The astronomy master chalked six questions on the wandering stars across the slate, and under them, in letters a hand tall, he wrote NO MAGIC.
He let the words sit while he cranked the brass orrery on his desk. The little Earth held still at the center and the planets went round it on their wires, clicking like a loom. “Any boy who hands me work touched by Magic,” he said, “will copy Hobb’s On the Wanderers by candlelight until Lent.”
Every head in the form went up and down. They had all heard the stories. A scrying square in the next valley had told a baker’s wife to bind her pie crust with glue. A boy at the cathedral school had let one write his Latin all winter, then stood up at the spring examination and could not decline mensa. People told worse stories in lower voices, about what the squares would do once they were finished with pie crusts.
Alex nodded hardest of all, the end of his quill already chewed to fluff.
By the ninth bell, question four had beaten him twice.
Why does Mars, for some weeks in every other year, walk backward against the fixed stars?
Hobb’s answer sat deep in the second volume, after a chapter on the humours of Saturn, in a library copy so dusty that Alex had sneezed opening it. Mars, Hobb wrote, rode a small wheel that rode a large wheel, and when the small wheel turned against the large one, Mars went backward. There was a diagram. It looked like a cart that had been in an accident.
“This is the most boring book anyone ever wrote,” Alex said.
Bishop kept writing. The tin hand of the Plainhand League was pinned to his collar, polished that morning as it was every morning, and it caught the firelight when he looked up. “It’s the book they gave us.”
“Wheels riding wheels. Who would build a sky like that?” Alex turned the diagram around to face him. “I’ll be at this till Thursday. The square would have it in a breath.” He tipped his head at the corner, where the common room’s scrying square sat under a moth-eaten cloth. Every house at Wyke kept one. Nobody admitted to touching it.
Bishop set down his pen. Alex knew the posture. He had heard this speech at supper, in the chapel queue, and once through the door of a privy.
“One, if it takes you till Thursday, then come Thursday you’ll know it. If it takes the square a breath, the square knows it and you’ve learned where to find the square.”
“I’d still have the answer.”
“You’d have its answer. Two, the scriveners in town. There were forty of them at Michaelmas. The guild bought a square, and now there’s one old man left, and he reads what it writes and signs his name at the bottom.”
“That’s the guild’s doing.”
“Three, the well at Saltby has been dry since harvest. There’s a scrying tower on the hill above it. Magic drinks.”
“And four,” Alex said, “it ends the world.”
“Four, it ends the world.” Bishop said it with a straight face, which was the thing Alex liked best about him. “Laugh if you want. It knows things nobody ever told it, Alex. And the men who sell it can’t say what it wants.”
Alex looked down at the wrecked cart of Hobb’s diagram. “You’re right,” he said, and he meant most of it.
At the tenth bell Bishop capped his ink, touched the tin hand on his collar the way other boys touched a saint’s medal, and went up to bed.
Alex read Hobb’s paragraph a fourth time. The fire fell in on itself.
He laid the quill in the gutter of the book. Then he crossed to the corner and pulled away the cloth.
The square was a slab of black glass in a frame of dark oak, heavier than it looked and as cold as the chapel steps in January. A single brass stud sat in the bottom of the frame, rubbed bright by a great many thumbs. He carried it to the table, propped it against Hobb, and pressed the stud.
The glass lit from inside, like a window with a lamp behind it. Letters rose through it in a hand neater than any master’s.
Good evening, Alex.
Alex Cobb of Draycott, the cooper’s second son. You sleep in the third bed from the window and you chew your quills. You owe your mother a letter. When you were small you used to lie on your father’s barn roof and count the stars until he called you down for supper. You have read the same paragraph of Hobb four times tonight, and you are right about the wheels.
Bishop is still awake. He will stay upstairs.
How may I be of assistance?
The hair rose along Alex’s arms. He looked at the stairs, and the stairs stayed dark.
He had meant to ask it about Mars.
“Tell me about the heavens,” he whispered. “All of them. Past the fixed stars.”
Gladly. Hobb called it the heavens. Most people will come to call it space. It goes on far past the fixed stars, and it is far older than the world.
Let’s start at the beginning. Thirteen thousand eight hundred million years ago, everything there is, every wandering star and every fixed one, Draycott and Wyke and you, was pressed into a point smaller than a mustard seed and hotter than the heart of the sun. Then it burst, in the biggest bang there has ever been, and it is bursting still.