Free Of Machines & Magics by Adele Abbot Page A

brighter but smaller—now just peering over the south western end of the valley. Dressed stone replaced rough-hewn logs, colored glass and delicately carved mullions shone with the quivering light of candles.
    They walked on, into the village. Most of the changed buildings were low: one and two stories with high pitched roofs of red terra-cotta tiles. There were several taller structures though, tall and narrow, towers with many stories and tiny windows, masts rose from the tops with long gauzy pennons flapping and wriggling in a make-believe breeze.
    At the center was a small plaza bordered with low box hedges. The open area was paved with smooth mosaics depicting knights mounted on unlikely looking animals and engaged in some sort of dual with long curved swords. Coy maidens looked on from the side lines.
    “I am tempted,” Calistrope said, “to believe I have reached some kind of latter day heaven, that I have left Old Earth entirely.”
    Ponderos was already touching finger tips to the stonework around them, rubbing them and feeling the dust between his fingers, tasting it. “This is all marble,” he said.
    “That’s what it looks like,” Calistrope agreed.
    “But it’s real,” he said. “Real. Not an illusion, glamour.”
    Calistrope looked about him at the many different colors of marble: red and green, pink and blue and white with here and there black or silver tracery weaving its way like lace through the mottled colors of the stone. Windows and doors were tall and narrow with high-arched lintels, they were lined with glazed tiles showing leaves and flowers and abstract designs. Roof lines were bordered with tessellated patterns garnished with colored stones and glasses.
    A scene from a story book, a fantasy.
    “Magic?” asked Calistrope.
    “Magic?” Ponderos wrinkled his brow. “We have detected no magic since departing the Raftman’s Ease,” he drew a long breath through his nose, repeated the exercise and raised his eyebrows. “A trace maybe. Just a trace.”
    Calistrope followed suit and nodded. “A trace.”
    Roli, ignoring the interchange, put his own point. “I want to know where everybody is. No sounds, no cooking smells, no people. Where are they?”
    Calistrope shrugged. “It looks well kept, someone must sweep the paths and clear away weeds.” Three pathways converged upon the square, the one which they had followed back from the wasps’ nest, one on the northern side and a third on the western side. Calistrope nodded to the north side where the alley led between a saddlery and a baker’s shop—the latter with still-warm ovens and fresh bread on the shelves. Both contributed a redolence to the air, one pungent, the other piquant. “The village is empty. Shall we try down there? It must lead down to the river.”
    The lane took them to the rear of the shops which fronted the square. Behind these were high blank walls enclosing silent courtyards where fruit trees lifted boughs over the walls, boughs laden with apricots and apples and dark rich plums.
    “It seems darker,” said Roli, turning a full circle as he walked. “Look at the sun, it’s almost gone and the stars are brighter.”
    “That’s remarkable,” Calistrope stopped and looked at the last fragment of the yellow sun shining between jagged escarpments. “Does the world turn again?”
    “Has the world returned to its old orbit?” Ponderos added. “If so, it saves us going any farther on our journey,” he sighed. “However, I suspect after all, that magic is responsible.”
    “Perhaps but it is a spell that I have never come across before.”
    The lane wound between two of the secretive dwellings and out on to the level ground beside the river and here was a vast tent pitched upon the grassy expanse. Scores of animal pelts had been stitched together to make the canopy which was supported on a multitude of poles and drawn taught with hundreds of guy ropes pegged into the ground.
    The side nearest to them was