, there are channels in the walls.” She ignored his teasing; although she also flushed, to her annoyance. “I mean the…wall? No, the walls.”
___“Square outside, round inside,” Jian agreed, and knelt at the open door to draw the shape into some dusty ground outside. “Leaving channels in the corners, for machinery, sending force to gears above us in the ceiling space.”
___“So?” He had spent an hour doing this?!
___“So—wouldn’t you say it’s overkill? Four complex, and rather large, machinery columns—for a chairlift! Even with a bucket on the bottom of the plank, it doesn’t make much sense. But, come upstairs!” He bounded up the narrow stone extrusions; Portunista followed more sedately. Halfway up, she figured out what he was going to show her…
___“Two long hallways.” Jian stood on the landing, pointing as he made the counts. “Four short halls, because they cross each other. Four small rooms per hallway fraction: sixteen rooms altogether. The rooms are all rectangular.” Well, true; but that was hardly what she figured he was going to show her!
___“Now, come in here.” And into his room he went. Portunista hesitated, trying to make this match what she had thought that he would say.
___“This had better not be some elaborate ploy to get me alone in your room again,” she dryly told him, hiding her confusion. “We’ve already wasted time enough this morning.”
___“As I recall,” he lightly replied, “you came down to me.”
___Portunista gave a gasp. Before she could decide if she should be angry at him—for reminding her? for using this as a retort against her…?!
___—he turned to her, and told her:
___“You will never convince me that we wasted our time this morning.”
___now she needed to gasp, but couldn’t…
___she opened her mouth to…what? say something? kiss him?
___she waited in expectation to discover what her mouth would do…
___“My wife,” he added.
___And she shut her mouth.
___She felt as though he had tricked her somehow. Ignorant, calf-love-struck, naive…!!
___He turned away, leaving her emotions a tangled mess, leaving her mentally cursing…him? Her? Both of them?
___“Behind this wall, you can hear the machinery again…” Did she detect some disappointment in his voice? He’d better get used to that…!
___He paused, and sighed, and looked back toward her; in the dimness, she saw only patient expectation.
___If she hadn’t been wearing the sound-tube, hanging from a string around her neck, she would have walked away, leaving him there. She had lost all interest.
___“Although in truth,” she would admit years later, “my interest hadn’t been lost.
___“I had crushed my interest, to avoid the implications of whatever he might say…”
___But, she still had the tube; and a shred of social propriety urged her to fill the implicit request. So, she set it in her ears again, and walked to put the sensor on the wall.
___“Yes, it’s the machinery,” she sighed.
___“Loud or soft?”
___“Soft,” she answered; then… “No.” Her brow furrowed; her nose-tip twisted a little, as she contemplated what she heard.
___She didn’t see that Jian was smiling softly on that quirk of hers, like someone watching a sunrise or a waterfall…
___“I think…I think it’s just as loud as behind the wall below. And yet it sounds…”
___She glanced at him; but by this time he had hidden his smile. “Finer,” he suggested. “That’s what it sounds like to me. The machinery is smaller, closer together, doing more things.”
___“Doing what?”
___“Don’t know,” he admitted. “You’re the maga, however, so I figured it might help you later. All four corners sound the same,” he added as he walked into the hall. “And we aren’t just talking about the built-in channels of a circle in a square. Draw it out, and you’ll discover these partition walls are closing off significant portions of this floor, at those corners. It can’t be more of the same machinery as behind the wall downstairs: that would sound fainter but just as blocky, so to speak.”
___“Instead it only sounds…finer. More sophisticated,” said Portunista. Jian nodded. “I wonder, why didn’t I hear them last night?” she muttered.
___“It’d have to be really quiet to pick them up without the hearing-tube. And later, when it was really quiet—well, you did have other matters on your mind…” Jian reminded her with a grin. Blast his eyes, he was doing it to her again! Every time she seemed to have a grip on herself, he flustered her somehow, leaving her off-balance.
___“I didn’t try to explore the laboratory, because I didn’t want to distract you,” he said in apology, as she followed him up the stairs. Why not? she fumed to herself, you distract me enough already…
___“It does appear, however,” he continued, “that the radius of the laboratory is less than can be accounted for by the landing here.” And he wistfully sighed, like a boy looking into an armory that he couldn’t explore at the moment. “Last!” he clapped his hands together, “but not the least…!” and bounded up the stairs.
___When Portunista reached the upper room—her room—she muffled any thought of it being their room—she found him standing in the middle looking upward with a satisfied smile, hands on his hips.
___Now what? she wondered in irritation. The tour so far, though moderately interesting, had not been exactly helpful.
___Portunista looked up.
___Her jaw sagged down.
___Above them, engraved into every bit of the circular ceiling—
___—was a map.
___“That’s…that’s…That’s a map!”
___“Yes…” Jian answered cautiously. He looked back down to see her staring up incredulously. “It’s a map,” he slowly agreed, as if perhaps expecting a joke. “Isn’t this what you were studying, this morning? Right before you sat up in bed and shouted, has been here’?”
___She snapped her head back down to glare at him, commanding herself to close her jaw. “Of course! It’s a map! So?” She attempted to say this casually, as if she’d known all along—but she could tell from Jian’s expression that now he wasn’t buying it. Still, she certainly wouldn’t admit that she had spent the-Eye-knew-how-long staring blissfully up at the ceiling without a clue, or a care, of what she was seeing…!
___“Now, as you can see,” he continued, trying to keep his amusement down, “the map shows us the valley around the Tower in minute detail, all the way out to the ridges and mountains.” The contours suddenly shifted into perspective for Portunista—the engraving was only a slightly different shade than that of the stone of the ceiling, itself abnormally smooth. Jian was walking to where he had pulled a taller chest of drawers over next to one low table. At least, she didn’t remember those drawers being in place there earlier.
___Then again, she upbraided herself, who knew what else she had overlooked in this room since arriving last night?!
___“The most interesting thing, however, can only be seen by getting up close to the map,” Jian said, carefully checking his furniture placement. “And, may I add by the way, this ceiling is far too low to match the height of the Tower outside? And the machinery in the walls continues up to ceiling level, too.” He paused, nodded, then turned back to her with a gesture of invitation.
___Portunista, still cursing herself for being so unperceptive, stomped to the table and pulled herself up onto it.
___“I had to balance myself with a hand on the wall,” the fair man warned. “One of the legs of the chest of drawers—”
___“I have excellent balance!” She kept her hand away from the wall, and mounted the chest of drawers.
___It did begin to wobble, as she rose into an ungainly half-crouch; but she threw out her arms without touching the wall, and inched her face to the ceiling. She wished that Jian would just tell her things straight out, instead of making her find out for herself…
___She missed it for the first few moments, concentrating on the extremely fine detailing instead. This engraving must have cost a fortune—
___Then she realized: she wasn’t looking at an engraving.
___The surface was flush, as well as smooth.
___She looked even closer.
___Every last detail was part of one, massive…
___“sigil…!” she breathed; or maybe squeaked. She turned and tilted her head to look across the ceiling’s surface. “This is a sigiltracing!”
___The awe of trying to fathom such a complexity, blended together along with her inconvenient posture and unusual viewing perspective—
___The chest of drawers wobbled with her increasing disorientation.
___Her balance shifted violently back and forth, her body instinctively seeking to reestablish its center of gravity.
___She waved her arms in all sorts of directions!—she was pitching over—!
___She tried to curse, but all that escaped was an angry “Eep!”
___Jian caught her.
___It wasn’t a graceful catch, partly because Portunista was a little taller than Jian, and partly because she had already twisted further over, like a cat, trying to land on her hands and knees.
___Consequently, she bounced off his waiting arms—both of them grunted with the impact—and found herself standing next to him, still braced in mind and body for an impact with the floor.
___“Uh!” she exhaled; then wobbled once again as her muscles unclenched and her center of balance steadied.
___Instinctively, she thrust out her hand, and braced herself on the table— completing her humiliation.
___“Don’t even dare to say ‘I told you so,’” she growled.
___“Now, not being a magus, I haven’t a single good idea why Qarfax would do this. So,” Jian asked, “what do you think?”
___Portunista’s disorientation, which she’d begun fighting down, now rose again; and she cursed herself for not being able to let go of the table, yet…
___Then she laughed at herself, silently and bitterly.
___She had expected Jian to say “I told you so” anyway.
___“I don’t know,” she muttered.
___Jian didn’t say anything. He only looked at her with expectant hope.
___“What else do you want me to say?!! “ she exploded. “I DON’T KNOW! I don’t know why Qarfax did this or that, I don’t know what’s under the dell, or how tessers work, or how any of his sigils work, and I haven’t been able to get a scrution to be worth more than dung the whole time I’ve been here, and my eyes are getting sore, and I nearly broke my neck just now, and—so just—stop looking at me like I know what I’m doing!!”
___She slumped, back against the table, and glared at the floor, and imagined ripping out his throat if he tried to comfort her.
___She did hear him walking across the floor…but not to her.
___Instead, he clambered onto the bed.
___—did he expect her to just jump up on the bed with him, like he was some sort of medicine for her misery?!
___She raised her glare, ready to curse him.
___He wasn’t looking at her.
___He was lying with his head at the foot of the bed, closer to the center of the room, looking up at the map—squinting his eyes, pondering what it could mean.
___She took a few slow breaths. Jian was clever in some things; but he wasn’t a magus. He had about as much chance of figuring out the functions of a sigiltracing, as she did of reading whatever was written behind the stars.
___But, he had done what she had wanted for him to do, although she hadn’t said it aloud.
___He had left her alone.
___Yet he hadn’t given up. He still was trying his best.
___Portunista chewed her bottom lip, and sighed. She really was an idiot…if she didn’t try, who else was going to figure it out?!
___Bowing her head again, she closed her eyes, focusing her intent; and began to jott an Yrthescrution. The elemental materia coalesced beneath her eyelids, her eyes seeping tears as they tried to flush the Yrthe. She put the discomfort aside, and sent her intent to the stone of the ceiling above.
___There it was—and there was the tracing, across and within its surface; infused with plenty of Yrthe, as well as other materia. Linked to a whole other room of machinery in the ceiling above them.
___And vastly more complex than she had even begun to imagine.
___Where to begin?
___She didn’t have the faintest clue.
___So, she tried to get a simple feel, for its shape in total.
___She tilted her head, deep in thought. How peculiar—now she seemed to be looking down on the valley from high above. The trees and streams and contours all were there; there were the ridges and mountains, too; there was the Tower. But, it wasn’t like looking at any map, or even seeing it like a bird.
___It was…like feeling every tree and shape, in detail, all at once. She didn’t have to move her focus here or there. All the map, all the sigil, twenty-four paces across or more, seemed to be one point—a point with the strength of a unity.
___Was this…how the Eye beheld the whole world…?
___Something was happening, as if in the corner of her viewing, yet right in the center, too. She couldn’t determine what it was—she unconsciously tilted her head in other directions, understanding intuitively she wasn’t properly seeing it yet.
___…was the sigil triggering?
___Yes…the scrution itself was activating it, blending with it somehow, completing parts of its circuitry where she hadn’t even guessed there were gaps. Whenever she focused too closely on the details, she lost all perception of what the whole was doing.
___So, perhaps she should start with what was happening, rather than trying to start with how.
___On impulse, she sent her scrution in other directions around the room, reaching up from the floor, as the sigil itself was teaching her to reach—seeing the room without seeing it, accepting the whole before trying to figure the details. She wouldn’t have had any hope, before, of understanding what she was seeing—because, she knew and would now admit, she lacked some skills and knowledge that must be gathered first in other ways. Experience itself might help, perhaps…?
___She turned her head, her body not guiding but echoing her intentions; not restricting, but responding to what her intentions could achieve.
___She didn’t know that she was smiling; immersed within, and radiating, the joy of discovery.
___She wasn’t thinking about her self, at all.
___She compared what she was feeling through her scrution, with her memories of sight—letting each inform and complement the other, inferring and learning the meaning of what must be…There was the basin; the tables, wardrobes, dressers, chairs. There was the bed. She could feel where Jian was, on the bed, and even ‘see’ that he was looking up at the map…
___…trying his best to figure it out.
___Trying his best, to serve her.
___She walked to him, and knelt, and kissed him lightly on the forehead.
___“I’m sorry,” she told him. “Thank you for being so patient with me, when I’m in a mood.”
___“I suppose,” he thoughtfully answered, “that this means the threat will now be ramping up considerably…”
___She would have blinked, except that would have interrupted her scrution.
___“What?” was all she could think of to say. Had she heard him correctly…?!
___“Well,” he said, pointing upward—she inferred it from clues in the scrution—“those little glowing dots are clumped together exactly where we left the brigade; so, I figure those other dots, over there, and there and there, must be—”
___“Wait…hold on…WHAT??” Her ‘view’ tilted as she lost control of the scrution, her eyes popping open, blinking away the materia. At the last moment, she reached reflexively with her intent, and did something she would have said was impossible.
___She bound the scrution into place, as she opened her eyes.
___The wonder of the previous moments dampened her normal annoyance at having to flush out the Yrthe with her tears; the wonder, and the confusion. Could Jian jott after all…?!
___He slightly moved his eyes, to look up at her instead of up at the map; smiling, and raising his eyebrows—which looked very strange and comical from her vantage. And he continued to point.
___“See?” he said. “You’re doing that, right?”
___Portunista looked up.
___The map stood out in even greater contrast and detail.
___And very fine points of orangish red, covered the edges of three of the compass-quarters.
___“I expect…” Jian yawned and stretched, “…those four points, running across the dell toward our front door, are Seifas and the others. Although we could be under attack already from scouts,” he allowed. He rotated round and off the foot of the bed. “I’d better go check. Be back in a minute!”
___And off he trotted.
___Portunista, however, was watching the masses, gathering from the east, the west and the north.
___Each mass was somewhat larger than the blob of dots at the south, near the mouth of the pass.
___And each was slowly moving, over the ridges, over the mountains, through the forests, toward the middle.
___“Oh, scrat,” she breathed…
I’ll be ramping that up in a later important chapter toward the end of this Section (but after this first half of the novel).