Agatha H and the Voice of the Castle

Agatha picked up an ornate china cup, held it under a silver spout, and threw a switch. A stream of black liquid sensuously poured out. The aroma that spread had everyone breathing deeply. It was the aroma of fine coffee, redolent with undertones of cinnamon, chocolate, and possibly, a soupçon of diesel oil. But there was more to it than just the aroma itself. Every person who smelled it found themselves remembering a frosty morning or an inn alongside a rain-soaked road or a quiet café in that indeterminate time between night and dawn when the city was just beginning to awaken and one could imagine that you were one of the few people left on Earth. Their mouths filled with the memory of the coffee that they had sipped then and how it was the perfect thing in the perfect place at that perfect time and how it restored one’s faith in one’s own humanity and reaffirmed your place in the world and gave you the strength to go on and do something amazing. Everyone who smelled the aroma that spread from the coffee in Agatha’s hand knew—they knew—that this coffee would be even better.

“It’s ready,” Agatha said brightly.

Carson ran a connoisseur’s eye over the device that loomed over the tables. “Not bad,” he conceded.

Vanamonde raised his head from beneath the table where he’d hidden when Agatha had turned the machine on. He looked like he’d been pole-axed. “But how did she…” He fished a watch from an inner pocket and checked the time. He then held it up to his ear to be sure it was still running. “But it’s impossible!”

Krosp shrugged nonchalantly, though Van noted that the cat had been sequestered under the table right beside him. “Never seen a real Spark in action before, eh, kid?”

Agatha sniffed the cup and then faced the crowd and gave them a small salute. “Well, here’s to Science!”

Instantly Vanamonde was before her, his hand covering the top of the cup. Agatha’s lips stopped millimeters away.

“Wait,” he said, as he deftly slid the cup from her hand. “As your seneschal, I should try this first, my lady.”

He glanced over to his grandfather and muttered quietly, “If regular coffee set her off, who knows what this stuff would do?” He was astonished to see a tear appear in his grandfather’s eye.

“Whatever happens to you, m’boy, try…” the old man said in a shaky voice, “try to remember that I’m so proud of you right now…”

Van blinked and examined the no-longer-quite-so-tempting cup in his hand. For form’s sake, he gave it a delicate sniff. “Excellent aroma.” He looked up and saw that everyone was watching him closely. With a feeling of trepidation, he took a delicate sip—

Light. Pure golden light burst upon his consciousness. The light one gets from a glorious clear sunrise at ten thousand meters in the sky with the fresh wind in your face. There was music—enlightening music—that filled his frame and made him want to dance and synchronize himself to its rhythms like a glorious symphony set to the tick of a metronome in tune with all of existence that gathered you in and showed you your place in the universe and how astonishing that it existed at all and how much more wondrous it was that you were there to appreciate its existence and realize that you were a part of it and that there was work to be done to make everything better and that you had an important part to play and that this was how it should be and you knew that nothing would ever be the same again because you now knew that the world and everything in it, all its glories and foibles, its madmen and saints, its agonies and its ecstasies, were necessary and that what we called “life” was how one surfed the edge of creation and that it was a glorious game and you were as good a player as anyone else and thus this moment and everything in it was—