The Broken Isles by Mark Charan Newton

Author:Mark Charan Newton [Mark Charan Newton]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Fantasy, General
ISBN: 9780230766495
Google: ns0zCl2J3IIC
Amazon: B0089YAJCI
Publisher: Tor
Published: 2012-07-05T00:00:00+00:00

SEVENTEEN

Jeza decided it was time to return to the location where the Mourning Wasp had been discovered. Though she had taken small samples to assess its potential, she alone could not have conducted the complex experiments to take it back to the factory.

She brought Coren and Diggsy with her this time, and they helped her with their sophisticated equipment. The boys cursed the rain that lashed against their faces on the journey there, and cursed the ascent on their skittish horses. But, eventually, in the sanctuary of the cave, they saw what Jeza had found and were astounded – as she had been herself.

As she stared at the remnants of the original Mourning Wasp once again she realized that the find managed to fulfil that need in her life, the thirst for knowledge.

It seemed to fill the void of answers in her own existence.

Like some of the others at the factory, Jeza had grown up without knowing her parents. She told herself she didn’t care about this. She had been lucky, though, and had somehow managed to scrape a decent existence alongside cultists, who had taught her to read, had instilled in her a sense of curiosity.

Jeza felt a strange kinship with these forgotten creatures of the past; and she was determined not to be forgotten. So she wanted to make her mark.

And she would do that through palaeomancy.

Coren laughed a little, pushed a few strands of black hair from his eyes. He walked around, folding his arms around his stocky midriff. ‘I’ll give you this. It’s the best find you’ve made.’

She examined his comments for any traces of sarcasm and then beamed with pride and said, ‘Thanks!’

They unpacked their relics and set to work. They built a frame over the pit using small silver rods, so that after an hour it seemed as if a metallic spider had been at work on some alarmingly brutal web. Once this was in place, she began to attach the necessary wires to a thaumaturge unit, which in reality was no more than a two-feet-square box, but she struggled to lift its weight on her own. Finally, she attached a large glass vial to collect what she liked to tell others was the distilled essence of Time. What was collected was essential to the re-creation phase back in the factory.

They switched on the equipment. Light shot along the wires and the silver metal mesh began to glow purple, illuminating their faces. They stared down on the work in progress. The exoskeleton on the Mourning Wasp began to stutter in and out of existence, then, soon after that, so did the skull.

After the better part of an hour, what remained was a translucent set of remains. This was the bit where she felt guilty, that these beautiful almost-fossilized remains would never be the same again. In the right light, it would seem as if a ghost lay there on the floor. She checked the vial and it had indeed filled up with a murky-looking fluid.

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