An Alchemy of Masques and Mirrors--A Novel

by Curtis Craddock

  “The secret passage wasn’t the only reason I chose this room for you. It is soundproof and, to the extent that such a thing is possible, proof against sorcery as well. No one will ever know what has transpired here.”

  Bastard! She willed violent death on him, but that was useless. She had nothing left but a mind, so she had to use it. If his trap was so secure, why was he nervously rattling off the details? What was he missing, and how could she exploit it?

  Kantelvar flipped her onto her back and she stared up at the ceiling, her mouth agape, very much, she imagined, like a landed fish. Kantelvar bent down and stroked her cheek with desiccated fingers. “You look just like her—Saint Céleste—so beautiful, and you have her mind, sharp as a razor.” His metal fingers traced the line of her jaw.

  Isabelle thrashed uselessly inside her own skin, trying to find a way to the surface, even as Kantelvar pressed a stinging cloth to her face. “Breathe this. Things are about to happen that you don’t want to be awake for.”

  CHAPTER

  Fifteen

  Color and sound swirled around Jean-Claude like currents in a raging flood. Smears of red, stripes of gray, and flashes of yellow barked and yowled and buffeted his awareness from all sides. He’d been poisoned. He was not entirely sure he was not dead. This place of vicious, viscous, shapeless colors and cruel sounds seemed a likely candidate for the Halls of Torment.

  Through the mud of noises assaulting his awareness something like voices came: “Oove im dow ere.” “Ike a sac v suet.” “Ake is other leg.” “Eave ho!”

  He tumbled. Something bashed his shoulder, his head, his poor leg. Pain spread through his body like cracks through drying mud. Pain was good. It meant he still had flesh and life.

  He came to rest on a floor, facedown, more or less. His fingers discovered splinters. A wooden floor. He smelled vomit. It might have been his own. That dull thudding noise might have been footsteps. Judging by how he’d tumbled, somebody had thrown him down a flight of stairs. He had to get back to himself, but firm shapes refused to resolve out of his colorful blindness.

  “Prop ’im up.”

  Two sets of hands grabbed Jean-Claude by the armpits and heaved him upright.

  He tried to say, “Good evening, gentlemen,” but his voice was a gurgle. He squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head, but it only lolled like a newborn’s. No wonder babies squalled, feeling this helpless.

  “Prop ’im up.” Several pairs of hands lifted him from the floor. “Make this quick.” They dropped him on what felt like a bench. One of them kept hold of him to prevent him from sliding down. He tried to flex his hands, his arms, but they might as well have been sacks filled with mud.

  Think. He couldn’t die like this—who would look after Isabelle?—but why wasn’t he already dead? They could have used a lethal poison or stabbed him when he succumbed to a nonlethal one. Perhaps they wanted to interrogate him first. He hoped so, because that meant he would be able to talk.

  One of his captors splashed something on his face. It was sticky and tasted like ale.

  “You’re wasting good drink!” complained one voice.

  “Gotta make it look right,” said another. “Knifed in a tavern, see?”

  So it was to be murder, after all, but why bother with misdirection?

  “Bah,” Jean-Claude sputtered, barely loud enough to be called a sound.

  “I think he’s waking up,” said one of the men. “Stab him now?”

  “Still limp,” said another one. Jean-Claude thought he could sift at least three voices, though he was sure he was only picking up about half the words.

  Jean-Claude tried again. “Ransom.” It wasn’t the most subtle hook he’d ever thrown into the creek, but he was short on inspiration, and these didn’t seem like the brightest fish.

  A wide, blurry face loomed before Jean-Claude. “What did he say?”

  “Don’t listen to him.” Someone pulled the wide face away. “He’s addled.”

  “Ransom,” Jean-Claude muttered. His voice was becoming steadier, but too slowly. “Worth more alive than dead. Much more.”

  “We’re not interested in ransom. Besides, you’re just a soldier. No money.”

  Jean-Claude’s pulse raced even faster. His mind was clearing more swiftly than his vision. “No soldier. King’s Own Musketeer. The princess’s favorite. I’m the one who knows where her dowry’s hid.” He willed them to take the hook.

  “Dowry?” a third man asked. Stupid. Stupid man.

  The blade of a knife, cold and sharp, pressed against his throat. “Tell me about this dowry, and I’d better like what I hear, or it’ll be the last thing you ever say.”

  Not much of a bargainer, are you? “The dowry of a royal princess, for the most important wedding in a century. It’s a gift from Grand Leon, three chests of Craton Riqueza gold, Aragothic gold recovered from a hulk of an Aragothic treasure ship. To be returned as a gesture of goodwill.” Would these thugs recognize the acceptable political code for captured booty? Probably not. He mourned an elegant detail lost on a dim audience.

  The blade scraped Jean-Claude’s skin. “Where?”

  The pain and fear churning through Jean-Claude’s mind slowly cleaned the gunk from his system. The pulsing fog resolved into three vaguely manlike shapes, dark splotches moving against a lighter background. “A shipment from Rocher Royale. Coming in tonight. Ship called the Weirgeld.”

  “He’s lying,” spat another, more skeptical thug. “Just gut him and be done with it.”

  “You don’t want the password?” Jean-Claude flexed his fingers and they responded, but slowly.

  “Tell me,” said the thug with the knife.

  “Why? Just so you can kill me afterward? That doesn’t sound like a good bargain.”

  “Don’t listen to him,” said the skeptic. “He’s trying to put the wind up us.”

  Knife boy said, “Tell me the password or you’ll die slow instead of quick.”

  The world of Jean-Claude’s perception slowly congealed toward familiar solidity. “You don’t want to do that. If I give you the right password you will all be very wealthy men, but if I give you the wrong password, bloody chunks of you will be fed to the pigs. The only way you could be sure of getting the right password is if I am there with you to give it.”

  The skeptic said, “Joseph, this is not what we’re being paid for. He’s lying, and even if he’s not, you think there’s any way he’ll give us gold once he has his friends around?”

  Joseph, the knife man, growled in frustration.

  “There’s one way you lads could come out ahead,” Jean-Claude said. “If you could get the password out of me, and one of you kept me under guard, the rest could go collect the gold. One of you approaches the ship while another keeps lookout from a safe distance. If anything bad happens, then the lookout runs back here and you can kill me any way you like.”

  Joseph wavered, and a third, hitherto silent shape said, “It could work.” Jean-Claude willed them all to come into focus, but the universe was noncompliant to his wishes.

  “I don’t like it,” said the skeptic, almost plaintively, as if greed were slowly strangling his good sense. “And Thornscar said kill him here.”

  Thornscar again! The man seemed to be everywhere, damn his eyes.

  Jean-Claude shoveled on another layer of horseshit. “Ah, so Thornscar is paying you a pittance to do his dirty work, while he collects a princesa’s ransom. You take all the risk, and he gets all the reward.”

  “I say we kill him now, like we agreed to do.”

  Perhaps it was Jean-Claude’s wishful thinking, but he sounded like a man willing to be talked out of it.

  “But what if he’s telling the truth?” Joseph said.

  “Money doesn’t do a dead man any good,” said the third.

  “You should have thought of that before you took up with Thornscar,” boomed a new voice from the formless space behind the kidnappers. The men whirled and stared, momentarily paralyzed
with surprise. A firearm bellowed, spitting flame and smoke. One thug fell. The skeptic reached for a knife, but a green blur came through the smoke and pricked his throat with a rapier thrust. Crimson blood sprayed. Joseph tried to run, but the green blur leapt after him.

  “Don’t kill them all!” Jean-Claude tried to yell, but the smoke choked him. He heaved with all his might and managed to achieve nearly a sitting position before collapsing backward and toppling off the bench. There was a heavy thump from the direction in which Joseph had fled.

  Jean-Claude rolled to his belly. His boiling humors had finally scoured away enough of the grime from his eyes that he could make out individual planks of the rough wooden floor. He had pushed himself slowly to his knees, trembling with the effort, when a strong hand gripped him under the upper arm.

  “Come on, old man, let’s get you up.”

  Jean-Claude jerked away from the grip, twisted, and landed on his rump, staring up into a blurry face with blurry blond hair. “Who are you calling old?” He might curse his age, the creeping weakness that stole in with every passing moment, but he did not give anyone the right to notice it. And what of this blurriness? Would it pass, or was he to be crippled like some sexagenarian with cobwebs across his eyes? The idea was too terrifying even to think about.

  The figure raised his hands in a gesture of supplication. “No offense intended, monsieur, but you seem to have been drugged. May I offer you my hand in friendship? My name is Martin DuJournal.”

  Isabelle’s nom de plume? What new quackery was this? Whatever the case, Jean-Claude was not about to let a good rescue go to waste. “Pleased to meet you. I am Jean-Claude, His Célestial Majesty’s King’s Own Musketeer, and I thank you for your timely assistance. How is it that you stumbled across this little tête-à-tête?” And why in the world do you care?

  “I attended Princess Isabelle’s masquerade, but I had left the ball and was on my way to her domicile to await a promised audience when I witnessed your abduction. I followed these ruffians and used the distraction of your fascinating repartee to approach them undetected.”

  “Why didn’t you simply summon the palace guards?”

  “Because I was not at all sure whose side they would be on.”

  Jean-Claude grunted by way of acknowledgment. Yes, the kidnappers had been in possession of royal livery. Had Thornscar suborned someone in the royal household? Breaker’s balls, but the man was inconsistent in his resources and his methods.

  “And what compelled you to involve yourself in my troubles?” Jean-Claude asked.

  Martin replied cheerily, “For one thing, what they did to you was entirely dishonorable, and I could not stand to see such a crime committed to one of my countrymen. For another, you are Princess Isabelle’s favorite, and I thought rescuing you might increase my stature in Her Highness’s eyes.”

  “Indeed.” This man was a liar, a trickster, and very interested in the princess. Another problem. Another lead into another one of Aragoth’s factions perhaps. “She is generous with her thanks, but she will be very interested to hear how you came to know the name Thornscar.” And DuJournal.

  “From the mouths of your assailants. I thought it might startle them to hear it.”

  “Are you saying you’d never heard it before?”

  “Should I have?”

  “Perhaps not.” For all the havoc Thornscar caused, there were an awful lot of people who had never heard his name. He ought to have existed in the storm cloud of gossip, if not as a lightning bolt of fear, then at least as a distant rumble of rumor. Yet the only people who seemed to know his name were minions he had recently employed. None-too-bright minions, in fact. Someone who employed such people should be known about even if they were not known.

  He asked, “And you wish an introduction to Princess Isabelle?”

  Martin produced an insolent grin. Jean-Claude could tell it was insolent from the way it gleamed through the fog of his vision. “I already have an introduction. She has invited me to attend her to discuss a matter of mutual interest, a math problem of sorts.”

  Jean-Claude coughed a laugh; he could imagine Isabelle’s chain of thought on that one, and he would have been willing to pay for the privilege of seeing her dismantle the monkey who sought to steal her best clothes—even if she did it in the foreign language of math—just so long as he was there to protect her from any violence an exposed fraud might seek to commit. “So you are a mathematician?”

  “Au contraire; I am the mathematician, the world’s foremost master of numbers.”

  Jean-Claude chuffed. “Not shy.”

  “Fortune favors the bold. It is well-known that she has a fine appreciation of the intellect and an awareness of the importance of mathematics—she published my monographs, after all—so I seek her patronage. Speaking of which, if I am going to take advantage of this opportunity, we should get you back to the citadel.”

  Yes. His whole body ached, and he could still barely see. “You didn’t kill all of these scoundrels, did you?”

  Martin prodded the limp forms with his boot. “I am afraid I was overzealous.”

  Conveniently silencing any testimony they might have been able to give, but there was no point in criticizing DuJournal on that score; the man had saved his life, or at least interrupted his would-be murderers. It was not outside the realm of possibility that this entire scenario, from kidnapping to rescue, was nothing more than a ruse to get DuJournal close to Isabelle, but the man apparently already had an appointment, assuming that wasn’t also a lie. A few words with Isabelle should straighten that out.

  “To the citadel, then,” Jean-Claude said.

  DuJournal eventually heaved Jean-Claude onto the bench seat of the very same coach that had stolen him from the royal citadel, then lifted the team to a quick trot. To Jean-Claude’s dismay, the Solar was rising; he had been out all night. The light came up from the direction of the harbor today, painting the world with broad strokes of rose and cream.

  The thugs had taken him far down into the city, because even with the right of way granted to a royal coach, it was almost full light by the time the citadel loomed into view. Jean-Claude squinted ahead and was happy to note that his vision seemed to be clearing up at last; the looming blur before him resolved into the royal citadel’s gatehouse.

  Two guards detached themselves from their posts. “¡Alto! ¿Quien va alla?”

  Martin reined to a stop. “It is I, Lord Martin DuJournal, returning stolen property”—he thumped the coach—“and, not coincidentally, the most excellent Jean-Claude, His Célestial Majesty’s musketeer.”

  The first guard’s eyes rounded and he faced Jean-Claude. “The musketeer? Señor, your papers, please.”

  Jean-Claude leaned forward apprehensively. “Why? What is the matter?”

  “We must identify you, señor. Please, no offense is meant.”

  Jean-Claude patted his belt for his pouch, but it had gone missing. “Blast. They must have been stolen when I was waylaid.”

  “I will vouchsafe for him,” Lord Martin said, presenting his own passport. The guard examined the papers with due diligence and entered them in his logbook.

  “Something is wrong,” Jean-Claude said. “Guards are never this meticulous until after disaster strikes. Has something happened to Isabelle?”

  The guard returned the papers and favored them with an ironic look. “I gather she has mislaid her favorite musketeer. She’s got the whole royal household and half the city guard looking for him.” He bowed them through the gate.

  “Cheeky bastard,” Jean-Claude muttered, not disapprovingly, as DuJournal piloted them through the gate tunnel.

  No sooner had they entered the courtyard than a frantic acolyte burst from the Temple complex to the right side of the vast square. “Help! Help! The artifex! Somebody help!”

  Jean-Claude hesitated, for he recognized Kantelvar’s adjutant from his last trip to Kantelvar’s demesne. As much as Jean-Claude needed to return to Isabelle’s side, thi
s looked like a situation disinclined to wait on his convenience. He jabbed his finger toward the Temple. “Go!” But DuJournal had already snapped the reins and whistled the horses into a quick trot.

  By the time the carriage rolled to a stop at the foot of the Temple steps, a crowd had gathered, and two yellow-cowled sagaxes were half-guiding, half-pursuing the frantic secretary back inside. Jean-Claude dismounted, caught his balance, and then lurched through the press. A trio of Temple guards wearing yellow tabards and carrying halberds were forming a cordon, demanding the crowd move back and announcing unconvincingly that there was nothing to see.

  Jean-Claude headed straight for the man in the middle, who raised a hand to thwart him. “Señor, I apologize but—”

  “King’s business!” Jean-Claude declared, stepping smartly around the outstretched hand.

  DuJournal caught up with him at the doors. “You’re going to earn that poor fellow a demotion.”

  “Then maybe he’ll learn to do his job.” Jean-Claude followed the sagaxes and the secretary up a staircase to Kantelvar’s office. Jean-Claude’s chest tightened with more than mere exertion. As much as he disliked the artifex, he’d be no use at all dead.

  The sagaxes pushed open a tall, narrow door graven with images of cogwheels, axles, and springs. Jean-Claude slipped in after them.

  Inside, the clerics stood aghast, staring at Kantelvar’s desk. Jean-Claude squeezed between them, and there lay Kantelvar—at least, Jean-Claude surmised it was he by his robes—spread-eagled across the massive wooden surface. He had been hacked to bloody pieces; his clockwork arm and leg were missing. Blood overflowed the desktop and made a great puddle of the floor. It was still wet. This had happened recently, within the hour.

  “Can anyone confirm this is Kantelvar?” Jean-Claude asked, startling the artificers, who had been too transfixed to take notice of him.