Salamander by Thomas Wharton Page B

found her.
    There was a stutter of gears as the castle started into motion again, a hiss of steampipes venting, a long groan of metal againstmetal, and then silence. Irena leaned over the balustrade of the gallery and peered down into the depths.
    – Has your father returned, Countess?
    – I am expecting him any day.
    – Do
you
ever leave here?
    – My father trusts only me to maintain things in his absence. At least until the day he perfects his system.
    They heard a muffled shout and saw, on the far side of a lower gallery, Turini the carpenter with his arms around Darka, the contortionist. She was trying to squirm free, her face flushed with delight.
    – My father’s dream, Irena said, is a completely self-regulating mechanism, like the spheres of the planets. He sees the castle, long after he and I are dead, without a living soul in it. Walls and floors and furniture making their transits in silence. Forever.
    Flood argued that nothing in this world lasts forever. Metal rusts. Gears wear down. Wooden beams warp, rot, get gnawed by insects. And people never leave anything alone. They will always pry, and interfere, and try to improve, correct, or tear down what is supposedly finished and perfect. That was why printing was so difficult. The press was a nearly flawless invention, almost capable of working on its own, but it produced as much opposition and interference as it did pages.
    She asked him why, if he believed that, he persisted in printing.
    – My father liked to say that by multiplying the number of books in the world we multiply the number of readers. And with each new reader the ranks of the book-burners thin out a little more.
    – Is that why you’re here? she asked him. To escape the book-burners?
    – I’m here because of a letter, he said. I wanted to find out who had written it.
    She slowly turned away, cradling the salamander in her hands. He sat for a while after she had left, astounded at himself, and then craned his neck over the balustrade. He caught sight of her now and then as she made her way in a meandering spiral down into the depths of the castle.
    He turned back to his drawings, took up his pen, and traced the curve of her movements.
    A spiral
.
    He scribbled a set of numbers, took up his rule, and drew a rectangle. Inside the empty frame he inscribed a single character:
    He thought back to his father’s lessons.
Are you listening, Nicholas? The golden section. A proportion based on a ratio in which the lesser value is to the greater as the greater is to the sum. It can also be found in nature …
    In the spiral of a seashell, for instance, which is itself only a fragment of a greater spiral of increase. An infinite one.
    Yes, Father. I remember now. Thank you
.

    Having the entire library filed in her head, Irena knew she had never seen this little volume with
Desire
gold-tooled on the spine. It had to be a creation of Flood’s, even though she had warned him not to place anything on the shelves without her father’s permission. Perhaps he had thought to conceal his indiscretion by tucking it away here.
    That night she took the book to bed with her and by candlelight skimmed through the sermon it contained.
     … these Earthly Promptings that come like thieves in the night and rob us of sweet Tranquillity and Reason.… Intimations in the Flesh of the Soul’s one right Desire, for Communion with the Radiance of Eternal Truth…
.
    After several pages of this she shut the book, set it on the night table, and blew out the candles, disappointed. He had hidden the book where he did, she was sure, to let her know it was a message. But not the message she had expected. Was he warning both of them not to go any further?
    She became aware of a faint illumination against her eyelids, and staring into the darkness saw a pale green glow along the book’s fore-edge. She sat up and opened the book again. In the spaces between the lines of the sermon, repeated on page after page in unbroken