An Alchemy of Masques and Mirrors--A Novel

by Curtis Craddock

  Keys rattled in the lock. Isabelle checked her posture and steadied her nerve. The door swung inward on well-oiled hinges. She stopped it with her foot when it was just wide enough to see out. An artifex stood beyond.

  Not Kantelvar, was her first impression. Though he wore the Temple’s saffron and a deep cowl and carried the artifex’s quondam staff, this man was tall and straight and lacked mechanical appendages. Yet it was in Kantelvar’s voice that he said, “Good day, Your Highness. I am glad to see you awake at last.”

  “You’ve changed,” she said. She had no trouble keeping her tone harsh. She had to convert to his cause quickly, but not so fast that he doubted her sincerity.

  Kantelvar chuckled, an eerily familiar sound, and pulled back his hood to reveal an unfamiliar face, square jawed and blunt nosed, but festooned with a sapphire lens where his right eye ought to have been, and his mouth sewn in a circle around his speaking grille. Long angry incisions, crudely stitched together, radiated from the implanted metal. His left eye was glazed and unfocused. His head had been recently shaved, and a segmented metal tube ran from the base of his skull, down the back of his neck, to a large backpack.

  Isabelle had thought there was nothing left in Kantelvar’s repertoire of madness that would shock her, but this left her throat tight. His mind is in the machinery. That was how he had survived since the age of Rüul, passed down from artifex to artifex with occasional stopovers in other useful clerics. His hosts thought they were being Exalted and honored by being conjoined with the Builder’s mechanisms, when in fact they were being hulled out like an apple infested with a worm.

  He said, “The body you saw was not the first I wore, or the second, or the sixteenth. The flesh is not made to endure as the soul is. When muscles rot and bones break, they must be exchanged. Céleste promised that the Savior would come. I must redeem her word. The prophecy must be fulfilled. She promised she would come back to me.”

  Kantelvar’s ardor gave Isabelle an extra chill. He had been serving Saint Céleste for over sixteen hundred years, and he expected her to return. Oh, unfortunate woman if she did, for who could live up to so much accumulated expectation?

  “What happens to those whose flesh you conscript?” Isabelle asked. Was Kantelvar’s latest victim still alive inside his skull, awake and aware of what had happened to him? His left eye swiveled and seemed to focus for a moment on Isabelle, an expression of despair rippling across that side of his face, before swiveling away again.

  Kantelvar said, “My hosts are volunteers, eager to pledge their souls to the Builder’s service.”

  Isabelle felt like someone had knotted her innards in their fists. She wanted to scream, to run away, but there was nowhere to go, no exit but forward down the gullet of madness.

  She said, “Let me guess. By now, everyone in San Augustus thinks we’re both dead. You chopped my arm off because that’s the surest way to identify me, and you shed your old skin like a locust. It was the only way you could be sure of making a clean escape.” And if it had worked, no one would ever come looking for her.

  “Very good,” Kantelvar said as if to a pupil who had just solved a difficult conundrum. “Can you deduce what happens next?”

  Isabelle summoned her court face, the mask of indifference that had served her so well in le Comte des Zephyrs’s house. “I imagine Carlemmo will die and there will be a war. What happens to me is, of course, entirely up to you.”

  On that carefully balanced note, Kantelvar’s expression twitched rapidly between a scowl, a smile, and a grimace. It was a lot like watching lightning in the clouds, random, spasmodic, and violent. He didn’t have good control of this new visage, which only made sense. If having a phantom arm took some getting used to, having a whole new body must have been especially problematic.

  Finally, Kantelvar smoothed his face and said, “You have a destiny—”

  “At the moment, my destiny seems to be to freeze to death. I don’t suppose you managed to bring me any clothes.” If she could engage him on purely practical concerns, perhaps she could segue into acceptance of his plan.

  Kantelvar hesitated a heartbeat. “Of course, but it will require you to let the door open.”

  Isabelle didn’t want him in the room with her, but it would be impossible to win his trust if she showed her fear.

  She stepped back. Kantelvar moved aside, and an omnimaton, the one she had seen in Kantelvar’s workshop, entered the room, carrying her trunk. The clockwork man looked most like great a copper skeleton with viscera made of cables, gears, cogs, and springs. Its chest and shoulders were clad in a carapace of coppery plates. Its head was a clamshell atop its broad shoulders, a metallic hillock set with a single gemlike orb that she could only think of as an eye.

  As the door opened, Kantelvar’s gaze fell upon her spark-arm. Kantelvar’s quilted-together face was, as always, unreadable, but his backpack gurgled excitedly. “L’Étincelle,” he breathed, the word leaking from his voice tube like a ghost loosed from Torment. “Your sorcery.”

  Isabelle resisted the urge to recoil from his interest. Don’t demur, debut.

  She turned her rotation into a ballroom pirouette and extended her arm in a graceful wave. “Is this your work?” she asked. “It’s beautiful.” And she was surprised to find that it was true. Its pure aesthetic delighted the eye despite the mutilation it represented.

  “It is your birthright,” he said. “The shadowburns your father inflicted upon you before your maturity served to suppress it, but his influence has been expelled, as it was with your handmaid.” He gestured to the tubes and bottles on their hooks.

  It was all Isabelle could do to keep the yelp from her voice as she asked, “Marie, where is she?” Please let her be on the ship.

  “There was not time to collect her. I am sorry.”

  Boiling outrage nearly shattered Isabelle’s reserve. You just left her there! Stowed away in a lost dark closet with no one to feed her or care for her! It was all she could do to keep herself from launching herself at him and trying to claw his mismatched eyes out.

  Instead, she ate her fury and said, “I hope you have plans to replace her.”

  Kantelvar hesitated. He had not been expecting such coldness from her. “Indeed, when we arrive at my aerie, I will provide you with a suitable handmaid.”

  As if that would atone for his sins. “And when will that be?”

  “By sunset,” Kantelvar said, drawing back into his usual, carefully clipped mode of speech. He gestured to the trunk. “When you are properly attired, the door is unlocked. I suspect you will want to explore the ship and assure yourself of its safety. When you are ready, I will be in the chart room.” He bowed himself out.

  Isabelle leaned against the door, shaking with rage, but she dared not let it out. She had to cultivate pliancy and feign ambition. Not for the first time, she wished for Jean-Claude’s silver tongue. Her musketeer could talk birds out of their feathers and make the outrageous sound not only plausible but sensible, while she had trouble holding anything in her mouth that she did not also hold in her heart.

  She waited for her fury to subside, then tried the door. It opened onto the quarterdeck, which was strung with an amazing spiderweb of ropes and pulleys, rigging even more complex than an ordinary skyship’s. The extra ropes were gathered at a single station amidships, manned, or rather machined, by the omnimaton. From there, the machine could do the work of twenty men without ever leaving its post. Someone could really disrupt the ship’s operation by fouling those lines, but to what good end? Kantelvar was taking her where she needed to go.

  She considered her spark-arm. If l’Étincelle sorcery revolved around giving life to the inanimate, the omnimaton surely counted. Might her power allow her to control the machines?

  Alas, her sorcery was a phenomenon with no theory behind it. She felt no instinctive connection with the clockwork man, and she hardly dared experiment. The last thing she needed was to have another limb or three ripped off. Indeed, it oc
curred to her that she didn’t need limbs at all for the service Kantelvar wanted from her. She imagined herself limbless and bloated with child and shuddered in disgust. Sometimes it didn’t pay to have a vivid imagination.

  A frigid breeze curled itself around her bare legs and chased her back inside. She opened the trunk and found her clothing the way she had left it. It took her some time to get herself dressed, especially since only one hand would interact with her clothing, and it was trembling with fatigue. She ended up looking like something a hurricane had thrown together, but it kept the cold out and the wind off. She found herself mentally sketching out ideas for a mail glove to wear on her spark-hand so she could use it to manipulate the otherwise inaccessible class of soft objects.

  Kantelvar had said he would await her in the ship’s chart room, and she really did want to go in there and get a look at the ship’s orrery—hopefully, she could discover where she was relative to where she had been and where she was bound—but first she wanted an unimpeded look around.

  She climbed up onto the windswept deck of the sloop, where the high, cold sky raked thin, icy fingers through her unbound hair, and the pale gray light of evening stung her eyes. She peered over the rails, but the Craton Massif was nowhere to be seen. How far away was she? Did anyone down there have any inkling where she had gone? Was there anyone left to care? She clung to the idea that Jean-Claude was still alive, looking for her. To believe anything else was utter despair. She said a solemn prayer for him, wherever he was.

  Stopping every dozen paces to catch her breath, she explored the ship from stem to stern. It had no launches that might be used to escape. She found Kantelvar’s cabin, the armory, the powder magazine, and the keel chamber barred, but beyond that, her captor seemed content to allow her parole. She found holds provisioned for a long voyage, stores of lumber, sailcloth, tar, paint, and all the other things required to keep a skyship functional. Practically every barrel contained some potential for sabotage—if she was willing to destroy the ship she was standing on—but now was not the time for such grandiose gestures.

  She made her way to the chart room and, in the absence of anyone to announce her presence, rapped on the door.

  There was no answer. She tried the latch. The door glided open on soundless hinges and she entered once more into quiet dimness, though neither so quiet nor so dark as the hold, owing to the emerald glow of the orrery’s simulacrasphere and the sibilant whisper of the aethervalve matrix under the pedestal.

  The orrery was larger and more complex than the one aboard the Santa Anna. Its green-glowing, aether-filled simulacrasphere was wider than Isabelle could have stretched with two arms. The cubic expansion of volume with radius meant this display was a hundred times more detailed than the courier ship’s had been. Hundreds of blobs and specks of light floated in the tank, each one representing an individual ship or skyland. The great number and minuscule size of the images meant that Kantelvar had increased the scale to include as much of the deep sky as possible.

  Kantelvar, hunched before the main instrument battery, did not immediately stir at her entrance. Bent over like that, with his hood pulled forward and his gurgling hump ascendant on his back, he looked a great deal more like the Kantelvar of old.

  That hump had to have something to do with his serial immortality. Perhaps it was the seat of his consciousness, some kind of soul bottle. If that were true, if she could gain control of it, she could force him to unravel his own schemes.

  Unfortunately, she had barely padded halfway across the room when the mad artifex lifted his cowled head. “G-goood d-day, Cél—Isabelle.” His voice was low and muddy.

  Had he just confused her with Saint Céleste, or was he merely waking from sixteen-hundred-year-old dreams?

  Kantelvar came around from behind the orrery. “I take it you have satisfied yourself of the ship’s integrity?”

  “It does not seem likely to fall out of the sky. Where are we bound?”

  “To my aerie, a skyland in the upper reaches.”

  “Uncharted, I assume.”

  Kantelvar chuckled. “No. If it was uncharted that would risk some fool coming along and discovering it. It’s just mislabeled. It was originally discovered by a merchant explorer with an eye toward selling its location to the highest bidder. I appropriated his chartstone from him and distributed the shards to all the skyfaring nations, along with a description that labeled it a broken reef, a very dangerous navigation hazard, an effective bit of occultation if I do say so myself.”

  Isabelle smothered a grimace. So there was a chartstone shard in the fabled Naval Orrery at San Augustus that could lead a rescuer straight to her, if anyone was even looking for her, but instead showed her destination as a place to be avoided.

  “And that is where my husband awaits, the man who tried to kill you. Don’t you think that will be a little awkward?” Julio, Thornscar, or whoever he was, ought to be a viable ally against Kantelvar, if she could convince him she too was Kantelvar’s enemy. Hard to do if she pretended to be Kantelvar’s ally.

  “Fear Julio not. He is defeated. He escaped from confinement once, but not again. Ere your marriage is consummated, he will have had a change of mind.”

  Isabelle was about to ask how Kantelvar could be so sure when understanding and loathing hit her all at once. She stared at the metal tube leading into the back of Kantelvar’s skull. Except it wasn’t his skull. It was the skull of his current body. Kantelvar’s mind was in that gurgling hump in his backpack. “You’re going to take Julio’s body,” she breathed.

  “Julio made that choice of his own free will when he decided to oppose the Builder.”

  Isabelle had never experienced sky sickness, but she imagined it paled next to this gut-sick, soul-deep dizziness. Kantelvar had expressed a deep devotion to Saint Céleste, but what if it was more than that? What if this was infatuation, an unfulfilled, unrequited desire, a festering obsession of sixteen hundred years? He wanted to prove himself to her across the millennia, to fulfill her prophecy and win her favor … her love. Now, in Isabelle, who apparently resembled her down to her sorcery, he had finally found … what? A proxy? A reincarnation? He meant to complete the circle, become the father of the Savior and the husband to his beloved.

  By the Savior—the real Savior, not the abomination Kantelvar envisaged—she would not … she would rather die than be taken by this man. She would sooner throw herself from the rail and fall forever into the Gloom. But that was not the plan. The plan was to take his plan and run with it. If he really imagined Isabelle the reincarnation of Saint Céleste, his long-lost love, then she ought to be able to use that to her advantage.

  She said, “I should speak with Julio before you … decant him.”

  “There would be no point—”

  “Is there not?” Isabelle asked. “He tried to murder me aboard the Santa Anna.” This was not true, but it was the official fiction.

  “And I will not give him the opportunity to try again,” Kantelvar said, so caught up in his own lies that he’d forgotten that Isabelle knew better.

  “Yes, you will be there to protect me,” Isabelle said, “but I have a right to confront the man who tried to kill me.”

  “To what purpose? He is full of lies and deception, and he will only try to confuse you. Nothing he says can be trusted.”

  “Damn his lies,” Isabelle said. “I don’t want to question him, but I cannot very well spit in his eyes after they become your eyes.” It was pure fabrication, but this struggle was not about the truth. It was about obsession and desire and madness.

  Kantelvar twitched. He must have been suspicious of her enthusiasm, but he couldn’t resist drawing her deeper into his fantasy where Julio was the villain of the piece. “That might … be arranged,” he said.

  “As soon as we make landfall.”

  CHAPTER

  Nineteen

  The Solar had mostly dissolved into the hazy horizon by the time Isabelle and Kantelvar debarked the sloop onto
the ice-rimed quay of his estate’s tiny harbor. Despite the omnimaton’s inhuman skill, it had taken the better part of the afternoon to make a safe approach to the slowly spinning, slightly wobbling column of rock. From a distance, the skyland’s wobbling movement looked innocent, even comical, like a child’s top just starting to come off its balance. But the very fact that one could observe its complete rotation in less time than it took to enjoy afternoon tea meant that, up close, it was a mountainside whirling by at a brisk running clip, carrying enough force to smash any incautious ship to flinders.

  The whole skyland couldn’t have been more than two kilometers in diameter, all of it jagged and barren with patches of snow. The mooring cove was little more than a crack in the side of the mountain. The only building Isabelle could see was a turret that squatted at the top of a short narrow stair at the end of the quay. The rest of whatever this place contained must have been underground.

  There was a moment, as Kantelvar stepped from ship to shore, that Isabelle almost thought she could grab him by his hood, give him a shove, and send him tumbling into the bottomless sky, but an omnimaton stood between them, ready to intervene, and even if she did manage to tip him over, it would not necessarily improve her situation. Without any way to control the omnimaton that ran the ship, she would succeed only in trapping herself here.

  The moment passed, and Isabelle followed Kantelvar onto the ice-glazed stone and up the slippery stairs. Her breath steamed, and the wind clawed at her motley skirts. Her heart hammered even from the minimal effort of climbing the steps. There wasn’t enough air up here. Kantelvar took her into a narrow crevice, through an even narrower door of thickly banded wood, and into a dark, round, low-ceilinged chamber. It was an improvement over the outside only in that it was out of the wind. The stones seemed to have absorbed more than their fair share of the cold and were greedy to exchange it for the heat of her body.