1. Orb

‘For every wonder you observe,’ cautioned Dow, ‘a horror lies concealed.’

But what wonders! thought Mercury Jones, his gaze irresistibly held by the image harboured inside the glass orb cupped in his hands.

‘Therefore, should you locate the forge, do not venture inside,’ added Dow.

Mercury’s nose was pressed so hard against the globed surface that it felt as if he might pass through the glass into the world trapped inside.

‘Jones, I’m serious. We must move with care.’

He glanced at his employer, at those greedy yellow eyes which normally drank you up unsparingly. Right now, they were big and almost pleading.

And Mercury nearly came out and asked him: what are you so afraid of?

Instead, let his gaze return to the glass and the impossibilities it contained.

2. Fractures

The door, made of some forge-cooked yellow stone, was going to be trouble.

An oblate disc twelve feet high and a hand span thick, it pressed so snugly against the warehouse wall that neither of Chroma’s diamond blades could be coerced into sliding behind it. After slipping the knives into their sheaths in her boots, she fingered the plait of hair curling around her pale neck and peered up at this obstacle which was nearly twice her own not-unimpressive height. ‘Bigger than you said, Jones,’ she observed.

The little man pushed his glasses up his nose. The door received a pained look. ‘From across the alley,’ he insisted, ‘it appears smaller.’

Chroma snorted. She ran her palms across the stone surface. It was smooth and grainless. However, telltale cracks and chips indicated that the Higgsfield preserving the stone’s integrity was waning. Either old or in frequent use, the door was starting to crumble around the rim. Perhaps she could work with that. She opened her satchel and began removing the tools she’d need.

 It was a moonless night and the alley Jones had led her down was unlit, making it difficult to see as she worked. She smelled the salty tang of the sea and the keen bite of ozone coming from the cooling metal-weave sails of lichtschiffe recently arrived in the harbour.

Jones crouched beside her. He put the ceramic flask he’d been carrying on the ground carefully. On their way here he’d halted twice to peer furtively inside it. As a veteran of his inscrutable ways, she knew better than to ask him about the flask. His explanations had a tendency to be long and leave her with more questions than answers. Listening to him could feel like trying to read a particularly difficult book and she often found herself needing to review his more opaque utterances. She used to think he couldn’t help his abstruseness, but nowadays she was convinced he was only happy when being mysterious. He delighted in a good puzzle. It was, he claimed, what drew him to study Higgswork. The inherent strangeness of the inanimate turned animate. She wondered if it was something to do with his years in the Library, where by his own admission his closest friend, if you discounted the books, had been his imagination. He’d become transfixed by the possibilities of the impossible.

Jones unscrewed the flask lid and poked his nose inside.

‘You’re supposed to be look out,’ she reminded him.

‘No one comes here after midnight,’ he said absently, staring deep into his flask. His face was faintly lit by whatever was inside and his eyes shone as if he was intoxicated. ‘Porteside watch patrols keep it quiet as the grave.’

‘It’s the watch which bother me. Warehouse breaking–’

‘No breaking!’ he hissed, looking up warningly. ‘Dow was explicit. No one must know we’ve been here.’

‘Then you should have measured up the damn door first.’

Chroma stood on tiptoes to examine the small oval keyhole in the disc’s middle. She had a lot of different keys and a licht battery. The problem was finding a key that could hold sufficient charge to trigger the stone to shift, causing a partial flattening along its curved edge and the door to roll open.

Turning, she saw that Jones had gone back to staring intently into his flask.

‘What’s in there?’ She hated giving in, yet curiosity was ever a worm eating away at the timbers of her resolve.

‘The glass, of course.’ Were his hands actually shaking?

Though it was a muggy summer’s night the flask’s illuminated mouth was clearly steaming. ‘You’ve put it in water?’

‘Yes,’ he said, looking more than a little pleased with himself. ‘Look – but don’t touch. It’s very hot.’

She sighed, crouched and peered into the flask. It was half-filled with water and a thermometer was fixed to the side. At the bottom was a glass sphere the size of her fist, which was covered in bubbles and glowed faintly. The first time she’d looked into the sphere – when Dow and Jones had shown it to her last week – it had been filled by a blue darkness which was very suddenly and briefly replaced by a gaunt face – either a boy or girl – peering out. She’d nearly dropped it in shock. But Dow and Jones hadn’t shown nearly as much interest in this vision trapped inside the glass as they had in the simple fact of the glass’s existence. It was clearly extremely uncommon Higgswork and its appearance in the city of course meant that it must be a subject of enquiry.

‘What made it hot?’ she asked, tipping her key collection out of its pouch.

‘Our coming here.’ He paused, as if waiting for her to speak but she was too busy sorting out her keys. ‘Aren’t you at least curious how I found this place?’

‘Didn’t Dow give you the address when he gave you the glass?’

‘Do you never listen?’ he sighed. ‘Dow said he picked this up in Wax Street Market from a stallholder who had no idea what he was selling.’

‘You believe that?’ she asked.

Dow, their employer, was rarely entirely frank with them and his motives were especially opaque. He claimed it was his duty as a representative of the Grand Palace and patron of Foundry to remove unlicensed Higgswork from the streets. Chroma, who believed all Higgswork – not just the unlawful kind – to be morally suspect because of the price paid by its makers, was happy to help him in that. However, it was never clear to her what Dow did with the illicit Higgswork after they’d seized it. Occasionally she woke from dreams of whole warehouses packed with crates whose volatile contents leaked puddles of licht, or of dark forges hidden in Foundry’s bowels – beneath the feet of its forge-strapped Smyths – from which twisted entities waited to emerge. Such peculiar visions troubled her but she knew enough to keep them to herself.

Jones ignored her question. ‘I located this warehouse all by myself,’ he said.

She checked over the licht battery. ‘Using the glass?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Dow said it was some sort of . . .’ Attaching wires to the licht battery was delicate work and difficult in the dark. ‘. . . crystal ball.’

‘You mean a scrying glass. They’re extremely rare and very costly to make, requiring the finest forge and a Smyth of the greatest mastery. A lump of forge-cooked glass is divided while molten to make identical twin spheres. On cooling, each sphere causes the light which enters it to exit via its twin. By looking into one you are granted sight out of the other – and vice versa.’

She thought of the child staring back at her. That lean face and those fearful blue eyes. She shook her head, pulling on a pair of oil-stained silken gloves.

‘No matter how distantly the twins are separated they exhibit this entangled property,’ he continued, breathlessly. ‘Instant communication over any distance! They’re very rare and highly prized.’

He was talking like a book. If you let him, he’d go on like this for hours, his enthusiasm getting the better of him. She needed to take care, she realised as she attached the wires to the ends of a rodlike clay key, for both their sakes.

‘These glasses have an additional entangled property. As the twins are brought closer together they grow unstable: one heats up and the other cools. I noticed it when I walked around the city with the glass in my pocket.’ He was holding the flask again. ‘Whenever I approached Porteside, the glass got hot. Too hot to touch. It was clear that its twin was nearby. It was also obvious to me that I now had the means of finding and acquiring it.’

Tiny sparks of licht flowed along the wires into the key. She gave it a charge lasting two seconds. ‘And the flask of water?’

‘Not only was the glass getting too hot to hold but in order to exactly locate its twin I needed a way of accurately determining how much hotter or colder it was getting as I moved around.’ He smiled at his own ingeniousness. ‘My solution was a flask of water and a thermometer.’

She stood up to slot the key into the lock. It whistled as it discharged. They waited. Nothing happened. The strength as well as the period of discharge had to be exact to trigger the door.

She retrieved the spent key and stared at the door, thinking.

‘I’ve spent the last two days slowly circling the alley to identify this as the place,’ he said. ‘I drew a temperature map and the isotherms indicated here.’

‘So why the rush?’ He’d turned up on her doorstep an hour ago, demanding she come with him, saying it couldn’t wait. It never could where Jones and Dow were concerned. Fear drove them, fear of missing something really big.

She chose another key – this one was fatter – and she gave it a double-length charge. ‘You’ve found the glass’s twin. We can watch this place and find out who comes here and what for in our own time. Why now, why tonight?’

He ran his hand through his mop of thick black hair. He avoided her gaze like he always did whenever she caught him holding out on her.

She stuck the key in the hole. It whistled. They waited. Nothing.

A big, old door, she thought. Too damn big. Time to show it who was boss.

‘Jones, does Dow know we’re here?’

He shook his head guiltily. The hand trembling had got worse, she noticed.

‘Ah. Why not?’

‘There wasn’t time.’

What was driving him – was it fear or was it hope? Normally she could tell, but when she couldn’t she got worried. She wished she’d stayed at home.

She picked up a key at random and poked a wire into one end. She inserted the wired end into the keyhole, holding up the battery with her other hand. The keyhole was at eye level, so her whole body was now pressed up against the stone door. It had the sulphurous stink of decaying Higgswork. ‘Talk to me, Jones,’ she said, her gloved fingers grasping at the loose wire.

‘I saw something,’ he whispered.

‘In the glass?’ The battery was heavy and her arms were beginning to ache.

‘Yes.’

She held the wire an inch from the key. ‘Was it the child?’

A pause. ‘No.’

‘Are you going to tell me what it was?’

‘I can’t say for sure.’ But the nervous anticipation was clear in his voice.

She exhaled loudly. ‘Should I be worried about it?’

‘Not if there’s nobody inside – which there isn’t . . . I’m fairly certain.’

‘Like you were fairly certain about the door’s size?’

He said nothing.

‘Step back,’ she said and poked the wire into the key. There was a flash of blue sparks as the battery dumped its entire charge of licht into the key which was fused with the door lock. There was a tiny explosion and a puff of grainy powder – which was the key disintegrating. Heat roasted her fingers and she dropped the battery with a yelp, falling back. The door hummed and shivered before fractures split its surface with loud cracks. In the lower right quadrant a hefty stone section broke off, revealing a narrow gap in the wall.

‘You broke it,’ whispered Jones, backing away.

Chroma gave the ruined door an appraising stare. Its crisscrossing fractures made patterns which reminded her of the street maps she’d used to navigate the city on first getting inside its walls. Patterns which always withstood your every attempt to divine their meaning.

‘From across the alley,’ she told him, ‘it won’t look so bad.’

3. Bait

They had to crawl inside on hands and knees. Mercury went first, pushing the open flask before him. The water was close to boiling point. If he was honest, so was he. His heart beat a tattoo in his chest. All day he’d been dreading this. Though he’d been desperate to get inside the warehouse, another, smaller, part of him was terrified of Angel succeeding in opening the door. He feared it was real. Once the vision he’d been granted was before him he’d be forced to treat it not in the abstract, as an idea or dream, but as a reality and so have to face all the attendant problems its existence created. These would be many, complex and likely insoluble. He couldn’t get through the gap fast enough.

What was immediately clear as he got to his feet and looked around the big dimly lit space was that the warehouse was not being used for storage. The rear and side walls were lined with shelves and on those shelves were a great many books. As a former servant of the Library, that self-proclaimed guardian of knowledge which abstracted others’ secrets while jealously withholding its own, Mercury was rarely impressed by displays of books. But already he’d identified the distinctive spines of a dozen rare, prohibited works of esoterica he’d never seen outside the Library. In the vast room’s large central space was a small, intricately crafted metal forge – answering a question that had been dogging him all week: how and where was the glass made? – as well as three long tables and a desk. The surfaces of each were covered in papers, tools, open books and such a number and range of objects and devices of a curious, arcane and forbidden nature that he could only stare in slack-jawed awe.

‘Oh shit, Jones,’ said Angel, standing at his side. ‘I’ve never seen–’

‘Neither have I.’

‘Jones, you should have said.’

‘Would you have believed me?’ He was still having difficulty trusting the evidence of his own eyes.

‘I’d have told you to go to hell.’

The air was warm, even hot, and peppery with charged dust particles. Licht polluted its surroundings, quickening matter so that the inanimate moved or shifted while the animate grew vibrant and wild. Great care was needed here.

‘Aaarrchoo!’ exploded Angel. She rubbed streaming eyes. ‘Fuck,’ she said. She got like this around forges, though she denied having an allergy to licht – which would have been a rather ironic affliction for one of the Scattered.

‘There is little ventilation and the forge has been in use today,’ he observed.

She peered suspiciously around her. ‘You sure no one’s at home, Jones?’

‘Someone left half an hour before I came to you.’ He approached a table and found a space to put down the flask next to a long clear tube. His fingers were twitching in their eagerness to examine these prizes.

‘Someone, Jones?’

The tube, he saw, was made of eisglas: water made solid at temperatures above freezing. He picked it up, found it sticky to touch. It was very delicate. He bent the tube and it held the new shape. Superior eisglas was pliable.

‘A woman,’ he said, admiring the Higgswork. ‘Older, disfigured. A Smyth.’

Angel took the tube from him. ‘We’re here to find the twin,’ she reminded him. ‘I don’t want to be here when its owner gets back.’

He nodded, looking elsewhere. Was that a Gribbin Pouch over there?

‘What about the flask?’ she asked. ‘Can it tell us where the twin is?’

He shook his head. ‘Not this close. My thermometer is not that sensitive.’

He’d never seen so many treasures under one roof. Bundles of KnotString: a watery twine which contracted instead of stretching under tension. A crystal Ashtekar Clock: its accuracy so dependable all the fastest lichtschiffe sailing between verses carried one. Sealed blocks of RockFoam: in contact with air it expanded tenfold. He felt like a child at a sweet stall, picking up objects and examining them, seeking to identify what they were for, putting them down and moving breathlessly on to the next. Every one was a miracle or a terror. Had it all been made here? How long had this forge been running? An illicit operation outside Foundry and in Porteside’s neighbourhood. There’d been no rumours, no signs. If any of these artefacts had come on the market they’d have known about it. But Dow had the glass in his possession. He’d known.

Angel was shaking her head. She pointed at a slim, ribbed slate barrel whose open top was a shadowy well of dense black. ‘Is that a DarkJar, Jones?’

‘I think so.’ He knew so. Its gaping maw was fuzzy in the corner of his eye.

‘It’s got no lid.’

He swallowed. ‘Yes, I see.’

‘What’s it doing here?’

Put an object in a DarkJar and it was gone, vanishing into some other place. Unstable DarkJars were known to suck in anything which was too close – people, air, buildings, even light – before collapsing into themselves.

‘Jones, there is some bad stuff here.’

It was astonishing, these things were out of his dreams. ‘And wonders.’

‘No, you don’t,’ warned Angel. ‘This is contraband. We’re not browsing.’

On a table he saw a cylinder made from fibrous tentacles of smoky DeadAir. But was it a Gauss Cage or a Hilbert Nest? He closed his eyes, trying to recall–

Angel snapped her fingers under his nose. ‘Don’t get distracted, Jones,’ she said. ‘We came for the glass.’

‘But–’

‘The glass,’ she said firmly, and he knew there was no arguing with her.

Impotently, he watched Angel searching. She was fast, not even slightly sidetracked by these treasures. Though she did have some use for Higgswork – her knives, or in the opening of doors – she rarely trusted it. Even now she kept her distance from the forge. Her aversion to licht had little to do with any kind of allergy, he had long ago supposed, but was instead due to her Scattered origins, her family having entered this verse via the wastes at its edge. The Scattered’s unique talent for Higgswork and Foundry’s need of Smyths granted citizenship to a fraction of those gathered in the camps outside the walls. Angel, denouncing it as a devil’s pact, accused the city of extracting ‘a living tribute’ from the thousands of refugees on its doorstep.

‘If this is a forge,’ she said, pausing, ‘where are the Smyths?’

‘I told you she–’

‘You said she was older. She won’t be Smything.’ She rubbed red eyes. ‘No one running this operation is going to be sweating blood at a forge.’

She was right, of course. The scars on the woman’s face had been old. She’d use others – younger, burgeoning talents – directing their work. But how had she found and got access to those with such rare ability and kept it so quiet?

‘There are stairs here,’ said Angel, from the back of the room. ‘Going down.’

‘Hmm?’ he said, trying to sound noncommittal.

‘I’m going to take a look.’

He nodded. ‘The twin will be cold, remember. Perhaps iced over.’

He didn’t hear her reply, if she even made one. With Angel out of the way he could turn his full attention to looking for what he’d really come to find.

He worked slowly but systematically, fighting the urge to pause, examine and assess the worth of every wonder he came across. He found objects and devices much speculated over but whose existence was widely considered beyond the realms of feasibility or even possibility. He saw papers full of plans and hastily scribbled drawings for bold and extraordinary creations.

Each new discovery troubled him. The disturbing feeling of being more and more out of his depth made him sweat. The excitement with which he began his search was soon overcome by the stark realisation that what he was seeing was counter to everything he understood about Higgswork. A forge like this should not be here. Work of such rarity and quality wasn’t left lying around. What had Dow known about it? He’d shown Mercury images in the glass – enough to whet his appetite – but been reticent over how it came to him.

Yet despite these feelings, he kept looking. He’d seen it in the glass, hadn’t he? The Rosen Thorn was a prize of an almost incalculable value. Wasn’t the chance to possess it – even if only for a short while – worth taking a few risks?

He stopped by the forge. It was small, the metal funnel suspended from a stone gantry. He noted corrosive wear here and there. The coiled needle at its tip dripped licht into a bowl. It was neither the pure white of refined licht nor the pale blue of unrefined. It had a yellowish tinge. Was it contaminated, or was this an experiment with an additive? His own ignorance troubled him.

‘Looking for this, little thief?’

He turned. The tall, slender woman in tan leathers who he’d earlier seen leaving here stood by the broken door. One hand held up a delicate silver object which caught the light. The other held a stubby AirBuster pistol.

Mercury’s mouth was dry all of a sudden. The Rosen Thorn glinted as she pointed the AirBuster at him. She pulled the trigger.

4. Cage

At the bottom of the stairs was a locked wooden door which her slit-lantern’s narrow beam revealed to be damp-rotted. Taking a diamond knife from its boot-back sheath, Chroma pushed the blade’s point entirely through the door and sliced around the lock so easily that it felt as though the wood had the consistency and resistance of a block of soft butter.

Her left hand, holding the lantern, was raised high. Her right, carrying the knife, hung low. With a foot, she nudged open the door. Her eyes itched.

She tasted cool, musty air. Dimly, she saw wooden crates, some tarpaulin-shrouded, and tables. In a corner was a large cage. She didn’t like the look of that. Stepping forward hesitantly, she saw blue flame flickering in a brazier hanging from a chain in the middle of the cellar, its cold light – a reminder of a place she’d seen but just now couldn’t quite recollect – revealing floor and tables crowded with incomplete, broken or damaged Higgswork. Here were neatly stacked piles and there were heaps of the carelessly dumped. She saw crumbling lumps of glowing stone, membraneous sacks leaking liquids, cracked or shattered eisglas vessels, metal objects whose blistered surfaces sparkled in pulses of silver light. It was a subterranean junkyard made from Higgswork which had gone to hell at the forge. She recognised many objects she’d seen upstairs, ones which had got Jones hot under the collar. But these were discards, failures hidden out of sight down here, because where else could you bury what you never wanted found but in your cellar?

The cool light made her uneasy – where had she seen it before?

Careful where she put her feet, she approached a table with a holder like one used by a coster to display her eggs, only this was ceramic and had much larger cups. Filling twelve of the cups were a half dozen sets of scrying glasses. In each pair one glass was iced over while the other glowed a hot orange. There was a lone unpaired sphere, frosted over like Jones had said. This, then, must be the twin to the one in the flask. All she had to do was take it, return upstairs and she and Jones could leave and the bad feeling she’d had since coming down here would go away. So why was she hesitating?

She stood still, listening. There! A faint rustling sound. She held her breath. There it was again. It came from behind her – the cage in the corner. Her heart hammered in her ears. Now she remembered the thin youth she’d seen in the glass and the blue dark from which he or she had emerged. 

Slowly, she turned to face the cage and picked her way among the ruined Higgscraft. Its bars, she saw, were forged stone. The rustling got louder. She heard groans. She could vaguely see shadows moving. Water dripped from an overhead pipe. She paused to widen the lantern’s slit and raised it higher. 

Chroma froze where she was standing. It took her a few moments to work out quite what it was she was seeing. Up close there was a sickly sweet smell. Her gorge rose. In the cage were five . . . people. They’d been changed. On the floor lay a hairless old man, so thin he looked like a bag of sticks. His trunk was impossibly long while his equally elongated limbs appeared to have been folded back on themselves like snapped twigs. In a corner, pressed up against one another, were two enormous flesh barrels. They were actually two women, egg-shaped, neckless and waistless, their arms emerging at elbows and legs at knees. They were naked and their skin was so stretched it had torn in a dozen places leaving them with open, bloody wounds. A boy was curled in a ball, his bare back covered in tiny growths. Peering closer she saw that they were flowers, little roses sprouting from his skin. Flesh-coloured petals beginning to unfurl. A teenage girl whose baby-faced complexion was bursting with purple spots gripped the bars of the cage. Emaciated and pale as a ghost, she was the one Chroma had seen in the glass.

Treasures above, thought Chroma queasily, and terrors below.

‘Told yer,’ the girl said in a squeaky voice, turning to the others. ‘An’t her.’

This statement received no response.

‘Git away,’ said the girl, turning back to Chroma.

Chroma shook her head. What had Dow said? Find the glass but no one must know. Too late now. She knew. She’d uncovered the forge’s dirty little secret.

‘Git away afore she back,’ repeated the girl. Her eyes were black, all pupil.

‘Who?’

‘Mistress,’ she said. ‘Will go bad fer us.’

‘For you?’ What could be worse than this? she wondered.

‘Fury in ‘er.’ The cold, empty eyes contained a hunger. ‘Git a whippin’. Go!’

‘How long have you been held here?’

The question seemed to confuse the girl and went unanswered. 

She turned away and Chroma spotted a triangle of numbers tattooed on the nape of her neck. She’d already worked out the prisoner’s origin by how she spoke and by the skin lesions they all bore, but this inked triangle confirmed that the city had marked them as Scattered. They’d come out of the camps.

She tried a different tack. ‘How’d you come to be here?’

She was circling the cage, looking for a door. Locked-up inside when their mistress had no more use for them upstairs, they were hidden out of sight down here like all the other broken and discarded things.

‘Yer should go,’ wheezed the old man. ‘She’ll know. Always knows.’

‘You can’t stay here,’ she said, unable to find the damn door. She struck a bar with the flat of her hand. ‘How do you get this thing open?’

‘She danger,’ hissed the girl.

‘So am I,’ replied Chroma, frustrated and angry and ready to start breaking something. ‘You worked the forge for her?’ she asked.

A nod from the girl, the old man and one of the flesh-heap women.

‘Who trained you?’ she asked. She was looking closely at the curled boy.

‘Mistress,’ said the old man.

Those weren’t flowers on the boy’s back. They were . . . She stepped back. Ears. Baby ears. Dozens of the little whorled shells growing all over him.

What had happened here wasn’t the result of accidents or mistakes at the forge. This was done wilfully, deliberately. ‘Did she do this?’

Silence.

She put her knife against the bars. ‘Okay, I’m going to cut this open.’

‘Don’t!’ said the old man. ‘Leave us be.’

‘Tell me then.’

‘When we spent, Mistress puts us under the forge,’ whispered the old man.

She looked at the girl. At the dark, empty eyes staring defiantly back. At the toxin-ravaged skin of one of the forge-strapped. At the cruel, savage smile playing on her thin lips. ‘She come now,’ said the girl.

‘What?’

‘She wait fer you!’

Chroma glanced at the scrying glasses. She stumbled through the junk and scraped the frost off the glowing twin of Jones’s glass upstairs. Cold needles dug under her fingernails. Light spilled out the glass, and with it trouble.

5. Mistress Ada

‘Your master’s weakness is true Higgscraft. Dow never could resist its allure.’

Mercury stared at the Smyth, wondering which of the many mistakes he’d made had proven most decisive in putting him in this tight spot. Right now, tied with KnotString to a chair, as the woman examined the glass and metal Rosen Thorn not two feet from where he was sitting, in some discomfort, he could only conclude it was the general overarching error of working for Dow. But to hear the Smyth confirm his own fears about his employer, as well as tell of how she’d turned the man’s weaknesses – and, Mercury was forced to conclude, his own particular temptations – to her advantage, made it clear that the only person truly to blame for his present predicament was himself.

She was called Mistress Ada. Mercury knew her of course, but only by reputation. For fifty years her work at the forge had been talked and written about, celebrated and denounced, imitated and emulated, attacked and smashed in each of the Hundred cities of the multiple verses. A divisive figure who refused to work under anyone’s constraints and rode roughshod over whatever boundary or barrier got in her way, Mistress Ada’s strident voice turned silent once Higgswork came under the control of city authorities and other vested interests fearful of what it might be used for in the wrong – i.e. someone else’s – hands. Rumours of new work and of places Mistress Ada might have sequestered herself had continued to circulate, though Mercury had long believed her dead, having succumbed to the ravages of the forge.

She’d paused, her green eyes watching him intently but also mockingly. Long tawny hair, shaggy like a mane, framed a seamed and pock-ridden face which, despite such deeply etched signs of age and work, was still achingly beautiful. ‘Little one, your master will regret sending you here,’ she said.

His master had of course warned him not to enter. An order which he’d have followed had it not been for the temptation of the Rosen Thorn.

‘I observed Dow and yourself through the glass.’ She indicated Dow’s scrying sphere, now lying between them on the floor in a steaming puddle alongside shards of shattered flask. ‘You did not see me, but I was watching you. Your visit was just a matter of time.’

He shook his head, still woozy from the AirBuster she’d used to incapacitate him. One minute she was pointing it at him and the next he was waking up, tied to this chair. Thankfully, he had no memory of his brief asphyxiation.

‘Dow is greedy,’ continued Mistress Ada, ‘coveting what he cannot have. He sends out his little drones and you buzz, buzz, buzz, seeking out my nectar.’

She turned back to the silver object on the table: a small glass capsule with a segmented metal appendage that ended in a tiny spike and resembled a scorpion’s tail. ‘You are the one he acquired from the Library, are you not?’

Mercury said nothing.

‘It is a shame it must be you. I do not like destroying precious things.’

The KnotString tying his wrists behind his back was loose. However, the slightest tugging or stretching of the Higgswater strands would cause contraction and tightening. ‘How have you kept this forge a secret?’ he asked.

‘My clients are discriminating individuals with particular requests. It is in their interests as much as mine that my work goes undisturbed.’ She popped open the glass capsule and removed a small, clear lozenge.

‘Dow was a client, wasn’t he?’ said Mercury.

‘A client?’ The bitter, strangled sound she made was laughter, he realised. ‘He never changes. Ever keeping his drones in the dark.’

‘But the glass is yours–’

‘No, little one, the glass is his. One for him and one for me. They are old.’

Suddenly it all made a worrying sort of sense. Dow’s morbid fascination with the glass and his insistence that its twin be located swiftly. His reluctance to agree to Mercury’s request to borrow it to aid his search. Even the weary interest he took in the Higgswork revealed by the glass. Dow, unusually, didn’t care about the twin or the Higgswork. He just wanted the forge found. Dow had known from the start it was run by Mistress Ada. He knew of its marvels and dangers. No doubt that was why he’d warned Mercury to keep out once he’d located it. Dow didn’t risk assets for no good reason. Pity it hadn’t occurred to him that, by hiding the truth, he’d aroused Mercury’s interest in the warehouse, leading directly to this act of disobedience.

Mistress Ada took a fresh lozenge and placed it inside the capsule, which was closed with a snap. It glowed with a thick yellow light.

Mercury stared at it with increasing trepidation.

‘A long time ago Dow was my muse,’ she said. ‘He understood licht’s true power like few others. He saw not only what it can achieve but, crucially, how ultimately it shapes the lives of all those who come into contact with it. Every living thing.’ She paused, her face taking on a far-away look. ‘But Dow the visionary proved to be Dow the cowardly. Made rich and respectable from trading in my work, he grew fearful when I continued further down the path we had first embarked on together. When the closed-minded howled outrage, he insisted I abandon this work. He told me I had gone too far, that I scared him. I would have been insulted if I hadn’t felt so thoroughly betrayed.’

Mercury had heard the rumours. She had grown bored with animating the inanimate. She had come to believe it was beneath her abilities. She’d turned her attention to plants first. Her experiments were widely reported: tales of trees ripping apart whole buildings in great, rapid spurts of growth. The next logical steps were insects, then animals. But these experiments caused an outcry and led to trouble. She had crossed a line, citizens wouldn’t stand for it. Shunned and driven out of city after city, she eventually disappeared.

‘Despite his protests, I knew Dow would have kept the glass. Over the years he has made several attempts to acquire work from my clients. He fears my true accomplishments, yet he cannot quite resist my lesser works.’

Mistress Ada faced him holding the Rosen Thorn. Inside the translucent capsule swirled sparks of licht, like a swarm of glowing insects.

He saw a movement behind her, near the stairs but he couldn’t tear his eyes from the silver spiked appendage. ‘What do you want with me?’ he asked.

‘You were tempted by my Rosen Thorn, little one.’ A faint smile of triumph. ‘You wanted to see this extraordinary little object for yourself. Well, now is your chance to get intimately acquainted with it. I’ve prepared it just for you.’

He was dry mouthed, staring at the tiny spike. When the capsule was put in the ear the tail snaked down the auditory canal where the spike stabbed into the flesh to inject a tiny charge of licht into this vulnerable part of the head.

‘One nip and your mind opens up, little one. Your memories and thoughts will be clear to you, and to me. You will be open to my every suggestion.’

Just like the Library, he thought. It was why he’d wanted to see the device, to hold it. To see how the Library had made him what he was and perhaps to remember what it had wanted him to forget.

She held up the Rosen Thorn as if it were a key to something. ‘Please do not struggle,’ she said. ‘If you struggle the pain in your ear will be excruciating.’

The sweat was pouring off him. ‘I-I can take a message to Dow, if you like.’

‘Little one, you will be the message.’ She smiled at him. ‘Dow was never going to rest once he suspected I had returned. That’s why he sent you. But I have work to do here. You will ensure he never interferes again.’

6. Dark

Chroma calculated. She had her knives, the cold glass, her knapsack – with its tools, a spent licht battery and a lot of useless keys – and she crouched behind the leaky forge, as yet unseen. A few pluses, she supposed. On the minus side, however, were streaming eyes, a thick and sore head, Jones tied to a chair and the woman the Smyths in the cage below called Mistress stepping forward to place a murderous spike inside her associate’s head. And there were just a few seconds left in which to prevent that. The question being, of course: how?

In her left hand she held the freezing glass. In it she’d been watching Jones and Mistress talk as she’d crept up out of the cellar. Her fingers throbbed from the cold. She could get up and go over there right now. She had her knives and while Mistress was tall she was also skinny. Physically, up close, it would be no contest. But she was dealing with a Smyth, a user of licht. Getting close would be the problem. What she really needed was a distraction.

She could see that Jones’ wriggles, as he tried to free himself from the chair, were becoming less and less forceful. That’ll be the KnotString, she thought.

The image in the glass jerked suddenly, showing a new view. Mistress must have kicked the twin in the struggle, turning it. Chroma saw something else there. A dark, curved shape. She rotated the glass back to Jones, scraping frost off the new side. A thought struck her. She rotated it back, wondering.

‘If you resist it will hurt,’ hissed Mistress.

‘I will not be your slave,’ said Jones.

‘Mine or Dow’s, what difference does it make?’

Chroma took out a knife, examining its edge. Blunt. She returned it to its sheath and removed the other. Both had been recently sharpened, but this one had barely left its sheath. She put the glass on the floor and balanced the point of the blade on top of the glass. She grasped the handle with both hands. She had absolutely no idea what this was going to achieve, having just a sense that it was probably the last thing you should do to a glass. She pushed down.

There was a brief resistance, then a pop as the blade punctured and slid into the glass. A fine mist, shining with blue sparks, sprayed in her face. Wincing, she wiped desperately at her eyes. She sneezed, loudly. Shit. Not clever. She stood up, still grasping the knife handle. Unsteady on her feet. Blinking.

Mistress Smyth didn’t look surprised, just pretty damn furious. One hand reached for a pocket, the other held tight to the thorn.

Chroma stepped groggily around the forge, spotting what she’d seen in the glass. In her hand the knife and the glass were an unbalanced weight. It was only a distance of about fifteen feet but the way she felt it was a damn big ask.

Underarm, she tossed the knife-transfixed glass. It flew in an ungainly arc, wobbling as it spun in the air, and collided with the top of the DarkJar. It curled around the barrel’s rim like a ball round a hoop.

They stared at its slow, teetering progress: Jones in horror, Mistress Smyth with a stubby pistol half-raised and Chroma wiping her streaming eyes.

The glass fell in. There was silence. A long moment of hesitation.

Jones’ worried eyes flicked from the DarkJar to Chroma and back.

Mistress Smyth pointed the weapon squarely at Chroma, pouting amusedly. ‘I don’t know what you expected to happen,’ she said. ‘But-’

The DarkJar emitted a languorous pop, like a lazy burp.

 Jones was staring at the floor, where an inky darkness was billowing up like clouds of black steam. The blackness appeared to be mushrooming up out of the air. Mistress Smyth backed away, the look of fury creasing the seams of her face so much that she turned haggard and deathly, like a long-mummified corpse. She slipped in the puddle, her legs flying out from under her. She fell on her back, clutching at the Rose Thorn. Her temptation, her revenge.

Chroma stumbled over to Jones. She held her breath as she bent over him, cutting his bonds with her remaining diamond knife.

She glanced down and saw Mistress Smyth, disappearing beneath the dark shadows pouring out of the ruptured glass on the floor. She was staring at her hand serenely. There was the capsule and its tail and the stinger repeatedly stabbing the thin flesh of her palm. The punctures were deep but didn’t bleed.

Chroma pulled Jones to his feet. Of course, she couldn’t see the glass. Twin to the one lost inside the DarkJar. The one fallen into its void, but connected still. The DarkJar – well-used to swallowing unstable Higgswork – was now trembling. She dragged Jones away, thinking about the people trapped below, conscious that doing anything for them meant risking her own life and aware she wasn’t prepared to do that.

They crawled out into the starred night as, inside, the DarkJar groaned and rumbled, spreading its smothering darkness over everything.

7. Visionary

‘Gone? What do you mean gone?’

The big yellow eyes glowering at Mercury were red. His employer looked as though sleep had been eluding him recently.

‘It vanished inside a DarkJar,’ said Mercury gravely.

‘You mean the glass?’

‘The forge, the warehouse. And some of the alley, by the end of it.’ He added, cautiously, for Dow had not mentioned her by name: ‘The Smyth too.’

Dow was silent. ‘I see,’ he said at last.

‘You were correct. In the cellar, she kept im–’

‘I told you not to venture inside.’

‘How could I not? Once I’d looked in the glass, the temptation . . . I saw things.’

‘That was always Ada’s problem,’ said Dow quietly. ‘She saw only what she wished to see. Nothing else mattered. A true visionary.’

The big yellow eyes looked sadly at Mercury and it seemed to him that they were eyes which had seen too much of the world, its wonders and its horrors.

(C) Colin Brush, 2017