Endworlds - Nicholas Read [52]
Hemmel was taken aback. “Some. Why?”
“Find a wishing well. Drop them in. Make a wish.” He turned to depart. “I have a feeling that’s the only way you’re ever likely to see your missing products again.”
BEYOND AND ABOVE
FJÆRVOLL, NORWEGIAN COAST
OCTOBER, 2007
GLASS UNENDING.
To a visitor capable of seeing through dimensions, such would the palace of Queen Fae’Elayen appear. As it stretched outward from the cliff to the sea its occupied splay of vitreous arms leapt in upward curling arcs above the first waves, there to hang like the branches of a lop-sided white and gold tree. A thousand-meter opaque glass tower rammed into the solid rock landward, a gigantic pin that kept the entire complex from collapsing into the ocean below.
As physics it was elemental, as engineering simple, and as architecture sublime.
Within the gently rising arms lay the offices of State, and at the very tip of the longest and highest arm was the Conclave, flanked by viewing rooms that included this chamber. Not a place for those afraid of heights. Or of the sea, which churned far below the nearly transparent floor. Everything within, from furniture to instrumentation, from walls to ceiling, was fashioned from silicon in one form or another. Though carbon-based themselves, the Fae’er were masters of its close relative, able to bend it to their will as a poet does words.
They’d had nearly 26,000 years to perfect the art.
Not all was transparent, of course. The audience chamber was as colorful as any decorated with more prosaic materials. Great crimson chandeliers did not hang from the convex ceiling so much as they flowered organically from it. Some furniture was movable while certain seats and benches erupted from the floor like glistening fungi molded for purpose. Through floor and walls not enhanced with integrated sculpture, water and land were always visible. Overhead, the roof darkened or grew light in tune with the weather.
What shot through the waves below and whirled in the flaxen-tinged air above was not of Earth Prime but that of the Fae’er and the dimension they now occupied, a remnant of when they were the first masters of the planet. Before the physical became ethereal. Before the Fall.
Slender, almost willowy, Queen Fae’Elayen brooded before the polished ovalurn floating in the air before her. Her dark green eyes slanted upward, her nose and ears were smooth and perfect, and her white hair swept vertical and back like the castle branch in which she stood. Though her feet touched the glossy floor, she seemed to flow more than walk. The long fingers of her right hand held tight the Scepter of Balance, joined to her wrist with a single strand of spun Tiametian gold, a reverential observance her office demanded every dawn.
Facing the cresting sun that now bathed the crescent-shaped room, she held the two-meter staff aloft and silently intoned the wordless mantra, speaking more by a projection of feeling than by voice:
“As we think, we attract. As we do, so we act. Grant us the wisdom and the balance, from lives without beginning, to worlds without end.”
Tapping the scepter three times to the echoing floor, she cast her emerald gaze to where golden sky met roiling grey seas and willed the glass sheet absent. Obediently the window was no more and frigid wind blasted in, thrumming in her ears as it swept over her, eyes now closed.
She let the ions blow around her body, and wipe through her mind. Eyelids squinted tight, ears filled with sound, her senses were cut off from the world without as she slid into the world within, sucking the salt air deep into her lungs as she had been taught centuries ago; in, out, in, out—the rhythm of a beating heart, a mortal heart, as hers had once been.
As the stillness of the moment washed over her, she felt back to another ocean, another time. How she had loved the sea gales! A bittersweet smile creased the corner of her lips as she allowed the rare indulgence.
IN HER MIND’S EYE she was home again, a mortal on Earth Prime of the First Age, a thirty-six