Mist, Metal, and Ash

by Gwendolyn Clare

Leo was too bemused at the conversation as a whole to take offense at his feelings for Elsa being likened to a dog fighting over table scraps. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said.

  Seemingly satisfied, Ricciotti rose from the armchair. He loomed close to Leo, his presence almost gravitational, and he clapped a hand on Leo’s shoulder. “Aris may be the elder, but sometimes you must be the mature one, understand?”

  “Yes, Father,” he answered automatically, as if his body were responding to Ricciotti’s paternal authority whether he liked it or not.

  Ricciotti gave a satisfied nod, patted his shoulder again, and left. Leo searched desperately inside himself for the resentment that Ricciotti usually instilled, but he could not find it anywhere. He rubbed his shoulder, trying to erase the feel of his father’s touch.

  I do love you both. The worst part was, Leo believed it.

  * * *

  That night Elsa woke with a start from a light sleep, unsure of what had roused her. A sound? A dream? Then the knock came again.

  Blinking away the daze of sleep, she slid out of bed and fumbled in the dark for her dressing gown. The air was unpleasantly chilly, the floorboards cold against her bare feet. She answered the door to find a certain blond boy standing in the hall.

  “Leo?” she said blearily. “What are you doing?”

  He carried a small kerosene lantern, the light turned down so low it was barely enough to see by, and left his face in shadow. “May I come in?” he said, his tone carefully neutral.

  Elsa considered him, trying to glean a hint of his intentions from his stance or the angle of his shoulders. He held himself stiff, collected, ready for battle. Perhaps this was to be expected, after how they’d left things in the solarium. Though why he thought he needed the rapier that was at this moment strapped to his hip, she couldn’t imagine. Was there danger afoot? Elsa held the door wide, then closed it behind him.

  “It’s late,” she said. “I don’t fancy another argument right now, if that’s what you’re here for.”

  “I’m not here to talk about us.” He turned up the wick and let the lantern brighten the room. His gaze swept around, as if scanning for spies.

  So the late-night visit was indeed about more than her reckless behavior. “What, then?”

  “I found something.” Leo leaned close, lowering his voice so she could barely hear him. “Aris has a secret stash of worldbooks in the mechanics laboratory. I don’t know for sure that he’s hidden the editbook inside one of them, but I think this is our best chance to get it back.”

  For a moment Elsa didn’t reply, taken aback at Leo’s sudden interest in recovering the very book he’d stolen from her. A flash of anger made her want to give him a cutting reply, but logic won out; everything that had happened between them paled in importance when compared against finding the editbook.

  “You have my interest,” she admitted. “Thank you for bringing this to my attention.”

  He nodded, visibly relieved at her acceptance of his olive branch. “All right then, let’s go.”

  “Now? What if you’re wrong and the editbook isn’t there?” Elsa shook her head. “We should bide our time and gather more information.”

  “If we wait, we risk Aris figuring out that we know about the hidden worldbooks.”

  Elsa fervently wished Vincenzo were still here to give her advice about how to proceed. Another bridge burned—apparently she’d developed a talent for that. She made a frustrated noise in the back of her throat. “Fine, we’ll do it your way.”

  She threw off the dressing gown and jammed her feet into the legs of her trousers. Leo flushed scarlet and turned to face away while she dressed. Elsa hadn’t meant to offend his modesty, though it did give her a certain petty satisfaction all the same.

  She buckled her leather bustier over a linen shirt. “We’ll need a portal device.”

  “I think I saw one there,” Leo answered without turning around. “But where’s yours?”

  “Not here.”

  “How specific.”

  “It’s a long story.” And not one she was inclined to share with a person of questionable loyalties. She finished lacing her boots and stood. “Let’s get this done.”

  Leo turned the lantern down again and slipped out into the hall, moving stealthily in the dim light. Elsa followed his lead, trusting his instincts when it came to the matter of sneaking. That much, at least, she could trust.

  The mechanics laboratory was clean and organized despite signs of recent use. Discarded off to one side was a pile of warped gears Elsa recognized as belonging to the airship transmission; Aris must have gutted the mechanism since the unfortunate maiden voyage.

  Leo led her through the lab to the back wall, explaining, “I knew there had to be a worldbook in here somewhere, because I saw someone open a portal right over there.”

  “Someone?” Elsa said.

  “Well, ‘someone’ in the loose sense. She was this automaton-monster sort of construct. Aris’s creation, I’d assume, from the admixture of mechanics and alchemy. I think she’s been watching me, although she was weirdly skittish when I caught her in here.”

  “If she was spying on you, she probably wasn’t supposed to get caught doing it.”

  “Maybe,” Leo said. “Or perhaps she’s supposed to be guarding the editbook instead.” He pulled down on a wall sconce, and a panel opened to reveal a hidden bookcase.

  “That’s not at all suspicious,” Elsa said dryly.

  “What do you think? See anything promising?”

  She ran her fingertips across the spines, feeling for the steady thrum of finished worldbooks. Several of Aris’s books had the tentative vibration of works in progress, and Elsa found it curious that he would have so many incomplete projects at once. Perhaps he was the type to abandon a worldbook partway through, if it wasn’t working exactly as he intended.

  She pulled out the first of the finished worldbooks and opened it to scan the text. “This one’s an alchemy laboratory. See here? He’s altered the basic principles of chemistry.” Apparently Elsa was not the only polymath using scriptology to get around the physical laws of the real world.

  Leo didn’t bother looking. “I’ll have to take your word for it, I’m afraid.”

  Elsa shelved the alchemy lab and found another complete worldbook. After reading for a minute, she said, “Huh…”

  “Tell me that’s a good ‘huh,’” Leo said hopefully.

  “This one’s another lab, I think, but it has alterations to linguistic properties.” Her interest was piqued—Veldana had special language properties too—but there wasn’t time to study this text in depth and figure out what Aris had designed it for. She replaced it and opened the next book.

  “Oh! This one looks promising,” Elsa said. “It’s a maze world. Well … sort of. Anyway, it’s the only worldbook here that seems to have anything I’d call security measures. Shall we go?” She reached for the portal device that was stashed on the shelf above the books.

  Leo pressed his lips together, considering. “As much as I’m loath to serve as the voice of reason, I feel obligated to point out that the last time we recovered the editbook from a maze world, we needed Faraz and Porzia’s assistance to complete the task.”

  Elsa gave him an appraising look. “You’re right: caution really doesn’t become you.”

  He scrunched his face distastefully, as if he wore the caution like an unfortunate fashion choice. “Somebody ought to keep us in check, and Faraz isn’t here.”

  “How very sensible of you,” she said in a mollifying tone, with only a hint of mockery. “Now are we going to dive blindly into to danger, or what?”

  “Oh God yes.” He grinned.

  It seemed like forever since she’d last seen him smile; it hit Elsa like a hatpin to the heart. She quickly looked away and busied herself with setting the coordinates. The black maw of a portal yawned open for them.

  They stepped through the portal into a vertiginous puzzle of paths and sta
irs that changed angles and twisted back on themselves in defiance of gravity and geometry. There was an open doorway on the ceiling—or rather, on the path above Elsa and Leo—and just out of reach on their left was a set of stairs tipped ninety degrees to lie on its side. There were no structural supports in sight, just a maze of stone pathways hanging in the air like a massive spider’s web. In the empty spaces between, there was only the distant purple glow of Edgemist.

  Leo said, “What the…”

  Elsa laughed, but she wasn’t entirely sure whether it was from delight or dismay. “One thing I can say for Aris: He does have a certain flair, doesn’t he?”

  Leo muttered under his breath, “Yes, let’s swoon over how brilliant my brother is.”

  Elsa caught the words. Dryly, she replied, “And after that, can we argue about whose property I am?”

  Leo gave her one of his inscrutable looks, some warring combination of woundedness and guilt. Then he shook it off and said, “In any case, this place is deranged.”

  He edged over to look below the path they stood on. There were no handrails anywhere in sight, no safety precautions whatsoever. Elsa guessed this was not an oversight, but an intentional feature.

  Leo whistled. “There’s no ground or anything—it’s just Edgemist down there beyond the maze.”

  Elsa looked both ways along the path they were on. In one direction, the path ended where it curved abruptly upward at a ninety-degree angle and became a wall; in the other direction it became a stairway.

  “Well, we’re not exactly spoiled for choices. Let’s go,” she said, and headed off to climb the stairs, with Leo following a few steps behind.

  At the top, the staircase ended in a round landing twice the width of the path they’d been following. Elsa stepped into the center and her stomach lurched with the sudden sensation of gravity abandoning her. Her boots lifted off the floor and she began falling up.

  Leo lunged for her, his fingers closing around her ankle, and he dragged her back down. Her stomach twisted as gravity flipped again, and she fell into his arms, too disoriented to try for a neat landing.

  Elsa’s pulse leapt in her throat, and not just from her narrowly averted fall. Leo’s hands lingered, reluctant to let her go, and his touch called up a sharp memory of their last embrace. Sharp like broken glass, because in hindsight she knew he had already been planning to betray her when they’d kissed—and because a part of her wanted to kiss him again, no matter what he’d done.

  She pulled back, irritated with Leo for that yearning look he was giving her, and with herself for warming to him despite everything.

  “You all right?” he said.

  “Localized gravity fields. So no, we’re not all right, we’re navigating through a death trap.”

  If only she had her laboratory worldbook with her, she could build a gravitometer to detect the fluctuations before they blundered right into them. But of course she’d scribed her lab book in Veldanese, which meant she couldn’t have risked bringing it to Garibaldi’s stronghold.

  Leo was staring up at the path above them, a strip of gray stone running parallel to the one they’d been following. It hung much lower over their heads now that they’d climbed the stairs.

  Elsa rubbed her forehead. “Please don’t tell me you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking.”

  By way of an answer, Leo lined himself up and stepped deliberately forward into the gravity well. He fell upward, twisting head over heels in midair, and landed neatly—feet-first and upside down—on the path above.

  He held his arms out, proud of his demonstration. “It’s not a trap, Elsa—it’s the way through!”

  “Through to where? There are doors scattered all over the place, but they don’t look like they lead anywhere.”

  She had reservations about the idea of using the gravity fields to their advantage. But at the very least it was admittedly disorienting trying to converse with someone who was standing upside down relative to her own perspective. So Elsa took a deep breath, then edged carefully across the gravity transition.

  The stone path dropped away, and the world spun around her—an enormous, nonsensical web of stone ribbons momentarily devoid of directionality. The new path came up beneath her and she caught it with the soles of her boots, stumbling two steps forward before her inner ear became entirely convinced of which direction now claimed the mantle of “down.”

  She straightened cautiously and glanced around to get her bearings. “So what do we do now?”

  “We’ll just have to follow the gravity pockets until they lead us somewhere useful,” Leo said, with a self-assurance that did not seem especially well-earned to Elsa. She still suspected this world was designed to punish any misstep with a rapid demise—specifically, the rapid demise of falling into the Edgemist and ceasing to exist. Not that Leo’s confidence would falter over such a petty matter as imminent mortal danger.

  “Wonderful,” she grumbled. “Here we are again in the land of Leo Knows Best.”

  He frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You know exactly what it means,” Elsa snapped.

  Leo folded his arms. “Are we arguing about the editbook, or about my brother, now? I’ve lost track.”

  Elsa felt a hot pressure growing in her chest, restless for release. Back in Pisa she’d been so careful not to vent her feelings, since Faraz and Porzia were struggling enough without the added burden of her hurt. And in Garibaldi’s stronghold there was no room for error, no room for honest emotion. But here, in this moment, there was only her and Leo and the dense pain of what they’d done to each other.

  “You took my choice away!” The dam inside her breached, and all her bottled-up anger came flowing out. “It was my decision, my responsibility, and you literally stole it right out of my hands!”

  “I was trying to protect you!” he shouted back.

  “Why couldn’t you try to respect me, instead? I loved you, and you treated me like a child!”

  Leo froze, stunned, and it took Elsa a moment to replay those last words and discover the cause. “You loved me?” he echoed, barely above a whisper. “Is that … past tense?”

  She took a deep breath and let it out.

  “Ask me again when this is over.” She turned away, feeling drained and hollowed out, and not wanting to watch his face as he processed what she’d said.

  He was silent for long enough that she almost wondered if he’d mysteriously vanished. When he finally spoke, his voice came out carefully measured and controlled. “All right, let’s find the editbook.”

  They started moving again, in the same general direction but upside down from their previous orientation. Leo stalked ahead, managing somehow to keep a lid on his mood. Elsa didn’t know whether to feel relieved that the argument had been set aside, or annoyed at his ability to compartmentalize.

  At the next gravity shift, it was Leo who began to float away, and Elsa who frantically grabbed the back of his waistcoat to pull him back down to safety. This time there was no path above them to aim for—just empty air and, eventually, the oblivion of Edgemist. So they turned around and went back in the direction from which they’d come.

  Soon they reached the open doorway in the floor—the one Elsa had noticed on the ceiling when they’d first arrived—and Leo crouched beside the rectangular hole to investigate.

  “We can walk around it,” Elsa pointed out, exasperated.

  “Sure,” he said, “but does that seem like the cleverest possible solution? We need to think like Aris.”

  Leo pressed his palms against the stone, right on the edge, and deliberately tipped forward. Still holding on to the frame, he swung headfirst into the doorway, and then climbed all the way through to stand on the opposite surface of the same path.

  Elsa stepped up to the edge and looked through, only to see Leo looking back at her like a reflection in a pool of water. “You’ve got to be joking.”

  He crouched and reached a hand through the doorwa
y. “It’s fine, I’ll pull you through.”

  She also crouched and grabbed his hand. After a childhood spent scrambling over the wild terrain of Veldana, Elsa considered herself quite physically competent, but this world presented a whole new challenge. She was not too proud to accept assistance if it meant not falling to her death.

  Leo pulled her down until the gravity flipped and down became up, and she was scrambling to get all four of her limbs onto the path.

  Elsa felt Leo suddenly tense beside her. “Did you see that?” he said, fast and hushed.

  Elsa almost asked, What? but when she looked around the motion caught her eye—something large and winged and green-skinned, moving with easy confidence through the maze. It leapt, twisted, and fell, landed as sure-footed as a cat, and moved on through the next gravity shift. Even at a distance, the creature’s grace was mesmerizing to behold.

  At last, the creature ducked out of sight behind a stone stairway. Elsa waited to catch sight of it emerging somewhere, but it did not reappear.

  “There,” said Leo, as if this were a victory. “That’s where we need to go.”

  His self-assurance was definitely starting to grate on Elsa’s nerves. “And how did you leap to that particular conclusion?”

  “Unless she literally vanished, there’s something over there—something that merits building a big, scary, taloned construct to protect it. What could it be, except the editbook?”

  “For all I know, Aris built a big scary construct to guard his extensive collection of big scary constructs,” she retorted.

  “Do you have a better idea of where to look?” he huffed.

  Elsa admitted that she did not, and so Leo began planning out a route through the gravity maze. She let him take the lead, mostly because they’d already wasted enough time and energy on arguing. They jumped and climbed and slid, fell in all sorts of directions, backtracked when they reached a dead end, and did it all over again.

  It was strange being able to see their destination, see all the various paths that converged there, and yet still need to rely on trial and error to approach it. At a distance there was no way to judge the orientations—did a particular section of path or set of stairs have gravity on one side or the other, or both, or neither?