THE
ILLUMINATION
PARADOX
Series
Soleil
Book Three
by
Jacqueline Garlick
SOLEIL: A Steampunk Fantasy, a novel, 1st edition: July 2016
Published by Amazemo Books, Ontario, Canada
Copyright © 2016 by Jacqueline E. Garlick
Cover Art copyright © Kevin C.W. Wong & Mae I Design and Photography
Interior Design by Quantum Formatting Service
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except for purposes of promotion by the media, not to exceed 10% of the content.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events and/or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Prologue
Eyelet – Age Five
WE DESCEND THE ALABASTER staircase into the marrow of the tallest bone, my hand clasped firmly inside of father’s, him dragging me along.
Bones. That’s what I call the buildings where my father works, because of the way they stick out of the earth—all smooth and white and jagged, like a body has come up out of the ground.
“Why are we in such a hurry, Father?” I squeeze his hand, the hard soles of my boots slipping on the wet stone steps.
He doesn’t answer, just continues hurrying down a second flight of stairs, deeper into the dark belly of the Academy.
Father’s never in a hurry. I try not to be afraid.
“Where are we going?”
“To the laboratory.”
He doesn’t look at me. Instead, his eyes search the adjacent hallways, before he yanks me across the landing and down another set of stairs. My arm hurts from being tugged.
“Why are we going there?”
“Because…” Father frowns down at my tiny pengulan boots clapping loudly—leather clapping granite—as I struggle to keep up. “I’ve something very special to show you.”
We reach the bottom step, and at last he hesitates.
“What is it?” I ask, tipping up on my toes. He releases me, and I clasp my hands in excitement. “Is it the space airship? Are you finally finished it?” My eyes dance over him.
I’ve waited so long.
Father promised me the first ride in it as soon as he was finished. It’s supposed to take me back to the day I was born, so he can take a picture of my brain and fix the problem.
My brain does not work like others. From time to time, it short-circuits, sending me spiralling into faraway universes, and I take a long time to return. I hate those universes. They’re dark and they frighten me. They make my body twitch.
Worst of all, they frighten Mother.
Sometimes they even make her weep.
Father says nothing, just leans out and checks the hallway twice, pulling me from the last step, tugging me up the hallway.
I try, but I can’t keep up.
He rounds a sharp corner and scoops me up into his arms. My feet no longer touch the ground. He jogs the final few strides, stopping in front of a giant cast-iron door.
“Here we are.” He places me down and pulls a piece of paper from his pocket. Hands shaking, he turns the lock. Turbines tumble as he dials it backward, forward, and back again, my heart starting and stopping as he does so.
At last a tiny bell clinks.
The sound echoes throughout the silent hallway.
I turn to follow it, afraid of where the sound has gone.
The handle on the door whirs then shifts mysteriously downward, cranking magically open. Father snaps to one side, to avoid getting caught up in the door’s sudden sweep, then bolts swiftly through it, as though if we don’t pass through the slim opening at this very moment, the moment will evaporate.
The door slams shut behind us on its own, causing me to jump. The heart dropping clunk gyrates through me as I take in the dark, dark room.
It’s cold and smells like a too-still stream.
I shiver inside its silence.
Father reaches up and strikes a match. The smell of pinched phosphorous nips at my nose. The lone aether-fueled, incandescent bulb swinging on a cord above my father’s head blooms slowly, flickering and crackling, then finally glows. The hairs on the back of my neck sizzle as the tiny filament inside the bulb dances.
Inside the tiny cone of light, I can finally see the room. It is large with smooth stone walls and rough stone floors. Wooden shelves line the walls, lined with scientific apparatus and other junk—bits of this and that, hoses, tubing, glass beakers, clamps, gadgets, and wire. In the corner, something silver glints like fairy dust inside a brass-topped cylinder.
Father whirls on his heel and bolts the door. He wears a worried expression. He casts his overcoat aside then lands bent-kneed beside me, making his impossibly tall body shrink to my tiny height, his eyes wide and playful. “You remember how much I like to play hide-and-seek?” He holds my hand in his.
“Yes.” I nod, eager to hear more.
“Well…” He checks behind him then looks back. His anxious brows soften. He rakes a swath of sweaty hair from his eyes. “Right now, you and I are part of a game, only neither of us are it,” he whispers carefully, looking around.
“You mean someone else is?”
“That’s right.”
He fixes his tie and I help him with it. “Who?” I grin.
“Well, that’s just it. We don’t know.” He curls my hair around my ear. “We mustn’t let him find us, isn’t that right?”
“Of course not.” I shake my head. “Then we’d lose.”
“Right.” Then he takes both my hands in his and presses them together. “So we must be very, very quiet, no matter what happens.” He stares deep into my eyes.
“No matter what happens.” I pull my hands back and cross myself.
“Good.” He nods and snaps to an unexpected stand.
My heart startles. It whirls in my chest as he stalks about the room, gathering supplies, clinking jars of silver dust, and sparking filament ends.
“Are you ready?” he says.
“For what?”
Father’s eyes slide from me to the curtain divider hanging across the back of the room. A sly smile creeps over his lips.
I follow his gaze. The hem on the curtain is badly frayed, like something has singed it. I look back at him, forlorn, and then it dawns on me. “You mean?”
Father darts his brows at me. “He can’t find you if you’re away in a space airship, now can he?”
My eyes stretch bug wide. I fling my hands together in a soft clap. “Really?”
Father nods.
“Ready, Captain.” I salute him, bringing my heels together with a clack.
“Excellent.” Father walks to the shelf that held the jars and reaches for a button hanging down from a wire attached to the ceiling. He yanks on it, and the wire extends. He smiles and depresses the button.
The room hums. The curtains vibrate. The sound and movement sputter throughout my body. The curtain pushes toward us on a billowing surge of wind, and I suppress the urge to run and hide behind him.
Father races over to the curtain as if some invisible force has sucked him there. He peels back the velvet fluttering cloth, revealing a swell of dark smoke that slowly, frightfully, clears.
A single steambulb chugs slowly to life, illuminating the dim space. The silhouette of an enormous wooden cabinet appears below it. It stands the full height of the room. Massive glass doors, fastened on with br
ight copper hinges, take up the top half of the cabinet. The inside of the glass is trimmed in lead, just like the walls of our apartment back at the castle. A pair of big brass bolts stick out from the front of the wooden cabinet’s frame on either side. On the ends of the bolts sit two brass cannon balls. Or at least, that’s what they look like to me.
Inside the glass and lead cabinet, two gigantic plates spin—big enough for Alice, after she drank the forbidden potion and became a giant. Plates big enough to be used at the Mad Hatter’s tea party.
I stare at the spinning plates, mesmerized by their rhythmic whir as they hum and sing. I stare until I feel as though I may be falling into one of my faraway trances, watching them circle first one way, and then the other, creating a terrible heat. It crackles and snaps and jumps about me.
I feel it at work beneath my skin.
There’s a bone-snapping pop. A bunch of snaggled wires shiver, that stretch from the sides of the cabinet to a metal halo mounted on a stand next to it. It’s then I notice there’s a metal bed below the stand.
In between the cabinet and the bed, an enormous, peculiar-looking glass tube sits propped up in an iron cradle. It doesn’t look like any other glass tube I’ve ever seen.
Not like any other in Father’s laboratory.
This one is huge and has a very strange shape. One end is round and the other pointed, like the head of a hummingbird with a needle-nosed beak. The sharp end is pointed toward the bed, while the round end is pressed up against the machine.
Father traipses around the room, fixing and fussing with the apparatus, placing the great jars of silver on the cannonball mounts. “What do you think?” He grins at me over his shoulders. “Is it as grand as you expected?”
“Grander,” I answer, weakly.
In truth, the pointed tube frightens me. Part of me wants to leave.
He strikes another match, lighting the end of a snaggled wire. The smells of sulfur and singed copper mingle with the sour stench of the gutter water lying in the corners, seeping in through the cracks in the walls. He touches the wicks on the bulbs on the front of the wardrobe and they hiss awake, like snakes spiralling out of baskets.
At last the time has come to rid myself of my unwanted dreams, so why am I trembling?
“It looks just like a rocket ship,” I say, hoping to please him.
“Does it?” His moustache lifts. He lunges, scoops me up, and in a count of—one, two, three leggy steps we are across the room, where he plops me down on the metal bed. Its cool, hard surface shocks my bottom. I wriggle and wince, hoping I haven’t spoiled the game.
“With this we’re sure to win hide-and-seek, aren’t we?” I ask nervously.
“I certainly hope so,” he says to the air. A tremor of worry floats through his eyes.
What does he mean, hope so?
He crosses the room again, adjusts something on the control panel behind the machine, then returns to me. “Now remember”—he presses a finger to his lips— “whatever happens…not a sound.”
“Not a sound,” I repeat.
I shiver as he unbuttons the neck of my frock, exposing my shoulders, and helps me lay down on my side. The cool metal surface of the bed bites hard at my skin. A breath of frost snakes down my spine.
Father takes his time, arranging me carefully. He props me up on one side and affixes the strange halo to my head. “Your helmet,” he whispers, tightening the screws. The pressure on my temples, causes me to wince. He straightens my dress and strips off my boots, then arranges my legs just so. Then he’s away, leaving me lying face-to-face with the giant tube in front of the wardrobe. The glass plates shake as they whirl faster inside.
“Father?” I say as he ducks behind the machine.
He turns a crank and an enormous lens appears, dropping down in front.
“Father?” I try again, but I don’t think he hears me. He’s too busy adjusting the lens. It creaks and growls, as he lowers it into place—a giant monocle over a monster’s eye. Then, he swings the peculiar looking pointed tube around, its pointed end poised as if to puncture me.
My breath quickens.
“Father?” I say, a little louder than I should. “What is that?”
“What’s what?” He peers out from behind a black cloth he’s popped over his head, like those used by fancy photographers.
“That.” I reach out, nearly touching the tube’s pointed end.
He hesitates; I think he sees my fear. He changes his voice to scrub my fear away. “Why, that’s the nose of your space airship, darling.” He floats back over to the table to pet my head. “Nothing to worry about.” He bends, kissing my forehead with such urgency I fear perhaps he plans never to kiss me again.
“Now...” He arranges my hands criss-cross over my chest. “I’ll need you to lie very, very still for take-off. You can do that, can’t you? Lie very, very still?”
He smiles, and I think it odd his lips should be trembling. I glance down at the foggy patterns my breath is creating on the steel surface of the bed.
My eyes must have said yes, because my mouth has said nothing yet he’s whisked away again, leaving me cold and frozen in place. Rounding the end of the table, he ducks beneath the black sheet again and begins furiously click-clacking buttons. My heart jumps with every clack!
I hold my chin as stiff as I can. “Should I close my eyes?”
“Whatever makes you comfortable, my pet.”
“But if I do, who will fly the ship?”
“I will, darling.” His voice is a song. “You close your eyes and dream as only you can dream, and let me handle the rest.”
He disappears completely behind a large black screen at the rear of the machine, and I’ve the sudden urge to jump from the table. Instead, I close my eyes and lie as still as I can, listening to the shuffle of his shoes whisking over the top of the stones.
There’s a buzz and a flash. A bulb bursts into darkness. Another lights the whole room. I see all this through my stuck shut lids, which I’m too afraid to open.
Something churns with a whip and a snap, and my hair is set sail, fluttering back from my face, twisting about my shoulders. I have to open my eyes.
The pointed end of the massive glass inches moves. The snaggled wires zap and crackle. A strange prickly heat pinches my skin. Streaks of purple lightning gash the walls and the ceiling around me— like the arms and legs of a giant scurrying arachnid.
I gasp and try hard not to move as the wardrobe rocks back and forth. There’s a great gust of wind.
“Are you all right?” Father shouts through the commotion, his hair flying wildly back behind him.
“Yes.”
I can hardly breathe.
The snout of the giant glass rocket ship inches ever closer.
The pressure at my temples is searing.
“Father?” I shout, above the rattling ruckus.
“What is it, darling?” He pokes his head out from under a black cover.
“Father, do you smell that?”
“Smell what, darling?”
“The toast? You’ve burned the toast—”
In my darkening peripheral, I see him flinch. He leaps into action, his arms hurriedly churning the crank at the side of the machine, the flywheel whirling.
The silver dust in the jars he placed on shelf mounts on either side of the wardrobe jumps and flutters. The brass cannonballs shake and sputter. Massive arcs of eerie green lightning fly between them, over and over and over. The glass plates inside the cabinet spin so fast, they are nothing but a blur.
“Father?” I say weakly, my lips going numb.
The halo on my head burns.
Before he can answer, there comes a flash so big, so bright, it fills my head, my heart, the entire room with its searing light.
Eclipsing all that was and all that will ever be.
Part One
Chapter One
Urlick
“EYELET?” I FALL TO MY knees and scoop her up into my arms, r
ocking back and forth, crushing her to my chest. The fear-fuelled crowd presses in around us, panic etched on their faces.
Pan circles overhead, screaming, her voice like a swinging sword. It cuts me to the quick, draws and quarters me and leaves me for dead.
I crumble under its weight.
“Get back! Get back!” C.L. hollers, forcing away the gawking crowd, but my focus is on Eyelet—only Eyelet.
“Help me!” I turn my eyes to the sky. “Somebody help me, please!”
Her skin is ashen. Her eyes far away. Her mouth agape.
Her lips have begun to blue, their natural colour slowly swept away, replaced by creeping blue-veined webs that slowly crawl across her cheeks and mouth and down her throat—the spidery hand of death closing in.
My stomach hollows. “Please!” I shout. “Somebody, please—”
“It’s not an episode,” C.L. assures me. “This is not how seizures act.”
“What is it then?” I shout at him, not meaning to. My heart slams hard against my ribs.
“I don’t know. I don’t know what’s happening.”
I turn to Iris, who frantically shakes her head. Cordelia lies dead in her arms, an arrow through her heart. Her blood stains the front of Iris’s clothes.
“Help!” I shout. “Someone, please help!”
My voice echoes throughout the park then falls down around me, suffocatingly still. I rock back and forth, sobs bursting from me. “Is there no one? No one that can help me? No one that knows what to do?”
C.L., Parthena, Masheck and Iris stand silent at my back.
“I can help.” A weathered voice winds from the back of the crowd to the front of it, snaking through the milling bodies.
“Who?” My head snaps up. I wrench my neck, searching. I cannot find the owner of the voice. “Show yourself!” I shout. Masheck curls his fists.
The crowd falls into a hush.
With trepidation, they slowly part—an apprehensive retreating surf in an ocean of consternation. A hooded figure is revealed, cloaked in a shimmering, crimson velvet robe. Bent at the neck, its gaze is hidden from the world.
Soleil Page 1