Chapter 142 - The Stars’ Measure

  “I have told you,” said the priestess, “We have come to observe Raphina more closely.”

  I looked at Rufus.

  “It is the truth…” he said. Then, casting a nervous glance at the priestess and the elite guards, added “Not the whole truth.”

  “That’s better than an outright lie, I suppose,” I said. I gestured to the bluff. “But why here specifically? Habberport had a dozen towers taller than any of our bluffs, and other infrastructure besides. The City of Brass is much further developed and can provide you with delicate components. As soon as I said you could set up here, every Midnighter delegation instantly changed direction and headed this way.” I narrowed my eyes. “You know something you’re not telling me,” I said.

  Rather than looking chagrinned, the priestess stood up straighter. “You are correct, King Apollo. The observatory is not the only reason—nor the primary reason—my kin now brave Raphina’s shadow. But these are not my secrets to offer, as they touch on the reflections of time yet to pass—a thing which, to reveal casually, can cause great harm. I face reprisal for revealing even this. I beg time only for my superior to arrive that she of authority might make everything clear.”

  I glanced at Rufus.

  “She’s telling the truth,” he said.

  I sighed. At the end of the day, I needed the Midnighters. I needed their calculations on the size and relative distance between celestial bodies in order to plot orbital altitudes and speeds. That information would save us months of testing and careful data collection—the precision of which might not even be possible to calculate for creatures like goblins. I highly doubted spatial geometry or calculus were anywhere in the Goblin Tech Tree. And they were months we may not have. Habberport wasn’t staging those troops and dragon riders for show.

  “Fine,” I said. “I’ll wait to hear from your priestess. But we don’t have forever.”

  “No, King Apollo. We do not have forever. She is making all haste. This, my promise to you.”

  I glanced at Rufus. He nodded. Truth.

  “All right, then. Can you at least tell me what so concerns you about the moon?”

  The priestess leaned down and chittered with her attendants for a moment. She lifted the hands on her right side and gestured toward the telescope. “Come.”

  I followed the priestess to the large scope where it rested in its gimbal. Sheets of brass had been erected as windbreaks to keep the device steady atop the pyramid, making a conical structure. But it wasn’t terribly different from observatories I’d visited on Earth (except for the Very Large Array in New Mexico, for obvious reasons). The biggest difference is that the chair beneath the observation lens of the telescope was designed for someone of insectile proportions. Most of the adjustment rings and wheels I could at least guess at. It also lacked the computerized controls and motor-driven stabilization of modern telescopes, but those were replaced with a small team of Midnighter serfs making constant adjustments.

  At the priestess’ invitation, I climbed up into the seat and peered through the view-finder. Cla’thn herself began to turn wheels and the crosshairs shifted to a point near Raphina’s horizon where a region of pink trees met a dark shadow. I switched from the viewfinder to the main optic as Cla’thn worked the focus ring.

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  “A little more… back it off a little… there!”

  The planet’s surface came into view, and the dark shadow resolved into a dead and rotting bog, dark and smoky, with a low-lying mire fog. It stretched on for miles and miles, butting up directly against a forest of pink-leafed trees.

  “It’s a swamp,” I said. I looked up from the optic. “We have those here. Why are you so interested in this?”

  “Observe, o’king.”

  The priestess reached out and grabbed yet another ring, one that I hadn’t seen any of the adherents touch. As she spun it, a feeling of potential energy rose in the air, like static across my fur. The lens of the telescope wavered, and the air on the other side took on a colorful shimmer, like light refracting through water. I peered back into the optic. As I watched, the line of living, healthy forest began to track back across the surface of Raphina. Dead and rotting bog turned to living, vibrant forest. Slowly, the march of decay reversed, until all that I’d seen on the surface was restored. I pulled away from the lens and looked through the viewfinder. The surface of Raphina remained unchanged, where the shadow met the light. The scope itself contained the shifting tableau.

  I swallowed, remembering that the priestess was also a sorceress. She had access to the Midnighter magic, and who knew what other tricks.

  “What am I looking at?” I asked.

  “The past, o’ king. Ripples do not travel only ahead of us. They show, too, where we once walked.”

  Cla’thn released her grip on the ring, and it slowly returned to its original position. The charged feeling in the air dissipated, as did the shimmer around the scope. In the main viewer, the image wavered, and the death and decay once again overtook the live growth.

  “What’s the time scale on this event?” I asked.

  “Many hundreds of years,”

  I pushed back from the scope and looked at Raphina again. The dark shadow wasn’t just on one part of the planet, it crept in from the dark side of the moon at several locations, though none so prominent as the one the telescope focused on. “It looks like a blight of some sort, a floral mass extinction event.” I eyed the priestess. “It doesn’t stop there, does it? You’ve seen what happens.”

  Cla’thn remained silent, but her adherents chittered amongst themselves, and she was too busy trying to keep her hands still to notice them.

  “And it concerns you, more than a rotting bog on another world ought to. Why? What has the blight got to do with you? With us?”

  “Please, King Apollo,” said Cla’thn. She rubbed her forearms together, almost frantically. “I can speak of this no more. I beg you not press me further.”

  I wanted to. Every ounce of the curious scientist in me wanted grill her until the answers spilled out. But I also saw the elite queen’s guard warriors start to edge forward, hands nearing weapons at belt or shoulder. They couldn’t kill us all, but they could carve a path clear of the bluff, if need be. And then I’d get no answers from the Midnighters. Ever.

  “Fine,” I said. “I’ll speak to your boss when they get here. Until then, please continue your work.”

  Cla’thn relaxed and made a subtle gesture with a hand behind her. Her guards relaxed, and a different kind of tension seemed to go out of the air.

  I turned to go, Rufus and Armstrong in tow. I felt like I was close to the answers I was looking for—but some of the pieces were missing. A blight on Raphina’s forests, a moon that had locked itself to one corner of the sky. A tribe of future-seers that had looked into the future’s shimmering ripples and were utterly terrified of what they saw.

  Or, perhaps, what they could no longer see.

  What was I missing? Part of it was simply my lack of understanding in how this world worked on a fundamental level. Moons don’t just lock themselves to one continent. Except apparently, here, they could. The amount of energy it would take to shift the orbit of something the mass of Mercury was mind-boggling, even before you took into account that the tidal forces of such an action should rip Raphina to pieces (and probably destroy all life on the surface of Rava in the process). What could do such a thing? Could System have that much sway over physics? Presumably it presided over the entire skill system for the entirety of the planet, effectively re-writing the governing logic of the physical world at the quantum level to impose an entirely new set of rules. Did that field extend to the moon? Did it originate from the moon?

  System was, of course, completely silent on the matter.

  Well if the answers were on the moon, I was going to have to go and get them myself. Hopefully I wouldn’t be too late to visit those vanishing forests before they were gone forever.