“I’m very sorry,” the inventor said, getting to his feet. “The city has plenty of artificiers in it. I’m sure you will find the right person.”
The customer rose and bowed. “Thank you for your time,” he said. “I’m sure I will.” He left, and John Ustion went to work.
. . . Just as the customer had known he would. Because this was not the first time he’d had this conversation since leaving Alphonsus Lung’s shop, and in his wake he’d left a handful of fascinated, inspired craftsmen, all with different specialties and different interests and all of whom had refused to sell to him but all of whom he also knew were presently occupied with fashioning impossible devices exactly to his specifications. John Ustion was a jack of many trades, but he was fire-savvy and had been thinking for a long time about a fierekenia mechanism. So he instinctively turned to flame to solve this challenge.
The key to working with fire is knowing what kind to use. Any craftsman will tell you the same. Ask a baker. Ask a blacksmith. So the first thing John Ustion did was think of all the sorts of fire he knew.
There is lyke-fire, among the most powerful sorts, but also the most painful, and the most difficult to control. There is belluine, more powerful and more difficult still and sometimes needlessly destructive, and cald-fire, easier to manage but perhaps too playful for anything with stakes as high as time-working. Bone-fire requires too much fuel at too great a cost to build into any kind of machinery; seel-fire is easier to kindle but is better for obscuring than for revealing; hnappian is a lulling-fire; and to use either wax-fire or wane-fire requires using both, which would’ve meant a physically bigger device and seemed inelegant to Ustion’s engineer’s mind.
Tangle-fire, now . . . tangle-fire has interesting physics underpinning it that might do well when working with space and time. Fleugana is persnickety, but not impossibly so, and can be used to enable flight. Heed-fire and hodijana he considered, along with brumire and bruweiry and welking-fire. All had potential, but none seemed precisely right.
Then there is wheat-fire, which has nothing to do with grain but whose name comes instead from old names for whetting and honing, and a still older word that means behold. Sharpen and witness, that is what wheat-fire does . . . and what it demands. It is a good fire for reckoning, but it is also heartless. Some fires are gentler and paint the things they reveal in kinder light, or arrange the skirts of their shadows strategically, but wheat-fire is brutal in its honesty. It is also shockingly simple to conjure for anyone with even a little fire-savvy; ask to be shown a thing, and wheat-fire obliges, come what may. The aftermath can sometimes be harder to reckon with. That is the fire John Ustion chose for his fierekenia mechanism: a fire for revelations, but a fire that has consequences and that demands its users face them.
Next he built a small calculating device composed of a line of brass dials set over a group of rods made of bone. All of them, dials and rods, were engraved with numbers and letters and symbols. Together, they allowed for thousands upon thousands of combinations that would identify a destination in time and space, and each turn of dial and rod would tighten by increments a spring. That spring would, in turn, regulate a pressure valve that would, when opened by a stopcock, release the precise concentration of wheat-fire required to illuminate a passage to the looked-for destination. If the calculations were done correctly, the smaller reckonings would combine into a bigger one to guide the device and control the fire. And then, somehow—I don’t know precisely how, but somehow—the fire would show the way into some other there-and-then.
It was a beautiful and terrifying device. Each time he turned a dial or twitched one of the rods into place, John Ustion understood why Alphonsus Lung had turned the customer away, and he knew he had been right to do the same.
But the contraption didn’t work.
Ustion tried for weeks to get his device to do what he thought—what he knew—it ought to be able to do. He made notes, made adjustments, swapped out parts, tore it to pieces, and started fresh. Each time, he came back to the same design and the same fire. It ought to have worked—he knew it ought to work, but the mechanism just wouldn’t do what he wanted. Something was missing. Still, he had a strong sense that, little by little, he was getting closer to figuring out what that something was. The mechanism persisted in not working, but Ustion became more and more convinced that it was just a matter of time before he solved its riddles.
A strange thing happened as he worked, though: he also began to feel more and more reluctant. He would set the parts aside for longer and longer between attempts. He would get new ideas but put off trying them. He would delay building pieces he suspected he needed, if he didn’t already have them to hand. It wasn’t that he’d lost interest—he longed to finish the device. But the closer he got to finishing it, the more he felt he simply . . . shouldn’t.
And yet at the same time, he couldn’t just walk away. A part of him—a part so strong, it seemed some days that it had a heartbeat of its own—needed to see the thing to completion. So his need and his conscience fought with each other as the weeks became months. Now and then he thought of the strange customer, and occasionally he considered visiting Alphonsus Lung and some of the others he suspected the customer might’ve gone to after Lung had turned him away. He wondered if they had been just as unable to let go of the beautiful, terrifying idea the stranger had put before them all. But he didn’t
