Chapter 78 : Gravity
Evan entered Rotterdam from the east as the sun was going down.
The city had started as a coastal fortress, but the original structure was now just one landmark among many. Rotterdam had grown outward from that castle until it held a permanent population of over three hundred thousand, with a transient population on top of that. No walls enclosed it. The city's nominal lord was the Count of Rotterdam, but real authority rested with the governor appointed by the Kingdom of Cartan. The governor commanded a land force of roughly two thousand: half matchlock infantry, six hundred artillery with a hundred guns of various sizes, and a knight contingent with one Great Knight, ten full Knights, and the usual complement of lower ranks and squires.
The navy made the land forces look modest by comparison. Rotterdam Harbor was a deep-water port divided into a military section and a commercial one. The military harbor held over forty warships carrying close to a thousand guns, five thousand sailors and marines, and two Dragon Warships — each carrying two true dragons, one fore and one aft, with dragon riders to direct them. In combat the dragons rose to altitude and could sink even the largest warship in minutes. The commercial harbor alongside it was busy in the ordinary way of a prosperous port: sails crowding the masts, ships moving in and out on the evening tide.
He came down the King's Boulevard, the city's main commercial street. The road surface was concrete — volcanic ash mixed with quicklime. Trees lined both sides, and the lamps were just being lit by the men whose job it was: fire-cotton oil, burning steadily in glass-fronted fixtures along the footway. The buildings ran two and three stories. The street was still busy despite the hour. Evan exhaled. This was what a city felt like. Rotterdam had light at night, which meant money, and money meant the maritime trade was as significant as its reputation suggested.
Shuang, on his shoulder, had gone completely still in the way of someone whose processing capacity has temporarily exceeded its limit. "Wang. How many lamps are there. How much does this cost."
"This is what a city looks like. The age of great voyages has begun — you can see it just walking down this street."
"What age of great voyages?"
"Humans don't sit still if there's profit on the horizon. Enough of them went to sea that it became something larger than any one of them intended. The continents are being mapped. The world is round — a sphere, a very large one — and eventually it'll all be connected."
"That's impossible. If it's a sphere, the people on the bottom fall off."
"Gravity. Objects attract each other — everything is pulled toward the center of the mass beneath it. That's why we feel weight. That's why things fall. We're held to the surface of this world by that force, whether we think about it or not."
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Someone on the street slowed without quite stopping, something in their posture shifting.
"I don't feel any pull," Shuang said.
"You feel it constantly. It's your body weight. It's the reason dropped things fall downward instead of sideways. You've never had reason to notice it as a distinct phenomenon."
The man who had slowed removed his hat, held it against his chest, and turned toward Evan with a short, respectful bow. "Honored traveler. I'm an alchemist — Josef Newton. I've been working on the philosophical laws of the natural world, and what you just said..." He paused. "Are you a mage?"
"I am. Evan Wang." Evan returned the bow.
"Would you join me for dinner? I don't want to lose this conversation."
"I'd be glad to."
Newton's house was a short walk: a two-story building with a laboratory in the yard behind it. The staff brought roast chicken and bread and poured tea with sugar. After the meal, they talked.
Newton had gotten further than Evan expected. The alchemist Matthiole had already observed inertia, it turned out — that bodies in motion tended to remain in motion, that bodies at rest tended to remain at rest — but he had never formulated it clearly, and no one had followed the thread. Newton had found the same observation independently and was trying to understand what it meant.
"The natural world has laws," Evan said. "They showed up at the edges of Selen-era scholarship, but they were always absorbed into magical theory or alchemical practice rather than treated as their own domain. I think I know why."
"Tell me."
"Mathematics. Natural laws have to be expressed mathematically to be genuinely useful. What everyone's been doing so far is qualitative description — this happens, that follows. But without precise mathematical relationships, you can't predict or build on anything reliably."
Newton stood up. Then, apparently noticing what he'd done, sat back down. "Forgive me. I got excited."
"Don't apologize. That's what the subject deserves."
They talked for another two hours. Shuang fell asleep on Evan's shoulder somewhere in the middle of it. Newton eventually noticed the hour and offered his guest room.
The room had a magic lamp of older design — fire-element core, classical array with a diffusion layer added, the light a warm yellow-red. Evan sat on the bed and took out the jade pendant he had found in the storage ring of the skeleton in the goddess's half-plane — the one he'd had no time to examine properly before. Number five, marked with the character at its corner.
It held a Philosopher's Stone formula. Specifically, a process — the Fulgronki equation, an elegant general framework for alchemical transformation. Twenty-seven specific ingredients followed, all of them common alchemical materials. He wouldn't have identified this pendant as a Philosopher's Stone fragment without the others as reference. At the end of the formula, where the other fragments had described the raw materials, this one showed the finished product: three white birds, conjoined, drawn in careful detail.
He studied it for a while and couldn't determine whether the three birds were a final material, an intermediate stage, or a symbolic representation of something else. His alchemical knowledge wasn't deep enough to resolve it.
He took out paper, made a careful impression of both faces of the pendant, wrote what he understood and what he didn't, sealed the letter with his magical seal, and set it aside for morning. Leonardo Calvin was an alchemical master and already researching the Philosopher's Stone — this was exactly what he needed. He'd promised to send word immediately when he found anything.
He kept his promises.