Page 8 of Elemental Truth (Mysterious Fields #3)
8
OCTOBER 24TH AT THE FOUR METALS IN TRELLECH
V itus had something of a headache, but he’d been determined to make it tonight. He’d hoped to see Thessaly yesterday, but she’d sent a note saying she wasn’t feeling well. That, he worried about, far above and beyond his own discomfort. She’d asked if he’d make himself free the evening of the thirty-first. There were family traditions she’d like company for, the sort that took all night. He was hanging onto that.
In between now and then, he was going to be busy. He had appointments with two potential clients tomorrow, both in the afternoon. He had three more the following week, and he’d have to find time to look for specific stones before two of them. And he was working on half a dozen routine pieces. Some were intended for sale from Niobe’s workshop, some were to begin to build up stock for himself, examples of the range of his work.
He’d taken time tonight to come out to the Four Metals clubhouse for conversation, though. The lecture from Wednesday night still had Vitus thinking, and he could use some help sorting out what he thought. Now, he let the chat around him flow through his ears, half-listening to see what caught his attention.
“Something to nibble on, Vitus?” Someone nudged a plate of finger food onto the table next to him. He looked up to see Philemon Hollington. He’d got to know Philemon better over the last two and a half months, working together on their exploratory research. It hadn’t produced particular results yet, but they’d made some progress. And they’d only had three more meetings in that time, which was not precise enough to solve a complicated problem.
“Thank you, Philemon.” Vitus made sure to smile, even though he was still distracted by his thoughts. Philemon claimed the chair next to Vitus, stretching out his legs. Vitus glanced over. “You waiting for someone?”
“Daedalus said he’d be along, and I had a question. Were you at the lecture last night?” Philemon reached out, taking a bit of cheese applied to a cracker.
“I was. I followed maybe half of it.” Vitus looked up to see Thirza Remmerton come in, and she took the chair opposite, making a nice little conversation group. “Are we somehow expecting Merryn or Amayas as well? I wasn’t thinking to see either of you tonight.”
“We must maintain a reputation for unpredictability,” Thirza said cheerfully enough. “We suspected you’d be here. You often are on a Thursday.”
He had settled into that habit, hadn’t he? Wednesday and Friday he went to the lectures and then here or out to a pub to talk about it after. Thursday he was often here, some Saturdays he was doing exploratory work with the five of them. Sundays were at home, so he could see Lucas. Monday or Tuesday was for Thessaly. Though if she asked, he’d make whatever nights she wished available for her. “Not next week, though.”
“Plans?” Thirza nodded at one of the staff, who’d brought her a drink and a plate with a sandwich of some kind.
“All Hallows.” Vitus hesitated, glancing around to see who else was within earshot. “Thessaly asked if I’d join her for her own remembrance.”
“Ah.” Thirza let out a soft sigh. “I’m glad to know she’s planning on it. Have you told her about the Four Metals, or about our own customs there?”
Vitus shook his head. “Not either. I might well next week. It hasn’t been the right moment. I know she’s going to the family estate in the afternoon, whatever they do there.”
“Metaia told me a little about their customs. Reflective, more than anything else, quiet. Not raucous, but not walling themselves away from the emotion, either. A bonfire’s customary, if there’s space for one, if that is any help in what you want to bring.”
“It is, thank you.” Before Vitus could say more, there was the sound of two others coming in. Vitus glanced over his shoulder to find Daedalus Briggs and a woman he didn’t know. She was dressed in a plain blue dress, a harder-wearing cotton than Thirza’s gown.
“Vitus, I don’t think you know Claire Weatherby. She also has an interest in machinery, steam engines in particular, but other applications as well.” Daedalus waved a hand and took half the sofa across from them. “What were we discussing?”
“I’m Vitus Deschamps. Talisman maker. Pleased to meet you.” Daedalus could not be trusted to do thorough introductions.
Thirza snorted. “And we were waiting for you, for our topic, so there we are.” She waited a moment, then went on. “We had a question for you and also Claire, Daedalus thought you might have some thoughts. We’ve been doing some work on circuits and systems, using magical principles but drawing from some of the work on electricity. Daedalus thought you might be interested?”
Claire shrugged. “Possibly. What sort of thing were you working on?”
There was a pause and Vitus realised they were waiting on him. “The thing I was thinking about yesterday was about the interactions. That bit about a Faraday cage. I’ve come across it in reading, but I don’t quite understand it.”
Claire and Daedalus both began talking at once, and Daedalus laughed and gestured. “Guests first.”
“Certainly not a lady,” Claire said, though in fairly good humour. She added to Vitus and the others, her tone explanatory, not defensive. “I went to Dunwich, my father’s a train engineer. That’s how I got interested in steam engines. The Four Metals brought me in during my apprenticeship.” That explained a fair bit, from the accent to her clothing. “You’ve been doing some work with the flow of electricity, all right, where I do I start? You understand that electricity flows through wires, or whatever material, but that it also creates fields around it, yes? Actions we can only see by the movement of things in the field.”
All of them nodded, though Vitus thought he was one of the more confident about the effect.
Claire went on. “A Faraday cage - named for Michael Faraday - allows you to block those fields. The demonstration last night, of placing an item, with some light metal trailing from it, near a generator, and then repeating the experiment with the cage.”
Philemon cleared his throat. “Why would you care about that?”
“Well, for one thing, if you have sensitive materials you want to protect from those fields, you could keep them in a space that would not be affected by them. You can make them whatever size you can get the materials for. It was the size of a breadbox last night. But if you can get the mesh, you could make an entire room like that. Sometimes it’s, oh, half a room, so you have space to generate the fields, but also space where they are blocked. And of course, if they are coming from a generator, you have control over when the fields are in play.”
“And you might also not want to be standing in a room generating a field - it’d be like standing outside in a storm,” Thirza said.
“Exactly. But if you can set up a switch so you can pull a cord or some such. Then you can turn it on and off. Or you have a generator controlled by someone on the other side of the wall, or— well, there are various setups possible.”
Vitus frowned, trying to remember something, and he lost track of the conversation for a sentence or three. Then everything went silent, and he looked up, blinking owlishly.
“Where did we lose you, Vitus?” Thirza didn’t sound upset. Rather, she sounded curious.
“I was trying to remember something. Can I run something by you, Claire? From first principles?”
“Certainly.” Claire leaned back, then paused to snag some of the food from Daedalus’s plate. They were obviously comfortable with each other. He guessed probably not romantically involved, but Vitus wasn’t sure, and besides, that was not the question of the moment.
“A while back, I’d have to check my notes at home, but at the end of May, the beginning of June?” He considered. No, he’d seen Thessaly on the first of June at the Temple of Healing garden party. The conversation had been just before. “End of May. I overheard a conversation at the Stream— Salmon House club.” He added the last for Claire’s benefit.
“I know people there. I’ve been inside, even. Very yellow, and those curtains! The paisley is an insult to the eyes.” Claire took it in good humour at least. “And?”
“Four people, all a bit older than me, were doing work on a project. I don’t think they’ve published yet. I was keeping an eye out, but I can check. Olivia and Oscar Hemmings, they’re twins, and, um.” He fumbled for the other two names. “Marius Collins and Aline Holder. A mix of skills, Holder does enchantments, I’ve talked to her a few more times since. They were working on a device to detect poisons in the water from industrial processes, the kind of thing that damages the land. Terribly useful, if they can get it to work reliably.”
The inhale of breath around their circle of chairs made it clear everyone else had figured that out as well. “And?” Philemon was leaning forward, listening intently.
“Their trials had been going smoothly,” Vitus said. “But they’d just come back from a day of readings, and they’d had problems. They’d already tested in Sheffield, where there were plenty of factories, in London, on Schola island, so they had data from a range of points.”
“And ranges of magic, quite.” Thirza was frowning.
“Anyway, I’d have to check where they’d been working.” Vitus knew, he remembered, but he didn’t want to say it out loud, not without thinking through the consequences. Not without talking to Thessaly about it, either. She might have a number of more thoughts. They’d been out near Arundel, that was the thing. “Anyway, their readings were all over the place. I thought at the time it might be something about the geology, but could a Faraday cage or something like it have caused the same sort of effect?”
“What do you remember about what they said?” Claire was looking entirely thoughtful.
“They said they went haywire. I wondered if it could be a portal opening nearby right as they were testing, but I don’t know.”
“I suppose it could be something like that,” Claire said. “It would be a subsidiary effect, something in a chain. You make the cage around the thing you’re protecting, after all, and if they were out on open ground, it couldn’t be a cage. But if someone were exploring the concept and were doing things outside the cage to test the effects in the cage? I suppose. Especially if it’s magic and not electricity. Electricity wants to find a ground, fundamentally, even if what it chooses is dangerous. Magic will pool and wander and do any number of other things instead.”
Vitus nodded. “Should I see about getting in touch with them? The Hemmings, in particular, that kind of problem solving is a lot of what they do, informally or more formally.”
“If it’s not a bother.” Thirza was the eldest of them, most senior, though she and Merryn had been sharing some of the organisational responsibility between them. “I’m curious now. And it’s possible the Hemmings or someone they know might have ideas for our project. I’m not opposed to bringing a couple more people in, or at least sharing. Whatever applications we want to take away from it will be individual in our respective fields. We don’t need to hoard the understanding.”
Vitus considered that. “You think that the individual quality we bring, as crafters, as specialists, makes a monopoly on the basic idea foolish?”
“Just so,” Thirza said, pleased. “And after all, the Four Metals want to share how to do more things. And that goes well enough with Salmon House, I would think.”
“Does Seal hoard information?” Vitus said, cheerfully, knowing her own house.
“Seal likes our secrets, but we share the ones that it makes sense to share. And this isn’t a secret, it’s practices we haven’t worked out yet.” She shrugged. “Vitus, if you’d be willing, gathering more information would be a help. And we can certainly run to treating them to a meal somewhere for a discussion, if that’s a lure.”
“I’ll ask. And check my notes.” Vitus said. “It might be a little, what with, well.” All Hallows or whatever other obligations people might have, it was one of those fortnights when people were busy or recovering from the strain of it.
“Oh, that’s fine. Sometime in November would do, I think, quite nicely.” Thirza nodded. “Claire, can we go back to what you were saying about linking engines together?”
That conversation was also of interest to their work, but was much less unsettling to Vitus. He mostly let the others talk, asking a question here or there. By the time they wrapped up, he’d eaten all of his supper. And he had several pages of notes and further references to explore. Mostly, he was still thinking about whether there was anything at Arundel that was acting like a Faraday cage.