An Alchemy of Masques and Mirrors--A Novel

by Curtis Craddock

  The girls scrambled out of the hole in the roof of the old millhouse at the corner of the edgeward cow pasture and had just about reached the stile leading to the paddock behind the stables when a shrill voice caught them by the scruffs of their necks.

  “Isabelle!” shouted the head governess. “Where have you been? And you!” She jabbed a knobby finger at Marie. “You’ll be lucky if I don’t have you whipped to the bone.”

  Isabelle and Marie cringed. The governess was not so foolish as to disfigure them, but there were punishments that didn’t leave a mark.

  “Come here,” the governess said, even while storming toward them. “I have been looking for you two for an hour! The comte has summoned you both, and look at you. You’re filthy! I’d strip you down and send you in there naked if I thought you had any sense of shame, but you’d enjoy humiliating your father in front of his guests. Builder do us all a favor and turn you into a pig. You’d be cleaner.”

  She grabbed Isabelle by the ear, much too hard, and dragged her back to the manor house. “Stop mewling. You will learn to behave as a proper lady, or I will break you.”

  The berating went on through the entire process of being stripped out of layers of clothing, scrubbed like a dirty pot, scraped dry, and stuffed into her most formal gown, rose pink with a spray of white lace at the throat. The double knot in the silver cincture around her waist announced her maiden status to anyone who cared.

  None of this rough handling distracted her from her more pressing question. Why had her father summoned her? She prayed to whatever powers would listen that he had not come up with yet another scheme to try to force her to manifest a bloodshadow.

  Father had never been able to accept that, saintblooded though she was, descended in a direct line from the Risen Saints themselves, she was unhallowed and had no sorcery. He kept trying to drag magic out of her soul using his own bloodshadow as block and tackle. How many times had he racked her with his own power, ripping away at her very soul in the effort to provoke some latent power to rise and defend itself? Year after year, that had been her fate, until her brother, Guillaume, had manifested his bloodshadow.

  At last, Father had a viable heir, undamaged, ensorcelled, and of the correct gender. Ever since, Father had done everything short of exiling her to pretend Isabelle didn’t exist, a dearth of attention for which she was profoundly grateful. Please don’t let him start in again.

  Isabelle’s heart fluttered with dread, and her skin was cold. A squadron of governesses herded her toward the audience chamber. She reached the glass promenade, a long, tall hallway with an entire wall of windows that looked out over rolling pastureland to the rocky Oreamnos Hills, which clung like barnacles to the skyland’s rim.

  Marie was already waiting there, looking very pretty, and very nervous, in her best ball gown, pale blue. Her cincture had only one knot, signifying a maiden betrothed. Some lord from the Craton Massif had picked her for his son as soon as she’d become eligible. She was to be delivered in two years, when she’d ripened to fifteen.

  Which reminded Isabelle of the second reason Father ever called her: to parade her in front of old men who were searching for brides for either themselves or their sons. Had the merchant ship in the harbor brought her a suitor? She could imagine herself married to an aeronaut, soaring on one of the great ships … but usually suitors got one look at Isabelle’s wormfinger, learned about her magical blight, and made their good-byes. Even the fact that Isabelle was le roi’s cousin did not impress them.

  Her lack of marital prospects was not a good thing. She was twelve; the bloom was very nearly off her rose, and she had been made to understand that the world had no use for princesses who could not manage to get married.

  Yet if some new suitor had come, why summon Marie? She could only make Isabelle look homely by comparison. Half a girl wide and a girl and a half tall, with a long face, Isabelle was well on her way to being horsey.

  Marie fell in beside Isabelle and whispered, “What’s going on?”

  “I have no idea,” Isabelle said.

  “Is this because we ran off?”

  “No. They were looking for us before they knew we’d run off, remember?”

  “Hush, you two,” said the governess.

  Marie stiffened up. The doorway to the audience hall loomed before them.

  In the silence that congealed while everyone marshaled themselves to stand before the comte, voices drifted through the door, muffled almost below the level of hearing.

  An unfamiliar voice that sounded like it had been hammered out of copper said, “… royal blood cannot be diluted or corrupted.”

  “I do not care about your pet theory,” her father replied, dry and disdainful. “In the meantime, this charade grows wearisome.”

  “Have you also grown weary of your prize, or shall I take that from you as well?”

  Isabelle’s curiosity flared and she strained to hear more of the conversation. Who would dare speak to her father like that in his own house? And what prize were they talking about?”

  Alas, the doors swung open and a short fanfare of trumpets announced her presence in the audience hall.

  Isabelle pulled herself even straighter and did her gangly best to glide into her father’s presence. The audience hall was built to classical proportions, like an Aetegian chapel, with height, width, and length as strict multiples of the golden mean, a fact that Isabelle was sure only she found interesting. Everything in the chamber was clad in polished white marble. A double colonnade of classical columns surrounded the main floor, with a two-step dais in the position traditionally occupied by an altar.

  Two thronelike chairs sat upon the dais. The lesser chair was empty, as it had been for the ten years since Isabelle’s mother had died giving birth to Guillaume.

  The greater chair was made of loxodont ivory, the legs and arms carved from great curving tusks. Isabelle’s father was ensconced therein. He was dressed in his court finest, white brocade doublet embroidered with thread of silver and festooned with pearls. One of Isabelle’s secret books said ivory was a kind of tooth. With Father’s bloodred shadow spilled out in front of him like a tongue, the whole arrangement gave the impression of a great mouth about to bite him in half, though that was too much to hope for.

  Standing to one side of her father was a Temple hormougant. Isabelle had never seen one, but their vestments were unmistakable. Most Temple officers wore yellow, but the hormougant wore a white chasuble trimmed with black and silver interlocking gears over a black cassock. The panels of his long stole were embroidered with black winged daggers. His skinny body was bent over a distended gut that swayed like a kettle when he shifted his weight. Both his eyes were white as lumps of lard, but a single green gem glowed from a metal setting in the center of his forehead. In one hand he held a staff of quondam metal, an artifact left over from the Primus Mundi. She could tell because the metal was the color of brass with a purple patina. It was capped with a spiny ball, like an urchin.

  But what was a hormougant doing here? They were the Temple’s prophets, interpreters of ancient signs, judges of Enlightenment who decided which new discoveries comported with the Template of Creation and which were heresy. Was he here for Isabelle? Did he know she’d been studying math?

  Curiosity had been Saint Iav’s great sin. Her striving to understand the secret of life had unleashed the Breaker and shattered the world. The penalty for a woman prying into forbidden secrets was to have her eyes plucked out. Isabelle’s thoughts fled to the cache of books hidden in a gap behind the molding of her bedroom’s wainscoting. Had they brought Marie here to witness against her?

  Isabelle’s heart squeezed so tight she thought it would implode. She and Marie made their way at a stately pace down the white carpet that bisected the glossy white floor, designed to show off bloodshadows. They curtsied at the foot of the dais.

  Her father scowled at Isabelle and said in a sepulchral tone, “Princess Isabelle des Zephyrs, have you claimed your so
rcery?”

  “No, Father,” Isabelle said evenly, even as she cringed inside; it was going to be one of those audiences, another attempt to wake the nascent bloodshadow Father was convinced she had to possess. This hormougant was only the latest petitioner to have some plan for her sorcery’s miraculous vivification. What would it be this time? Would it be another potion, a diet, a strange regimen of exercises, or would he resurrect old favorites like attacking her with his bloodshadow and trying to provoke hers into a response?

  “The time has come to determine once and for all, in the eyes of the Temple, if you are truly unhallowed or merely obstinate and spiteful. Only a hormougant can make that decision.”

  Despite her father’s nasty tone and the warning Jean-Claude had put in her ear, a hope flickered in Isabelle’s chest. Could this truly be the last time she had to endure trial by ordeal?

  She regarded the hormougant with increasing interest. “Enlightened, I … Can you certify that I am unhallowed?” No more tests. No more torture.

  “Indeed,” he said.

  Her father snarled. “Are you so eager to reject your birthright, then? Do you think it is not good enough for you?”

  Isabelle winced. “No. Of course not, but, Father—”

  “No one who rejects their saintly blood is any child of mine.”

  Tears stood in Isabelle’s eyes, and she felt as if she’d been kicked in the chest. It was stupid to talk to him, stupid to think he’d ever care about her, but she couldn’t stop trying. “I don’t reject it. I just don’t have it.” Having a bloodshadow would make her a true Sanguinaire, a proud link in an endless chain stretching back to the Risen Saints. Not having a bloodshadow was a defect even worse than a wormfinger. Without sorcery, no one would ever want her.

  “Your denial is insincere,” her father said. His bloodshadow rippled at his feet like a restless snake.

  The hormougant said, “Do you consent to the test?”

  Isabelle summoned all her courage. If Marie could be brave in front of all those Iconates, then Isabelle could be brave here. She cast a glance at Marie for strength. “Yes.”

  The hormougant nodded to the comte. The comte fixed his gaze on Isabelle’s friend and said, “Lady Marie du Bois.”

  Marie popped up like a startled doe. “Excellency!”

  Isabelle’s breath caught; what was her father doing?

  “You are my daughter’s handmaiden sworn to her service, bound to her need, subject to her command, and protected by her mighty hand. Yes?”

  “Yes, Excellency.”

  “Then it is her duty to protect you.”

  The comte’s shadow darted across the floor toward Marie. Marie hopped away, but des Zephyrs’s sorcery grabbed her gray shadow by its ankle and jerked her to a halt.

  “Father, no!” Isabelle bolted toward Marie, but adult hands snared and held her fast.

  The bloodshadow pierced the boundary of Marie’s shadow and began filling it up, the red stain spreading through the gray silhouette like ink spreading in water.

  Marie screamed and tried to pull away, but the sanguine rot spread to her shadow’s legs and arms, making her movements dull and sluggish.

  “Stop!” Marie screamed, even as the color drained from her skin. “Please!”

  “No!” Isabelle surged against her captors. She knew what it felt like to be mauled by a bloodshadow, the icy razors of pain, the mind-sucking soul numbness.

  “You can stop it, Isabelle,” her father said. “Your bloodshadow can fight mine. Stop denying your birthright.”

  Isabelle reached within herself, searching inside for something, anything, but there was no answering will echoing up from the depths of her soul, no tincture in her inner darkness.

  “Please! Mercy,” Marie begged. In the middle of the marble floor, she looked like a fish mired in mud, her body slowly writhing, useless limbs flopping, mouth agape, and eyes staring.

  “Stop!” Isabelle wailed. Not Marie. No!

  Isabelle wrenched free of her handlers and sprinted toward Marie. The color drained from Marie’s features. Her hair turned white. Her flesh became translucent. Isabelle tried to cover her, to somehow get in the way, but a strand of her father’s bloodshadow whipped out and pinned her shadow by its neck. Suddenly, she couldn’t move at all. Her body might as well have been made of wood. There was nothing she could do. About anything. Nothing!

  “Fight like a sorcerer!” her father spat.

  “I can’t!” She had tried. She had searched. There was no magic in her.

  “You are weak,” her father said. “Worthless.”

  Marie’s whole body arched. She loosed a horrible haunted wail. Isabelle could see all the way through her skin and flesh, all the way to her bones.

  Tears flooded Isabelle’s cheeks and she thought her chest would explode with helpless horror. “Stop. Please!”

  The comte said, “The weak cannot protect their own. They deserve no mercy.”

  Marie’s wail became a deathly keening, a threadbare sound, unraveling into nothing.

  “Are you satisfied, Sleith?” Father asked the hormougant.

  “Yes. Isabelle is unhallowed.”

  The bloodshadow withdrew from Marie, gorged and sated, its color thick, rich, like the finest wine. The bloodshadow’s grip on Isabelle’s body released as if cut. She stumbled forward and hugged Marie around the shoulders, but her friend’s skin was ice cold, her expression slack, her transparent eyes unfocused as a doll’s.

  “Marie!” she shrieked. “Come back!” She rounded on her father. “Bring her back!”

  “She will not return,” her father said. “She is a bloodhollow now, but do not worry; she will serve you as she always has, only a bit more … docilely.”

  Isabelle squeezed Marie tight, as if that could force heat and life back into her numb flesh, even as she cursed her father. “I hate you! I hope you die!”

  Marie shrugged Isabelle’s grip off, and Isabelle stepped back, but the hope that bloomed in her mind died when Marie’s ghostly features warped and her father’s visage emerged from within. “But if I die, so does your friend. I am the only thing keeping her alive. As a bloodhollow, she is an extension of me, my eyes and ears and hands and voice, and she will keep watch on you … always.”

  Many sets of hands took Isabelle by the arms and tugged her, sobbing, from the room. Bloodhollow Marie trailed behind.

  CHAPTER

  Three

  Crepuscular light angled in the wide window of the single modest room Isabelle occupied at one end of the servants’ wing of the Château des Zephyrs. In one corner stood a small printing press Jean-Claude had somehow acquired for her. Most of the rest of the room was filled with books and art supplies, like the back room of a museum without all the dust.

  Isabelle sat on the low couch that served as her bed and had Marie lift her feet, one at a time, and spread her toes so Isabelle could check them for bruises. Her transparent flesh made such insults difficult to see, but even minor wounds could fester and spread.

  Satisfied that the bloodhollow was undamaged, Isabelle said quietly, “Dress yourself. Gather my paints.”

  Marie moved off to do as she was told. For twelve years, nearly half the span of her life, Marie had padded silently after Isabelle, fetched and carried and performed other small tasks. It was not her fault that she also acted as a lens through which Father could spy on Isabelle. In return, Isabelle attended all of Marie’s needs, examining her from crown to toe every morning and evening, keeping her fed, watered, cleaned, and clothed.

  It was a strange sort of symbiosis they had, each one tending the other, spending energy in a downward, inward, self-negating spiral. Effort that should have been spent exploring the world and unlocking the secrets of the universe, or tending an estate, or raising a family, was instead spent tilling dust on barren ground.

  Yet Isabelle could not quit. An untended bloodhollow would not care for itself. Without Isabelle’s attention, the revenant that had been her frien
d would collect wounds, rot, and fall apart, if she didn’t starve to death first. Even if Isabelle could have borne the thought of such a fatal indignity heaped upon Marie, the notion of being trailed around by a putrefying near-corpse held no appeal. Nor could she put Marie out of her misery, for fear that her father would murder some other innocent soul to replace her.

  Not that he had any obvious targets. After news of what he had done to Marie got around, Isabelle had become social poison. No one would allow their daughter to associate with her for fear of being next. Even the servants preferred to leave her meals outside her door, knock once, and run away.

  This suited Isabelle well enough. Talking to people was risky. You never knew what they really meant with their words. Even if they weren’t lying, even if they’d learned to speak precisely, you could never tell who they were going to talk to next. The bookbinder you confided in today might need a favor from your father tomorrow; best not to talk to him, lest some unguarded word slip and be carried off like an uncrewed skyship to disaster and ruin.

  As time went on, she’d grown more comfortable with silence and solitude. She frequently went months without talking to anyone save Marie, who hardly counted, and Jean-Claude. Ever since the day her father hollowed out Marie, Jean-Claude had made it his habit to cross Isabelle’s path at least twice a day. He was father and friend to her, bringing her gossip of the town and news of the world. He kept her from going mad, or at least any madder than she already was.

  She hardly missed other people at all. Hardly. Most days.

  Today, however, she meant to receive a guest, a mathematician from Brathon. Fortunately, she wouldn’t have to speak much, just “Hello and thanks for coming,” polite formalities devoid of significance or dangerous connotation. Then she could sit and listen to his lecture.

  Isabelle pulled the cover off her mirror and took stock of her appearance. She didn’t have the resources to waste on finery, so the best she could say about her clothing was that it was well preserved. There were no stains on her somewhat dowdy bodice nor rips in her pleated sleeves. She’d long since clipped her hair short for convenience and comfort, but her long, curly white wig was full of bounce and devoid of lice.