An Alchemy of Masques and Mirrors--A Novel

by Curtis Craddock

  The Solar had settled on the rooftops, the matinée performance rolling on into the evening. Jean-Claude had just dealt himself yet another hand of cards when the rickety door banged open, then fell off its frayed rope hinges. A quartet of Temple guards in wheat-yellow doublets burst through, bringing the performance to a premature close.

  Every patron shrank in their seat except for a couple who tried to flee out the back, only to encounter a pair of guards coming the other way.

  A guard with sergeant’s stripes barked into the sudden silence, “We are here for Nufio Tellarez.” Several people reflexively flicked their gazes at the incapacitated swordsman.

  “Breaker’s balls,” Jean-Claude muttered. It was a whole afternoon wasted, or was it? He’d been expecting someone to come looking for Nufio, and someone had. Had this been the plan all along?

  In theory, Nufio would only have nailed the hat to the door if Jean-Claude were dead. And who better to receive that signal than someone inside the Temple. Kantelvar? Jean-Claude resisted making that leap, as tempting as it was. The Temple was a vast organization, a stateless nation with its own factions and internecine quarrels. As Isabelle was wont to say, follow the evidence where it leads, and right now his evidence was being bundled out the door.

  Jean-Claude waited a slow thirty count after the guards had left, then slapped down a winning hand of cards, swept the pot into his coin purse, and limped after them.

  The Solar had sunk behind the rooftops and inky shadows quickly washed the color from the cobbled channels of the city’s streets. A few meters along the way the Temple guards shackled Nufio in the back of a wagon. Jean-Claude crossed the street at a hobble, too slowly to give the guards any cause for concern, at least until he got to the alley opposite, after which he limped at speed. On the next street over, a cul-de-sac, awaited Mario and the chaise.

  “Señor musketeer.” Mario waved in what he likely imagined was a surreptitious manner.

  “Mario, are you a sight for sore legs. Mount up. The Temple has Nufio and I want to know where they’re taking him.”

  “Of course, señor.”

  Jean-Claude was about to embark the chaise when he noticed a ragged figure curled up on the floorboards. Rheumy eyes peered at him from under a hood made of layered rags. “What’s this?”

  “I’s Tony,” said a voice that had traded several teeth and part of a tongue for an extra helping of slobber. “I has what you’re looking for, good sir.”

  Mario said, “You said you would pay good coin for refuse brought from the blown-up room, and this fellow spent all day tracking me down. He was incredibly persistent.”

  “Top coin, he says, but only if it’s real. Tony’s is real. Tony was first.” His breath smelled of rotting teeth and cabbage.

  “Well, let’s see it, then.” The way today was going, Jean-Claude didn’t expect much.

  “Top coin,” Tony insisted, holding out a cupped hand.

  Jean-Claude displayed five copper coins in one hand and drew his main gauche with the other. “I will give you these coins, but what you show me had better be genuine or I will have them back with a tithe of your skin to boot. Do you understand?”

  Tony quailed but managed to stammer, “Y-yes.”

  Jean-Claude drizzled the coins into Tony’s hand, probably more wealth than he’d seen in a year. Quicker than a conjurer’s trick the coins vanished and Tony produced a few twisted bits of brass. “Here, here. Take!”

  Mario spat in disgust. “You followed me around all day for that, mongrel?”

  But Jean-Claude took the bits and examined them closely. “Hinges,” he said at last. “These were brass hinges.” If he just unbent them with his mind, he could see the shape, and they were covered in gunpowder smudge. “Tony, where did you find these? Where in the room?”

  Tony stammered, “M-mirror. On the mirror frame they was.”

  “And did you bend them getting them off?”

  “No. No, they was already like that.”

  Jean-Claude gripped a hinge that had been bent nearly in half and prized it apart, revealing a chunk of iron that had embedded in it. Metal from the bomb, just like the metal the doctor had extracted from his leg.

  “Thank you,” Jean-Claude said, and put his main gauche away. “Don’t drink it all in one place.”

  Tony scuttled off like a reef crab with a broken leg.

  Jean-Claude climbed aboard the chaise. “A bunch of Temple guards just left the Cog and Crank with Nufio. Let’s find out where they’re going.”

  Mario flicked the horses into motion. “What does that brass tell you it doesn’t tell me?”

  “It tells me that whoever killed Vincent was no Glasswalker.”

  “I don’t understand,” Mario said.

  Jean-Claude grinned, his blood coming up. “How do you hide a hole in a wall?”

  Mario shrugged. “You could cover it up.”

  “Yes, with a curtain, or a mirror, but then if someone looks behind the curtain or the mirror, they see the hole. But if you planted a bomb in the room, it would blow the wall to smithereens.”

  Mario’s brows drew down in puzzlement. “Then you’d have a very big hole.”

  “Exactly. The small hole would be invisible.” He could see the progression of events. The sharpshooter in his nest shot at the princess, lit the fuse on the bomb, opened the mirror on its hinges, and escaped through the other room. Any witness who wasn’t killed by the blast would see only an empty room with no other means of egress; in a land ruled by Glasswalkers, it would be easy to assume the shooter had gotten out through the mirror.

  Yet where did this brilliant insight lead him? It did nothing to suggest who was actually behind the cavalcade attack. The only fact with a name attached to it was that Duque Diego owned the building. That smelled of a stalking horse, but Jean-Claude would investigate the man anyway.

  Mario had no trouble locating the Temple cart or following it up the hill to the citadel, where it lurched to a stop before the great Temple across the courtyard from the royal palace. It was a vast wheel of a building with six chapel wings extending from a central hub capped with a huge brass dome. A dozen alchemical floodlights illuminated the hemisphere, making it seem as if the Solar, swollen and sullen, had come to rest on the roof.

  Even after dark, the pilgrims, scholars, and other worshippers came and went through the doorless entrance. Jean-Claude joined the flow, following the guard sergeant inside. The Aragoths had certainly spared no expense on this edifice. The walls were lined with a series of alcoves painted on the inside with vibrant frescoes, each depicting the life and deeds of a particular saint. There was Cynessus the Blind, the first to awaken from the long sleep in the Vault of Ages. She was the last person ever to gaze on the Primus Mundi and the only one to witness the breaking of the world, for which sin her eyes had been withered in her skull.

  There was Saint Cerberus the silver eyed, first and greatest of the Glasswalkers, or perhaps the last of an elder breed. The artist here had naturally depicted him as first and greatest of all the saints, with several other prominent figures showing him deference.

  On and on they went, probably weaving together some greater narrative for people who were impressed by that sort of thing. Jean-Claude’s quarry turned down a side corridor. Jean-Claude followed without breaking stride.

  The hallway was short, with a door at the end, where an all-too-familiar voice from the other sided rattled, “Enter.”

  Jean-Claude put on a lurch of speed just as the guard heard him coming and turned.

  “¡Alto! This is—”

  “Crown business,” Jean-Claude said automatically. Never mind which crown. He barged past the guard and into a room that looked like a cross between a clerk’s office and an alchemical workroom. A chandelier hung with humming alchemical lights provided harsh, brilliant illumination. The walls were lined with bookshelves, pigeonholes, and glass-fronted cabinets filled with brass instruments, crystal beakers, vellum scrolls, pots of slimy w
orm-things, a jar of what looked like eyeballs, and even the occasional book.

  In the center of a horseshoe-shaped desk in the middle of the tile floor sat Kantelvar, his clockwork fingers drumming a tinny tattoo on the desktop. On the desk before him lay Jean-Claude’s much-abused hat, now with a hole in it from being nailed to the Temple door.

  “Artifex Kantelvar, why did I know it would be you?”

  Kantelvar said, “Jean-Claude. How … unexpected.”

  The guard rushed in behind Jean-Claude, drawing a dagger. “I said stop! Exaltedness, my apologies. I’ll remove this ruffian.”

  Kantelvar held up a warding clockwork hand. “That won’t be necessary, Sergeant. Jean-Claude is, in fact, the person we have been looking for.”

  Jean-Claude kept his attention fixed on Kantelvar. “A private word, if you don’t mind.”

  Kantelvar said, “You may go, Sergeant.”

  The sergeant said, “Are you sure that’s a good idea, Exaltedness?”

  “Not entirely,” Kantelvar said. “But diplomacy does have its place.”

  Jean-Claude waited until the sergeant had taken himself out and said in a lower tone, “Just what in blazes are you up to?”

  Kantelvar steepled his fingers. “If by that you mean why did I send my men to the Cog and Crank, I should think that would be obvious. I was looking for you.”

  “Why?”

  Kantelvar said, his voice grating, “Because your safety was in doubt. Princesa Isabelle asked about you this afternoon. My men followed your trail as far as the building where the assassination attempt took place, where they learned you had been in an altercation with a local thug. They were told you had returned to the citadel, but you were not here. Fearing that you had been set upon, a search was launched, but to no avail.

  “Then one of my contacts in the local Temple informed me that a reprobate named Nufio Tellarez had nailed a hat to his door. He thought it was a nobleman’s hat; you see, it had no reflection. I recognized it and sent my men to search for Nufio, who is known to wallow at the Cog and Crank. Now, I believe, it is your turn.”

  Jean-Claude looked for a chair, saw none, and so leaned on the desk. “I was looking for Thornscar.” And I found you. “I might have found him if your men hadn’t stolen my bait.”

  “Perhaps if you could be persuaded to share your plans with me, we might stop tripping over each other. I’ve wasted considerable resources looking for you that could have been looking for Thornscar.”

  “I’ll take it under consideration. Where is Isabelle?” He wanted to ask her if she’d asked the artifex to look for him.

  “At the masquerade by now, which, I must point out, you are ill dressed to attend, unless you intend to arrive as a bad smell.”

  Jean-Claude considered the spectacle he’d make, stumping into the ballroom, ill kept, lurching, and smelly. It would almost be worth it, if not for its casting Isabelle in a bad light. “No, I think not.” Right now he needed about a dozen things to make him human again, starting with a bath. “I shall retire for the evening.” He clapped his much-abused hat on his head and limped out the door.

  The warm night air tickled Jean-Claude’s skin and made him itch. He passed by the gaol wagon, which was still waiting at the bottom of the steps. Nufio lifted his head and gripped the cage bars. “Antidote,” he groaned. “Please.”

  Jean-Claude shook his head wearily. “I didn’t poison you, dog, just gave you a bellyache. Stick your finger down your throat and puke it up.”

  The swordsman’s eyes rounded. Waves of surprise, relief, and fury rolled across his face. “You unholy bastard. Breaker take your balls!” Then another wave of pain hit him and he doubled over.

  Jean-Claude said, “A word of advice, friend. The next time somebody offers you money to kill a King’s Own Musketeer, turn it down.”

  * * *

  Getting dressed for the masque was an epic event, not helped by the fact that Isabelle fidgeted through the washing, the powdering, the painting, the primping, the fitting of layer upon layer of petticoats and a corset that assumed she had no further use for her internal organs.

  Right now she didn’t care about the Aragoths and all their ridiculous squabbles. She just wanted to look through that book. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe there was nothing in it but disconnected fragments, as its title implied. Or it might tell her why the blood ciphers thought her father was not her father and why it labeled her l’Étincelle. She had no powers … although she supposed it was possible to be an unhallowed l’Étincelle instead of an unhallowed Sanguinaire, a difference that made no difference, surely.

  At last her handmaids were done touching up everything but the train of her skirt, which she wouldn’t put on until she was ready to board the coach. She thanked the handmaids and complimented them profusely before shooing them out the door.

  “But, Highness, the coach is waiting,” said Valérie, more subdued than usual; she was still rattled and grieving, but she was sticking to her post.

  “Then I will be fashionably late. I just need a moment to compose myself. Alone. It’s not as if they can start without me.” She bustled Valérie out, closed the felt-lined door, and hurried to her desk. The Fragments awaited her. She opened it to its first page. It was handwritten, but definitely not two thousand years old. The pages, though yellowed like autumn leaves, were not so dry as to crack under her touch.

  It was, thank the saints, written in Saintstongue and not some more esoteric language. The text of the first page read, “… fluctuations in the underlying aura … primordial infinitesimals are generated…,” which was annotated with a description that went on much longer than the passage itself of where and when the fragment had been found.

  She tried not to get stuck wondering what primordial infinitesimals were and flipped another page, and another. The book was long and there was no way she was going to get through it all tonight. Did she have to put the answer together in pieces? Was there an answer? She needed more time.

  The book was well worn, its tooled leather cover warped, the rough edges of its paper stained from the oil of many fingers. Maybe he had a favorite passage, something he kept returning to time after time.

  She closed the book and set it, spine down, on the table, then let the covers fall open. There was the telltale crack of a broken spine, and the pages spread to reveal a longer passage much stained, smudged, and scribbled upon.

  Isabelle stifled a cry of triumph; there was no guarantee this passage held what she was looking for, but she dove in:

  I, Saint Céleste, inscribe this argument in defense of my beloved and innocent sister, Ur-Saint Iav.

  Isabelle stopped and read the line again, and again, as if her eyes and her mind must have been playing tricks on her. Never had more heresy been encoded in a single sentence. Saint Céleste was Iav’s sister? Iav who had tried to steal the secret of life from the Builder. Iav who had unleashed the Breaker and shattered the Primus Mundi. And Saint Céleste named her innocent? Impossible.

  Or was it? If this was a true transcription of the actual words put down by Saint Céleste, one of the blessed few who had survived the Primus Mundi, could Isabelle discount her words? If Céleste was her greatest-grandmother, then that made Iav her greatest-aunt.

  With trembling hands Isabelle traced the rest of the passage. Much of it was broken and much more written in a technical language she had no way to decipher, words that no longer had meaning because the theory behind them had been lost. Near the end of the passage were a few clear uninterrupted lines.

  Iav’s hypothesis was correct. Heritable minutiae are neither infinitely elastic nor divisible. Given the limited number possible stable corpuscular sets, it is plausible to infer that the decay of sorcery need not be inevitable and the tendency toward malignancies can be reversed by outbreeding with the clayborn. Not only did her limited experiments with wild crosses show no evidence of corruption, but the extra degree of motility provided by the exosomes enabled the emergence of novel phenomena
. The most enticing possibility is the manifestation of a higher order of sorcery …

  Isabelle felt as if she had entered a trance or a dream. It was no wonder the Temple had not included this fragment in the Instructions; it contradicted every belief they espoused. Sorcerers breeding with the clayborn produced abominations … and what was an abomination but a novel type of sorcery that its wielder did not know how to control? Something as unfamiliar and powerful as unbound sorcery could be terrifying, and people had a very difficult time distinguishing between frightful and evil.

  The last line of text was broken.

  … with the ability to transmute … on a scale hitherto deemed impossible … could lead to the salvation of … manifest in a single individual … that which was promised …

  A single individual. This was what drove Kantelvar and his ilk, breeding sorcerers down through the centuries. Combining, back-breeding, narrowing all the bloodlines down to two.

  Julio and I. The understanding of exactly what Kantelvar wanted of her stunned all other thought from her mind. My child. The Savior.

  The door to her room opened with a soft swishing noise and Valérie said, urgently, “Highness. It’s time to go.”

  Quaking with reaction, Isabelle shut the book. Yes. She needed to concentrate on other things, to clear her mind. She had been expecting politics to rule her life, not prophecy. She needed to talk to Jean-Claude about this.

  Later. Right now she had a social duty to perform, a betrothed to meet, and a war to avert.

  On her way out the door she said to Valérie, “If Jean-Claude comes back, ask him to wait for me. I need to talk to him.”

  “Are you well, Highness?” Valérie asked. “You look pale.”

  “Just nervous,” Isabelle said. “Going in front of all those people. I feel like a prize heifer at a county fair.” And that was the least of her worries.