So Fulque Darien at last proudly displayed the orrery We had commissioned him to make. He whipped up the purple silk that was shrouding his device and swung the sheet aside like some conjuror converting a crouching slavegirl into a pig, or a minotaurador flourishing his cape to bamboozle a razor-horned ape.
Swankily, indeed!
Light streamed through the arched, mullioned windows of Our seclusium, illuminating a thousand motes of dust which Darien's dramatic unveiling released--as if to demonstrate his molekular theory of matter, that all the world was made of minute particles glued together by magnetism, which a strong enough shock could wrench apart. Darien had begged for funds to prove this.
However, We weren't interested in the mikrokosm, only in the makrokosm, as befitted a ruler who must have large concerns.
Darien sketched a bow, drawing back his short green cape.
"Here it is, Hautarch. After much trial and error. After many tests ... It appears to correspond perfectly with the celestial motions."
The gaunt, one-eyed fellow tugged at his greying caprine beard as if he had just remembered some missing component. He squinted, then nodded, reassured. The other eye had been lost to a splash of boiling lead during experiments at transmogrification on behalf of Our treasury. The eyepatch was silver. Visitors to Our court sometimes took Fulque Darien at first for a legendary mutant mage, one of whose eyes was organic and the other crafted of precious metal.
His orrery consisted of several dozen little brass finger-cymbals instantly identifiable as those employed by temple prostitutes during their gyrations to the Spiral Spirit--as well as by less exalted dancing whores in bordellos along the waterfront. We wondered which source of supply Our court savant had used! Darien had erased any sacred or pornographic motifs from those digital percussion discs, and superimposed on each the astrological symbol of a particular world.
Each cymbal was held up in midair by a long, thin, jointed arm which branched from the intricate clockwork of the base. A protective cage enclosed the maze of gears and toothed cogs--the reticulations somewhat blurred the details.
This clockwork was belt-driven so as to dampen vibrations and the motive power occupied an adjoining cage mounted above an alcohol lamp. When the alcohol was lit, a cunning series of little mirrors would focus the lamplight upon the central luminary crystal rising on a slim glass spike in the midst of the array of cymbals--representing our lustrous sapphire sun.
We pointed a stout, ring-clad finger at those mirrors.
"A homage to Our signalling system, Fulque?"
The savant nodded eagerly, and his one-eyed gaze flicked towards the nearby window as if to underscore this subtlety.
Way beyond Our beloved city of Majiriche, hugging both banks of the million-mile river here in the Forever Valley, far beyond the agricultural levels and the forests rising above those, Mount Sinister continued soaring upwards towards its peak at a steady inclination of forty-five degrees. Above the tree-line the slope became snowclad. Above the cloud-line, where the air was so thin, it was stark. Hardly indented by any cols or gullies, the massif cut an almost perfectly straight line through the sky, except where intervening cumulus smudged the view.
Up there on the summit-ridge shone the visual pinpricks of a couple of mirrors--seemingly miniscule yet actually quite sizable.
At the moment those shone steadily. No signals were winking.
It had been one of the culminating triumphs of Our reign to mount those messenger devices upon Mount Sinister, leftward bastion of Our valley, and upon Mount Dexter, the rightward valley wall. My great-grandfather had begun the breeding program to cultivate slaves with barrel-chests and shaggy coats of hair who could breathe in such high regions and avoid hypothermia. How unhappy such persons were in the warmer, thicker atmosphere of the Valley when they descended even as far as the tree-line to collect their supplies of meat and fish and oatcake, which guaranteed their obedience!
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