An Alchemy of Masques and Mirrors--A Novel

by Curtis Craddock

  “But why? The dead give you no political leverage, and you can’t collect ransom on a corpse,” DuJournal said.

  “Not for ransom, for something else, and I would give a lot to know what that ‘else’ is. But first they had to get rid of me, so they kidnapped me and tried to make it look like I’d been gutted in a tavern. Nothing mysterious about that, just a stupid foreign drunkard dying a drunkard’s death. No one would ever investigate such a death.”

  “No one except Princess Isabelle; she had the whole city looking for you.”

  “Yes, but while I was supposed to be dying in a tavern, Isabelle was abducted. The kidnapper wanted to avoid pursuit, but he knew he’d be hunted unless everyone thought Isabelle was dead, so he set the fire and left another corpse in her place. One burned corpse looks pretty much like another, except for Isabelle’s … oddity.”

  DuJournal said, “Bones survive fires, so he took the only course open to him. He amputated her deformed hand and left it for searchers to find.”

  An impotent fury swelled in Jean-Claude’s heart. Someone had maimed Isabelle, vandalized the most beautiful, precious girl in the world. And whoever had stolen her intended to keep her, else why the cover-up? He had to find her. Idiot! He had already wasted four whole days feeling sorry for himself. But there was no time for additional self-recrimination now.

  DuJournal looked thoughtful. “But if we’d found her with just a missing arm, we might have been suspicious, so this mysterious kidnapper cut off the corpse’s leg for verisimilitude, because two missing limbs looks more accidental than just one. Ironic.”

  “Yes, he counted on people accepting the obvious explanation. He didn’t count on you looking this poor woman in the mouth.”

  “So you were kidnapped in order to be murdered, and Isabelle was murdered in order to be kidnapped. Very symmetrical. But that still doesn’t tell us who did it. Or why.”

  “You are correct, but I do know who might know why.”

  “Who?”

  Jean-Claude frowned, wondering afresh who DuJournal worked for. He did not want to give his next quarry any warning; neither did he want to let DuJournal out of his sight. “Come with me and I will show you.”

  CHAPTER

  Sixteen

  The coach Jean-Claude had borrowed from Don Angelo rattled and splashed its way along San Augustus’s winding, rain-slicked streets. Jean-Claude willed it to go faster. Every step taken slowly for the sake of care was another instant lost in his search for Isabelle. People didn’t become lost by distance but by time. Events did not hold still, and the courses of lives were buffeted and twisted by events no empirical philosopher could calculate. Where was Isabelle, and what was happening to her? She had to be absolutely terrified.

  “Do you mind telling me where we are going?” DuJournal asked.

  “To visit Duque Diego,” Jean-Claude said.

  DuJournal’s eyebrows lifted. “You think he knows something about Isabelle’s disappearance?”

  “I intend to find out.”

  “What makes you think he will speak to you?”

  “I will demonstrate to him that it is in his best interest to do so.” He flashed a sideways look at the imposter, still wondering who the man was working for and what he wanted. “You do not have to accompany me, of course.”

  “Builder forbid I would miss an opportunity to introduce myself to a great nobleman.”

  “On your head be it.”

  The coach halted under the portico outside Duque Diego’s city residence, a stand-alone house in an expensive quarter. It was built to a tasteful scale but clad in ostentatious marble.

  Jean-Claude marched up the broad steps to the main doors as if he had an army at his back instead of an imposter. He hoped persuasion would get him an audience with the duque, but if not, Jean-Claude had other means. One of the more specialized classes in the musketeer academy was penetration without detection, taught by a man with the title “master of the rooftops” whose final admonition with every mission was, “And don’t get caught.” Jean-Claude found himself wishing that the academy had not been such a long time ago, or that he had not spent so much of the intervening decades loitering in taverns. He was out of practice.

  Just as Jean-Claude was about to rap on the door, it swung open and a steward liveried in black, red, and gold appeared. He bowed them in and said, “Señor musketeer, be welcome. Duque Diego has instructed me to inform him whenever you should happen to arrive. Happily, he is in residence at the moment. May I ask who is your guest?”

  DuJournal grinned at Jean-Claude. “Do you get the feeling you are expected?”

  Jean-Claude said, “This is Lord Martin DuJournal, mathematician, swordsman, and gadfly.”

  The steward took their sodden coats and their swords. In l’Empire Céleste, disarming a King’s Own Musketeer was tantamount to disarming le roi, but in Aragoth, he was just another foreign soldier.

  A pair of menials scrubbed the muck from their boots. Jean-Claude would have sooner gone barefoot than had any poor drudge kneeling before him scraping his boots, but no representative of Grand Leon went barefoot like a peasant, and, as one of his musketeer instructors had pointed out many years ago, “If they don’t clean your boots, then they have to scrub the whole floor.”

  The steward led them into a lushly appointed library. Jean-Claude did not have the sort of mind that could peruse a man’s book collection and deduce everything there was to know about the inner workings of his mind, but he looked around anyway. The books were certainly impressive, leather-bound volumes in various colors, some with titles sewn, stamped, or embossed on their faces, but most without. A few large, old, hand-calligraphed volumes were chained to the wall at a broad writing desk. A few upholstered chairs sat before a fireplace, and paintings of people Jean-Claude didn’t recognize filled in the gaps. Judging from the wear on the upholstery, the place got used, but how much time did Diego himself actually spend here? Maybe his housekeeper spent a lot of time in here knitting when Diego was away.

  The door on the far side of the room opened, and a silver-eyed, thickset man in a fine doublet, tall boots, and slops—Diego, presumably—strolled in. He folded his left arm behind his back in the position Jean-Claude always thought of as the please-put-me-in-an-armlock pose. He made a point of dismissing the two armed guards who accompanied him. The guards took up stations outside the door, a subdued but unmistakable declaration that, while they were all civilized people, violence remained an option. Diego glanced at the philosopher impersonator and said, “You are Princesa Xaviera’s man, are you not?”

  DuJournal doffed his hat in a sweeping bow. “Lord Martin DuJournal, mathematician, swordsman, and gadfly, at Her Highness’s service.”

  That answered the question of who DuJournal worked for, and opened up a whole slew of other questions, such as, what had the other princesa retained him to do, precisely? It made sense that Xaviera would have wanted to open up a line of communication with Isabelle while she was alive, but why had her minion lingered when everyone thought Isabelle was dead?

  Diego turned his silver-eyed gaze on Jean-Claude. “And you must be the musketeer.” Jean-Claude braced himself for some sly mockery of his competence, but Diego only said, “I present you and your king with my condolences,” which was almost worse.

  Jean-Claude did not say, You tried to kill her yourself, you goat-sucking whoreson, nor did he let that emotion anywhere near his expression. “I shall bear them to him, personally. Before I return home, however, I must conclude my investigation. Sadly, a few sizable holes remain. I was hoping you might help me fill them, in the interest of—completeness.”

  Diego raised one salt-and-pepper eyebrow. “Completeness? Not justice?”

  Jean-Claude produced a mirthless smile. “The only true justice is in the crime that is foiled before it is committed. That twisted thing the law calls justice is little more than revenge by committee. Completeness only asks that the whole story be told. All I want to know is, why did
Thornscar want to kill Isabelle?” That danced nicely around any suggestion of impropriety on Duque Diego’s part.

  Duque Diego had been reaching for a goblet of wine on the sideboard. He paused with his fingers on the rim and gave Jean-Claude a puzzled look. “Thornscar?”

  Jean Claude would have sworn the man’s surprise was unfeigned, but how could Diego not know his own assassin’s name? “The man who attacked the Santa Anna and tried to kill Princess Isabelle.”

  Diego looked like he was going through some quick mental shuffling of his own. “Did he call himself that?”

  Jean-Claude answered warily. “In fact, he did not. The name was given to me by another.” By Kantelvar, in fact.

  Diego asked, “And did you see this supposed would-be assassin?”

  “Face-to-defaced-face,” Jean Claude said.

  Diego drummed his fingers on the sideboard. “And I suppose you have some accusation to lay against me in the matter of the attack?”

  “None that the authorities to which you bow seem to care about,” Jean-Claude said, glumly aware that he was not leading this conversation, though it seemed to be meandering in an intriguing direction. “Though you might do well to distance yourself from the burning of Princess Isabelle’s residence.”

  “Your concern for my welfare is touching. I assure you I had nothing to do with setting fire to your princesa’s chambers. That foul deed belongs to another. I know not who. I am only surprised no zealot has stepped up to take credit.

  “I have not seen the man you call Thornscar since the night he bade me have a mirror placed aboard the Santa Anna.”

  At least Jean-Claude now knew what Diego was fishing for. “What name did you know him by?” Jean-Claude asked, and it felt like flakes of rust were dislodging from his brain. “And what hold did he have over you that he could compel you to that act of sabotage?” Diego as the cat’s-paw in someone else’s scheme was backward to Jean-Claude’s expectations. He cast a glance at DuJournal, who was as intent on the conversation as a cat on a mouse hole.

  Diego turned and gave Jean-Claude a sharp, direct look. “First answer this. At whom was his attack aimed?”

  “At Isabelle,” Jean-Claude said.

  Diego shook his head. “Of what significance was a crippled, deformed, unhallowed princesa from a fading power? She had no inherent worth.”

  Jean-Claude had no sword, but his heavy cane would make a fine club, and he imagined he could stave this arrogant pig’s skull in before his guards could intervene.

  DuJournal placed his hand upon Jean-Claude’s shoulder. “I am sure Duque Diego is only asking you to look at the attacks from Thornscar’s point of view. Who was his target?”

  “Kantelvar,” Jean-Claude realized aloud; the artifex was the only one who had actually been attacked. “He attacked Kantelvar and failed. That’s when he turned tail and fled. But why in the Breaker’s Torment…” The question died on his lips as his brain got on with the business of exhuming his assumptions to take a better look at their desiccated corpses. If Kantelvar had been the target all along … “Just who in the name of all the saints were you helping?”

  Diego took a defensive swig of his wine and said, “I am not completely sure.”

  “Are you saying you helped someone you didn’t know sabotage a diplomatic mission?”

  “I am saying that the situation is more complex than you grasp, but you are bound to stumble over the truth eventually, so it would be best for everyone if you found it unfractured. Come.” He turned and strode through another set of doors into a drawing room. It differed from the library mostly in that it had more paintings and no bookshelves. There was a gated alcove with comfortable chairs and a full-length mirror in it, suitable for receiving a sojourning Glasswalker.

  Duque Diego said, “Señor musketeer. Allow me to introduce you to His Highness Príncipe Julio de Aragoth.” He gestured to a painting.

  Jean-Claude’s eyes rounded. The face was the same one he had confronted in the Santa Anna’s hold, only absent any scar. Jean-Claude’s thoughts lurched and spun like a skyship in a hurricane as he revised everything he had learned to balance around this new center.

  DuJournal looked equally surprised. “You’re saying Julio attacked Kantelvar? Why?”

  Duque Diego glowered at the painting as if willing it to yield up an answer to those very questions. “One night, over a month ago, I was roused from sleep in the hours of the dead and summoned to this very chamber by a man, an espejismo I instantly took to be His Highness Príncipe Julio, except that he still had his leg and his face was marked with a great scar. He was dressed in servant’s garb, and he quivered in horrible distress. He was so pale, I thought he must have been stabbed, but there were no fresh marks upon him. I asked him what had happened to him, and he said he had been betrayed. I asked him by whom and he said, ‘Everyone, my whole family, but Kantelvar most of all.’

  “I asked him what he meant, and he asked me when was the last time I had seen him. When I told him that I had seen him that very morning, he became even more distressed. He told me that he had been kidnapped months ago, an attack arranged to look like a hunting accident. He fought back against his attackers, and that was when he acquired his scar. He said, ‘The man you saw today, the man who has been your príncipe for the last nine months, is a fraud, an imposter, a marionette placed there by Kantelvar in a bid to usurp the throne.’

  “Needless to say, I was aghast, but such an outrageous accusation could not go unchallenged. Did he have any proof, any evidence of his legitimacy or his alternate’s fraud? He gave such proofs as speech alone may deliver. He answered every question I posed to him, no matter how subtle, yet even then I was skeptical. Why had he not gone to his father with this; why come to me? At that point, he became as bitter as winter and said, ‘My father is delirious. My mother wields the power there and she plots against me. There is no one in the royal household I dare trust, and even if I did, Kantelvar has spies everywhere, and my body is under his power. If he guesses I have found a way to escape him, it will mean my death.’ At last he persuaded me that with my help he could acquire such proof as to banish all skepticism.

  “He said he had a plan to unravel the plot against him, expose the traitors, and prove his own true identity. All he wanted from me was to use my contacts on the Île des Zephyrs to put a mirror on board Princesa Isabelle’s ship, a service to which I reluctantly agreed.”

  Jean-Claude did his best not to sneer. “And what did he promise you in return for this favor? What tipped the balance? Or was it merely that you hoped he might dispense with Isabelle? Either he might have killed her or proved the marriage contract fraudulent. Whether he is the real príncipe or not, he was in a position to solve a problem for you.”

  Diego’s face darkened. “Julio’s marriage to Princesa Isabelle would have been a disaster for Aragoth.”

  “But once she was gotten rid of, you could sort out the problem of the príncipes at your convenience. So you gave your visitor what he wanted, but then it all went wrong. The attack on the Santa Anna failed, whatever its mission was. The scarred príncipe never came back, and you’ve been searching for him ever since.”

  “He said he was being held by Artifex Kantelvar, but now Kantelvar is dead.”

  Jean-Claude felt suddenly light-headed, as if the floor had dropped out from underneath him. Dozens of small clues suddenly lined up and came to attention like a regiment of lazy soldiers when a sergeant barked a command.

  “Breaker’s blood,” he muttered.

  Both DuJournal and Diego gave him puzzled looks.

  Jean-Claude reviewed his clues and grinned. “Who is the one person who is never a suspect in a murder?”

  DuJournal arched his eyebrows. “A riddle, monsieur?”

  “Oh, better than that,” said Jean-Claude. “This rides right through the land of Riddle and into the duchy of Hoax.”

  “Explain yourself,” Diego said.

  “The victim.” Jean-Claude bumped his
fist into his open palm while he gave throat to the idea boiling in his brain. “The victim is never a suspect in a murder.”

  “That was not an explanation,” DuJournal pointed out.

  Jean-Claude backed up to get a running start at his inspiration. “There were only three people who actually saw the man who boarded the Santa Anna: Vincent, me, and Kantelvar. Well, there was one more, but nobody counts a bloodhollow. Kantelvar knew his game was finished if either Vincent or I made the connection between Príncipe Julio and the boarder. Kantelvar had to get rid of us, and he had to frame a third party for it. He invented the name Thornscar on the spot and left the convoy in a tearing hurry. He had to secure his captive and set up a trap for the witnesses. It was only after he left that we discovered your involvement, Duque Diego, otherwise he probably would have gone after you as well.

  “After that, everything falls into place. The attack on the cavalcade killed Vincent but missed me. He tried two more times to kill me after that, but thanks to DuJournal, I’m still above ground.”

  Diego looked thoughtful. “You say Princesa Isabelle did not see the intruder, but she knew what he looked like. When she saw Julio’s face, I swear she nearly fainted.”

  Jean-Claude straightened up and grinned. “Yes. Isabelle used her bloodhollow’s memory to draw a portrait of the assassin, but Kantelvar didn’t know about that. So on the night of the masquerade, Isabelle finally got a look at Julio. If Kantelvar saw her reaction as you did he immediately realized she’d recognized his deception. His intrigues were doomed, so he took the only course available to him. He kidnapped Isabelle and faked both their deaths.”

  Diego’s face slackened in surprise. “You think they’re alive? I saw Kantelvar’s corpse!”

  DuJournal said, “You saw a corpse that looked like his. We saw a corpse that looked like Isabelle’s, but it turns out to have been a fake.”