The ticking sound of the brass gears was a comfort. The device had been machined with a precision that could not be matched by our local smiths. Not even close; it was remarkably small for its complexity. I wondered how they managed to create the tiny gears inside. The Scholars of Thensapolis must have helped their smiths develop this truly spectacular device. As I spun the rings, I watched the symbols move: circle, line, triangle, square.... None of Elias' documents had any information about these keys, not even a hint that they might exist. I tried using them as a substitution cipher on the poem, but that went nowhere. The poem was just words, and this was an endless, meaningless stream of some kind of numeric code.
Danio was right. I was ridiculous to treat a spectacular and intriguing paperweight as if it were a key to the poem. And it was probably just as ridiculous to think the poem was the key to saving the city. But we were desperate... And desperation makes you look for patterns in the clouds and meaning in the rust.
I looked back at my attempted translation of the poem using Elias' rudimentary lexicon. My hand had made many ink smudges.
_Two thousand forty-eight dodecahedrons, white..._ _The_ **_Truth_** _stone, a blinding, knowing light._
I think my translation of this segment was pretty good.
But the next lines made no sense.
_To use its power, hold it rapidly
And point your mind, the act of dying is a set of actors in a stage play.
You can't hold something rapidly. It didn't make sense. Grab it and let it go with high frequency?
Then the next line: The act of dying is a set of actors in a stage play? Was it some kind of metaphor?
I struggled with the subsequent lines just as much. Some of the words weren't in the glossary.
_It works on two roads: easy to shape and easy to see.
To find the truth from out a ?????._
_The ??????? road, a silent ????
That lets you know just what they mind-words._
Did it mean I heard their thoughts like a voice? Then the final section:
_The second road, a gifting choice
That shows their purpose, a ??????_
I turned back to the incantation that the old woman had used. The words were even less decipherable. I deduced that the phonetics of this ancient language didn't even match the spelling. Horrific. It was a language of idiots or madmen. Elias had always held the ancients in high esteem. They had achieved amazing things and created incomprehensible machines. But relics in their idiotic language and an uncertain history were all that was left of them.
I closed my hand around the white dodecahedron. I held it and pointed my mind at the map of the Red Sand Sea. I pointed my mind at the idea of truth. I thought about the trade routes. I thought about the Hegemony. I thought about the people out there who would soon be hungry.
Nothing. Nothing at all.
I picked up the stone and put it down very quickly and ran the same experiment. Again, nothing.
Certainly if this was a plow that could fly to the stars, I wasn't able to use it properly. Especially if that poem contained instructions that I couldn't read.
I picked up the black stone. The one labeled Justice and looked again at the poem.
_Four thousand ninety-six tridecahedrons, black,
The Justice Stone, the final ??????.
It rests upon a dark and heavy base,
Its word is given to the human race.
_The intelligence of low-weight will show the truth to read,
The stone is sure about the act and title document.
But when the ???? turns slowly into night,
The stone is lost, unsure of ????? or clockwise.
_If low-weight is gone, an empty muscular organ exists,
The deep fissure in the ground is small, unclear, or hard to ????._
The poem, or at least my translation of it, was completely useless. Too many words were missing, and likely the ones I had were wrong. These stones had no more practical value than any that I could pick up on the mountainside. Perhaps it was a useless graveyard of idioms from a time too long past.
I looked out at the city from the window in my quarters. The lights were going out one by one. It was peaceful and quiet. The quiet of one who dies in their sleep.
A knock at the door startled me. I quickly threw my soiled clothing on top of the stones and Danio's device.
"Come in," I said.
My father opened the door and entered. He was hunched and looking more tired than ever.
"Father?" I asked, stepping away from the table. "Did something happen?"
He walked to the window to look at the sleeping city just as I had done. "There's news. A courier arrived from Latifundium of Carth."
"Carth?" The very word tasted like iron filings in my mouth.
He turned to face me. "The King of Carth has made us an offer, Elyan. A formal alliance. He will send a mercenary garrison to protect our caravans. He will open a humanitarian corridor through the southern passes to feed our people."
"That sounds... like salvation," I said. In my pause between breaths, I realized it couldn't be true. "But Carth doesn't give charity. They always make sure they're getting the better end of the deal. What are they asking for in exchange?"
My father looked me in the eye. "You."
"What?" I gasped. "To work on the plantations? What is one more slave to them?"
"Nothing that awful. They want a marriage alliance," he said. "Between you and Princess Nesa. Heliqar's reputation as a virtuous city has spread even to them. The King of Carth wants to buy our legitimacy. He wants to wash the stain of the slave-pits off his royal line by marrying into ours."
I stared at him, horror dawning. "Princess Nesa? The daughter of the Slave King?" I had seen her likeness on Carthian coins; her face was cold and angular. To marry into that house was to become a part of the machine. To wake up every morning knowing your bread was harvested by men in chains. "Father, their entire society is built on human misery. To ally with them... to become their kin..."
"We wouldn't become a vassal state, technically," my father said. "But once their mercenaries got into Heqliar we would never get rid of them. We would become a respectable face on their evil. We would be border guards for their slave kingdom."
"You refused," I said; it was a statement. "Of course we could never agree to this."
"I did," he said. "Your mother and I are in total agreement. But the Council... the Council is terrified. When they hear of this offer some will say it's fair trade. More than fair, miraculous. A prince who would remain a prince in exchange for going back to life before it was. They will say that slavery by contract is simply living by a different law. If they don't see another way, they will accept this one and stop looking."
I was still thinking about Carth's motives. "I don't see how an improved reputation is valuable enough to pay for enough mercenaries to defend caravans from Spartova."
My father nodded. "You're right. Alone it wouldn't be sufficient. But it doesn't hurt that many, if not all, of Carth's iron and steel tools come through Heliqar. They know the situation we're in as well as we do. Their timing was impeccable. They knew it would be an offer that the Council couldn't refuse, even if we did."
My eyes were wide, and my tongue wouldn't move. It was perfectly reasonable. The Council no doubt personally knew many of the traders who had been taken by the Spartovans.
He placed a hand on my shoulder. "When I took the kingship, I did it with the understanding that I wouldn't be a tyrant. If I started overriding the will of the people's representatives, I would become the very thing that I spent my life fighting against. To save the law by breaking it is not virtue. I am telling you this because you need to know how close we are to the edge. If we do not find another way, this will be an offer we can't refuse. I would not sell my son to a slaver. But this is beyond the limits of my authority. The Council has the power here."
He nodded and squeezed my shoulder with a strong grip, a silent apology. Then he turned and left the room, leaving the door slightly ajar.
The horror of the proposal washed over me. An alliance with the Latifundium would be a betrayal of Heliqar's hard earned reputation. I had always believed that beneath our laws and councils there was bedrock, immutable truth obvious to all. But now, I saw that even our kingdom was built on sand. My father's nobility prevented him from acting, and the Council was blinded by fear. Our political principle of giving the people full access to information and a real say in what we did would prevent tyranny, but it left us defenseless against our own desperation. Neither logic nor reason were our salvation; without a miracle Heliqar would be consumed by the sand on which it was built.
I pulled out the stones from under my tunic and wraps. The stones were still there, useless. But they were the only things I had short of surrender.
I wrapped up the stones and the device and put them in my bag. Tomorrow would be the Council session. The bedrock wasn't waiting for me under the sand; either I figured out how to build it myself, or watch everything I loved be swallowed by its shifting dunes.