Sunday, July 8th, 2012
“All right,” Samantha says as
they close the last dozen yards, “here we are.
This could be anywhere, but it’s where the Sandstorm Hourglass was first
made. Well, and between two doors, and at night. Probably more low-key than our last few
dealings. But pay attention, and you
might learn a thing or two.” She smiles
and pushes at the handle – the door budges, but does not open. Sam looks to the door’s edge at her left and
sees hinges, then pulls, and it opens as she chuckles at herself.
On the other side, a man in a
black robe sits at a large desk, writing with a quill pen upon a broad sheet of
parchment. He pays no mind to the women
entering his quarters. On a simple table
to her right, Della spots the Sandstorm Hourglass: its wood is a little brighter, its glass is a
little clearer, but it looks otherwise identical to the magical timepiece she
remembers.
The door shuts behind them, and Della
sees another to her right, past the hourglass.
They are in a corner room of some apparently circular building, perhaps
a large tower, the wall to Della’s left curving around to join the straight
wall to her right with the straight wall at her back. A floor-to-ceiling window gives a view of the
night sky, resplendent with stars in the dim candlelight from the man’s desk,
clouds billowing just beneath them and a gibbous moon shining brightly above.
“Hi,” Samantha says brightly,
waving a wooden hand and rising briefly to tip-toes.
The man turns to look at the
women, then his eyes go wide and his jaw drops.
“Va alar khal ne a khuzha,” he
exclaims. Or something like that. Della can’t even place the language, but the
man’s tone and body language reveal that he is clearly alarmed – his heartbeat
speeds up, and Della can smell his sweat glands opening.
“Ah,” Samantha says. She adds soothingly, “Ah, ahh, ahhh,” then
hoists the wooden hoop into the air. She
pantomimes babble toward the man in the black robe as she says, “OK, Della,
pretend you don’t understand me. Then
grab the ring and act like you suddenly do.
All right, go.”
Della feigns confusion, then
reaches for the hoop as Samantha offers it to her. She grasps it, then Samantha adds in a
casually friendly tone, “OK, so now you understand me, so just smile and nod
and things and stuff.”
Della smiles and nods and says,
“Ahh, yes, I see what you are saying, please continue.”
The man stares quizzically at
them for a moment, then rises from his desk and cautiously approaches. He examines the wooden hoop, shrugs his
shoulders, and grasps it.
“All right,” Sam says as soon as
he’s taken hold of the ring, “you should be able to understand us now.”
The man’s face brightens in
response, and he replies, “Why, yes! A
marvelous piece of equipment you hold in your hands. It is similar to our own speaking stones.” Or rather, that’s what Della hears in her
head; in her ears, she hears the
same gibberish he spouted just seconds before.
“Yeah, sure,” Samantha agrees.
“So,” Della hears in her mind,
as the man intones a slow khaaa. “To what do I owe the pleasure of this
visit?”
“Well,” Sam stammers, “It’s to
do with that hourglass there. Which I
hope you’ve just finished.”
“Ahh,” the man says, “My
masterwork.” Or rather, “masterwork” is
what Della hears in her mind. The man’s
actual syllables, mah-ah’chid-rah, bring up all
manner of connotations in her mind, from “final project” to “senior thesis” to
“dissertation.” She understands, despite
his paucity of words, that the Sandstone Hourglass is a project he has
undertaken to demonstrate a mastery of skill for the sake of a rite of passage
to higher rank.
“Yeah,” Samantha says affably,
“It’s quite a piece of work.”
Something in the turn of phrase
must trigger a red flag in the man’s mind, for he asks uneasily, “Is there some
trouble with my project?” The very
prospect seems to fill him with anxiety.
“Something like that,” Samantha says. “You see, we come from another time,” she
adds, to which the man nods easily, “and your hourglass has become, shall we
say, something of a hot commodity.” She
raises an eyebrow, and the man nods for her to continue. “It’s been taken, we’re not quite sure what
for, so we’re here to try and figure out how it works.”
At this, the man nods agreeably,
eager to explain the inner workings of his invention. He tugs them by the hoop toward the table on
which the Sandstone Hourglass stands, then points at the body of the enclosure.
“It’s ingenious in its
simplicity, elegant in its execution,” he explains. “You see, all the ‘grains’ of sand are the
same.” Della marvels at the hoop’s power
to preserve the subtlety of language she would describe as “air quotes” – the
voice in her head rises, falls, and tenses with exactly the right inflection to
bring her around to what the man is trying to say. She supposes briefly that such a device might
be invaluable to international politics, though it might be challenging to get
a hundred-odd delegates to join hands around a wooden ring no more than two
feet wide. “When they touch a mirror,
the mirror turns them inside-out: white
becomes black, black becomes white. Giving
all the tiny beads a black outside and white inside was the most
labor-intensive part. The mirrors are
what do all the work, though.”
The man brings the hoop and his
visitors over to the table where the Sandstorm Hourglass sits, doing its
thing. “The beads themselves,” he begins
again, “have no intrinsically magical qualities. Aside from the process of their making, they
are entirely mundane. The mirrors,
though, have a specially prepared backing which is thick enough for some light
engraving. Each mirror is the same, and
the spells do two things: first, they
turn inside-out whatever touches them; that was easy. The second part, though, is that they steal a
little bit of momentum from the falling white grains, causing them to fall more
slowly, and transfer it to the black grains, causing them to rise upward. Getting the engraving to work on all the
grains, but without transferring all the white grains’ momentum to a single
black grain, that was the difficult part.”
The man looks at his visitors
expectantly. The short one with the pale
complexion seems as though she doesn’t really understand the principles at
work, or why it was such a difficult feat to accomplish. The tall one with the tattoos seems a bit
bored, as if she’s heard it all before.
“So, what is it for,” Samantha asks at last.
“For?” The man’s face bears an awkward look of
affronted puzzlement. “It’s my
masterwork. It shows that it’s possible
to create a spell to perform specific tasks on generically-defined objects,
without screwing up when those objects need to have different tasks performed
upon them.”
“Well, right,” Sam says, “and
that’s all very impressive, I’m sure.
But what use does it
have? What could someone do with
it? Why would they want to steal it?”
“I’m, um,” the man
stammers. “I’m not sure, to be
honest. I can’t think of why anyone
would want to steal it, unless your time is truly starved for magical
education. It’s not designed to do any
kind of work, it’s simply a
proof of concept.”
Samantha stares blankly for a
moment, trying to reason her way across a missing connection.
“Hey,” Della says after a silent
moment. “Where are we?”
“Why, the Ivory Towers, of
course,” the man says. “Where else would
you find an aspiring mage finishing his masterwork?”
“No, I mean, what country? And what year is it? We come from a place called ‘America’,” Della
explains, “in the twenty-first century.
Maybe it will help us if we know where and when your masterwork was
made.”
“I’m not sure where or when that
is,” the man says, “but by our calendar, it is nearly the end of the Fourth
Age. Just a couple more centuries to
go. And you are standing in the Kingdom
of Atlantis.”
“Great,” Della says. “So how does the Kingdom of Atlantis count
its ages, then?”
“By the precession of the
equinoxes, of course,” the man answers. Sam
and Della share a glance that indicates neither of them knows what the man is
talking about. “My goodness, what do
they teach in your schools?”
“That’s not important right now,”
Samantha says, shaking her head. “Look,
do you maybe know anything about the seven seals?”
“Seven seals,” the man says
pensively. “Seven seals, seven seals –
hmm – let’s see.” He strokes his beard
for some moments, then says, “No, I can’t say as I’ve ever heard of any seven
seals. Sorry.”
The conversation winds down from
there, and the women take their leave of their gracious host. They head back into the bramble, and the last
writ crumbles as its magic fades away.
Samantha and Della speak little
during their journey back to the present day, reflecting on the knowledge they’ve
gained and sorting out the questions that remain.
At long last, they come once
again to a full length mirror. Samantha
steps through, Della follows, and they are back in Samantha’s bedroom in
Miami. Samantha puts the hoop back in
her hall closet, then leads them through her front door back to Della’s room in
Las Vegas.
“Home again, home again,
jiggety-jig,” Samantha says when their journey has come to an end.
“Yeah,” Della says, feeling more
than a little tired. She looks at her
watch: just a few minutes past
nine. A slight sense of jet lag descends
upon her. “I guess we should go tell
Thomas what we found out.”
They head back up the stairs to
Thomas’ office to find him speaking with Herman, almost in exactly the
positions they left them.
“Yes,” Thomas asks as the women
enter. “Did you need something before
you headed out?”
“No,” Samantha says. “We’re back.”
“Really? That was fast.”
“For you, maybe,” Della
says. Thomas raises an eyebrow.
“We went through the bramble,”
Samantha explains. They relate the
details of their travels: passing
through the trophy room, the museum room with the large stone, the railroad trestle
(Della is careful to omit her conversation with the revenant), the temple on
the mountain, and their encounter with the mage in Atlantis.
“I see,” Thomas says after
listening to the tale. “Well, it sounds
like you ladies had a full night. Alice
will no doubt be able to make more sense of this than I can. I’ll get in contact with her, and we’ll take
it from there. Thank you very much for
your help, Samantha.” He inclines his
head to her, and she gives a shallow bow in response. “Della, you’re dismissed.”
Della nods and leaves the three
of them in the room. Out in the hallway,
she closes the door behind her and slumps against the wall. It had been quite a night for her, though it
was just beginning for everyone else.
Mentally exhausted, she retreats to her room and turns on the
television.
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