Alan Akers - Armada of Antares

“Ha! My Prince!” he cried as I came in, and then he sneezed. He was smothered in fine dust, and he kept sneezing. I kept upwind of him.

“You seem to be immersed in your work, San,” I said.

I called Evold Scavander, the wise man, San. As you know, San is the respectful title given to a dominie or sage, and how well San Evold Scavander earned this mark of respect. But, for all that, sneezing, he had to say: “Nothing, my Prince. Not a movement, not a sign. And the bags grow less with every trial.”

A spluttery, bewhiskered, round-faced man, with crab-apple cheeks and snapping brown eyes, he wore an old stained smock and a pair of decrepit foofray satin slippers. I always had the feeling that, with his contempt for the Wizards of Loh, he missed something of their dark power. But he refused to adorn his clothes with archaic symbols or wear the tall conical hat, and he used his long sensitive fingers to good purpose in the many schemes to improve Vallia and Valka I put forward. His temper was of the same order as a leem’s.

On a scarred bench lay a number of silver boxes. I felt my heart go thump at the sight. These were boxes we had made up here, in Valka, in imitation of those silver boxes made in Havilfar that powered and lifted fliers. I had uncovered many of the secrets of the various minerals that went into the vaol boxes, at some discomfort to myself, as you know. With a mix of five minerals of certain kinds of voller would fly and might be pushed by the wind, with the effect of gripping the subetheric forces of the structure of the universe, of sliding against these forces as the wind pushed. With a mix of nine minerals a voller would fly independently of the wind.

As for the paol boxes, those boxes that for so long I had thought contained only air, there lay the heartbreak.

“Dirt and air!” I said, somewhat heavily, I fear.

“Aye, Prince! The minerals would seem to operate well enough, and I have that lazy scamp Ornol out searching for them in the Heart Heights. I feel confident they will be found.” His brown eyes snapped at me. “If they are not, Ornol will get a striping, by Vox!”

“Yes, but, San, what of the paol boxes? What of cayferm?”

He crowed his triumph.

I stared at him, willing it to be true, willing that he had discovered what that mysterious immaterial substance truly was, if substance it was at all.

He reached down a monstrous old hyr-lif, massively bound with brass bands and with a brass lock. He produced a key from under his clothes, a key of brass hanging on a brass chain. With this and much creaking and groaning, he turned the lock and opened the book. I swear I expected a black cloud of bats to fly forth. He blew away dust and sneezed again.

“Here, Prince, in The Secret Lore of San Drozhimo the Lame is to be found the only reference I have run across to cayferm.”

He turned the pages, ancient and stained and yet supple still in that perfect atmosphere of Valka. A little spider crept out and ran across the lines of black writing, and Evold Scavander leaned down and gently blew to help the spider on its way.

I was fully aware of the gravity of the moment. Dirt and air! How they had mocked me in my struggles in distant Havilfar! But I had come through in the end to an understanding of the names and the compositions of the minerals. We might not find all of them in Valka; we must find them all in Vallia! And cayferm! That mysterious substance, cayferm that was supposed to be steam, when all of Kregen knew steam as kish; could old San Scavander have found the secret in this musty book?

He found a page very nearly at the end. I breathed more easily when I saw the page was untorn. How often at the end of a book a torn page has destroyed all hope. . He cleared his throat, sneezed a mighty sneeze, and peered close.

“Listen, my Prince, to the words of a sage dead these thousand seasons and more!”

“I listen.”

“Then this is what Drozhimo the Lame has to say.” He read in a loud wheezing voice, and I felt the shadows come closer in that high ceilinged room with the tall windows and all the splendor of the Suns of Scorpio flooding in.

“ ‘The Freeing of an Ib from a Mortal Body Undiluted.’ ”

He looked up. “The spirits of the dead do not always leave the body the moment men are killed. Sometimes a man retains his ib, to his own mortification in the blessed light of the Twins.”

“Aye. Read on.”

“ ‘Take the body and wash in the water taken from a maiden’s first bath after the marriage night. Place the body undried in a brazen coffin above a fire heated seven times, and with bellows pumped by a dwarf. A dwarf with red hair ensures complete success; if a red-haired dwarf is not to be found then a black-haired dwarf will suffice, or a brown-haired dwarf; but then the fire must be pumped over twice. Into the coffin over the body pour the water used in the bathing. To this add the same weight of squishes. The fruits may be used entire, but they must be scrupulously clean. Add in double-handfuls so that the spirit may boil from them into the water and the cayferm enter the submerged body and so remove from it the ib. When all has boiled away the body may be taken up and given due burial; it is wise to place a tuffa wand at the head and feet until the first night of Notor Zan passes.’ ”

He looked up, resting one hand on the open hyr-lif. His eyes wrinkled up, regarding me. I was aware of a flick-flick plant snaking out a six-foot tendril, taking a fly on the wing, and popping it into one of its orange cone-shaped flowers. The shadow of the plant in its pot on the windowsill, the sound of laughter from outside, high and shrill, meant nothing; the sight and sounds were as distant as the planet of my birth.

“Cayferm,” I said.

“Aye, Prince. I think after treatment like that any body would be willing to go down into burial, aye, and be glad to.”

“Yes, that would be the way of it. But, Evold, it must be! Don’t you see? Steam! If you boil water you must get steam!”

“Steam,” he said. We used the Kregish word, the most common word for steam, kish. “I can find no other mention of cayferm in all my library.”

“You have done well.”

“I remembered one horrific time in the Heavenly Mines where I had sweated, as number eight two eight one, to dig and tunnel for minerals. And how a little Och stylor, writing in his notebook, had jumped with alarm, deep in a tunnel through a seam, and called to the Rapa guard to prod the slaves out fast. We had not gone back to the seam. And now I recalled that over the smell of the cheap oil lamp I had sniffed the scent of squishes. I had thought of Inch, and then the little Och had near-panicked. Now I thought I knew why.

“Steam made up with boiled squishes,” I said. “Cayferm.”

Evold sneezed. “Maybe, maybe. But we must test it first. We can only talk now, we must-”

“Yes!” I bellowed. “Everyone must gather squishes! Every perishing soul, by Vox!”

Evold Scavander nodded, the excitement getting to him.

“Although. .” I said. And I felt a chill. “Although this cannot be so. It is against nature.”

“Many things are against nature, my Prince. Every time you put on a hat to go out into the rain, it is against nature.”

“I grant that. But I mean that boiling will produce a purity; the steam cannot possibly contain any part of the squishes! This is a matter of common knowledge.”

He put a yellowish finger alongside his nose, which had a large brown lump on the larboard side.

“Maybe nature winks, my Prince. For a man to fly through the air using boxes filled with dirt and air -

surely that is so against nature as to make all the rest simple.”

“Oh, the vollers work. There is no doubt of that. Aye,” I added viciously, “and they crash, also.”