Harris did some mental math and calculated each bell at about three hours, each chime at nine minutes, and each beat—what? a little over a second. As confusing a nonmetric system as he was used to back home.
So as the sun set far to the west of Neckerdam’s stone and steel canyons, Jean-Pierre, driving, pulled up beside the Bergmanli Elevations building site and honked.
Joseph, clad in his work clothes and an enormous yellow shirt, emerged through the fence gate. He walked awkwardly, as though he were new to locomotion. He climbed into the car, settling alone into the rear-facing seat opposite Doc, Alastair, and Harris.
“You must be Joseph,” the doctor said. “Alastair Kornbock. Grace on you.”
The man with the unfinished face gave him a little nod.
“Care for something to eat? We’ll have better pickings before we leave Neckerdam.”
Joseph shook his head.
Alastair reached into the little red satchel he’d brought and dragged out a green glass flask; he waved it hopefully. “Uisge?”
Joseph shook his head.
Alastair sighed, uncapped the flask, and took a sip. “This is going to be a long drive.”
He was right. A strained silence settled over the car. Jean-Pierre seemed strangely stiff during the drive; Noriko kept her attention on him, and Harris felt, in spite of the emotional detachment she projected, that she was concerned for him.
Doc spent his time disassembling the volt-meter the ersatz musician had carried. “Interesting design,” he said quietly. “Old techniques, decades old, but very creative. I think I can improve on it, though.” He seemed disturbed by the design of the device and spoke very little after that.
They took the Island Bridge to Long Island; it amused Harris to learn that it was called Long Island. Some things obviously translated quite well from the grim world to the fair one. The community on the far side of the bridge was Pataqqsit, and in the twilight it seemed to be half city, half green park.
On the far side of Pataqqsit, where traffic thinned so that the red limousine was often alone on the tree-lined road, Harris saw the first windmill. It was tall and more slender than the archaic sort of grain-grinding mills he’d seen in photographs.
Then they topped a hill and he could see what looked like an ocean of the things laid out below him; the road cut through an enormous field full of windmills. “Jesus,” he said. “What’s all this?”
“Wind farm,” Alastair said. “Otherwise Neckerdam would have no way to power her lights, her underground trains and high-trains, or anything.”
“What about coal? Oil?”
Alastair laughed. “While we’re at it, why not lean out the window to empty our bowels instead of using the water closet?”
Doc didn’t look up, but his tone was admonishing. “Alastair.”
Harris frowned. “Then what do cars run on?”
“Alcohol, most of them.” Alastair fondly patted his red medical bag, where he’d replaced the glass flask. “Oh, not the good stuff, of course. That’s for fueling people.”
Noriko turned back to face them. “I once owned a two-wheeler that ran on gas I bought from chicken farms and sewer plants.”
“Chicken—methane. Of course. This place is an environmentalist’s dream.” Harris turned away to watch the windmills pass by and wondered why their answers annoyed him.
Probably because their responses were so unquestioning. But that didn’t make much sense. He’d seen no sign that the normal people of Neckerdam were fanatically devoted to the clean, organic, tedious causes some of his own friends back home were. So why didn’t they use all the same things the grimworlders did?
A few miles further on, they reached a large stone sign reading “Wickhollow.” At Doc’s direction, Jean-Pierre drove through the quiet town with its curiously irregular brick homes and turned down a blacktop country road, then took a narrower dirt road that led far away from the lights of the town. Finally, where trees and thick underbrush gave way to a good-sized clearing, he pulled to one side and stopped the car.
In the light cast by the nearly full moon, Harris could see a large black rectangle in the center of the clearing. On the blackness was a lot of standing rubble, some of which looked like remnants of a chimney. He followed the others as they piled out of the car.
It must have once been a huge house, Harris realized. The black rectangle was an enormous array of foundation stones, now cracked, with weeds growing through them. The blackening looked like old fire damage. After the house had burned, someone had pulled down much of the remainder and scattered the pieces all over the lot.
Doc walked out onto the foundation, looking here and there, pausing for a long moment beside an unmarked section of stone, staring down at it with eyes out of memory. Then he shook himself and looked back at Joseph. “The conjuration laboratory?”
Joseph moved out on the foundation and moved around until he found what he wanted: an irregularly cracked section of stone, an oval roughly five feet long and four high, piled high with a mound of fallen rubble.
“Just below where Duncan died,” Doc said, his tone low.
Joseph had to clear the rubble away before he could get at the foundation stone beneath, and this he did with terrifying ease, scooping up thigh-high piles of stones that must have weighed hundreds of pounds and hurling them off the foundation. Then he stepped aside and waited.
“How do you open it?” Doc asked.
“I do not,” Joseph said. “It’s a deviser’s laboratory.”
“Ah.” Doc closed his eyes.
Harris saw his lips move as he murmured silent words. For long moments nothing happened; then there was a faint vibration in the ground.
A square portion of the foundation stone cantilevered upward, revealing a rectangular black space below. A dry, musty smell wafted out. Doc opened his eyes and nodded in apparent satisfaction.
Alastair brought an armful of long, clumsy-looking flashlights out from the car’s trunk—boot? Harris remembered them calling it a boot, like the British—and passed them around. They all lit the ungainly devices and shined their beams down on the dull gray steps heading into the earth. Doc led the way down.
The conjuration laboratory of Duncan Blackletter turned out to be a large, simple chamber. Two facing walls were covered in bookshelves, many of them now collapsed with rot and age and the weight of the volumes they held. In one corner were a plush chair, rotting and bug-eaten, and a collapsed mass that must have once been an uncomfortable cot.
Most of the floor was decorated with what Harris now recognized as conjurer’s circles: unbroken rings of paint or carefully laid-out stones, decorated along the rims with painted symbols that looked a little like Ms and Ws and Hs—two or three vertical lines connected at the top, middle or bottom by short horizontal lines. The writing style didn’t look at all familiar.
Jean-Pierre cast his flashlight beam again at the standing shelves of books. He looked tense and grim. “With my luck, we’ll be digging our way through that until I’m grayed with age.”
Alastair peered into the younger man’s dark hair. “Too late. Going gray already.”
“I am not.” Jean-Pierre, scowling, pulled down a lock of hair and put the flashlight beam on it.
Alastair moved to the bookcase. “Stop worrying. It’s good to get older.”
“You’re lying to me.”
“The blood cools. Women become . . . less important, somehow.”
“I’ll die first.”
Harris saw Doc smile, just a little, before the man moved to join Alastair.
It wasn’t as bad as they had feared. Duncan Blackletter had kept a very organized library, and Joseph remembered which volumes had served it as an index. They were rotted now, whole sections falling to pieces no matter how carefully they were opened, but the pages pertaining to special sendings of conjuration circles were intact. Within an hour they’d found the bookshelf where the appropriate reference works lay and busied themselves looking through the aged and damaged volumes.