The Cap of the Well

Sari did show up about forty five minutes later, her arms full of baskets and paper parcels. Once she had helped Gemma unload it all she announced that a panel of the elders wanted to meet with Trick. So he gathered up all his things and followed her towards the center of town.

The diffuse light in Harbek had changed while he was asleep. At a glance it looked brighter outside but Trick wasn’t sure whether that was because there was more lumi suffusing the town or because the color had shifted from green to yellow. Either way it made him feel much more alert and energetic. As he looked around he asked, “Does the town cycle through the full spectrum of colors? Or do you just use yellow and green?”

“In Harbek we only use topaz and verdant lumi. Both to conserve the other colors for fending off attacks and because we don’t need crimson or cobalt most of the time.” Sari gestured to the leafy side of a nearby building. “The valley here is quite narrow and we have to conserve space, so we cultivate many of our crops using verdant lumi to make up for our having little to no soil.”

“What about ochre and… violet?”

“Amathyst. It’s the color of domain and protection, so using it when the town isn’t under attack is wasteful. We could use ochre for lighting, I suppose, but topaz, while very useful, isn’t as critical for other tasks and it’s not worth spending the gestalt and crimson lumi necessary to formulate ochre when the job could be done with just a third of the lumi.”

“That makes sense, I suppose.” Now that the reservoir crystals were glowing yellow rather than green Trick found it easier to pick them out of the landscape and he realized most buildings had at least two fist sized crystals built into their walls or roofs. “Do you only find lumi in the primary colors, then? Or can you find compound colors like verdant in wells?”

“Sometimes a well or two that normally flows with one color will turn to another and, as the colors change, they will mix into what you call a compound color. However, for that to happen a certain amount of gestalt lumi, which we were harvesting when you met us, must be mixed in. If that doesn’t happen naturally compound wells won’t appear.”

“I see.” He looked up towards the sky and found that the ambient light was bright enough that he couldn’t see the stars overhead. No wonder Sari had said the starsight would naturally head for Harbek. With all the light it shed the town had to be visible for miles and miles, perhaps even from the orbits of the ninth sphere.

“If you don’t mind, I have a question for you now, Trick.” Sari clasped her hands behind her back, worrying at the bracelet of her channeling glove with her fingers. They were very long, graceful fingers.

Trick forced himself to stop watching her mesmerising digits and said, “I’ve asked you more than a few so answering one or two myself seems fair. What do you want to know?”

“Why do you think you came here from the tenth sphere, rather than one of the other ones? It’s been bothering me since you first said it but things were so chaotic last watch that I never got a chance to bring it up.”

“Well, you said the tenth sphere is beyond everything you know here and I haven’t seen anything remotely familiar since I got here.” Trick offered a helpless shrug. “I’m not sure the tenth sphere is the right way to describe where I’m from. Saying the third or fourth sphere might be more accurate. I just don’t know if that’s the case or not and my intuition says the tenth best describes life as I knew it yesterday morning.”

Sari nodded, humming thoughtfully. “I suppose if you stay here in Harbek you’ll have plenty of time with the elders to figure out as much as you can about that.”

“Perhaps, although if they’re anything like town councils where I come from they’re pretty busy people already so I won’t hold my breath.”

She looked at him, one hand resting lightly on her breastbone in a gesture of surprise. Trick absently wondered why he’d thought her veil hid her feelings the night before when she was so obviously emotive. Maybe he’d just been tired. He wondered if it was something she’d developed because of her fashion choices or a natural part of her personality.

Unaware of his musings Sari asked, “Why would you stop breathing because the elders are busy?”

“It’s… a phrase we use back home to mean we don’t expect something. Explaining it would take too long.”

“Maybe some other time.” She pointed off to the side of the road, down at the only two story building Trick had seen in Harbek Valley so far. “That’s the cap of the wellspring, where the elders are waiting for you.”

Trick was expecting to go all the way down to the lowest level, where the armillary sphere was located, and the wellspring wasn’t quite on that level. They were pretty close, though. He found it interesting that the sensibilities of the seventh sphere were that different from Earth’s, where important places were placed up high.

The building itself was interesting as well.

As they got closer it became clear the structure was less a two story building and more a single story building on stilts. Six huge, rounded pillars supported a circular structure that was slightly wider on top than at the base. Jutting supports held up the roof and sunken windows ringed the entire structure. It vaguely reminded him of the sound baffling stuff he’d seen on the walls of the hexagon rooms in the Steel Perilous.

Beneath the structure was a twenty or thirty foot wide pit full of rough cut crystals gleaming a pale cobalt blue. A metal scaffolding created a path across the pit and rough stairs that led up into the building proper. As they got closer the air temperature dropped noticeably. “Strange place to keep your village elders.”

“The recorder says it was the first thing Harbek built when he settled the valley.”

“Well, if the building is old you might as well keep all the other old things there, too. Come on, let’s go see what they want.”