Mist, Metal, and Ash

by Gwendolyn Clare

  The editbook would be somewhere Aris could access it easily. Ricciotti himself couldn’t scribe, so he’d be relying on Aris to figure out how to use the book. But where would Aris hide it? Not in his scriptology study, certainly—much too obvious.

  Well, two could play at the surveillance game. A plan formed in his mind.

  He glanced around the solarium; in the corners, dead leaves had collected like snowdrifts. Leo picked up a few, examining them. They were brittle with age but just the right thickness. Satisfied, he tucked the leaves into his waistcoat pocket.

  Then he left the solarium to stroll the halls, pausing at those doors he knew to be locked. For each locked room, he broke off a small piece of leaf and wedged it into the doorframe. If the leaf remained undisturbed, he would know the room wasn’t in use and could be eliminated.

  Leo remembered enough about his father’s rigorous expectations and lack of patience to know that Aris would be studying the editbook every day. Ricciotti would demand nothing less. So all Leo had to do was figure out which places Aris frequented.

  When he finished laying his tiny, innocuous traps, Leo retreated to his bedchamber to wait.

  He woke with a start some time later, unsure whether there had been a sound or if he had dreamed it. The room was dark, the house silent. He fumbled at the bedside to light a candle, then checked his pocket watch: half past midnight.

  He’d fallen asleep with his clothes on, his boots still laced. Not his intention, but it didn’t matter now—he was up, and the rest of the house was not. Time to go hunting for the right door.

  He crept down the stairs and began checking for signs of opened doors. His eyes strained against the dim light, searching the floor of the hallway for dislodged leaf fragments. There—he crouched and picked up a piece, dry and crisp between his fingers. It had fallen from the doorframe of Aris’s mechanics laboratory.

  The door was locked, but Leo’s lockpicks made short work of that problem. The lab looked unchanged from the last time Leo had let himself in, though that didn’t necessarily mean anything. Aris was the neat one—he could have built an army of bots in here, and then returned every piece of equipment to its exact preferred location.

  Leo walked a slow circuit around the room, searching for any signs of scriptological activities, but the ink he found beside the drafting table was an ordinary black, not the shimmering midnight blue of the special ink used for scribing. No books of any kind were in evidence.

  But wait—that didn’t make sense. He’d seen the mysterious clockwork creature open a portal in this very laboratory, and a portal implied a destination. There had to be worldbooks nearby.

  If Aris was going to construct a secret door or hidden compartment, where would he put the trigger mechanism? Leo went to the workbench and ran his hands along the edges, feeling the underside for buttons or switches. Nothing.

  Leo didn’t know exactly what he planned to do if he found any worldbooks. He could operate a portal device well enough—that was a simple matter of numbers and dials. But interpreting the nonsense that scriptologists wrote upon those pages was beyond him. He found it truly astounding that anything could at once be so dull and so complex. Let alone that it actually worked. Building something out of pistons and joints and gears made sense; building something real out of nothing but intangible words still seemed the height of absurdity. Words! The very idea was mad.

  Best not admit that to Elsa, he thought, his mind drawn automatically to her, like a compass needle finding magnetic north. Love wasn’t just a feeling, it was a paradigm shift—a new context for everything. He could not help but imagine what Elsa would think, how she would respond. Even now he couldn’t stop, even knowing it was over between them.

  Leo walked the circumference of the lab, running his fingertips across the walls to check for telltale hairline cracks. On the back wall he felt a tiny groove, invisible in the low light, and his pulse jumped. He followed the line by touch, and it described a panel three feet tall by four feet wide. Aris was hiding something; but how to open it?

  Experimentally, Leo pushed against the panel, then against the wall surrounding it in several places. Nothing. An idea struck him: he held his candle up to the unlit wall sconce nearest the panel and pressed his cheek against the wall to examine it from the proper angle.

  Leo grinned. “Always got to go for the high drama, eh, brother?”

  He hooked a finger around the brass pipe of the sconce and pulled down; it levered away from the wall, and with a loud click, the panel slid open. Built into the wall was a hidden bookcase.

  Leo set his hands on his hips and surveyed the spoils of his investigation. Aris thought he was so clever, but Leo was onto him now.

  15

  LIFE IS A SHIPWRECK, BUT WE MUST NOT FORGET TO SING IN THE LIFEBOATS.

  —Voltaire

  At last Porzia had reached the most delicate and challenging part of scribing the worldbook that would, someday soon, store and protect the editbook.

  If only they hadn’t needed to abandon Casa della Pazzia, she could have taken a portal to Veldana and asked Jumi and Alek for advice. Jumi was an expert in this sort of thing; she was the one who’d scribed the Veldanese linguistic talent into the Veldana worldbook. But they were out of reach, so Porzia had to do her best and pray it was good enough. The pen in her hand felt heavy with the invisible weight of responsibility.

  These last few lines were the dangerous part, where she had to balance specificity with the perfect amount of vagueness. Too vague, and the worldbook would provide little security; too specific, and she could end up accidentally textualizing someone, addling their wits like what happened to Simo. For the conditional statement, Porzia decided on born in a scribed world, which was broader than she wanted but erred on the safe side.

  When the worldbook was finally done, Porzia sought out two very particular test subjects to help her evaluate it. Little Aldo would serve as an independent scriptologist, and Revan would represent the Veldanese. Feeling giddy at the prospect of success, she gathered them together in the relative privacy of her room.

  Porzia opened the worldbook to the first page and held it out to Revan. “Tell me what you see.”

  He gave her a confused look, as if wondering whether it was a trick question. “Uh … a book? Paper?”

  “Yes, but what’s inside?”

  “Nothing. It’s blank.”

  “Excellent.” Then Porzia held the same page open for Aldo. “Could you read the coordinates for me, please?”

  “Of course I can,” Aldo said, affronted at the suggestion that he might not be able to. His hands were still too small to comfortably work an adult-size portal device, but he had no trouble reading the coordinates off the page.

  Revan said, “Wait—huh?”

  Porzia grinned. “The ink is visible only to scriptologists of the Pisano bloodline.”

  “But … how?”

  “The materials I used to make this worldbook are themselves the products of another worldbook—a laboratory where I can design custom inks and papers that can’t be made in the real world,” Porzia explained. “Thank you, Aldo, that was very helpful. Why don’t you go find Faraz now?”

  “But I want to go in the world with you!” He stomped his foot and scowled at her.

  “Next time,” Porzia promised. “No portals in the castle, remember?”

  Aldo was not happy with this answer, and Porzia suspected he’d spend the rest of the day sulking about it if he didn’t get his way. That boy could hold a grudge.

  She sighed. “All right, fine. But no complaining about how far we have to walk—that’s the deal.”

  Aldo’s scowl vanished, instantly replaced with a beaming smile. “I can do it,” he said, full of determination.

  So Porzia had an escort of two as she left the ruins with her new worldbook in hand. They walked most of the way to Manarola, and though Aldo certainly did slow their pace, he kept his promise and did not complain even once.

  Po
rzia selected an out-of-sight nook along the path and let Aldo read the coordinates off the page for her. Then she led them through the brief darkness of the portal and stepped into her new world for the first time.

  They stood inside a square pavilion of classical design, caged in by Corinthian columns on all sides. Beyond the edges of the pavilion floor, sheer stone cliffs dropped into a sea of Edgemist. It was not a large world, nor an especially welcoming one. Even the air felt chilly against Porzia’s bare forearms.

  In the center of the pavilion sat a broad stone pedestal topped with a transparent blue sphere about the size of the globe in the library back in Pisa. Electricity sparked across the sphere’s glassy surface.

  “What’s that for?” Aldo said, standing on tiptoes to get a better look.

  “Careful—don’t touch,” Porzia warned.

  Revan walked a slow circuit of the pavilion, looking around. He whistled through his teeth. “You made all this, just in the few days we’ve been in Corniglia?”

  “I thought you’d be used to this sort of thing,” she said.

  “Sure, Jumi adds new areas to Veldana all the time, but that’s just expanding something that already exists,” he said. “I guess it seems different, making a whole new world from scratch whenever you like.”

  “Actually, what Jumi does requires a fair bit more finesse. If you scribe a new world and muck it up, you lose some time and effort and materials, but you don’t risk killing off your entire nation.”

  Revan blinked. “Never thought of it that way.”

  “Anyway. Here you go,” Porzia said, handing Revan her pen. “Put this inside the sphere.”

  “You want me to touch that thing? It looks dangerous.”

  “It shouldn’t be dangerous to you. I scribed it specifically for this purpose. Go on.”

  Revan squinted at her. “What do you mean, ‘shouldn’t be’?”

  “Ooh!” said Aldo. “I’ll do it! I’ll do it! Can I do it?”

  “No, you may not,” Porzia told her little brother. Then to Revan she said, “Obviously it hasn’t been tested yet. That’s what you’re here for—to make sure everything works properly.”

  “I don’t know.” Revan eyed the sphere skeptically. “How am I supposed to put something inside, anyway? It looks solid.”

  “Of course it looks solid. It is solid, for anyone born on Earth. But not for you.” When he still hesitated, Porzia huffed, “Do you trust me or not?”

  Revan pressed his lips together, hardening his resolve, and held the pen out in front of him. Slowly, he eased the pen toward the sphere. An arc of blue electricity licked outward as if exploring the object, but Revan didn’t jump. The pen touched the sphere and passed through as if no barrier existed. Porzia watched Revan’s face as he dipped his hand through the surface; his eyebrows rose in surprise, but there was no sign of pain.

  “How does it feel?” she asked.

  Revan set the pen down on the pedestal inside the sphere and pulled his hand back out. “It doesn’t,” he replied while he scrutinized his palm and the back of his hand. “There’s no sensation at all, as if it’s nothing but an illusion.”

  Porzia tapped one finger against the surface of the sphere. The electricity swarmed toward her with an audible zap, and even though she pulled away quickly, her whole hand cramped with a bone-deep ache.

  She massaged her fingers with her other hand and shot Revan a rueful glance. “No, it is definitively not an illusion.”

  Revan looked distressed at her pain. “Why did you do that? Are you badly hurt?”

  Porzia shook the rest of the stiffness from her hand and said briskly, “I told you—we came here to test it out. Now it’s properly tested.”

  His eyes widened. “You’re mad.”

  “Thank you,” she replied with a smile.

  “That wasn’t a compliment.”

  “Then you’re saying it wrong,” Porzia quipped. “‘Mad’ is always a compliment.”

  He was watching her with an intensity that made heat rise in her cheeks. He reached out and took her hand in his, gently examining it for injury. The touch of his calloused fingers against her palm sent a shiver through her.

  Porzia cleared her throat. “My pen?”

  Revan quickly dropped her hand and reached into the sphere to retrieve the pen. “Right, here it is.”

  He hesitated, dark eyes meeting her gaze. Instead of handing the pen to Porzia, he leaned forward and kissed her.

  His lips were soft and full, and the kiss buzzed in her brain like static, obscuring rational thought. There were practical matters she ought to consider before engaging in such behavior, but for the life of her Porzia could not remember what they were. For now, it was enough to know that this kind, guileless boy wanted to kiss her, and that she wanted to kiss him back.

  “Ew!” Aldo declared.

  Porzia startled out of the kiss, pulling back from Revan and raising a hand to cover her lips. For a moment she’d forgotten they weren’t alone.

  She turned to Aldo and ran her hands down the front of her dress, trying to smooth out the flustered sensation. “Well,” she said with forced brightness, “we’d best get back. I wonder if Simo’s been up to anything fun—what do you think?”

  Aldo looked deeply skeptical at her deflection. Fantastic: now even her youngest sibling could see right through her. But then Aldo said, “Simo’s boring. He doesn’t have any books at all.”

  “Still, you must be nice to him. Like he’s part of the family, remember?”

  Aldo heaved a dramatic, eight-year-old sigh. “I know, you said.”

  She risked a quick glance at Revan; a smile flickered across his lips in answer. He looked at ease, neither embarrassed nor smug. What a strange culture the Veldanese must have, with their guiltless kissing. She supposed they did not even have the phrase to steal a kiss, since you could not steal something freely given.

  Porzia opened a portal back to Cinque Terre and waved them through. Then she followed, working hard to wrestle down a giddy smile.

  * * *

  Alek wasn’t much help with mechanical repairs. Give him a syntactical challenge any day, but scriptology was not going to solve the problem with Casa. He played assistant to Gia as best he could, though all the tools looked the same to him and he had no idea what she was trying to accomplish.

  Burak was still hidden in the walls, working in secret thanks to some sort of blind-spot device. Alek helped by running messages to him; Casa watched Gia’s every move with intense scrutiny, so Gia and Burak could not risk a direct meeting.

  Alek took the basement stairs as fast as he could, leaning heavily on the railing every other step. He’d been up and down five times already, and his bad hip was screeching in protest. At the bottom, the generator room provided little relief—it was hot as a Veldanese afternoon in there, and stuffy to boot.

  “How’s it looking?” Alek said.

  Gia squeezed out of the narrow space behind one of the huge, hulking generators. “Well … I have a few minor concerns…”

  Casa’s disembodied voice bellowed, “You do?!” They had told the house that Gia was working to shore up security, which at the time seemed like a good way to trick Casa into giving her access to the systems. But now the house was excessively anxious over her progress.

  Gia sighed. “Minor security concerns, I said minor. Don’t worry so much—it shouldn’t take long to make the necessary adjustments.”

  She threw Alek a look that was equal parts exasperation and exhaustion. Alek drew back a corner of his mouth in sympathetic agreement.

  A deep, resonant chime sounded somewhere in the house, making Alek jump. He said, “Was that the doorbell?”

  Gia closed her eyes, as if praying for patience. “Casa, please don’t admit anyone into the house right now.”

  “No need to worry, Signora,” Casa replied. “I am quite capable of keeping you safe.”

  “That’s precisely what I’m afraid of,” Gia muttered.

 
“Signor Pisano is with the group at the door. Should I not welcome him home?”

  “No!” Gia yelped. It took her visible effort to steady her voice. “We’ll go up and speak with them. Please wait for us, Casa.”

  She took the basement stairs at an undignified run, and Alek followed as fast as his bad hip would let him. As they rushed down the hallway to the foyer, Casa said, “Signor Pisano is being most insistent…”

  Alek’s heart stuttered in his chest when he looked up and saw the front doors cracking open. Gia dived for the doors and grabbed them, blocking the entrance with her own bulk just barely in time. Alek came to a stop behind her and pressed his palm against his ribs; he was too old for this sort of excitement.

  He peered over Gia’s shoulder and through the crack to spot Filippo—husband to Gia and head of the Pisano family ever since his brother Massimo died—who stood on the stoop, wringing his hands anxiously. Beside him was Augusto Righi, a portly mustachioed man who served as the current elected leader of the Order of Archimedes. With them were two other pazzerellones: the council secretary, a Signor Papone if Alek recalled correctly, and a German representative whose name vanished from his memory. And behind them stood a pair of seven-foot-tall enforcer automatons, not unlike the ones designed to guard Montaigne’s prison.

  This was all highly unusual, and made Alek’s skin feel hot with nerves.

  Gia cast Alek a worried look over her shoulder and said, “I’m afraid you really, truly cannot come in just now.”

  “Move aside, Gia,” Righi said.

  Filippo looked miserable. “We have to let them in, my love.”

  “No,” Alek said, “Filippo, you don’t understand. The house—”

  But Righi motioned the enforcers forward, and they pushed their way inside so roughly that Alek had to catch and steady Gia. She made a surprised, indignant noise, and Filippo came immediately to her side as if to declare his allegiance against the machines’ rudeness.