An Alchemy of Masques and Mirrors--A Novel

by Curtis Craddock

  At last the queen said, “I would sooner trust a scorpion in my boot than your intentions.”

  Jean-Claude tasted victory. She was hooked. “I, on the other hand, trust your intentions implicitly. There is nothing you wouldn’t do to secure your position, and you cannot afford to leave Thornscar gliding in the wind. In this we are utterly aligned, or do you really think I want him to escape? He murdered my princess.” Jean-Claude had no trouble conjuring rage to back his words, only in restraining it.

  Margareta’s face contorted with the ferocity of some inner battle. As a traitor and a conspirator herself, she was primed to see plots everywhere. If most people judged the world by the view they saw in the mirror, how much worse must it be for a Glasswalker sorceress?

  “You will go to the orrery,” Margareta said. “You will find this Thornscar’s ship.”

  Jean-Claude exhaled in authentic relief and bowed to her. “Your Majesty is most wise.”

  Felix spat, “This is a mistake. He is dangerous.”

  “That is why you will go to guard him and ensure he does as he has promised. And if he complies, you will bring him back unharmed. In the meantime, Alejandro and I have a visit to pay to his father.”

  CHAPTER

  Eighteen

  Isabelle clawed her way through a fog of pain and fever. Where am I? Her bones felt like hot coals cooking her flesh and blistering her skin. Was this how a cut of beef felt on the spit, roasting in its own juices? If there was any part of her that did not ache, she could not name it. The vaporization point of self equals the limit of suffering as it approaches agony. Call it Isabelle’s first theorem of pain. She hadn’t thought it possible to feel worse than she did after her father set his bloodshadow on her.

  It was humbling to know she had been wrong.

  The last thing she remembered was the stinging bite of the vapor filling her nose and her lungs. And then a darkness full of sharp-edged, rasping dreams, and screams, and now—

  The creak of heavy ropes under tension reached her awareness, and not all of the heaving and dipping in her gut was a product of her uneasy flesh. She really was being tossed slowly up and down.

  Skyship, she surmised, and the implications of that were enough to force her upward, outward through the haze of sickness. Kantelvar. The artifex had kidnapped her and now they had left San Augustus, left the Craton Massif. She was en route to whatever stable he meant to breed her in.

  She opened her eyes—they felt glued shut and only opened partway—and found herself in a ship’s cabin. Thick-glassed portholes let in a thin, watery light, but even that poor illumination stung her brain like a thousand tiny needles. She was bundled in blankets and tied into a hammock that was wrapped around her like a sausage skin.

  Cold air scraped at her face, chilling her fever sweat, and her breath steamed. Where had this winter come from? But she knew the answer to that if only the pudding of her brain would set up properly. Altitude. A few thousand extra meters of elevation turned summer to winter. A few thousand more made men delirious right before it turned them into frozen corpses. Kantelvar was insane in the lower sky. How much worse would the upper airs make him?

  Isabelle tried to shrug her way out of the blankets. If she could just get her hand free, she could undo these ties, which looked as if they’d been put into place to keep her from thrashing in her fever.

  A sharp pain knifed up her right arm when she tried to press out with her elbow. She grabbed her right arm with her left.

  She grabbed a stump.

  A stump!

  Horror flooded her veins as her left hand crawled, spiderlike, over the place where her right arm should have been, seeking something that wasn’t there and finding a metal stub instead. Kantelvar had removed her arm at the shoulder. Saints in Paradise, he’d dismembered her. Disbelief and denial flooded Isabelle’s mind. Her gorge rose in pure visceral terror, and she only barely managed to roll herself far enough to vomit over the side of her cocoon. The convulsions seemed to go on forever, even long after she’d run out of bile to disgorge.

  One good thing about the retching was that, by the time she was done, she was too spent for panic. No wonder she ached with fever. Amputation was surely one of the greatest insults a body could endure.

  Why did he disarm me? Kantelvar might have been completely mad, but he never did anything without a reason. If he’d wanted to cripple or contain her, he would have taken her good hand. Why take the abnormal hand?

  Understanding struck her nearly breathless. He’d cut off her identifying mark, and she could think of only two reasons for that. Either he wanted to conceal her identity—from whom?—or he wanted to convince someone else that she was dead. She imagined her absolutely identifiable bloody stump dropped somewhere near her chambers. Her countrymen would cry murder, and Grand Leon would demand justice, but Carlemmo would die, and the Aragothic court would fracture and begin fighting amongst themselves. The mercenaries from Oberholz and Vecci would pick sides and draw their home powers into the fray, and Brathon would take the opportunity to challenge Aragoth’s overskies influence. All the powers of the world would descend on Aragoth like wolves on a wounded bear. Blood would run in rivers. Kantelvar would have his age of ruin, and she … did he honestly expect her to comply with his wish that she bear some unfortunate child that he could twist into a counterfeit Savior?

  Surely he must realize she would oppose him at every step, and just as surely he had accounted for her resistance, just as he had accounted for everything else. He had been planning this for more than a thousand years. He had to have contingency plans for every conceivable opposition, which meant that to thwart him, she had to do something inconceivable.

  She certainly couldn’t do anything while she was hanging here like a smoked ham. The straps around the hammock clearly hadn’t been arranged to prevent escape, or they would not have been placed so that she could, after a short eternity of squirming, shrugging, and sweating, get hold of the first buckle with her teeth. She worried the leather and brass like an exhausted terrier. Her neck strained, and her jaw ached, and her stump burned with fresh agony every time it hung up in the folds of the blankets, but she did not relent. Tears and drool and sweat were streaming down her face by the time she worked the first buckle free.

  One down, four to go.

  Ah, but now she worked her good arm loose, unlatched the next buckle, and peeled off the blanket to see what had become of her starboard limb.

  The arm had been cut off just below the shoulder. The stump had been covered with a cap of quondam metal, a gleaming hemisphere that swirled with shades of pink and purple and glittered with motes of firefly light. There was no obvious seam where metal ended and flesh began; the one flowed smoothly into the other like twilight into full darkness. It was so strange and unexpected, she even forgot her horror in the fascination of it. She ran her fingers over the metal and found it smooth and warm and sensate. How could that be?

  The fever heat that had filled her awareness slowly ebbed, as if her waking allowed a pent-up reservoir of pain to drain away.

  She finished unbuckling the straps; not as easy as it should have been without her right wrist to use as a brace. She might not have used her crippled hand for much, but she used her right arm all the time.

  She swung her legs out of the hammock opposite the direction of her vomit and tried to stand, but the deck rocked, her knees buckled, and she reflexively tried to catch herself with an arm that wasn’t there. She sprawled across the planking like a dropped jelly-floater, gritting her teeth against the white, sharp pain where she’d banged her stump. Perhaps she ought to just lie here for a moment, catch her breath, and gather her strength.

  And then what? She was certainly no physical threat to Kantelvar. She was not going to be able to overpower the ship’s crew, lock them all in the hold, and sail this ship back to San Augustus by herself. Persuading Kantelvar to turn back from the culmination of sixteen centuries of obsession did not seem likely, either.


  She wanted Jean-Claude to rescue her, but Kantelvar had said Jean-Claude was dead.

  No.

  But what if he was telling the truth?

  No!

  But Jean-Claude never would have let this happen to her. Over his dead body, he would have said. He was her oldest and dearest friend. He had raised her, served her, protected her against the whole world. Why? She was not his child, his blood. Because of her, he’d never taken a wife. Because of her, he’d never had children of his own. Because of me. And now he was gone. A flush of sweltering grief filled Isabelle’s chest and boiled up behind her eyes, forcing out tears as no physical pain could. And in the dry tinder of her soul, anger sparked a flame.

  Kantelvar, I will kill you for this. I will see you dead.

  But how?

  Something inconceivable.

  Isabelle carefully, stiffly, picked herself up and searched her surroundings. From a set of hooks on the ceiling hung several glass bottles with tubes dangling from them, just like the ones Kantelvar had poked into Marie’s arm. Each was filmed with a thin residue of saints only knew what concoctions, and there were bruises on her arm where clearly needles had been. Had he been keeping her alive or asleep? Where in the world was this ship?

  She wobbled to the porthole. It was amazing how unbalanced she felt without her right arm. She leaned against the cabin wall, sucking down deep drafts of thin air, and peered out through the thick glass, but there was no sight of land, only endless banks and shoals of clouds.

  She tried the cabin door and found it locked. Damn! But what else did she expect?

  She shivered. Outside the heavy blankets in the hammock, she’d been left with nothing but a light linen shift that was insufficient for this cold weather. She retrieved a blanket and a strap from the hammock, draped the fabric over her shoulders, and tried to belt it at the waist, another process frustrated by her lack of a limb.

  Breaker’s blight! If only she still had her wrist. She couldn’t quite bend far enough to use her stump for a brace or lever on the buckle. Stretch! A hair-raising tingle raced down her neck as her mind sent commands to muscles that were no longer—there.

  An invisible, intangible force pressed the belt buckle to her waist. What’s more, she could feel the metal against her nonexistent wrist. She gasped in astonishment and let go with both … hands? The sensation vanished. The belt and buckle fell to the floor.

  Isabelle looked down at her left hand, open in front of her, and her stump. She hadn’t imagined that. It had really happened. She had touched the buckle with a hand she didn’t have. She had heard tell of soldiers who had lost limbs but retained some sensation from those truncated appendages, an itchy foot on a missing leg, or a trick elbow on a missing arm. Phantom limbs, they were called. What if this sheath, this quondam metal, or whatever potions Kantelvar had fed her from those vials, somehow made those sensations real?

  What if this is sorcery? Kantelvar’s blood ciphers had claimed she was l’Étincelle, that she had the power to animate the inanimate. But how could that be? How could she have gone twenty-four years without manifesting any sorcery at all? Had it been dormant all this time? It was true that some sorcerers needed prodding to awaken their powers. Her father’s methods were well founded even if his application of them was needlessly cruel. Might it be that bonding with this strange metal had been enough to rouse hers from hibernation?

  Or was it just a property of the metal itself? Kantelvar needed Isabelle to live in order to complete his plan, but he had cut her arm off anyway. He must have been confident of her survival, which meant he must also have been confident in his surgical technique, which included the metal sheath. That suggested it was an operation he had done before, perhaps the same operation that was performed on clerics having their limbs replaced with clockworks in the ceremony of Exaltation. That would explain how Kantelvar and other priests who wore quondam prostheses controlled them.

  But she didn’t have a prosthesis, just a stump, yet she’d pressed the buckle to her belly.

  Exactly what caused this phenomenon was a question for later. Right now the only thing that mattered was whether or not she could exploit it. Isabelle knelt and extended what would have been her right arm to the buckle. Just push. Nothing happened. She closed her eyes and tried to remember what it felt like. A tingle down her spine and along her arm. The cap on her stump hummed with a vibration she felt deep in her bones. Out at arm’s length, the ghost of her wormfinger twitched.

  Her wrist brushed the buckle. Yes! She held on to the sensation and bumped the buckle around the floor, trailing its strap. She used the front, back, and sides of her invisible, intangible limb. That’s it. That’s the way. She opened her eyes and almost lost it, but she could feel its presence, its shape in the air.

  Like a kitten obsessing over a shiny button, Isabelle swatted the buckle around the cabin until she was satisfied she could do it on a whim. It was too bad she had manifested a phantom wormfinger instead of a whole ghostly hand, but this phenomenon seemed to be taking advantage of her body’s memory of its missing flesh, and it could not remember sensations it had never experienced … unless it could be trained to imagine that sensation. She knew what it felt like to flex the fingers of her left hand. Could she imagine that on the right?

  She closed her eyes and placed her phantom palm on the buckle. Imagine a hand there, a thumb jutting out, four fingers spreading. An electric shiver raced down her neck to the stump of her shoulder. She felt more than heard a buzz like a thousand ants tiptoeing across the metal surface. She pushed past the distraction. Imagined her hand closing on the button. Don’t think about flexing, just … flex.

  The buckle budged. The weight of it pressed against her imaginary fingers and thumb. She lifted. Abstract muscles contracted though there was nothing for them to pull against. The buckle came off the floor. The tingling burrowed deep inside her and settled into her bones. A faint light leaked in through her eyelids.

  She opened her eyes and gasped. Pink and purple light limned her stump, like the stormfire that caught on the masts of ships during a squall. The strange glow extended, sketching the shape of her phantom arm in the air. A glowing mist of pink and violet filled the volume, and glittering motes of rose and lilac sprang to life in the mist. She might have been wearing a glove made of stars in a nebula. And in the grip of those stars hung the buckle.

  “How extraordinary,” she breathed. She swished the buckle around, marveling at the feel of it, fascinated by the cold sparks that sprayed and spiraled away from her arm whenever she moved it. This was l’Étincelle, it had to be … and that fact had more implications than she could begin to consider right now.

  She dropped the buckle and picked it up again several times, just to be sure she could. Her phantasmal fingers were as clumsy as a toddler’s, but perhaps ease would come with practice. She tried to pick up the belt by the leather, but no matter how she focused, her spark-flesh passed through leather as if it weren’t there.

  She moved on to grabbing other things. Her spark-hand passed right through the wooden planking, the blanket fabric, and her own flesh, but found good purchase on a metal sconce and the glass from the portal. So what did all these things have in common? Fabric, wood, and flesh were or had been living things, whereas neither metal nor glass ever had. It was a correlation that bore further investigation.

  Now that the spark-limb had manifested, it showed no inclination to disappear. Every sorcery had its blazon: crimson shadows, silver eyes, a crest of feathers instead of hair, or … this.

  And if she could not find some way to rid herself of it, she could never return to civilization. L’Étincelle was not one of the canon sorceries. No one would recognize it as a saintblooded gift. The Temple would dub her an abomination, and for that the remedy was Absolute Confession, excruciation unto death.

  No doubt that was part of Kantelvar’s plan, to bring forth her blazon and thereby isolate her from all possible allies, to convince her beyond all hope t
hat there was no way out for her, just as he had done to that wretched imposter on the throne.

  Change the Rules, she had told him, a participant in the ubiquitous delusion that other people’s problems were easier to solve than one’s own.

  So make them someone else’s problems. Even if she had no future, others might, Jean-Claude and Marie first and foremost, and her handmaids and everyone else who had been kind to her. She would not leave them a future of war if she could help it. If she could not return to Aragoth, if she could not warn them of Kantelvar’s manipulation, she must get someone else to do it for her.

  Príncipe Julio. If indeed Kantelvar intended to breed her to the not-actually-a-prince, he had to take her to wherever he was standing stud.

  Having a goal was good, but it did not tell her how to reach it. She sat in the corner of the cabin, her feet braced on the chilly floor, massaging her face with her flesh-hand. Think! She had no other weapon but her mind. What is inconceivable? To Kantelvar? She could not overpower him, nor, she admitted ruefully, outwit him. He had arranged everything to force her to capitulate, to bend to his will or be broken. He had blocked off every possible retreat.

  Or was that the answer? Isabelle’s head came up and she stared into space with the same tentative extension she felt when a new proof suggested itself to her imagination. If only she could reel it in without breaking the gossamer thread of reason.

  Deep in his warped and bitter mind, Kantelvar expected her to fight him. He did not expect her to give up. Her capitulation was inconceivable. So what if she inverted the equation, agreed wholeheartedly to his plan, dragged him forward instead of pulling him back? He would not have prepared for that. Once she had the bit in her teeth, she would run as far and as fast as she could. Could she snatch control from him?

  It was not a game she was well equipped to play, but she had no better idea. Besides, a plan like this would make Jean-Claude … cackle. The idea twisted her mouth in a painful smile, but it also gave her the strength to shove off the floor. She adjusted her blanket cloak and knocked loudly on the cabin door. Several minutes of repeated hammering finally brought footsteps to the door.