An Alchemy of Masques and Mirrors--A Novel

by Curtis Craddock

  Isabelle bit back a dozen questions; Valérie needed time to pull herself together, and Isabelle didn’t know what to do to help. Uttering platitudes like, “You did well,” or, “It’s over,” could hardly be a comfort to her at this point. Likewise saying something like, “Would Vincent have wanted you to fall apart like this?” would squash her flat.

  Instead, Isabelle asked, “Is there something we can get you? Wine? Blankets?”

  Valérie looked at her with gratitude in her eyes. “Yes, please.”

  “Get her wine and warmth and anything else she wants,” Isabelle said.

  “What about you, Highness?” asked Darcy of sergeants-are-better-than-privates fame.

  “I…” Isabelle hesitated. She felt neither good nor exactly calm, but, instead, strangely balanced, focused. It was as if she’d climbed a steep emotional cliff and found herself on a high plateau where the view was broad and clear but the air was cold and thin. She couldn’t stay in this clarity above it all forever, only as long as it took to scout a course ahead.

  “I am uninjured,” she said, but Vincent was dead and Jean-Claude’s fate uncertain. Was she defenseless now? Whom would she turn to for counsel?

  A quiet cough drew her attention to the Aragothic ladies-in-waiting, all six of whom had formed up in an arc and stood with downcast eyes, apparently awaiting her recognition, or approval, or something. On a mannequin between them was displayed an elaborate, layered gown of silk and velvet, black and red with gold embroidery. It had matching gloves and slippers and lacquered combs for her hair.

  “Highness,” said the first lady, “allow us to cover your nakedness.”

  Isabelle looked down at herself, still clad in cuirass, jacket, trousers, and boots, and tried, unsuccessfully, to contemplate the propriety-is-more-important-than-reality mind-set that could possibly consider this naked, or that being so was important at a moment like this.

  But as much as she wanted to hare away to find Jean-Claude, outside was more dangerous than inside, and information was likely to come to her faster than she could fetch it. And when that information arrived, she had to be ready to receive its bearers. Being clean, polished, calm, and collected could only help.

  She spread her arms and said, “Ladies, I place myself at your mercy.”

  * * *

  When Isabelle disrobed, the Aragothic lady who pulled off her right glove nearly swooned at the sight of her wormfinger, and all the others turned slightly green.

  Isabelle glowered in habitual resentment of this revulsion, but she was still too worked up to be anything but blunt. She smoothed her expression and gathered the Aragoths around, holding her hand up like a torch. “I am Princesa Isabelle, and this is my hand. Yes, it is malformed, but there’s nothing I can do about that; I just have to live with it. You all don’t. If you stay, be informed that I am not ashamed of it and I will not hide it. Or, if you think this makes me a monster, or if you just can’t stand the sight of it, you can go with my good blessings and a letter of recommendation. I leave the choice to each of you.” Probably this would come back to bite her, but right now she didn’t care.

  The Aragothic ladies dispersed to discuss the matter with a great deal of whispering, and Isabelle’s Célestial handmaidens took over the duties of bathing her. She hated this. People got one look at her wormfinger and forgot everything else about her. Not for the first time, she wondered if she wouldn’t be better off just having the whole thing amputated at the wrist. Then she could claim she’d lost it in an accident. A stump would still be unattractive, but it might provoke reactions of sympathy rather than horror.

  She lowered her gangly body into the steaming bath. The hot water soothed her flesh even if it couldn’t touch the shivers in her soul. How could she be carrying on like normal while Vincent cooled, Valérie grieved, and Jean-Claude’s fate remained uncertain? But maybe that was her job, to be the place where fear and panic stopped, to pin down one corner of reality so that disaster did not blow all civilization away, like a loose sail.

  It physically hurt to turn her attention to the future, almost like ripping free of her own skin, but if her job was to pick up shattered pieces, she had damn well better have a plan.

  As Jean-Claude liked to say, “In confusion, there is opportunity,” and she expected a spate of opportunists to show up on her doorstep seeking audience. She made a mental wager with herself that the first ones to arrive would be the ones who had nothing important to do during a crisis. As a survivor of the Comte des Zephyrs’s court, she knew the value of identifying such parasites and avoiding them.

  Would Príncipe Julio come to check on her? He was presumably nearby, but he seemed to be the only person in all of Aragoth who wanted nothing to do with her.

  She was still brooding on this when Olivia, her oldest handmaid, leaned in the door to the bath chamber and said, “Highness, Artifex Kantelvar is here. He seeks an audience.”

  Isabelle’s first thought was to rush to meet the artifex, but Kantelvar had once again failed to stop an assassin from making a try at her, this time at great cost. She would not put her vulnerability on display by being rushed. “Tell him to wait until I am dressed.”

  Normally it took an hour or more to get sewn into a new dress, but Isabelle’s Aragothic ladies seemed determined to make up for their earlier squeamishness and had her stitched up in a quarter of that time. The threads would hold, probably, as long as she didn’t attempt any radical movements … like sitting down. She swept from the dressing room, hugged by velvet from the waist up and flowing with silk from the waist down. The strange short-hemmed, long-sleeved jacket that she had seen Margareta wearing was called a bolero, and Isabelle had been given one of black velvet embroidered in gold.

  Kantelvar stood up from the padded chair the ladies-in-waiting had provided for his comfort. His hood hid his expression and his hunch distorted his body language, but the gleam from his emerald jewel of an eye fixed on her. He made a formal bow, the joints of his quondam prosthesis softly whining.

  “Highness,” he said, his voice a rasp. “Thanks be to the Builder, you are safe.”

  “Thanks be to Vincent, you mean,” she replied.

  “Yes, of course, what happened to your men was unfortunate, tragic, but they—”

  “Men?” The plural form gripped her around the throat and made her voice quaver. “Jean-Claude?”

  “I am given to understand he entered a building that exploded, but you must not—”

  “But you don’t know if he’s…”

  “Dead? I have not confirmed it, but he is not my charge. You have a greater destiny, and it is my concern to see that you reach it. I must keep you safe.”

  “You’re doing a rotten job so far,” Isabelle snapped. “Why are you here now, with the assassin still abroad?”

  “You asked to be kept informed.”

  Isabelle sucked down a deep breath to calm herself. “Yes. And now I wish to know how this assassin managed to evade your security, kill my bodyguard, and elude capture.”

  Kantelvar’s head shook. “I have not yet had the chance to investigate the scene myself, but I am informed there was a mirror—”

  “Is this Thornscar again? I though you said he would still be incapacitated.”

  “I very much doubt it is Thornscar, but our enemy has many resources.”

  “And we don’t?”

  Kantelvar ignored that barb. “I had my men search every room in every building along the parade route. I can only surmise the assassin moved the mirror into the room after it was searched, possibly as recently as this morning. He then entered and departed the building by way of the mirror, leaving no trace of himself behind.”

  Isabelle forced her anger and disappointment back into its cage. Let it snarl in the background, but she had to think. “That’s not entirely true. He left a bullet. It embedded itself in the back of the coach, and I recovered it.”

  There was a muddy gurgle from the hump under Kantelvar’s cloak, and his bent bac
k stiffened in surprise. “What did you do with it? Do you still have it?” His voice was rough, eager.

  “It’s in my coin purse. Darcy.” She gestured to her junior handmaiden, who fetched the purse and handed it to Kantelvar.

  Kantelvar accepted the pouch with his mechanical hand. He considered the silken purse for a moment, as if it were a puzzle box, then turned and shuffled to a small table flanking the doors and began worrying the strings. “My apologies, Highness, but my fingers are not as clever as they once were.”

  Isabelle nodded to him to go ahead; every day, she strove to prevent people’s noticing how one-handed she was.

  Kantelvar rummaged through the purse and then upended it. A few coins buzzed as they spun on the table. “There is no bullet here.”

  Isabelle stiffened. “What? Oh damn, it was an espejismo. It must have faded, like Jean-Claude’s hat.” Alas, the wound it caused was not so ephemeral. Still, the timing was strange. “But Jean-Claude said his hat disappeared immediately after falling off his head, while this bullet was embedded in the wood for much longer, a quarter of an hour at least.”

  “Metal lasts longer than cloth does, and an object to which significant emotion is attached will last longer than an object taken for granted. If this assassin is driven by hate, he may have spent weeks obsessing about that bullet, imagining the path it would tear through flesh, imbuing it with his obsession. I doubt your musketeer was so attached to his hat.”

  Isabelle subsided into frustration. Up until now, the horrors of her life had been known and familiar. They had been dread certainties of abuse and humiliation, killing her slowly. Survival had been a matter of coping with what she could not hope to combat. These attacks were different, knife-quick flashes of terror and chaos, here and gone, leaving blood in their wake before she could even grapple with them. She needed some way to slow them down. She pressed her wrists to her eyes and forced herself to think.

  She said, “I think the killer may have been working for the Temple.”

  An angry boiling noise came from Kantelvar’s hump and his posture stiffened. “What? What makes you think that?”

  “An accurate musket that could punch through alchemetal and ironwood. A bullet made of hard metal with strange grooves. That was a quondam device, and the Temple takes a dim view of anyone but itself having possession of the Builder’s gifts.” She gave a pointed look to Kantelvar’s artificial limbs. “Also, there were three sagaxes down at the harbor who spoke of rising up against me … and you.”

  Kantelvar’s tension subsided and his voice came out a metallic monotone. “I know those three. They are partisans of Príncipe Alejandro, probably sent down by his wife, Xaviera, as something of a clumsy snub. No one would employ them as conspirators, though. As you noticed, they tend to leak—the tongues of warriors and the spines of jelly-floaters, though I suppose they might be useful for disseminating misinformation.”

  “They claimed that you are obsessed with the Reckoning and the coming of the Savior.”

  Kantelvar stilled into one of his thoughtful silences, then rapped his staff on the ground and said, “The Temple’s whole business is preparation for the end of these degenerate times. We are instructed not to wait for the Savior, but to prepare the way. Any cleric of any rank who is not working toward that end has failed his most fundamental duty.”

  There was little in theology of interest to Isabelle so she turned back to the subject at hand. “Then how do you explain the musket? It could not have been an ordinary weapon.”

  “The Temple certainly has the only legitimate collection of quondam devices, but not all collections are legitimate. Greedy, stupid men seek to circumvent the Builder’s law and usurp His power as Iav of old did. This is especially true in Aragoth, where many Temple warehouses were raided and many artifacts stolen during the Skaladin occupation. Xaviera’s father had a large collection of quondam relics that he seized from the invaders. He handed a great deal of it over to the Temple, and such was the nature of the time that no questions were asked concerning any pieces he might have kept for himself. He was, after all, defending the border from a heathen horde.”

  Isabelle stilled her expression. That was twice in less than a minute Kantelvar had tried to direct her suspicions at Xaviera from two entirely different angles. As someone raised by Jean-Claude, Isabelle’s first thought was, I should talk to her.

  The outer door opened and Olivia bustled in, her face flushed with as much excitement and alarm as if there had just been another assassination—with at least one person dead it hardly seemed fitting to think of it as just an attempt—and curtsied before Isabelle.

  Isabelle gestured for her to speak, and Olivia said breathlessly, “Your Highness, His Imperial Majesty Leon XIV, le Roi de Tonnerre, arrives via his emissary.”

  Isabelle was nonplussed. Over the past few weeks, she had been so caught up researching particulars of the Aragothic court that she had mostly failed to consider the Célestial presence in San Augustus. But of course Grand Leon kept an embassy here, complete with a full diplomatic staff—the ambassador’s name was Hugo du Blain, though she knew nothing else about him—and an emissary, a bloodhollow le roi maintained in San Augustus for those occasions when he needed to project his presence here in person.

  Her breathing came too quick and her head felt light. She’d never been given to fits of the vapors, but this was Grand Leon. His word was more like a divine proclamation than mere law. By an act of the Builder’s grace he had given her birth his blessing and bestowed on her Jean-Claude’s protection.

  “Send him in,” Isabelle said, dry mouthed. Isabelle nervously brushed her new dress smooth. Olivia opened the door and stood aside, curtsying deeply, eyes downcast.

  A tall, stout gentleman, larger than Jean-Claude but of the same general shape, stepped through the door. He was clearly a man of flesh and not a translucent bloodhollow, so Isabelle reasoned he must be Hugo du Blain, the Célestial ambassador. He wore the most elaborate costume Isabelle had ever seen on a man, layers of silk and satin in Célestial blue and white, with lacy cuffs and ruffs, a broad baldric, silver frogging, and several heaping helpings of silk braid. The fact that the ensemble looked glamorous instead of ridiculous was a testament to his tailor’s genius.

  Du Blain swept off a hat for which an entire flock of exotic birds had been sacrificed and announced, “His Imperial Majesty le Roi de Tonnerre, Leon XIV!”

  Isabelle curtsied deeply as her imperial cousin entered. Grand Leon’s emissary was a skinny man, dressed all in white, a doublet and roomy trousers tucked into tall white boots, all stitched with silver and pearls. Her gut sickened at the sight of the bloodhollow, and she could not help but wonder by what criteria the man had been selected for this hellish fate. Jean-Claude always said that Grand Leon kept few bloodhollows and selected only the worst criminals to endure this fate, but was there truly any crime so vile as to justify the harrowing of a soul?

  As the emissary came through the door, Grand Leon’s presence swelled inside it, bulging through the translucent flesh, stretching and molding it into a new shape, taller, broader of shoulder, an expression of le roi’s towering pride and indomitable will rather than his actual physical shape. The bloodhollow’s shadow turned from gray to red as Grand Leon forced his sorcery through the aperture of its flaccid soul. Any Sanguinaire sorcerer who could make a bloodhollow could inhabit its body, but for most that was as far as the transfer of power could go. As far as she knew, only Grand Leon could make his bloodhollow vessel produce a bloodshadow of its own. Even the Comte des Zephyrs at the height of his powers had not been able to achieve it. Cold comfort for those through whom he had experimented.

  Isabelle’s heart hammered so loud that she could barely hear herself think, but she managed to avert her eyes and mumble, “Your Majesty. How may I serve you?”

  Grand Leon said, “Rise, Princess, be at ease, and you, Artifex Kantelvar, though I should have expected to find you elsewhere, hunting down whoever attacked ou
r cousin.”

  Isabelle rose and Kantelvar said, “I cannot be everywhere at once, Majesty, and arranging to close the holes in Isabelle’s security left by the deaths of her bodyguards seemed my paramount task.”

  “Indeed, though I do wonder how this debacle forwards your schemes, as all such calamities seem to do.”

  Kantelvar said, “You know as well as I do that a good strategy ensures all paths lead to victory, but as it happens, in this case, the Temple’s only concern is to ensure the continuity of Aragoth’s royal line. The preservation of the saintblooded sorceries is our greatest mandate.”

  Grand Leon made a curt gesture of acknowledgment, and Isabelle got the impression she’d been witness to one scene from the middle act of a much longer and more complicated play. She was very much a latecomer to her own betrothal.

  Grand Leon looked Isabelle in the eyes, something men other than Jean-Claude rarely bothered to do, and asked, “Are you injured? Are you ill at heart? I would treat with you, if you are able.”

  Isabelle’s throat tightened up. The very last thing in the world she wanted to do was treat with le roi. It could only lead to disaster … and yet was not treating with him any worse? She had lost Jean-Claude. No, don’t think like that. Whether Jean-Claude was dead, or alive, or standing athwart the shadow’s breach, she could not fail his faith in her by balking at the first test. If you can’t survive without me, then I have truly failed you. She would not make a failure of him, even if her heart quailed and her bowels turned to water.

  She filled her lungs and said, “My heart is wounded, but it still beats. What would you have of me?”

  “I would have the story of your attack from your own lips. What did you see?”

  “She saw nothing, Majesty.”

  Isabelle didn’t dare turn her body away from Grand Leon, but she risked a glance as her father strolled in. The Comte des Zephyrs wore Marie’s body, his face pressing out from her ghostly features. He took up a station in front of Isabelle and bowed to Grand Leon. Isabelle’s mustered courage wobbled into a familiar queasy loathing, and her tongue clove to her palate. Grand Leon might not strike her down out of pure spite, but her father would. He would silence her, punish her. He always had.