An Alchemy of Masques and Mirrors--A Novel

by Curtis Craddock

  “Who are you?” asked one of them indignantly.

  “The one asking intelligent questions. How can you be sure this is he when he never takes his cowl off?”

  “Not in front of outsiders.” The artificer skirted the blood slick and leaned over to lift the cloth from the corpse’s face. He revealed the waxy gray visage of a corpse with a hole through his right eye socket all the way to the back of his head.

  Jean-Claude recoiled. “What is that?”

  “That is Kantelvar,” said the second sagax.

  Jean-Claude shuddered deep inside. Perhaps there were worse fates than growing old. He turned to the secretary. “How did you find him?”

  The man stammered, “I-I just came in to deliver some papers, and there he was.”

  “Was the door locked?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Who has keys?”

  “He does, and I do, and so does the lord chamberlain.”

  “Is there any other way out of here?” Just because Jean-Claude didn’t see another door didn’t mean there wasn’t one.

  “Not that I know of.”

  Just then, a dull thud stunned the air, like the distant impact of a giant’s hammer. It reverberated up through the floorboards, shaking dust from the rafters and rattling the mechanical devices littering the shelves.

  “What in the Builder’s name?” DuJournal muttered.

  “That sounded like a mortar shell,” Jean-Claude said. It had been twenty-five years since he’d last felt one detonate, but it was a sensation not easily forgotten.

  An alarm bell sang, a desperate warning. Fire! Fire! A dozen more bells joined in, a symphony of urgency and terror. Jean-Claude hurried to the window. Across the square, smoke and flame belched from the windows of Isabelle’s residence.

  “Isabelle!” Jean-Claude’s heart twisted in a horrible knot. He bolted from the room and all but toppled down the stairs. DuJournal took his elbow and hustled him out the door and into the coach. They shot across the square in a rattle of hooves. People vomited from the princess’s building, coughing and gagging from the smoke. Jean-Claude debarked and fought his way upstream, his wounded leg crumpling at every step. “Isabelle!”

  Two women stumbled through the doorway. Jean-Claude recognized Adel, who was coughing and sputtering and half-carrying Olivia, whose face and hands were burned to blackness.

  “Adel! Olivia!” Jean-Claude reached to help her support Olivia.

  Adel fell to her knees in a paroxysm of hacking. Olivia reached up with one hand that was little more than bone and grabbed Jean-Claude by the collar. Blood and serum sprayed from her lips along with the words, “Princess. Room.”

  Jean-Claude felt as if he had been harpooned, a massive pronged barb pierced straight through his chest. No. No. Not this. He laid Olivia down and scrambled for the doors. Strong hands grabbed him by the shoulders and tried to spin him around. “Monsieur, wait! You can’t go in there.”

  “Unhand me!” Jean-Claude turned and rammed his fist into DuJournal’s groin. The mathematician fell with a yelp, and Jean-Claude hurtled through the doorway. Black smoke, stinking of scorching meat and burning wood, enveloped his face, choking and blinding him. He dropped to his hands and knees. Beneath the smoky pall, a dozen figures lay sprawled in death, suffocated or trampled. Jean-Claude crawled past them. Flame filled the corridor beyond the foyer, greedy worms of heat gnawing on the wood. Tapestries blazed and sheets of flame danced across the carpets. The heat broiled Jean-Claude’s face like dragon’s breath.

  “Isabelle!” he cried, and the smoke reached down his lungs. No! Not her. Please, Builder, not her. Take me!

  Something grabbed Jean-Claude’s feet and hauled him backward. His face scraped along the floor. “Princess,” he gasped, “Isabelle!” He tried to kick his way free, but his legs did not avail him. Cool air seared his lungs as he was dragged into the courtyard and pinned fast. Several people piled on top of him as greedy fingers of fire claimed the entire residence as their own.

  * * *

  The fire burned for a day and a night before the royal and city fire brigades managed to put it out. To add insult to grievous injury, the sky unleashed rain three hours after the blaze was extinguished, and the downpour hadn’t abated in the three days since.

  Wrapped in heavy oilskins, and accompanied by DuJournal, Jean-Claude hobbled in numb desperation through the wreckage of the residence. The building had been reduced to a blackened shell. Bits of the outside wall remained upright, but the whole interior had collapsed down to the ground. Recovery crews worked day and night, clearing a path to where Isabelle’s chamber had been, but progress was slow. So far, fifty bodies had been recovered from the massive building. The fire had spread so fast that few escaped.

  Jean-Claude had inspected all the bodies recovered so far. The worst of them were unrecognizable, charred husks curled into fetal balls, but none of their clawed hands had Isabelle’s distinguishing digit.

  Jean-Claude staggered through a muddy black slurry of ash and debris, picking his way carefully around broken timbers and splashing into holes where the stone floor had cracked from the heat. Before she died, Olivia had managed to convey that she had been looking for Isabelle, but when she opened the door to Isabelle’s chamber, the room had exploded.

  Adel, still abed with the drowning lung from the smoke, had described a blast like a bomb that had thrown Olivia across the room. “It all happened so fast,” she wheezed. “There was an explosion and then suddenly the whole world was on fire. Isabelle’s room looked like the inside of a forge.”

  And then Jean-Claude had gone back to losing his mind. He’d stood on the porch of the infirmary in the rain and slowly ripped his fancy, soot-stained musketeer’s uniform into shreds, strip after strip, until those threads that remained were too small even to be used as bandages. A musketeer was all he’d ever been. He’d been so proud. Of the king’s blessing, of raising Isabelle, of being too damned clever by half. What damned good had it been? What a fool. What an ass. Why her and not me? When there were nothing left but shreds, he threw the sodden tangle in the gutter with the rest of the filth.

  Yet nobody had said Isabelle was dead. Nobody dared. They hadn’t found her body—until an hour ago they hadn’t even found anything from her room—and until they did, the forlorn shadow of hope remained, a whisper against a howling gale of despair.

  Amongst the courtiers, accusations of blame had begun to fly. When something like this happened, someone had to be blamed, but nobody wanted to be the one accused, and the best way to avoid that was to accuse someone else. Several members of Queen Margareta’s faction tried to pin fault on Jean-Claude—where had the musketeer been when Isabelle was attacked? Out carousing, no doubt—and only Lord DuJournal’s persistent defense had kept him from being thrown in a dungeon on an accusation of murder.

  Not that disgrace mattered anymore. Jean-Claude had failed his master, his child—the child of his heart if not his loins—his maker, and his soul all at once, and he hadn’t even managed to acquire a fatal wound doing it.

  In the end, he had only one duty left to perform. To find her, and to find the one who had done this. To wrap his fingers around the villain’s throat and hurl him from the sky cliffs.

  On the fourth day after the fire, with DuJournal at his side, Jean-Claude splashed into what was left of Isabelle’s bedroom. He did not know why the imposter accompanied him—what purpose could Jean-Claude serve for him now?—but he was glad for the company.

  The area underneath the princess’s chamber was only now being uncovered by salvage teams being overseen by Don Angelo. Standing under a military rain tarp, surrounded by aides de camp, in the midst of the soggy destruction, the gray-haired nobleman looked like a field commander on the battlefield of the damned.

  Jean-Claude ducked under the overhanging canvas and doffed his soaking hat. “Your Grace, may we join you?”

  “Of course,” he said solemnly. He offered wine, which neither accepted, and th
en said, “I am grieved. Princess Isabelle seemed a very worthy woman.”

  Jean-Claude had thought he had no tears left, which didn’t account for why he had to fight back a fresh wave of them. Enough. “She was that and more.” His voice was rough, and not just because of the smoke damage. “By your leave, we would like to witness the recovery.”

  “Of course,” Don Angelo said.

  As they turned away DuJournal whispered to Jean-Claude, “Did you know his daughter was once destined to be Príncipe’s Julio’s bride?”

  Jean-Claude hesitated, planting his walking stick in a puddle. “Lady Sonya?”

  “No, no. This was years ago. When Príncipe Julio was an infant, he was betrothed to Doña Angelina, who was a year his senior. She was sickly for years and finally died about two years ago. “

  Another woman murdered. Jean-Claude shook off the assertion as baseless. Sometimes people got sick and died; he had seen it many times. Besides, even if she had been killed, what good did it do him to know it? He had failed his charge.

  “Your Grace!” came a cry from the work site. Two dozen wet burly men had stopped hoisting fallen beams and clearing away rubble. They clustered around a pile of wreckage near what once had been her writing desk, and the foreman called again, his voice strained between excitement and horror. “Your Grace, I think you ought to have a look at this.”

  To Jean-Claude’s mind, that could only mean one horrible thing, and he limped into the space where the room had been with a sick anticipation.

  The foreman pointed. Jean-Claude’s gaze followed his direction to a pile of charred timbers, and there, sticking out of the wreckage like one more torched fagot, was a dismembered limb, a lady’s scorched and blackened arm, with one wormlike finger.

  Jean-Claude’s whole world went black. How he remained standing, he could not say, for all his strength had fled, and time went very queer. The next thing he knew, the searchers had found the rest of Isabelle’s body. She’d lost a leg and an arm, and her face had been completely scorched away. Jean-Claude shuffled along after them as they loaded her onto a makeshift catafalque and carried her to temporary shelter under a tarp. One of Don Angelo’s aides said something about the possibility that Isabelle had accidentally knocked over a candle. “A tragic accident.”

  Jean-Claude gave the aide such a glare as made the man retreat a full step. “She had alchemical lanterns, not candles, and this was no accident.”

  Jean-Claude’s hand clenched the head of his cane, but braining the liveried staff would do him no good. He stuffed grief and despair and rage and every other emotion down into the pit from whence nightmares came. What use had he for feelings? What right had he to grieve, he who had failed so completely? Nothing could undo the crime. Nothing remained of his service but to hunt down its perpetrator.

  Jean-Claude stalked into the remains of the building and stared around, looking for he knew not what. Isabelle would have been able to survey the room and tell him a dozen unusual things about the fire, about the way it burned and what that meant about whoever started it, but Jean-Claude was not so gifted. Yet perhaps others with more talent than he could be brought into service. DuJournal was already in the room, examining bits of charred wood, sniffing them.

  “What are you doing?” Jean-Claude asked.

  “Trying to figure out how the fire got started,” he said. “The princess was found near her desk, which means she wasn’t in bed when she died, but if she was awake, she could have escaped before the smoke overwhelmed her.”

  “She might have been asleep at her desk,” Jean-Claude said, playing the Breaker’s advocate.

  “Hmmm—possibly,” said Martin. “But no mere candle started this fire. Smell this.” He tossed Jean-Claude a piece of burned wood.

  Jean-Claude sniffed it dubiously and his nose wrinkled at a sharp stench, oily but stinging even more than vinegar. “What is it?”

  “Unless I miss my guess, it’s some sort of oil spirits, spilled all over the place. It would be perfect for getting a fire started.”

  “I thought a bomb caused the fire.”

  “I haven’t found any bomb bits. Things look to have been burned rather than blasted.”

  “Then what caused the explosion?”

  “Sometimes that can happen when a fire burns in a closed room. Fire needs air to mix with its phlogiston. I read a monograph by Gregor VonOrn that hypothesizes that once a fire has used up all the air in a confined space, it lies dormant until, say, a door is opened, then it flares up explosively. Isabelle would have been at her desk. Then a fire started and burned and she succumbed to the smoke and fell to the floor. And then Olivia opened the door, and that caused the blast and spread the fire. I can’t say for sure, but the furniture inside the room seems in place, if not intact, which means the blast was mostly outside the room.”

  Jean-Claude grunted—it all sounded like hocus-pocus to him—but followed along with the story. “If the blast was outside, how did Isabelle lose her arm?”

  “That is a very good question. With your leave, I would like to examine her body.”

  Jean-Claude’s gut knotted at the thought of this stranger pawing over Isabelle’s corpse. It was indecent, but Isabelle … it was exactly the sort of thing she would have thought to try. Jean-Claude said, “You will treat her with respect.”

  “The utmost.” DuJournal bowed low and took himself out, leaving Jean-Claude alone in the drizzle. He poked around through the ashes. He didn’t understand empirical philosophy. Fire didn’t have motives or reasons. It just was what it was. The natural world didn’t make mistakes. People did. Except whoever had murdered his princess hadn’t made enough mistakes, or Jean-Claude hadn’t been clever enough to spot them.

  His walking stick jammed and twisted against something in a puddle that was deeper than it looked. He jerked the stick in consternation and popped an oblong object from the murk. He blinked, and saw a cavalry officer’s pistol half-submerged in a hole in the floor. He knelt and picked it up. If it was not the same pistol he had given Isabelle on the day of the cavalcade, then it was an identical twin. The barrel was cracked at the base, a sure sign of a backfire—like what might happen if a loaded pistol were left in a burning room.

  He frowned and imagined the room as it had been. There was the wreckage of Isabelle’s bed, and the pistol had been in the trunk at its foot. The trunk that was no longer there. There was no remainder of it, no debris. Could the workers have taken it out already? Could the murderer? Why?

  Jean-Claude went back to basics. Catching the killer was his duty, as empty as it seemed. How did the murderer get in and out? There was only one door. The walls had been burned down to mere stubs. Jean-Claude walked the perimeter, looking for what would have been empty spaces indicating secret passages. Alas, if such existed, their defining boundaries had been obliterated in the building’s collapse.

  So assume just one door, and the chamber beyond had been filled with handmaids and guards. Could one or more of them have been complicit? Half of them were dead and therefore difficult to question. So further assume that a guilty handmaid, being forewarned about the fire, was one of the escapees. Were they all accounted for? He seemed to recall talking to each of them in the last few days. So, had all the dead ones been positively identified, or … wait.

  Realization struck Jean-Claude like a crossbow bolt. He stood in the center of the room and turned a complete circle, peering through veils of rain, probing every cranny for something that was not there.

  There was one handmaid unaccounted for. Marie. She wasn’t here. There was no corpse. So where was she? Most people wouldn’t even think to account for a bloodhollow. Bloodhollows weren’t people. They were part of the background, a piece of functional furniture. They didn’t count, except to people like Isabelle and therefore Jean-Claude. So where had Marie gone? Was she the instrument of the murder, controlled by the Comte des Zephyrs? But no … he stood to gain nothing from Isabelle’s death, and even if he did use Marie as a murder
weapon, why not just let her burn along with everything else? Marie had left this room or been taken, but why and by whom? Whoever it was, it was a mistake, a loose thread, if only Jean-Claude could find some way to tug on it.

  “Monsieur musketeer,” DuJournal shouted to be heard over the drumming rain.

  Jean-Claude hobbled quickly to the mathematician’s side and carefully tipped the brim of his hat so that it did not drizzle on Isabelle’s remains. DuJournal knelt by Isabelle’s side. Jean-Claude still found it hard to look at her blackened husk, but the spirit of the hunt gave him strength. He would find her killer, even if it took him until the end of time.

  “What have you found?”

  DuJournal flexed his fingers, as if preparing to snatch a burning brand from a fire. “I think … the princess did not have foul breath.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Look at her mouth.”

  Jean-Claude had to hold down his gorge, but he bent to look where DuJournal was pointing. Isabelle’s skull had shattered in the fire, and the flesh had been burned from her bones, but her teeth remained. They were yellowed and blackened. “I see nothing,” he admitted.

  DuJournal pointed at a group of molars that were black and deeply pitted. “This isn’t burn damage. This is jaw rot. This woman, whoever she was, had rotten teeth and terrible breath. Princess Isabelle did not. I danced with her the night of the fire.”

  The implication stunned the breath from Jean-Claude’s body. He hardly dared embrace the logical conclusion lest the reprieve be snatched away. At last he whispered, “She’s alive.”

  “Or at the very least, this is not her,” DuJournal said.

  “But someone wants us to think it is.” Jean-Claude’s mind raced, and understanding heaved up like a leviathan from a cloud bank, vast and frightful and unexpected. “It’s all misdirection. Breaker’s balls, I’m such a fool.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “This is not a murder; it’s a kidnapping.” And if it was a kidnapping, that meant Isabelle was alive, bless the Savior. Without food or drink or sleep, Jean-Claude felt he could live a hundred years on that knowledge alone. “Someone meant to kidnap Isabelle, but they wanted everyone to think she was dead so no one would look for her.”