He thought of calling Ser Perth or Sather Karf, but there was no time
for that, and they could hardly have heard him over the sounds of the
desperate fight going on.
He bent to the floor, searching until he found a ball of the sky
material that had been pinched off when the little opening was sealed.
Further hunting gave him a few bits of dust from the star bits and some
of the junk that had gone into shaping the planets. He brushed in some
dirt from the ground that had been touched by the sun stuff and was
still glowing faintly. He wasn't at all sure of how much he could
extrapolate from what he'd read in the book on Applied Semantics, but he
knew he needed a control--a symbol of the symbol, in this case. It was
crude, but it might serve to represent the orrery.
He clutched it in his hand and touched it against the orrery, trying to
remember the formula for the giving of a true name. He had to improvise,
but he got through a rough version of it, until he came to the end: "I
who created you name you--" What the deuce did he name it? "I name you
Rumpelstilsken and order you to obey me when I call you by your name."
He clutched the blob of material tighter in his hand, mentally trying to
shape an order that wouldn't backfire, as such orders seemed to in the
childhood stories of magic he had learned. Finally his lips whispered
the simplest order he could find.
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