Of Machines & Magics by Adele Abbot Read Free Book Online

ants, for whom the Nest’s instructions were irrevocable, had other and very fixed ideas. They waited until the humans were clearly at a loss then, squatted, one to each side of the raft, and extended their three outer legs into the water. They began to paddle the ungainly craft onward.
    Meanwhile, the powers of the two Mages waned steadily. Calistrope had detected such depleted regions in the ether before but why they should occur in the relatively undisturbed regions of Mal-a-Merrion’s central waters was a mystery. Neither he nor Ponderos could offer a theory to explain it.
    The mist began to clear soon after the fateful battle. It lifted and dispersed until the sky became its accustomed purple-black and the sun’s bloated disc hung just above the south western horizon, giving them a sense of direction and purpose. Three more days passed before the ants, occasionally aided by one or more of their human companions, brought them to the farther shore, far up the Lake from Sachavesku. The insects sculled the craft slowly along the bank in search of a place to disembark.
    Calistrope’s wound was now giving him continual pain, the poison had spread and often, he was only semiconscious. In a more lucid moment he asked one of his companions to bring him his bag. The ant—the one with the injured eye—complied and neatly snipped the drawstring with its mandibles so that the bag fell open. Calistrope groped within, withdrew a glass medallion and with difficulty, set it spinning on its edge. It wobbled, straightened up again and continued to spin but so slowly that the detail on both faces was quite plain.
    “Take us northward,” he said and fixed a tiny part of his mind and remaining power upon maintaining the rotation. “If it speeds up, stop.”
    Calistrope slumped back, his eyes closed, his gaze turned inward.
    The glass disc spun slowly and the water lapping alongside the raft was a soothing, somnolent sound in his ears. The Mage slept more peacefully in the dark sunlight.
    Images swirled around his mind, memories.

    Sometimes, larger waves spread down the Lake from the north and would break viciously along the shingle, sending tongues of salty water up along the banks. The larger ones would flood into the many pools of supersaturated water, splashing salt crystals as high as the road.
    The silvery glass medallion still spun slowly.
    Ponderos had fashioned a travois from branches and a piece of fabric from the abandoned raft. The ant which had lost its antennae dragged the conveyance behind it with Calistrope, unconscious still, tossing and turning on it. The two ants, one speechless, the other all but blind in one eye, pressed on resolutely or stood impassively when the humans needed to rest.
    A day’s length passed, another. There was little significance to the term except as a measure of time; the stars wheeled about; infinitesimally, the planets wandered among the stars, their evolutions just as minute, just as precise. Humankind kept to its own rhythms, resting when weary, eating when hungry, laboring when necessary.
    However, there was one transition which went quite unnoticed for some time. Calistrope’s spinning disc, perched on a corner of the travois like a gyroscope, gradually spun faster. No one noticed the phenomenon until the increasing speed became audible as a rising whine. It continued to accelerate, the whine becoming a shriek, the disc becoming a milky colored sphere. Still the rotation increased, the sound rising up beyond even the insects’ hearing until it was gone, burst suddenly into a scatter of bright dust.
    A minute or two later, Calistrope sat up. He rubbed his eyes and massaged his right shoulder. Peeling the bandages away, he found the flesh around the wound to be purple and swollen—his body battled against the poison. Now that the ether was stronger, he stroked the discolored skin and the angry colors began to fade, the puffiness diminished.
    “Ah. That is better,” he breathed.