Shownotes
And then – and then Bernard saw a violet flash, something that he had never seen before...
A man that has magically travelled from Bernard's future wants to help him avoid his mistakes, but Bernard finds that destiny has a mind of its own.
Part 2 of 2.
Written by: Jonathan Cohen
Narrated by: Joe Cruz
A Faustian Nonsense production.
To read the full transcript for this episode, go to https://thelavendertavern.captivate.fm/episode/the-scrying-eye-part-2
Content warnings: tobacco, alcohol
Transcript
This is Part Two of The Scrying Eye. In Part One, Bernard, a young man with a gift for cooking, is visited by Radolf, claiming to be from his future. Radolf has three ‘testaments’ – proofs, he says that Bernard will be unhappy in life and unhappy in love…unless he does as Radolf says. Bernard becomes a painter and prepares himself to work on the Scrying Eye, a magical device that Radolf had used to project himself back into the past. In the meantime, Bernard falls in love with old-fashioned Kedrin, although if Radolf’s predictions are correct, their relationship is doomed. Kedrin is on the town council, and at an important meeting about the Scrying Eye, a woman from the opposing party has just shot an arrow at Kedrin…
-- And Bernard raced forward without thinking and pushed the woman as hard as he could, as hard as he had thrown the rock in the forest, and she struck the ground. But the arrow still flew through the council chamber and struck a man, and the man fell.
Kedrin, Bernard thought. My heart.
There was a silence as the members drew back from the slain man, and Bernard saw that it was not Kedrin after all. He felt guilty for a moment that he was rejoicing that another man had been killed, but all thought stopped a moment later.
Kedrin, cradling the man, withdrew the arrow from him and held it up. It was split in two.
Men and women crowded around Bernard, thanking him, holding down the woman who had fired the arrow, talking and shaking their heads. He felt surrounded by a great stillness. The dead man – Farah – was the leader of the conservative faction, Bernard knew. It had only been his own intervention which had diverted time’s arrow…
For the split arrow was the same one as the second testament in Radolf’s pouch.
“They want me to take over the conservative faction now that Farah is dead,” Kedrin mused later that night at their home. It was as if he had to keep talking, keep moving to prove to himself that he was yet alive. “But nobody can replace him. We’re going to lose the vote against the Eye.”
Bernard wanted to laugh. The vote! Of course they would lose the vote. The Scrying Eye must be built. His life had been cast in iron from the moment Radolf had come back to him all those years ago. “A failed relationship,” Radolf had said. If time itself could not be changed, how could he ever hope to keep Kedrin?
Nobody blamed Bernard for Farah’s death, and he was encouraged to take some time to himself. Contemplating Radolf and his past made Bernard think of Blayed, his old instructor. He decided to visit the painting academy and talk to her.
A warm spring wind blew through the windows of the painting academy, and Blayed was marching about like a soldier, as always. She was much older and gray, but still as wise and wily as ever. She eyed him with a vinegar expression: “My old student. What prompts you to visit your older tutor?”
He had brought his newer paintings with him, the best ones. They were rolled up and tied with a leather strap, and he took them out and asked her to look at them.
“You’re a respected illustrator,” Blayed said acidly. “Do you still need my approval?”
She sighed and placed the paintings on a table. He watched as she flipped through them, saying nothing. At last, she rolled them up again, tied them off, and gave them back to him.
“It is good that you are not following the latest fashions,” she said. “It must be Kedrin’s influence.” He smiled, pained.
“You capture the events of history well,” she added.
“But?” Bernard asked.
“There is no ‘but.’ You capture the events well.”
“Buuuut,” Bernard said, “my heart is not in it?”
Blayed sighed. “Did you bring a lunch, Master Bernard?” He could not recall her ever calling him Master.
“As a matter of fact, I did,” Bernard said, and drew out from his satchel a small box. He opened it: a riotous combination of colours and textures and scents, spirals of meat and twists of bread, carrot curls and radish roses. With the sauces and colours, it suddenly occurred to Bernard that it resembled nothing so much as an artist’s easel.
Blayed looked at the box and nodded. “You are a competent painter,” she said. “But I do wonder where your heart is.”
Thinking of Kedrin, Bernard wondered the same thing.
“What do you think of The Scrying Eye?” he asked her. The news had finally been announced around town, and discussions were vigorous and intense on both sides. “Will it take away my employ? Will they truly be able to see everything through it?”
Blayed shrugged and drew her cloak closer, and he saw afresh how she had aged. “Your parents’ generation needed painters and illustrators,” she said. “Your generation needs painters and illustrators. The day that a giant Eye tells us that we no longer need painters or illustrators…that is the day when I shall retire.”
He left her standing in the courtyard, a soldier still defending her keep.
Kedrin, with other council representatives, was to visit other nearby towns and request their investment in The Scrying Eye. Their town would provide intelligence and information to the other towns in exchange for the vast sums of gold that would be needed to build it. It all sounded rather circular to Bernard.
“I haven’t been to see my family in some time,” Bernard mentioned to Kedrin. “Would you mind if I stayed in town while you travel?”
“Of course,” Kedrin said, somewhat distant. Bernard suspected that Kedrin felt strange about him having saved his life, but they had never discussed it. Kedrin’s mind was now on the Eye, and the council, and the magistrate’s position. Although they shared meals and a bed, there was a distance that Bernard did not like.
His parents were also older. Tai was a delightful young woman who had not married and did not plan to.
His mother drew him aside that night and spoke to him in hushed tones. “Your father has contracted the forgetting illness,” she said.
Bernard shook his head. “I have been with you and him all day, and I see nothing wrong. He is as he has always been.”
“It takes time for one to see it,” she said, shaking her head. “I tell you that something is wrong.”
After dinner, he left his parents to their usual bickering and wandered through the rooms of the small house, stopping at his father’s easel. It had not been used in months; the paints were dry and cracked.
“An artist is always working,” Bernard remembered his father telling him, and a chill prickled his spine. Am I misinterpreting the signs, he wondered, or does my father truly have the illness?
But he soon forgot about his father, for Kedrin, the council, and the entire city became caught up in the planning, building, and creation of The Scrying Eye.
The town had become a city, and the city now had its project. Everyone in the city was involved – from the builders who constructed the giant building that would house the Eye, to the drafters and designers, to the mages of arcane arts who gave the Eye its power, and even the graduates of the cooking academy, who supplied the builders and drafters and designers and mages with food and drink.
Bernard’s task was to document the progress of the Eye. He sketched as the builders laid down the foundations, the mages scratched symbols and runes in the Eye’s enormous circle of glass, the city alchemist poured the dyes that swirled and ran across the surface of the Eye, and finally a hundred men and women used ropes and pulleys to lift the Eye into place.
The Eye did nothing, and would do nothing, until it was told what to do. One of the mages explained it to Bernard thusly: “If I ask you to cook me a pie, and you have never done so before, you would not be able to cook one. But if I give you a list of steps, very clear and very simple, then you would be able to follow those steps, one at a time in order, and bake a pie. The Eye is similar: It is powerful and can do much, but we must tell it exactly what to do.”
The mages and alchemists could not tell the Eye what to do; there were few in the entire world that had the skill of, as Bernard thought of it, “recipe writing.”
A young man from several towns over was the only person nearby known for his skill at writing such instructions, and the city council spared no expense at sending a messenger with the promise of a great deal of gold. “Some say that they’re going to offer that man more gold than it took to build the Eye,” Kedrin said darkly one night, tamping the contents of his pipe. He’d taken to smoking an aromatic mixture at night, which Bernard thought made him look even older. “But it is only a rumor.”
“I would have thought that the council would have arranged for such an artisan before the Eye was built,” Bernard said as he cleared the dinner dishes in the kitchen. The smell of pipe tobacco – of Kedrin – wafted into the kitchen.
“Such is the power of haste,” Kedrin replied. “Every task is out of step.”
The man with the talent for writing ‘recipes’ came to the city at last, and there was a large crowd assembled to meet him. Bernard had been given the assignment to illustrate the meeting, and he sketched furiously as the hansom cab pulled up and discharged its passenger.
There were rules to sketching an open public event: first, to roughly draw the outlines of the people Bernard already knew. Then, he would focus on the most important person he did not know – this man. But as the door to the hansom cab opened and the man stepped out of it, the charcoal stick fell from Bernard’s hand.
The man was tall and of stocky build; Bernard did not need to hear the mayor speak to know his name. It was Radolf, Radolf after all of these years. He was no longer indistinct; Bernard’s artist’s eye imprinted his blond hair, hazel eyes, sly smile, and thick beard. After a very long moment, he bent down, picked up the stick, and continued to sketch.
There was a long ceremony, with much clapping and huzzahs, and when the people began to disperse, the mayor, a rotund middle-aged man with a red face and long sideburns brought Radolf to Bernard.
“This is Radolf,” the mayor said.
It isn’t necessary, Bernard thought, looking at Radolf. Of course we know each other. We have known each other for years…he has directed my life as surely as an archer directs his arrow.
But Bernard saw no hint of recognition in Radolf’s eyes, and he realized that to Radolf, this was the first time they had met.
“I’m charmed,” Radolf said, and again showed that sly grin.
“You will work together,” the mayor announced as if there was a scribe nearby to take down his pronouncement. “While Radolf prepares the Eye, you will document his work for our town history. And once the Eye is ready, the city will be transformed.”
Transformed, Bernard thought for the first time: transformed into what?
There was little time to think about such things over the next several months. Radolf plunged himself into the work of writing the instructions for the Eye, and Bernard drew Radolf, and the mages and alchemists who helped him, and even the builders who cursed at him.
Radolf walked back and forth, singing, chanting sometimes, muttering to himself and writing strange symbols in chalk on a large slate in the building that housed the Eye.
“What do you think of this?” he would demand of Bernard. And when Bernard admitted he knew nothing of those symbols, Radolf would shake his head. “Does it look correct? Does it feel correct?” And he’d smile his sly smile and clap Bernard on the back, telling him of his wonderful, wondrous work and how much Bernard was helping him.
Radolf would often forget to eat, and his body grew worryingly lean. Bernard, of course, brought his own food to the Eye building, and started forcing bits of it on Radolf, who would grab it out of his hand and eat while muttering about the stars and the sky.
Eventually, Bernard decided that Radolf had to eat, and so he cooked double portions, and brought an extra wooden box with lunches that he gave to Radolf every morning. Radolf said nothing about this, but he dutifully ate the colorful meals on their midday break as they sat on the hill overlooking the far river and beach.
“The Eye grows ready,” Radolf said at one point, gazing off into the distance. “It will see the beach, the river, all the lands beyond. There will be nothing it cannot see.”
He was young, and impetuous, and his enthusiasm and energy made Bernard smile. But then Bernard would come home to Kedrin. The same old dusty Kedrin with his old clothes and old books and pipe tobacco. Spectacles perched on his forehead, shaking his head and grumbling about The Dangers of the Scrying Eye.
Bernard would kiss Kedrin on the cheek and go to the kitchen to make the meals for him and Radolf for the next day. And so the time passed, and though Kedrin held him close at night, Bernard felt more and more distant.
At one point in Radolf’s work, Bernard became useful for more than simply documenting the passage of time. There were images and illustrations that needed to be drawn and then passed beneath the Eye’s gaze. The mages had attempted to do so, but they lacked the skill and precision that Bernard had. After all this time, he had become attuned to Radolf’s way of thought, and so the illustrations were easy to sketch. A thought could pass between Radolf and him without words needing to be spoken.
The days grew shorter and shorter again, and Bernard started spending longer and longer hours at the City Center where the Building of the Eye was now complete. One day, a messenger brought a note from his mother: “Your father is ill. Come quick.”
His father sat in his chair as usual, but he saw nothing and said nothing. Bernard put his hand under his father’s nose to make sure that he still breathed. His father breathed, but did not respond to words, entreaties, touches, or even a gentle slap to the cheek.
His mother stood next to him, arms crossed. He would have expected her to be angry, or upset, but she seemed determined…or resigned. “He has been this way since early this week,” she said at last. “This is the forgetting illness.”
“Have you consulted the healer?” Bernard asked, without hope. The forgetting illness struck few at his father’s age, but it was well-known that there was no cure, and no treatment. Death would follow.
“Charms and amulets,” his mother said bitterly. “I would have been better off buying bread and salt.” She pushed her hands into her pockets and drew out trinkets that must have cost her several gold pieces. She tossed them onto the dirt floor in front of his father. Glittering, they reminded Bernard of the testaments that were still hidden in the buried pouch.
“He is in there somewhere,” she pleaded, “but he sees nothing.” She grasped Bernard’s shoulders. “Can you help him see?”
Bernard returned to the Building of the Eye later, and, viewing the blood-red swirls and symbols of the Scrying Eye, he thought about his father. “Can you help him see?” The Eye could see everything, but surely it could not see wherever his father had gone.
Radolf greeted him with a hearty hug, but as they resumed their work, said less and less. “You are upset,” he commented when Bernard made an error in an illustration and had to scrape the paint from the canvas.
“My father,” Bernard said. They had spoken of his father before, and Radolf knew of the illness that was consuming him. “He does not move, he does not speak.”
“There was a woman in our town, a great scholar. She had the forgetting illness. There was no cure,” Radolf said quietly.
Bernard looked up at the Eye. “He sees. I know he sees something inside himself.” And then: “Could we use the Eye to help him see?”
It was a foolish question, born of hope and despair, and Bernard expected Radolf to discard it. But Radolf stepped forward and looked up at the Eye himself. The moonlight that shone in through the eye cast a dim red light on Radolf. “The Eye is meant to see,” Radolf said. “What was, what is, what is to be. It is not meant to alter…”
A curious look came over his expression. Bernard held his breath. This is the moment where the world changes, he thought, and wondered why he would think such a thing. Radolf was furiously drawing on the slate.
There were new symbols, and new runes, and even the builders had to be recalled to change the shape of one end of the Building of the Eye, though Bernard did not understand why. Thirty days later, Radolf asked him to bring his father to the Eye.
His mother was beyond protest, and she helped his father into the cart that Bernard had hired, riding up front with Bernard.
Bernard had not understood much of how the Eye was to function. He had a vague sense that it would be similar to a telescope, or spectacles. That one would peer through and see, as Radolf said, “What was, what is, and what is to be.”
But Radolf placed Bernard’s father in a chair in the center of the large main room of the Building of the Eye, facing the Eye itself. The Eye was at least a hundred feet up, and it was tilted so that the sunlight shone through into a circle on the floor…where his father sat.
Bernard noticed then that the floor was a checkerboard of black and white, the black squares not black at all, but filled with thousands of dark runes and symbols written on each one. The square where his father’s chair sat was blood-red, an arcane circle drawn around it.
There were large levers that Radolf pulled, and small levers that Radolf flipped, and the light from the Eye grew brighter and brighter. Bernard expected the blood-red color of sunset, but it was the violet of dusk that poured down from the Eye and bathed his father in an unearthly glow. Beside him, his mother gave a strangled cry.
They stood in silence and waited. The silence drew out, became unbearably loud. Every time Bernard thought to ask Radolf if it was working, he looked at his mother and stayed silent.
And at last – at last he heard the raspy voice of his father, like a creaking door that had not been used in a long time. “I see them,” he said, awe in his voice.
“What do you see?” Bernard asked, heart quickening.
“I see the fish…the fish have come back to the river.” His father’s eyes shone with the violet light as he peered into a place where Bernard could not go.
His mother cried,...
