Ten years passed, which seems like a long time but isn’t really—not to someone working on the problem of manipulating time, anyway. At last John Ustion figured out what was missing from his design. Not something, but several somethings were still wanted to complete his time-working fierekenia mechanism. On the list he had compiled over the long years of testing and trial, there were four items: a spring with very specific properties that would convert the turns of the rods and dials into the right kinds of power and regulation; a key capable of tightening that spring and all that was to be wound up with it; a keyway that would allow the wheat-fire to not simply reveal a destination in time and space, but also open a door to it; and a box—or coffret; I hadn’t heard that word before, but I like it quite a bit—to hold the lot.
That night, John Ustion slept badly. His dreams were all nightmares, each one a cautionary tale warning him to go no further with his fierekenia mechanism. In every nightmare, a different type of fire appeared and appealed to him not to finish the device, and when, each time, Ustion’s pride and fascination drove him to declare that he would build it come hell or high water, whatever fire was there with him in the dream became a comet that consumed him with flame when it hit, so that over and over he woke up screaming in pain and panic, sure that he was being immolated in his own bed.
When at last, just before dawn, the wheat-fire came to him, it made no entreaties or threats. It said simply, I will do it if you make me. And then, without waiting for Ustion’s defiant dream-reply, the wheat-fire consumed him with a touch. And, because what is revealed by wheat-fire can be so much more painful than its actual burn, the fire did not immolate him but merely showed him flashes of possibility, probability, and consequence. There were grim prospects, but also, surprisingly—or perhaps not; wheat-fire, after all, reveals nothing but the truth—there was the potential for great good as well.
It was the last dream of the night, and when he woke from it, Ustion went straight to his workshop. He took the pieces of the unfinished mechanism and the list of missing bits, and he locked them in a cabinet.
As I told you before, John Ustion was fire-savvy, and he was an artificier of the highest magnitude. He continued to perform reckonings himself when he needed them, and he built many, many wondrous machines. But he never opened that cabinet again.
Many decades later, just before he died, he told his granddaughter the story of the half-built device, and he asked her to take it from the cabinet and destroy it—a thing that he had never managed to convince himself to do in all the long years of his life. His granddaughter listened with the same fascination with which Ustion himself had listened to the specifications of the customer all those years ago, and she promised to do as he’d asked.
She put it off until after he was in the ground, telling herself there was plenty of time and that she couldn’t bear to destroy anything of her grandfather’s while he was still alive. Then she put it off again, telling herself now that he was gone, she couldn’t bear to destroy anything he’d left behind.
At long last, after she’d had a good long think and a few glasses of courage, she went to the workshop and opened the cabinet.
There was nothing there—not the mechanism, and not the list.
She told herself her grandfather must’ve destroyed it himself. Perhaps he’d seen the ambivalence on her own face when he’d asked her to do it, and decided to spare her the temptation. Perhaps he’d done it years ago, but in the twilight of his life, he’d forgotten that fact, along with birthdays and the color blue and the songs he’d sung to her when she was a baby.
Either way, it was probably for the best.
INTERLUDE
“THINGS LEFT BEHIND are fascinating, aren’t they?” Petra asked. “I mean, as an idea.”
What on earth is she up to? Amalgam wondered. Amused and curious, he said, “Certainly. They can take on rather a life of their own.”
From the chair by the sideboard, Masseter, too, watched her with interest, but his curiosity was beginning to solidify into an actual theory. It was for the sake of testing his theory that he said quietly, “The magic of that-which-remains.”
Petra smiled at him, but the expression told him nothing. “You’re very poetic, Mr. Masseter.”
“Do you mean something like relics?” Negret Colophon asked.
“I don’t really know what I mean,” she said in a musing tone.
Yes, I believe you do, Masseter thought. I think you mean something very specific. But he couldn’t quite be sure.
“Relics . . .” Petra said dreamily. “The power of things left behind in memory . . .”
“And left behind in reality,” Negret put in. “Mr. and Mrs. Haypotten, you must be experts in things that are left behind. Surely guests are always forgetting things. I would imagine you have quite a collection.”
Reever shot him an exasperated look, but his brother ignored it.
Mr. Haypotten nodded, looking studiously down into the teapot on the cart as if something very interesting had been left behind inside it. “Inevitably.” His face was a little bit redder than it had been.
“Though we do try to return things,” his wife added. “And a good many of our guests come back, so we manage it more often than not.”
“There have been some notable exceptions, though.” The innkeeper replaced the top on the teapot. “But you have me thinking about relics now. I believe I have a tale I could share.”
FOURTEEN
THE PARTICULAR
The Innkeeper’s Tale
IT WAS MADAME GRISAILLE’S STORY last night that put this tale into my mind—the bones of the hero, you know, and the mysterious box—and also my dear wife’s, with
