The Broken Lands (12 page)

“Is that so?” His fingers hesitated for just a moment, and Jin knew why.

The book. More properly,
The Conflagrationeer's Port-fire Book, Being a Compendium of the Chemistry and Design of Infernal Devices, for the Artificier of Displays Entertaining and Educational, or the Purveyor of Mayhem of Any Sort.
Author unknown, but, as far as Jin could tell, probably insane.

She watched Liao as he secured four cylindrical explosive cases to one arm of the guilloche. She tried to read his silence.

The book wasn't precisely off-limits; they kept it with the rest of the pyrotechnics manuals on the communal bookshelf, right alongside Jin's much-abused copy of Comstock's
Natural Philosophy,
Liao's
Tao Te Ching
and the writings of Meng Chiao and Chuang Tzu, and whatever popular fiction Mr. Burns was reading that week. They just didn't use it. Ever. And Jin had always understood that there must be a reason for that. She had just never figured out what that reason was.

“It is not easy to find meaning in the formulas in the book,” Liao said at last, dusting off his hands and reaching for the hammered yellow-metal cup of wine by his elbow. “Not everyone is able to read it. I am curious as to how you managed it.”

“Not easy to find meaning is putting it mildly,” Jin mumbled, still not sure if she was in trouble or not. The
Port-fire Book
read as if it had been written to annoy potential readers right into giving up. Formulas had names like The Calling, Five Winds and a Fire Bring Winter, the Graven Sky, and Ascension, Part the Eighth. Ingredients generally included some kind of elaborately named mud and a list of things that logic dictated had to be the rest of the components, if you could only figure out what they were.
Drops of autumn, tincture of bitter-and-gray, horizon red (refined), salts of age . . .
Not a single thing about the book was obvious or straightforward.

How she had figured out the formulas she'd used—what they did and what the instructions really were—was no easier to explain.

“It's . . . I think I recognized the proportions first,” she said after a moment's thought. “Black powder is usually always made with the same proportions of saltpeter, charcoal, and sulfur. So I realized I could make spur-fires first, because there were ingredients in those same proportions. That helped me figure out what some of the ingredients were, and then I could sort of, I don't know, see the sense of how things were written.” But that made it sound like she'd worked out some kind of code. It hadn't really been quite like that.

She tried again. “Do you remember when I was younger and learning English?” Liao nodded. “There was a time when I knew a few words here and there, and then a time when I understood more of them and could work out what an English speaker was trying to say if I put the words together like clues. And then, one day, I suddenly realized I wasn't doing that anymore. Putting clues together, I mean. I
understood
what I was hearing, really understood it.”

She paused, remembering how strange it had been when that realization had hit. “It was more like that. I knew what I was reading. I just
understood
it.”

“Spoken like a true
fangshi,
” Liao said with an odd smile. “Perhaps you are not destined to be a mere grinder of powders for long.”

Fangshi . . .
a master of methods. Uncle Liao's term for a pyrotechnician who was a true artificier. It was his name for what
he
was, a word borrowed from
waidan,
the ancient Chinese art of compounding elixirs.

It was high praise.

“Come.” He nodded to the basket of spur-fires they'd made according to Jin's specifications. “Let us go and see what magic you have worked.” Jin picked up the basket and followed him out of the tent where they'd been working.

Every time they set up shop, Fata Morgana erected three tents beside the wagon. The first was the tent they left now: the
danshi,
Uncle Liao's laboratory tent, and there was always a bit of ritual to setting it up. He was very particular about it.

The first consideration was location, and Jin had seen her uncle demand to move the entire encampment for the sake of putting his tent just where he wanted it. They had to dig down a foot or so into the ground where the
danshi
was to go, which—Liao had once impatiently explained—was to make sure there was neither an old well nor a tomb concealed below. The best Jin had been able to figure was that a hidden well might've made for unpredictable humidity above. But she had never come up with a reason why Uncle Liao would be concerned with an unmarked grave.

Yet, it was this concern that had caused the most trouble in the past. There were parts of the country where you couldn't dig in a field without unearthing hidden burial places, and Jin had come to learn that the greener and more verdant the ground, the more likely it was to be nourished by the dead. Tall nettles, in particular, were always best avoided. After passing through Gettysburg, which she'd since learned was the site of one of the bloodiest battles of the War Between the States, Jin had developed a healthy fear of open fields.

Once they found a good spot without bodies or wells, they assembled a low wooden platform and built the tent on it; Uncle Liao's laboratory had to be off the ground. The tent had flap doors on three walls, which had to face south, east, and west. His stove went in the middle, facing the east door and insulated by white clay bricks. His chest of ingredients, his workbench, and his favorite tools made of burnished yellow metals went on the northern wall. Last of all, Liao hung four flags that he called his talismans, one at each corner of the tent. He kept the furnace going religiously from the moment the erection of the tent was complete until the night before Fata Morgana packed up and moved on—just long enough for it to cool down before they left.

The second tent, which they also built on a platform, became a storage and staging space. The third was made of heavy black, oiled fabric to shut out the light, and this was where Jin and Liao took her freshly made spur-fires.

They slipped into the dim interior. Jin took a pair of goggles from a rack beside the door and pulled them over her eyes. She dragged a table to the center of the tent, took one spur-fire case from the basket, and set it there. Then she lit the fuse with the pocket-sized flint lighter Liao had made for her, and backed away as her uncle drew the curtained doorway closed and plunged the tent into darkness.

The fuse burned down fast, and the case erupted into a hemisphere of scattering stars in a shade of deep violet Jin had never seen before, with a smell like fresh pine needles that definitely wasn't normal.

“
Hen piaoliang,
” Liao murmured.
Very pretty.

The violet cinders danced themselves out, and the tent went black again, but Jin's heart was so full and bright she felt like laughing.
I did that. I made that, and I worked out how to do it on my own.

 

After dark, the Broken Land Hotel was a mania of lights. Even the lawn was aglitter: there were lanterns in the trees and on posts that overhung the paths, and even a pair of croquet courts with candlelit wickets.

Sam joined a cluster of folks walking from the hotel toward the water, trying to look like he belonged as he kept an eye out for Ambrose or Tom. He stepped around groups of guests busy spreading blankets on the grass, until he heard the drifting sound of familiar music. He followed the tune across the boardwalk that ringed the lawn and onto the beach, where Tom Guyot sat plucking the strings of his tin guitar. “Hey, now.” The old man grinned. “Glad you decided to come on out. You run into any trouble with the hotel folks?”

“Nah.” Sam kicked off his shoes and dropped into the sand. “I did what you said and just acted like I wasn't worried about getting stopped. Also I . . . er . . . ran into the girl from the fireworks company earlier today,” he added as nonchalantly as possible. “We happened to have a little conversation.”
Just a little conversation, after she defended herself with explosives from some rowdies. And just another little conversation, after that business with the dead body in the alley.

Tom nodded equally nonchalantly, fingers nimble on the strings. “I see. That wouldn't have anything to do with why you're wearing such a snappy outfit, would it?”

Sam smoothed down the front of his best shirt. “I was trying to look less like a scruffy card player so they'd let me on the grounds here,” he said defensively. “But . . . about her. There was something else.” He swallowed. “She . . . Jin—the girl—she found a body. Somebody murdered and dumped in the rough end of town.”

Tom set down the guitar and looked at Sam. “That poor thing. She all right, you figure?”

“She seemed to be. She's . . . well, she's pretty strong, I think. Still . . .”

“Still.” Tom nodded and began quietly plucking the strings again. “Ain't easy, coming across something like that. 'Specially when you're someplace civilized, like the middle of town.”

“You remember the pianist at the Dram? Walter Mapp?”

Tom's song faltered. He tapped the metal body of his guitar with his fingernails, staring out at the water. When he started playing again, Sam felt a little thrill of recognition: it was the song Mapp had played that Tom had reacted to so oddly the day before.

The music stopped again. “Sure,” Tom said easily. “Nice fellow.”

“He wants to talk to you about it. What . . . what Jin found. Tonight, after the fireworks.”

“Why's that?”

Sam still wasn't sure why Walter Mapp thought Tom could help. “Well, there was writing over the . . .” He lowered his voice. Tom leaned closer. “ . . . over the body. It said
Claimed by blood for Jack Hellcoal
. I think he thought . . . you might know what that meant. I don't know why.”

Tom drummed his fingers on the guitar again. “I suppose I'm part of the roaming world now,” he said softly. “Guess I got to start acting like it sometime.”

Sam frowned, wondering if he was supposed to understand what that meant. “Sorry?”

By way of answer, Tom just went back to picking gently at the strings. “Getting dark,” he said at last. “Should be starting soon.”

“You couldn't find a spot on the grass?” Ambrose appeared suddenly, standing over them with a scowl on his face, and dropped a picnic hamper into the sand between Sam and Tom. “These are fancy sandwiches, and they will not be improved by sand, I'll have you know.”

While the newspaperman unpacked paper-wrapped sandwiches and cold bottles of beer, Sam leaned back and stared skyward. Then Tom said something that snapped Sam to attention. “Ambrose, you remember those Jack tales you used to tell?”

“Sure,” Ambrose said. “What about them?”

“Jack . . . tales?” Sam asked, confused. “You know about this guy?”

Ambrose glanced up from the picnic. “What guy? There are dozens, scores of tales about Jack. Gets mixed up with kings and giants a lot. You might've heard one about a beanstalk.”

“That's the same Jack?”

“The same Jack as what?” The newspaperman lowered the sandwich he'd been about to bite into. “It's a
character.
When folks want to tell a story and they need a trickster for it, they talk about Jack.”

Sam frowned. “So . . . this isn't even a real person?”

Ambrose laughed. “You think there are magic beans out there, Sam?” But then he hesitated. “Well, that's not to say that
some
of the stories might not have some truth to them.”

Tom spoke up again. “Ambrose, you ever heard one about Jack and a hellcoal?”

“Sure,” Ambrose said, still looking vaguely confused by the conversation. “The one where he beats the Devil.”

“Ah.” Tom sat back, thoughtfully. “That sounds like the kinda thing might be useful to hear. You mind coming along with Sam and me after the show, maybe tell what you know of the story to a couple folks?”

“Sure, I suppose,” Ambrose said. “You mind if I eat this sandwich now?”

There was a sudden, piercing whistle, and a single streak shot into the sky like a falling star going the wrong way. The whistle trailed off, and the shooting star dwindled to nothingness. And then the sky caught on fire. The crowds on the beach and the lawn stopped moving and turned their heads up with a murmur of wonder.

A dome of light exploded over the Atlantic, turning night into day and illuminating a platform that floated fifty or so yards out on the water. Sam just barely had time to notice that most of the platform was hidden by a curtain before the curtain dropped, revealing a framework structure that looked like the skeleton of a castle.

From the center of the framework came a spark. Four fuses rushed the spark to the bottom corners of the skeletal castle, and the thing came to life.

Golden fire broke out at the corners, sped along the base of the structure, and began to pour upward. Before the dome of light in the sky from the first rocket had entirely died out, the fire had charged over the entirety of the edifice on the platform, replacing the skeleton with a palace built of flame. It looked, apart from the gentle, just barely visible motion of the fire, like a grand stone building caught by the red-gold of sunset.

Then, from the ramparts of the castle, the fireworks began.

There were rockets that sailed overhead and burst, alone and in clusters, into a wild array of shapes and colors. There were some that whined and hissed and undulated across the sky. Some flew up in pairs or in threes that twisted around one another, leaving braided vapors of smoke behind them before they exploded. Others rose like tailed comets and burst into constellations of falling stars. And still there were more: rockets that spiraled like springs as they flew heavenward, shooting so high that when they finally burst into gigantic spheres or domes, the resulting fingers of light and trailing sparks seemed to be falling like rain over the people below.