Closer to hand was a long table piled high with books, and beyond that rows of shelves stacked with more tomes, alchemical instruments, beakers, redactors, crocks of strange compounds, chests, and quondam artifacts. Isabelle turned in a slow circle. There was a true ice crucible, an alchemical forge, a printing press twice the size of her own.
Oh, I want this place. Her pulse leapt at the thought of all the knowledge hidden down here and all the philosophical experiments that a woman might perform well out of the sight of disapproving eyes. She could give Lord DuJournal so much more to write about.
A glint of emerald light in a corner caught her eye. “An omnimaton!” It was a clockwork machine in roughly human shape, with bones of the same coppery substance as Kantelvar’s limbs, and muscles made of telescoping silver tubes, just like Kantelvar’s right arm and leg. Its flattened, clamshell-shaped head was set directly on its shoulders. A single cyclopean eye set in the leading edge of the clamshell glowed a dull green.
Isabelle veered toward the device, drawn like iron filings to a lodestone. “I’ve never seen one intact before. I thought they were all destroyed when—”
“Don’t touch it!” Kantelvar snapped, his voice sharp as a knife.
Isabelle halted, her hand close enough to its metal surface to feel it coldness. It was like standing in the doorway to an icehouse. “Why not?”
“Because it reacts badly to being touched. When I found it, it was much more greivously damaged. It took me ages just to restore its inner spark. Alas, its behavior is still erratic. The last time it was provoked, it reduced a man to a thin paste.”
Isabelle took a cautious step back. “How did you repair it? I thought nobody really knew how these things worked.”
“No one does. Nobody really understands how black powder works, either, but that doesn’t stop anyone from building cannons. Over the centuries, the Temple has retrieved enough functional quondam mechanisms to make at least an educated guess where the pieces are supposed to go and which fluids need to be present in what proportion to make certain things happen. Where possible, we compare our experimental results to the Instructions for confirmation, but even that is not the same thing as understanding.”
Isabelle hesitated; The Book of Instructions was the Temple’s holy book, its secrets forbidden to women. Isabelle had therefore made a point of reading it cover to cover, painstakingly translating every passage from the Saintstongue into la Langue until she had a better grasp of the saints’ language and of Temple lore and doctrine than most clerics.
“Do the Instructions contain information about omnimatons?” she asked as innocently as possible; she did not recall any passage devoted to them.
“It’s in one of the lesser-known apocrypha, the Twelfth Book of Fragments, cantos eight to twenty-seven.” He pulled a thick book from the shelf and thumped it down on the table.
Isabelle’s blood thrummed with new excitement; she’d never been able to get her hands on a copy of the Fragments. Yet in case Kantelvar’s bringing out the book was some sort of test of her moral rectitude, Isabelle repressed an urge to open it up and leaf through it. “I’m afraid it wouldn’t mean much to me.”
Kantelvar drummed his fingers on the book and scrutinized her with his unblinking emerald eye. At last he said, “Come, let us see to the bloodhollow.”
Kantelvar led Isabelle, who had never let go of Marie’s hand, into a small side chamber with a rope-sprung bed with a thick mattress and several blankets. Kantelvar had Isabelle arrange Marie in the bed while he adjusted an apparatus made of copper vessels, glass spheres, and lots of brass piping on a stand by the bedside.
“This matrix will deliver the infusion. The great unknown in this experiment is whether the subject’s soul will respond to the opportunity or whether it has atrophied over the years. The fact that the subject has matured physically during the intervening decade is hopeful but not necessarily predictive.”
As he spoke, he bathed Marie’s arm, located a vein, then jabbed in a needle that was connected to a tube leading to the still.
Isabelle said, “You aren’t going to leave that in there, are you? She’ll take fever!”
“Everything has been properly cleaned. I have some experience with this. Corruption is possible but not likely. It’s a risk that must be taken.” He tied the first needle down and moved around to her opposite side. By then, Marie’s blood had percolated all the way through the device and was starting to return through a second hose-and-needle. Kantelvar waited until a steady trickle of blood was coming out of the needle and then jabbed it into a vein in her opposite arm. The transparency of her skin at least made the veins easy to see, and the returned blood flowed through her glassy flesh like dark ink in a stream.
He said, “Now, if you will please instruct her not to fight the needles or pull them out…”
There followed several minutes of adjustments and fiddling wherein Isabelle summoned every scrap of hope and encouragement she possessed and whispered it into Marie’s ear. Finally Kantelvar took her arm and led her from the room, extinguishing the alchemical lantern, shutting the door, and plunging Marie into darkness.
Now that the process had begun, Isabelle’s heart should have felt lighter, but instead it was heavy as lead. She folded her arms to stop herself from fidgeting, wishing there was something productive she could do; anything would be better than nothing. What if Marie could not be revived? What if there was no hope at all? Then what? Should she continue as she always had, treating her once-friend like a precious but fragile heirloom, or should she take the hard step and a draw her maidenblade across Marie’s throat? The very thought made her ill.
She asked, “When will we know if the treatment is effective?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never dealt with a victim who has been entangled for so long. It could be anything from hours to weeks—”
“Weeks!” Isabelle was appalled. “But I can’t leave her alone. She needs someone to feed her and—”
“Be at peace. It will be taken care of. You are no longer alone,” Kantelvar said, his mechanical voice nearly guttering out as he softened it. He reached out with his fleshy hand to touch her shoulder in what was probably meant to be a gesture of reassurance. His fingers were gray and clammy as a corpse, with bruised-looking nails. She recoiled, her skin shrinking away from him.
Kantelvar hesitated, his hand in midair, before self-consciously withdrawing it up his voluminous sleeve.
Isabelle turned away to stifle her revulsion. Hypocrite. How could she ask people to accept her deformity if she did not return the favor? Indeed, she was usually fascinated by the strange and grotesque, but Kantelvar’s attempt at compassion, at familiarity, was more disturbing than all his obfuscations.
Leather scraped on wood. Isabelle turned in time to see Kantelvar heft the copy of Fragments he had put down earlier and weigh it in his hands. “Did you know one of your ancestors helped compile this?”
Thankful for relief from the blighted silence, Isabelle said, “No, who?”
“Saint Céleste.”
Isabelle puffed a noise of disbelief before her math skills caught up to her. “Well, that was hundreds of generations ago. If her children had children and they survived, she must have thousands of descendants by now.”
“Yes. I believe every single living Sanguinaire is related to her by some degree, but you are her only living direct maternal descendant. She had two sons and one daughter, who took her name, as was their tradition. The younger Céleste in turn bore a daughter, and so on and so forth down through the millennia, to your grandmother to your mother to you.”
“How can you possibly know that?” Isabelle said, thrilled and appalled at the same time. To think that she was the direct descendant of an ancient heroine was like a childhood fantasy come true. In stories, such omens and portents always came complete with some grand destiny. But to think that Kantelvar actually believed such nonsense cast doubt upon his sanity. “It’s been two thousand years, genealogi
es get fabricated, people are unfaithful, women are raped—”
“But blood will out,” Kantelvar said. He hefted a small chest onto the crowded table, extracted from it an ornate rod about the size of her finger, and presented it to her.
A tingle of excitement ran up her spine. It was clearly a quondam artifact; shadows played beneath its metallic skin, as if the metal itself had a pulse. She’d never so much as touched such a prize before. Gingerly she took it. It was warm to her skin and heavy as gold. One end was tipped with a bulb the size of her thumb joint and the other with a half loop about the same size. The shaft was covered in rows of characters that seemed to be extruded from the surface. One row read “Isabelle des Zephyrs” in the Saintstongue. The others were all in strange characters that Isabelle did not recognize.
Seeing her name on this odd trinket made all the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. “What is this? And what is it supposed to prove?”
“It is a blood cipher, and it will tell you your lineage,” Kantelvar said. “Just press the round end to your thumb?”
“Why?”
“Because that’s how it works.”
Isabelle wavered. She did not trust Kantelvar, but he clearly wanted her alive and in good health to have Julio’s children. He could not simply make her disappear, and she’d never used a quondam artifact before.
Curiosity took the reins before reason had worked out all the details, and she touched the tip of the thing to the pad of her thumb.
It stung her, sharp and hard. She yelped and tossed the rod away. The cylinder arced across the room, caromed off a pillar, and rolled under the table. A dot of blood welled up from her thumb.
“What did it do?” she gasped, her pulse racing with fear. “Poison?”
“Not at all,” Kantelvar said, lurching around the table to retrieve the fallen device. “It just needs a drop of your blood to decipher. A man’s seed is a special form of blood that carries the spark of life into a woman’s womb. It mixes with her blood, half to half. This admixture precipitates from the mother’s body to form the child. The child is therefore half its mother and half its father.”
He gave the blood cipher’s head a twist and plunked it down on the table. Instantly it set up a high-pitched whirring hum. Seams opened up in its sides and it sprouted four insectile legs. From inside the crate came an answering buzz, and dozens of blood ciphers scuttled out. The swarm converged on the blood cipher bearing Isabelle’s name and all the metallic bugs crawled over one another, touching tips and tails in a boiling hive.
Isabelle edged closer, sucking her pricked thumb.
Suddenly one of the bugs reoriented itself to the vertical and all the other bugs swarmed up it, branching out two by two until it formed a tree over a meter tall. A family tree. Kantelvar leaned in and stared at the base. “This is you … yes. Just as I thought. And this is your mother and your grandmother.” He traced her lineage back through five generations of mothers.
“And if you activate this one,” he said excitedly, pointing at her three-times-great-grandmother Giselle, “it goes back five more generations, and so on until we get back one hundred three generations to Saint Céleste herself.”
Isabelle marveled at the device—what a magnificent machine—almost as much as the information it so elegantly displayed. She leaned in close to get a look at how the ciphers hooked up to one another—how in the world did they communicate?—and read her name again, only more information had been added: Isabelle des Zephyrs, l’Étincelle.
Isabelle was not given to fainting fits, but this made her dizzy. This had to be wrong. She was unhallowed. She most surely did not possess l’Étincelle, Saint Céleste’s power to breathe life into the lifeless.
Impossible. She very nearly blurted the word aloud, but Kantelvar didn’t know she could read Saintstongue.
She quickly followed the branch up to her mother: Vedetta des Zephyrs, Sanguinaire, and her father … Her father? The man listed as her father was Lorenzo Barbaro, Fenice.
Isabelle’s mouth dropped open and her blood ran cold with shock and disbelief. Surely Kantelvar had to know it was wrong. Unless it wasn’t.
Assume it’s true. She was more than happy not to be related to the cruel and vicious Comte des Zephyrs, but who in all the world was Lorenzo Barbaro? The Fenice ruled the city-states of Vecci. She had never met one, but she had seen paintings of men and women clad in brilliant feathers, like scale armor, each one sporting an elaborate mask of feathers and a great crest of plumage on their head. They were said to be stronger than a team of oxen and tough enough to survive grapeshot unscathed.
Was Lorenzo Barbaro still alive? Did he know of Isabelle’s existence? Did she have any other siblings? Did her father … le Comte des Zephyrs know he had been duped? He would have killed her for sure … or would he?
What if creating Isabelle for Kantelvar’s conspiracy had been the deal from the very beginning? What if the comte had known from the start that he was to raise a cuckoo? His contempt for her needed no explanation—he was cruel to everyone—but it would explain why no other match had ever been made for her, why there had never been talk of a nunnery, of getting rid of her for any price. She was already spoken for. And from there it was not hard to guess what her father had gotten in return. The name des Zephyrs, the rank, and the title all came with the skyland, and that had been his wife’s dowry. And if there was one thing Kantelvar and his ilk seemed to be good at, it was brokering marriages.
“Is something the matter?” Kantelvar asked.
Isabelle stiffened. He hadn’t meant to show her this. He hadn’t announced her supposed sorcery or her paternity. He wanted to show her, but he didn’t want her to know.
Her mouth dry as dust, she asked, “Can it do this for anyone?”
“It can track anyone for whom it has a sample to compare.”
“So it had to have samples from both my parents?”
“And all four of your grandparents.”
Perhaps the sudden heaviness in Isabelle’s chest was the weight of history settling behind her breastbone; if Kantelvar’s astonishing claim was true, someone had been tracking her ancestry for more than two thousand years. Was the conspiracy that old? It seemed impossible, but so did at least three other things that had happened to her today.
She tried to school her face and glanced at Kantelvar, but he was staring enraptured at the genetic tree, like an artist staring at a vision he was struggling to bring into the world. This was his obsession. He’d brought her here to show her this, but also to show himself, to make absolutely sure of his facts.
“This is fascinating,” she said. Question his obsession, push his lever. “But this grand lineage seems an inheritance without property.”
“No.” Kantelvar’s voice came out a rusty groan and he shuddered like a sleeper waking. “There is destiny.” Almost unconsciously, he reached out with his gray hand and stroked the cover of the Fragments. The answer was there, so close she could touch it. So far away.
“What destiny?” she breathed, as if she were blowing on the ember of a candle trying to get it to light. How badly did he want to tell her?
Kantelvar shook his head slowly, his cowl swinging. He withdrew his hand from the book. “To carry on the line. Until the Savior comes.”
Isabelle looked back and forth from the artifex to the family tree. No. Not until the Savior comes. Until the Savior is created. That’s what all this was about. The Temple admitted to only one prophecy, “The Savior will come,” and Kantelvar’s order was trying to force destiny’s hand.
Isabelle’s blood felt like icy slush in her veins. If Iav’s transgression, seeking the secret of life, had caused the Breaking of the world, how much worse must be the attempt to shortcut humanity’s redemption?
“What happens next?” she asked aloud. How close was Kantelvar to his goal? Did he imagine that Isabelle would deliver the foretold redeemer?
“We get you back to your handmaids to prepare for the masked ball.
” Kantelvar twisted the blood cipher with Isabelle’s name on it, and the whole tree collapsed in a brief rain of cylinders. He scooped them into the chest and then stepped toward the door. “Come.”
The book lay unattended. If she could grab it up … but no, he’d surely see her. She could not sneak it out from under his sight.
From under his mind, then.
“May I have this?” she asked, resting her fingers ever so lightly on the cover. “If Saint Céleste was truly my greatest-grandmother, I would like to have something of her to think on.”
Kantelvar hunched in alarm, but his voice was its usual monotone. “Leave it. You would not be able to read it in any case.”
Summoning every ounce of calm she possessed, Isabelle let her fingers slide across the leather cover and down the spine. Fear churned her bile to a froth, but she kept her voice calm and reasonable. “Reading isn’t the point. It’s an heirloom, something that was touched by her hand, now by mine. A memento.” She eased the book from the table and cradled it to her breast, praying like an Iconate that the saints would aid this mad deception.
Kantelvar raised his hand as if to ward her off, but hesitated and then lowered his arm. “As you wish, Highness.”
Elation thrilled through Isabelle’s veins as she followed him out of the room. She felt like she was clutching a powder keg with a lit fuse to her chest. She hated abandoning Marie, but what choice did she have? She had to give Kantelvar’s potions time to work. She had to make it to the masquerade and meet her husband-to-be. She had to talk to Jean-Claude, and she had to find a spare secret moment to read this book!
* * *
A space narrow, dark, and so stuffy that the air tasted of vomit, the Cog and Crank tavern had little in its favor as a venue. The one-man play in progress, which Jean-Claude titled Bait for a Villain, with the swordsman Nufio in the leading role, made up with longevity what it lacked in variety. Nufio had done little but moan and clutch his belly since Jean-Claude had fed him a concoction of herbs guaranteed to induce stomach cramps, telling him it was a slow-acting poison. All he had to do to earn the antidote was stay put until Thornscar or his proxy showed up.
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