Ru felt neither excited nor afraid. She felt… right. Correct. As if there were no alternatives; everything converged on this moment.
“Well?” said Lady Maryn. “What do you think?”
Ru squinted, lifting a hand to block the sun’s glare. Eventually, her eyes adjusted, cutting through the shadows, and she saw it.
“I think it’s a fossilized head,” came another voice.
“Shush,” said a third.
But she ignored them, gazing silently at the thing. It lay quietly, almost the exact color of the earth around it: a black rock. As her eyes adjusted further, she saw that it wasn’t quite the same. It was darker, more pure. A rich, smooth black, like obsidian. It was slightly misshapen, quite small, maybe the size of a man’s fist, with no sharp edges. Obviously not a fossilized head.
It called to her and she wanted to answer. She yearned to jump into the hole and touch it. To hold it to her chest, run her fingers along its curves. Some unknown part of her understood now that her distance from the object had been causing her nausea, the pain in her head. As if it needed her to meet it at just the right moment, to gaze upon it at some pre-arranged time.
Now that she was here, there was only a gentle touch against her thoughts. And while it seemed tethered to her in some way, anchored to the base of her consciousness, the pull was no longer sharp and needy. It was unsettlingly... comforting.
I found it, she thought.At last. But there was no further realization, nothing to explain what it was, or where these feelings came from.
Ru shook her head, squeezing her eyes shut as if to dislodge an unwelcome thought. This thing had to be magic. It had to be. These thoughts, as if fate had drawn her here, as if a rock were speaking to her? It didn't make sense. Nothing had made sense since that morning when the Shattered City came into view.
“Well?” Lady Maryn said for the third time, her tone impatient. She came forward to crouch beside Ru, fixing her with a stern gaze. “You’ve been peering at the thing for five minutes without speaking a word.”
“Sorry,” muttered Ru. In fits and starts, she became more clearly aware of where she was, and pulled her attention away from the stone to focus on her surroundings. But fiveminutes? It had felt like five seconds. A brief moment of connection with an inanimate artifact. “I’ve never seen anything like it, Lady Maryn.”
She wanted to call it beautiful, but bit her tongue. It should be terrifying. A strange artifact uncovered in the Shattered City, a stone that seemed to reach into Ru’s thoughts and feelings, affecting her psyche with disturbing ease. Itshouldbe terror incarnate.
Then why couldn’t she tear her gaze from it?
“We’ve all read your paper on magic,” said Lady Maryn, matter-of-fact. “Made a point of it. We have a theory about the air around this thing. The particles, you might say. It made our technology go haywire.” She paused, pulling a watch from her waistcoat pocket and flipping it open with a metallicping. “Only… it seems to have stopped, now you're here.”
Ru didn’t want to delve into what that might mean. Not now, anyway. Turning to face Lady Maryn head-on, she blinked at the change in brightness. “Have you noticed any other properties that might suggest magic? An inexplicable pull, for instance. Or an inner voice.”
Lady Maryn shook her head, a wrinkle forming on her brow. “Nothing like that. Why?”
“Trying to narrow it down,” Ru said vaguely. Then she was the only one who felt so intensely when she was near the artifact, the only one who felt… drawn to it. Her stomach tightened. She glanced over her shoulder at the gathered researchers, watching and listening intently. Tents shuddered in the breeze. “The artifact could have been emitting a kind of frequency,” she said, low enough so that only Lady Maryn could hear. She sat back on her heels and wiped her hands on her trousers. “That could explain any clockwork mechanisms acting strange.”
Lady Maryn nodded, listening, brows drawn together. “I’ve never seen or heard of anything like it before,” she said at last. “And my people don't like it. Other than its effect on our devices, there’s definitely something about it. Something beyond our experience, something…”
“Magic?” Ru finished, raising a dark eyebrow.
Lady Maryn nodded, a dip of the chin. “So we asked for an expert.”
Ru gnawed at the inside of her lip. “And the Lady Regent,” she said, “she agreed to this? She read my paper?” It was difficult to stay focused on the conversation. The stone was so near, and even though she did her best to ignore it, she could feel its pull against the edges of her mind, as if waiting for something. As if she were tethered to it, from mind to stone.
“Apparently so,” Lady Maryn replied, pushing a loose piece of hair behind her ear with distracted impatience. “Although I'm told the regent's advisor brought it to her attention. He’s a man of science. Everyone is these days. Beyond that, we’re all in the dark.”
She coughed suddenly and stood, offering a hand to Ru. “Well, you’ve seen the thing now. We’ll set it up for a proper inspection, if you don’t believe it will cause us any harm to do so. And in the meantime, you and I will lunch.”
Ru allowed the other woman to help her to her feet, stumbling slightly, her legs partially numb after crouching for so long. The researchers were beginning to peel away in small groups now, seeing that Ru was finished with her initial assessment. Yet they hovered outside their tents, eyes still catching on Ru, making her uneasy.
She didn’t like being the expert. She wasn’t used to being the center of attention. The strangeness of it rankled. Despite everything the riders and Lady Maryn had said, the reassurances, the summons from the regent herself, it all felt precarious, unreal. As if a stiff wind could come and blow it all away, revealing Ru to be the laughingstock she truly was.
Yet the feeling she’d had at the edge of the darkness, gazing down at that smooth black stone… had it been real? A touch against her mind told her that it had.
A pair of researchers approached carrying tongs, digging tools, a rolled-up blanket, and a small woven basket.
“Ah,” said Lady Maryn, “good. Get the artifact out of its hole and safely inside. Miss Delara will conduct her inspection after she’s fed and rested. If it’s safe to do so, that is.”
“I don’t think moving it will harm anything,” said Ru. “It doesn’t appear volatile. But use caution.”
