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She brushed by him to enter his rooms without an invitation. One quick glance showed her a small, spare living space, clean and uncluttered. The place of a man who was rarely home or who craved order in at least one corner of his life.
“Not yet,” she said. “But you owe me some explanations.”
Pietro must have given Cody a searching glance as he followed her across the threshold, because she heard Cody say, “I don’t know why we’re here, either.”
She spun around to face Pietro. She had had a few days to consider, and she thought she had come up with a safe way to ask this question. “I met a woman the other day. And it turned out she had this amazing skill. She could take a lump of dirt in her hand and make it glow with light.”
Cody seemed impressed. “Really? I didn’t know anyone but Aussen could do that.”
Pietro closed his eyes. “Ahhhh.” He thought for a moment, nodded, and opened his eyes. “Let’s sit down and talk. Would you like something to drink?”
They gathered around his small table and sipped at a lukewarm beverage that Jayla didn’t like very much. Neither she nor Cody said a word while Pietro appeared to gather his thoughts. She thought he looked noticeably older than he had when they camped out by the bridge. Although that was ridiculous; that had been less than three months ago.
“Of course you know the story of Cordelan,” Pietro began.
“Of course,” she said impatiently.
“But just for context, let me recite it again. The world was a wide expanse of many small islands and land masses, separated by a tempestuous sea. Some of the lands were ruled by Dar and some by Zessaya, and nothing changed for centuries. Until one day Cordelan made himself known to the world. And he said, ‘I will knit together the scattered lands. I will bring water to the desert and stability to the islands and prosperity to the united people.’ And so he stitched the mountains to the midlands, and the desert to the islands, and the city to the larger mass.”
“We know all this,” Jayla said.
Pietro sipped his drink before continuing. “Now, the religious doctrine tells us that Cordelan was, indeed, a deity, though the sacred texts are unclear on why he chose that moment—after eons of silence—to step forward and reshape the world. There are some historical scholars who posit that Cordelan was not a god at all, but a visitor from another world, who had crossed the unimaginable miles of space to land on our planet.”
“Really?” Cody said. He sounded delighted. “I like that!”
Jayla was confused. “Would something like that even be possible?”
“Who knows? But many of the things that seem to be explained by divinity make even more sense if you view them as technology created by people who were advanced enough to travel across the stars.”
“Such as?”
“The power core that drives the city, for one thing. No one truly understands how it works. The story is that Cordelan created that power core after he sewed the continent together. But maybe a visitor from another world took whatever energy source he used to travel here, and buried it beneath the land, and set it up to sustain us for untold generations.”
“That sounds—impossible,” Jayla said.
Pietro shrugged. “More impossible than a god creating the power core by simply waving his hands and willing it to be so? Maybe. I would think advanced technology also would explain how our own world could be so forcefully reconstructed.” He took another sip. “And the theory about a visitor from another planet is attractive for other reasons. Historical artefacts dating back for millennia show that the Chibani and the Maratans and the Oraki people and the islanders—everyone except the Cordelanos—have lived on this world almost since it was formed. But there is no evidence of Cordelanos living here until a thousand years ago.”
“How can you know that?” Jayla objected. “It’s not like you can dig them up and see the color of their skin.”
“The shapes of their skulls are slightly different and they have a particular bend to their index fingers. More than that, we have drawings that have survived since ancient times that we can date with passable accuracy. It’s only about a thousand years ago that Cordelanos appear in any of these pictures. It’s not unreasonable to assume that Cordelan came here with some contingent of others—dozens, maybe hundreds. They settled onto this planet and began intermarrying with the natives. Cordelan himself is supposed to have taken Dar as his wife and fathered ten children with her.”
“I don’t understand what any of this has to do with Aussen. And the trick with the light.”
“I’m getting to that. It’s complicated. Whether you believe Cordelan was an alien visitor or an actual god doesn’t entirely matter, because the rest of the story plays out the same either way. He rearranged the world and he locked the new continent in place with a very peculiar device.”
Cody looked up at that. “You mean, the one we visited under the temple?”
“Exactly.”
“Justtellme,” Jayla said.
“The device is a lever that is tied to the mechanism that holds the pieces of our world together. Every few years that lever must be oiled to keep it functioning. If it is not oiled, the stone walls that surround it move closer to each other—and closer. Eventually they will crush it. And the lever will shatter, and the lock will fail, and the land masses will break apart—probably with a great deal of violence.”
“The quakes,” Jayla said.
“The quakes, indeed. They are a precursor of what could come.”
“So then—the quakes are letting us know that the mechanism needs to be attended to.”
