Following supper, he had an unplanned appointment that forced him to take brandy in one of the castle’s many opulent parlors with Simon Stepney, the burgomaster of Growl Mort.
After listening to Simon petition for less stringent labor laws and plead for relief from the city’s pollution tax (while professing the indispensable value of Growl Mort’s factories) Caliph politely accepted a miniature factory made of iron.
The ugly little contraption was bedizened with tiny emeralds in place of windows and contained a chemiostatic cell that made them glow. Caliph felt fairly certain there was some kind of bromidic metaphor going on.
About clean factories and clean power sources.
A hidden ampoule of chemical ink and some sulfate, or so Simon explained, was mixed at the touch of a button and produced a soundless but violent reaction that caused black steam to bubble from the smokestacks and dissipate harmlessly into thin air.
Caliph smiled graciously at the clever but hideous effect and handed the model off to Gadriel for relegation to the hidden stockpile of useless gifts accepted with outward cordiality from the arms of many decades’ worth of wheedling politicians.
Then, maintaining decorum despite a throbbing headache and exigent need for sleep, the High King accompanied the burgomaster of Growl Mort into yet another lavish parlor where a dozen other guests had gathered for an evening of chamber music.
Somewhere between the sublime strains of violins, violas and cellos Caliph nearly lost his sanity.
Though the music dripped with gorgeous sounds Caliph could barely stay awake. The recital ended at sixteen-forty, an hour and a half before midnight.
Caliph clapped brightly and thanked everyone before the High Seneschal—who must have seen the king’s discomfort like piano wire stretched under his skin—mercifully made an excuse and ushered him from the room.
“I’m terribly sorry.” The seneschal began a bizarre apology. “They’re usually much better.”
Caliph waved off the man’s kind but baseless repentance.
“It’s not that, Gadriel. The musicians were fine. They were wonderful. I’m just exhausted. If I don’t start getting more sleep—”
“Tomorrow morning you will not be disturbed. I swear my life on it. I will postpone your breakfast appointment until—”
“No, that’s no good. I need to be there. It’s a very important breakfast. Don’t postpone it. And don’t make the cooks go to any special trouble. I don’t want it to seem like an important breakfast.”
“Very well.” Gadriel paused at the High King’s bedroom with a strange look of sympathy. His eyes said something like, twenty-six is too young to be High King. He opened the door and Caliph walked in like a blind man, slowly but straight for the bed.
“Shall I help you undress, my lord?”
“No.” Caliph fell like a tree across the mattress. He muttered with his face in the comforter, “Wasn’t that miniature factory hideous?”
“Ungodly,” the High Seneschal agreed.
“What did you do with it?”
“I had it melted down for sling bullets and given to the castle children for hunting crows.”
“Excellent choice. I’ll see you in the morning.”
Gadriel turned down the gas lamp in the room, opened the windows as was his lord’s habit and shut the door as quietly as he could.
The next morning Caliph waited in the high tower, watching Bilgeburg smolder into another day’s work.
Sigmund arrived on time and was admitted by the seneschal. He wore grimy leather overalls that had once been mostly tan and no shirt. As usual, Sigmund’s hands looked like he had made a reasonable attempt to scour them and then thought better of it or had been distracted or simply given up.
“How’s it goin’, Caph?” he asked, slouching into his chair with one meaty arm draped over the back.
Gadriel made a noise of distinct admonition as he set a tray of pastries and tea on the table. Nevertheless, no visible trace of disdain marred the aged butler’s countenance and Sigmund would have probably ignored him even if there had.
Gadriel poured each man a cup of tea before leaving the room.
“It goes,” sighed Caliph. “And it continues . . . indefinitely.”
“Sounds like I’m glad I’m not the High King,” Sigmund remarked, scooping up two pastries and shoveling one in. It left a puff of cream at the corner of his mouth.
“I brought a booprints,” he struggled while chewing. His left hand set the other pastry down and rooted around in a filthy canvas rucksack slung over his shoulder and down across his waist.
Outside, zeppelins were cruising through the striation of vanilla and oyster-colored clouds. They looked deadly. Like ornately finned fish, duny shinquils and coelacanths, that glinted in the high oblique sunlight from the west.
Sigmund pulled some thickly creased and wrinkled squares of paper out, each folded many times, and set them in a leaning stack beside the pastry tray.
He smacked down the rest of his breakfast, dumped three spoonfuls of sugar into his tea, stirred, gulped and swished.
“Thing is, Caph . . .” he dug at some bread trapped in his molars, “this stuff, this solvitriol mechanics. It’s some scary damn shit. It’s no wonder the profs at Desdae couldn’t figure it out even when they got their hands on that little clurichaun. They even had some extra cells taken straight out of Iycestoke but once you crack ’em open the real important stuff, the stuff that makes the cell work in the first place, escapes . . . like light.”
Caliph reached out and picked up the blueprints. He unfolded them with care. He had still not spoken to anyone about Sigmund’s claim. He wanted to make sure his excitement was justified before he made the secret official.
On the paper were all kinds of formulae and dimensions. Blocks of information penned in precise handwriting framed by perfect squares and rectangles that hovered around carefully drawn diagrams of tubing and cells of blown glass.
The cells looked similar to chemiostatic batteries but instead of holding acids and holomorphically charged fluid, the cells on the blueprints contained something called solvitriol suspensate.
The glass was not normal glass either—something professors at Desdae had already figured out.
“What’s solvitriol suspensate?”
Sigmund was about to bite into his second pastry. He reconsidered and set it down, folding his hands and looking suddenly solemn.
“That’s the scary part, Caph. That’s the scary part.” He dragged his chair around to sit beside the High King.
“See these caps and tubes and whatnot? These are like chemiostatic junk we’ve all seen before. You know, conducting electricity from the battery out along a circuit to power whatever it is you want to supply juice to? It’s really basic shit. Problem is you lose energy over distance. That’s why it’s better to light a city with gas. Localized chemiostatic cells can take care of a building if the cells are big enough and you want to change ’em out every couple months.”
Caliph snorted.
“Yeah, right.”
“Exactly.” Sigmund shared the sarcasm. “Pulling bolts on a two-ton chemiostatic cell in a zeppelin is bad enough. I don’t want to be the one lugging one out of someone’s basement. But what if you never had to change it out?”
Caliph’s brow knitted and he bit his lip.
“I suppose you could find a way to drain the battery and add more fluid, enhance the housing so it could withstand a decade’s worth of acid and—”
“No, Caph,” Sigmund interrupted by laying his hand on Caliph’s arm. “I mean what if you never had to change it out?”
“Never?”
