by Jes Battis
“You mean Jekyll and Hyde?”
“¡Claro! Dr. Jekyll. He was supposed to be an alchemist looking for la piedra de la filosofía. The philosopher’s stone, or cincero elementa. Some say he worked in the court of King Philip IV; others that he was the personal physician to Queen Mariana of Austria.” She chuckled. “Whatever the case, he never found what he was looking for. But he did stumble across something else instead: la manticora. A manticore.”
Becka’s eyes widened. “Isn’t that the thing with the lion’s head and the scorpion’s tail? I remember it from the cover of a Piers Anthony novel.”
“It’s a paradaemon,” I said. “Something like a cross between a pureblooded demon and an elemental spirit. They live on the prime elemental planes, where materia exists in its purest form.”
“You don’t usually see them and live to tell about it,” Duessa added.
“And did el alquimista survive his encounter?”
“Supposedly, he made a deal with la manticora. He did something for her, and she fulfilled one wish in return. But in the end, she turned on him, and el alquimista died a horrible death.” She smiled. “That’s usually where the story gets creative, so that you can scare los niños. He gets cooked and eaten; he gets flayed alive; his bones get turned into jelly. Blah, blah, brush your teeth and don’t talk back, end of story.”
“So you’re sure he wasn’t a real person?”
“Anything’s possible. But I remember mi abuela telling me that story. It’s older than this painting. And I never heard anything about a suit of armor being made for him. What would an alchemist need armor for? He was surrounded by potions all day long, and he never left his laboratory.”
I sighed. “Awesome. So the bird’s yanking my chain.”
“Even so,” Becka interjected, “it wouldn’t hurt to brush up on the legend, would it? Maybe your informant was speaking in some kind of code.”
“True. But it’s just as possible that he’s a crazy old demon living in a hedge.”
“Either way, I can pull up more information and e-mail it to you.” Becka grinned. “I really do love research.”
“Cool. Knock yourself out.”
“Now…” Duessa walked over to the table. “Speaking of legends, let’s take a boo at the Velázquez. Ordeño had good taste.”
“Did you know him personally?”
“I wouldn’t go that far. But we ran in some of the same circles. Six degrees of undead separation, that sort of thing.”
“I understand that he was sort of mentor to Lucian Agrado.”
“Oh, you understand, do you?” She smiled at me. “Preciosa , don’t be so sure that you understand anything about Lucian Agrado. He’s a lot like this painting—lovely, confusing, and just the right amount of fucked-up. Don’t go jumping to any conclusions about the boy until you’ve spent more time with him.”
Duessa gave me a sly look. She knew full well that I’d spent plenty of time with him, but she was covering for me. A nice favor, and one that I’d probably have to repay someday. Immortals always collected their fees.
I just nodded. “Right. He’s an enigma wrapped in a fitted tee. I get it.”
“He’s hot,” Becka said. “For a necromancer, I mean.”
“Fire’s hot, too, baby. Doesn’t mean you should play with it.” Duessa returned her attention to the painting. “It’s a nice reproduction. Nineteenth century?”
Becka glanced at another computer screen. “According to the microscopy results, it’s somewhere between one hundred and one hundred fifty years old. It’s tricky to know for sure, since there aren’t really any forensic databases for paintings—the closest thing is the FBI database of automobile paint.”
“So if Velázquez had spray painted Las Meninas, we’d be set.” I stood next to Duessa, examining the picture. “Okay, seriously—two dwarves or one?”
Her eyes hardened. “If you’re referring to los enanos de la Reina, then there are two: Mari-Bárbola and Nicolasito Pertusato. They were both domestic servants within the queen’s entourage.” Her expression softened, and then she smiled a strange, almost faraway smile, as if recalling something familiar. “They gave Mari-Bárbola four pounds of snow every year. Nobody’s sure why. Maybe she used it to cool off in the summer, or slept in it, or ate handfuls of it. But Ponte wrote a poem about her. Que cada boca suya rumie del invierno. ‘With each mouthful she chews, she ruminates upon the winter.”
“Did you know her?”
“Nobody really did.” She stared at the painting again. I guess that was the best answer I was going to get.
“Okay.” I exhaled. “Ordeño’s body was found lying underneath this painting. He had other paintings by Velázquez, but none were hung as prominently as this one, in the middle of his living room. Can you think of any reason that it might be significant?”
“The painting itself?” Duessa asked. “Or its placement?”
“Both.”
“Well, it’s no surprise that any fan of Velázquez would have a nice reproduction of Las Meninas. It’s a beautiful and puzzling work of art. Maybe he hung it there so his guests could appreciate it.”
“But that doesn’t explain why he died underneath it.”
“Couldn’t that be a coincidence?”
I gave her a look. “Do you really think so? He was wearing a suit of armor from the Golden Age, and he died underneath a painting from the same era. Either the guy’s just crazy about the Renaissance, or we have a pattern.”
Duessa examined the image that was projected on the wall. “It’s amazing what we can do with technology. Las Meninas didn’t even appear in a public museum until the end of the nineteenth century. All an observer could do was stare at it passively, trying to figure out its perspective. Now we can blow it up and study it with algorithms and computer programs. Kind of destroys the mystery.”
“Actually,” Becka said, “in some ways, it only increases the mystery. If we use a computer program to calculate all of the orthogonals and geometric factors in the painting, we can determine precisely how every subject is placed—their orientation, their depth of field, everything.” She pushed up her glasses. “But we still can’t figure out why the painter created them that way, or why he used those techniques. So a part of the mystery remains.”
Duessa sighed. “I’m just worried that, one of these days, they’re going to figure out a computer program that explains all of the magic in the world, down to the last fairy wing. Then everything will just become an endless list of numbers and commands in some government database. And before we know it, they’ll start saying who can have access to the data and who can’t. Beating Mother Nature at her own game.”
Becka shrugged. “It’s also just as probable that magic, like any genetic mutation, will eventually be eradicated from our DNA. Or it will become a useless appendage, like the pinkie toe, or the epiglottis.”
We both stared at her.
She blinked. “That’s the dangly thing in the back of your—”
Duessa cleared her throat. “Anyway. The problem with this painting is that, the more you subject it to analysis, the more it confounds you. It’s nearly impossible to say that you know who Velázquez is painting, since you can’t see what’s on the canvas. He could very well be paining Las Meninas itself. A painting of a painting of a painting, going on to infinity.”
I frowned. “But what about the man and the woman in the mirror? You can see their faces. Aren’t they supposed to be the king and queen?”
“Probably. They could be Philip IV and Mariana of Austria. And if the mirror is directly within the observer’s line of sight, what would that mean?”
I stared at the painted mirror. A man and a woman stared back at me, but their features were vague and cloudy. I couldn’t say for sure what their expressions might be, what they were thinking or feeling, or even if they truly existed at all.
“If the mirror is reflecting what’s on the canvas,” I said, “and the subjects of the painting are withi
n my line of sight, it would mean that we’re actually occupying the same space. The king and queen are standing where I’m standing. That’s why I can see their reflection.”
Duessa nodded, still smiling. “But that seems impossible. Unless he’s trying to suggest that every observer is also Spanish royalty. And what about the Infanta Margarita, and her two meninas, Doña María Augustina and Doña Isabel de Velasco? The painting is named after them, but they’re only handmaidens. And Margarita isn’t the subject of the painting, but she seems to be in the middle of everything. All of the light in the room is falling on her face and her hair.”
“She looks sad.”
“Maybe she is. Children are allowed to be sad.”
I thought about my own childhood. Had I been a melancholy kid? Having the ability to cause an earthquake when you’re ten years old can definitely have psychological repercussions. But I didn’t feel that my adolescence was particularly sad. I felt like it was normal, which was the strange thing.
Because I wasn’t normal. I’d never been normal, and I never would be. I watched my best friend, Eve, die in a fire, and I couldn’t save her. The flames hadn’t touched me, but they’d reduced her body to ash and calcined bone, crumbling to the touch like a tiny form made of snow and carbon.
You can’t see her now, my mother had said. You don’t want to see her.
Then, I’d trusted everything that my mother said. She was a goddess to me. But after discovering that she’d been a mage all along, that she’d lied to me—just as I’d lied to her—about magic and its place in our family, I found myself revisiting old memories with a sense of anxiety. When had she been telling the truth, and when had she been lying? If magic could spin illusions and cloud thoughts, if it could make you think and feel things against your will, then did I really remember my childhood correctly? Did I know everything I thought I knew?
How much of it was verbatim, and how much had my mother crafted and manipulated in order to provide me with what she thought was a “normal” life? And what made her think that keeping her powers a secret would somehow make us a normal family? She’d always known that I was part of the CORE. She’d even worked with my old teacher, Meredith Silver, to ensure that I was trained. So what had she gained by staying quiet all these years and pretending to be dumb?
It still didn’t add up. And my mother wasn’t talking about it. Lately, she wasn’t talking about anything except recipes, bird-watching, and whatever outfit she’d found on sale at Winners for Mia. I didn’t want to hear about any more supercute hoodies and skirts that she’d bought two-for-one. I wanted to know why she left the CORE and stopped practicing magic.
Or if she ever really had.
“Maybe it’s really a painting of Ordeño,” I said.
Duessa looked at me strangely. “Why would you think that?”
“The guy was probably over four hundred, and there’s a chance that he knew Velázquez. Maybe the reflection in the mirror is just a trick to cover up the real subject of the painting.”
“But why would Velázquez paint a necromancer when he was supposed to be painting the king and queen of Spain?”
“I don’t know. Why is there a dog in the picture? Why did he paint so much of the ceiling? We could ask questions forever. All we know is that Ordeño, the painting, and the suit of armor are somehow connected.”
Duessa shook her head slowly. “It irks me—the thought of Luiz Ordeño in a suit of armor. He was a lawyer, not a caballero. He had enemies, but they weren’t the kind that would attack you with a sword.”
“Lucian seemed to think that the armor looked more like it was designed for a tournament. Maybe he just liked to dress up.”
Becka’s eyes brightened. “Like my neighbor!”
Duessa looked at her. “What about your neighbor?”
“He’s a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism. He dresses up like a knight, and his boyfriend’s a milkmaid, or a wench or something.”
She sighed. “That’s wonderful for them. But I don’t think Ordeño was into playing dress-up. He had to be wearing the armor for protection.”
“But protection from what?” I was still looking at the painting. I couldn’t help it. The Infanta Margarita’s eyes knew something, and she wasn’t telling. I wanted to climb in there and ask her. “You said yourself—his enemies weren’t going to come at him with a sword or a crossbow. If they wanted to eliminate him, they’d blow up his apartment or mow him down in the street.”
“I never understood the use of that verb,” Becka mumbled to herself. “How do you mow someone with a car? It’s not a lawn mower. If you can mow with your car, does that mean you can speed with your lawn mower?”
Duessa ignored her. “The armor isn’t what it seems. I don’t know what it is exactly, or what it’s capable of. But it’s definitely special.”
“Couldn’t you chat with it again?” I asked. “Maybe oil its hinges, promise it a nice polishing if it gives you more information?”
She smiled. “I wish it worked that way. But it’s like talking to a stone. It doesn’t precisely tell you anything, does it?”
Duessa was right. Inanimate objects did have their own kind of consciousness, but it was pretty one-sided. When I opened my mind to them, I received a confusing welter of impressions: dark, cold, dampness, layers of earth, immobility, density, and a kind of low, monotonous song composed of a single, unwavering note. They were alive, but not in the same way that even single-celled organisms and amoebae had “life.” Their life was ancient, inscrutable, and as opaque to us as our lives were to them.
Still, it was nice to hear their song. I’d be sad if I stopped hearing it.
I tried to refocus on the case. It was growing increasingly more difficult, as of late, to wrap my mind fully around the particulars of my job. Like a dog in an off-leash park, it wanted to wander everywhere, and getting it to return was a bit of a task. I thought about the pills that Hinzelmann had prescribed. Maybe a good night’s sleep would help. Maybe the chemicals would kill my dreams. That would be a relief.
“Is it possible,” I asked, “that the armor and the painting are two halves of a magical artifact? Maybe we’re supposed to put them together somehow.”
Becka raised an eyebrow. “Are you suggesting duct tape?”
“Maybe. If the duct tape were magical.”
“I think I see what you’re getting at,” Duessa said, “but it’s not that simple. I mean, theoretically, you could create a kind of polymer out of water and earth materia, and use it to bind the two together. But all you’d be left with is an artifact sandwich. It wouldn’t produce anything but rust and paint chips.”
I frowned. “There’s got to be some Matrix-y way to handle this. Like, breaking down the armor into its molecular components, and then—”
Duessa raised a hand. “Nobody will be ‘breaking down’ the priceless armadura from the Habsburg Dynasty. Besides—the armor isn’t necessarily the heart of the puzzle. There could be other clues hiding in his apartment.”
“We’ve been over it with every piece of detection equipment the lab has access to. If there’s something hidden, we should have found it by now.”
Her eyes sparkled slightly. “Unless someone else found it first.”
“Huh.” I gave her a long look. “You think the necromancers are keeping evidence from us? That would be a violation of our agreement.”
“Of course. And they’d never, ever violate something written on paper. That would be unthinkable.”
Becka looked confused. “I’m not sure what we’re talking about anymore. Do we think that Lucian Agrado stole evidence from the scene?”
“Who said anything about Lucian Agrado?” Duessa shrugged. “I’m not suggesting that the necromancers tampered with evidence. I’m just reminding you of the fact that they arrived on the scene first. Or so you tell me.”
Once again, I was back to thinking about Lucian. Lucian, who wouldn’t return my calls, text messages, or e-mails. Luc
ian, who seemed to have dropped off the face of the planet without so much as a wave good-bye. Liar. Thief. Illusionist. Bastard. The person who drifted through my thoughts all day long, reclined, indolent, as if he’d taken up residence on some comfortable divan in my psyche.
And why did my psyche have furniture to begin with? Was this something that I should be worried about?
I stared at the Infanta Margarita. “She knows something.”
It was better than saying, He knows something. At least I could speculate openly about a work of art.
“You mean Margarita?” Duessa looked at the small girl. “See how she receives the cup of water from her menina? She’s looking at us, but she’s also taking the water. It’s as if she’s saying, Go ahead, try to figure out anything about my life. You can watch my actions, but you’ll never know me.”
“Did Velázquez know her?”
“He was the mayordomo del palacio. He knew the ins and outs of the royal court, and he’d painted the Infanta before. But nobody can say for sure if he really knew her. Even as a child, she seems difficult to read.”
“And what about you?”
She looked at me calmly. “What about me, Tess?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Are you asking if I knew the Infanta? Or if I knew Velázquez?”
“Both.”
Her expression grew thoughtful. “The Infanta? No. Velázquez? You could say we knew each other. But not well.”
I smiled suddenly. “Maybe he was painting you on the canvas. Did you ever pose for him?”
Her look soured. “La perra no cumpló su promesa.”
I blinked. “¿Perdone? I don’t understand.”
She sighed, still looking at the Infanta. “Yo tampoco. Me neither.”
11
“How many wings were on the armor, dear?”
My mother was washing dishes while I cleared the rest of the table.
Mia and Patrick had already retired to the living room and were watching TV, their bellies full of garlic mashed potatoes and meat loaf. I watched my mother’s hands as they slipped into the hot water, passing a cloth swiftly but deliberately over a plate (from the set of dishes that she’d given me last year). Her movements were ordinary and graceful at the same time. She flicked water from the edge of the plate, then set it down to dry on a white towel laid flat across the counter.