Salamander by Thomas Wharton Read Free Book Online

without knowing how or why, the entire universe, I have come to realize, is a vast, unbounded book of riddles. A book written in the elusive and unutterable language of God.
    The Count snapped shut his watch.
    – What I want is nothing more or less than my own personal edition.

    As Flood discovered, there were areas of the castle where one function appeared to predominate over others. The head carpenter, a curly-headed young Savoyard named Turini, directed him to his proposed workplace, a gallery circling the rim of a central cavity. The immense hole, as the carpenter explained, was originally excavated to allow the Count’s engineers easier access to the main clockworks far below. As the complexity ofthe castle’s design increased, this great cylindrical shaft had become a central rerouting point for bookcases and other furniture. As Flood watched, leaning over the balustrade, the cases far below him swivelled ponderously, changed direction, dropped or rose to other levels on their way through the castle. At times they passed over and through the gallery where he stood, as he learned when the carpenter pushed him abruptly to one side to avoid being run down by a glass-fronted map cabinet approaching from behind.
    Down the middle of the gallery’s long sweeping curve ran a sunken rail along which a metallic angel of death glided (counter-clockwise, Flood noted) with lance raised on high. Under Flood’s direction, Turini pried loose the life-sized memento mori and replaced it with Flood’s press and work table, mounted on a small platform attached to the sunken rail in the floor. The undercarriage glided along smoothly enough that vibrations would not be a problem, except on the stroke of the hour, when everything jarred to a halt. Turini ran a callused hand through his hair and suggested that when Flood heard the clockworks beneath him tensing to strike, he would have to cease work for the next few moments. An annoyance, certainly, but not an insurmountable obstacle.
    – That’s what His Excellency told me, the carpenter said, when I first came to work for him. No obstacle is insurmountable. So I’ve set my sights on Darka, the contortionist. She’s deaf and dumb, it’s true, but what a beauty.
    Flood was allowed to keep his stacks of paper and casks of ink in one place, a cabinet he could reach by climbing down a ladder into the central shaft. In order to reach what he needed he soon found he had to plan his path carefully through the moving labyrinth of bookshelves.
    Turini helped Flood assemble the press, a device he had never seen before, and praised its ingenious construction.
    – Before there was a machine to make books, he mused, how did men get smart enough to invent one?
    By early evening the uncrating, assembling, and arranging was complete, and Flood wiped his grimy hands on a cloth and stepped back to appraise, for what had to be the thousandth time, the ungainly instrument of his livelihood.
    We are both out of place here
. As if aware of its incongruous presence in such surroundings the ancient workhorse seemed to hunker down before him, a faithful beast of burden awaiting the next load it was to bear.
    Not for the first time he marvelled at what an odd composite creature a printing press was. With its legs and its stout frame and its various handles and protrusions, it resembled at one and the same time a bed, a pulpit, and an arcane instrument of torture. The weathered wooden timbers had been scored, cracked, water-damaged under leaky roofs, set on fire (once on purpose, by an author given to drink who’d found a typographical error in his book), realigned and repaired again and again. It had been taken apart, hauled to new lodgings, and reassembled countless times before this latest epic remove. Its wood and metal parts had been scrubbed and polished every single day of its existence, and replaced only after all attempts at repair had failed. The longest-surviving timbers, from the time of his