The Sorcerer's Progress (Page 20 of 62)

LOL there's a Girl Genius for every situation! Even for girl's "tools" that Amy (probably) wasn't referring to, the ones that only work on men ... hehehe

I also only have to run faster than Elisheva ... hehehehe

Thanks.  You've hit points nobody else has.  I'll have to think about them.  A little more description wouldn't hurt, but I want to keep it light.  The previous chapters in the thread should give a lot of the picture.

One down, about 80 to go?

The instrument itself sat atop the wood post.  It was made of a yellow metal, too light to be brass but polished and gleaming like silver.  A sleeve of the metal rested on the post, sized and fluted like a handgrip.  A short shaft rose up from it and split into two sides of a fork.  These flattened out and rose straight up, then bent into hooks.

Between the parallel hooks a ring of the same metal hovered, about a handspan in diameter.  It was flat inside and out like a bracelet; the outer face was not polished but dull, and engraved with numbers and symbols.  These markings were filled with color: red, black, and deep blue.

Two red wires stretched from hook to hook at their ends, framing a short section of the engraved ring--just enough for one full mark to fall into the frame.

The spells on it were done with a precision Merran had never seen, nor had she ever seen so many, or seen them interlocked in such complexity.

She said, "It's beautiful.  I've never seen anything like it.  What is it?"

Erevain beamed.  "We did this for one of the Atlas-makers.  It indicates the strength of the barrier you need to overcome to open a world-crossing.  With this, they can show just how hard a crossing is--and how large the area is as well, by circling out from the center and measuring how the barrier rises."

He grew serious again.  "This is the first one we built, and it worked perfectly almost from the start.  We expected to get orders for several dozen, maybe more.  Then, when Nikkano was ready to deliver it, it stopped working.  The readings became erratic."

The first instrument was a work of beauty to sorsight and eyesight alike.  This one was made of heavy brass wire and thin tin sheet.  Four lengths of the heavy wire ran out like long feet.  They joined together into a center post about two handspans high.  A beam or yoke of wire, about half the device's height, was balanced in a hook at the top.  At each end, a longer yoke was balanced perpendicular to the first, and at the ends of these long yokes, more short yokes linked and balanced with each other to support strips sheet tin, which hung with their long ends parallel to the long yokes, three on each side of the center post.

It looked like the work of a talented, bored child.

The spells on it were another matter.  They lacked the elegant intricacy of the first instrument, but they were executed with almost breathtaking precision, balanced against one another in a pattern that almost-but-not-quite matched the linkages of wire above.  The slightest disturbance in the Elemental Fire surrounding them would set the whole thing quivering.  And as Merran leaned in for a closer look, the residue of Fire she carried did just that.

"Oh!  I'm sorry!"

"That's quite all right," Erevain said.  "If your Fire didn't disturb it, your breath would have.  If we built this to sell, or for serious use, we would have put it in a glass case.  Not that the problem isn't serious."

This instrument was set in the center of the big table, as far from disturbances as possible.  A strip of brass the length and width of Merran's forearm lay on the table, its long edges bent halfway up to make a shallow trough.

Above it, a dozen or more gold disks hovered on edge.  Their faces had curious markings on them, not quite familiar.  At the edges, their circumferences were divided by short and long lines in the same blue and red that they had seen in the crossing-barrier gauge, as well as a lighter, greenish blue.

Jamen squinted at the disks.

"Yes," Erevain said.  "Gold coins, flattened out.  We could have used crystal, but gold is easier to work and less valuable."

Merran examined the spellwork--as best she could.  The workings of Elemental Fire--if that's what it was--were only half-visible to her sorsight.  The spells seemed to fade away in one place and reappear in another.

Erevain said, "This took Nikkano and me working together, and we just barely made it work.

"I've done so much of the building in the last few years that I'm actually more precise than Nikkano.  But I've never seen some of what he came up with here, and I'm still not sure exactly how it all works."  He motioned them to move around to the end of the table.

"Here, sight along the edges of the disks, so that you can see the scale marks on each disk, one past the other."  He moved out of the way for Merran and Jamen.  "You see?"

Merran asked, "What are we seeing?"

"You're seeing time malfunction."