Someone laughed behind her, and it was as if she’d been plunged into the River again.
All the water splashed back into the basin.
She looked round, chagrined.
“You’ll never get it that way, you know, Miss Nyx,” Charles said.
“Why not?” she asked.
“Because you’re starting off with things that are far too difficult.”
Vespa frowned. “I don’t see why it matters to you.”
He stepped into the garden. “Well, I suppose it really doesn’t. Except that I hate to pass up the opportunity to help.”
“Yes, we’ve seen how helpful you’ve been in the past.”
Charles sighed and sat down. “Why can’t you let the past go? Surely you’ve seen by now that I have only the best of intentions. I always did. They just got twisted somehow.”
“Oh?” she said.
He ignored her sarcasm and reached for the end of a vine that hung near him.
“Watch,” he said.
Charles stared at the vine but only for a moment. Then he looked up at her and smiled. Nothing seemed to have happened, except that when she looked again, the tip of the vine had burst into full bloom. The scarlet trumpets nodded against his fingertips.
He stood. “Start with what is already there. The blossom is within the vine. You have only to make the vine realize that. It is harder to make water realize it should go into a shape that it was never meant to be. You would need something much more powerful—a focusing device—in order to accomplish that. Master that which seems easy before trying something that is hard. And realize at some point that you may need help.”
Vespa stared at him, open-mouthed.
“Good day, Miss Nyx,” he said.
And then he was gone again, bent on goodness knew what errand.
Vespa waited a while to make sure she was alone again.
Then she went to the opposite end of the arbor and worked at making the vine blossom.
CHAPTER 23
When I wake, it feels like midmorning, judging from the light coming from between the slats of the shutters. I throw off the covers and sit up, putting my aching head in my hands. It feels like the venom is coursing through my body anew. All I want to do is vomit.
A servant enters the room with scarcely a knock. “The demonstration will begin soon, sir,” he says, and begins opening shutters everywhere.
The light blinds me. “Stop!” I shout.
He looks at me as he has at many a spoiled lordling, I’m sure.
“I’m sorry, just . . . please don’t open them yet.”
“Yes, sir.” He bows and plunges the room back into shade.
An hour or so later, bathed, booted, and braided, I make my way up to the demonstration courtyard. My escort leaves me at the stairs. I feel like a stork walking in these strange boots, and it seems like I’ve entered a great exhibition hall of similarly awkward if brilliantly plumed birds. The women are bedecked with feathers and jewels, and their skirts are wider than those at Bayne and Lucy’s wedding masque. I feel somewhat ill, imagining how much all these getups must cost.
In contrast, Olivia wears a simple blue gown and a few glimmering stones around her throat. Her pale hair is held up with ribbons and perhaps one diamond pin. Next to the Scientian nobility she looks almost plain, but I think she looks regal. The only oddity is the knitted stole she wears wrapped around her shoulders and piled high on her neck, but I know she’s wearing it to hide her wound. She smiles when she sees me, and I bow quickly to hide the blush I know is coming.
I’m still stunned by the extravagant beauty of this place, so much more magnificent than Virulen was. And yet people here move under the intricately woven arbors as if it’s commonplace. In the center of the courtyard a tall, canvas-covered object stands. “What is that?”
“No idea,” Bayne murmurs. “Perhaps it has something to do with this demonstration I was told about.”
“So, why has this never been the capital?” I can’t help but wonder that, looking around at the gilded pillars and alcoves filled with flowers.
“I’ve read in the Archives that John Vaunt was afraid of the magic here. He came here not long after New London appeared and before the devastation of Euclidea. And that an army of ghosts chased him right out of the city because they didn’t believe he was worthy of being a king. So the Architects always said.”
The darkness in my mind opens, and I see him—a much younger version of the crabbed Emperor. He is standing before a silver statue at the head of a line of silver statues. He admires it the most. “Bring this along,” he says to one of his guards . . .
“Hmph.” The dark strands of the nightmares threaten to drag me down. I’m not going to bring them into the light of day.
“In any case, my family came here after the devastation of Euclidea, and here they’ve remained, to their great fortune.”
At that moment, a servant comes by, bearing an ornate tray full of delicacies. A bright orange cluster of berries layered on green icing over a delicate wafer catches my eye. I pop it into my mouth without much thought and then nearly retch.
“Like sea urchin, do you?” Bayne asks. He slips one into his mouth, smiling, as I scowl and barely manage not to wipe my mouth on my sleeve.
I grab at another servant with a tray of fluted glasses, not caring that the pale pink liquor is cloyingly sweet. Anything, anything to get that briny taste out of my mouth.
“I should have warned you,” Bayne says. “There will be many treasures of the sea on the menu today, even more than last night.”
I nod, wondering if I can slip into the kitchens and somehow find a bit of cold mutton. Somehow I doubt it.
Olivia gestures for us to come to her. People sometimes offer respect, but no one stays to make conversation with her. The room seems to part around Bayne like waves. All eyes are on him, and yet no one wants to meet his gaze directly.
As we get closer to Olivia, I notice that her skin is even grayer than before. Her eyes look weak and feverish.
“Are you well, Majesty?”
Her glance at me says she is not. But she nods instead and returns to surveying the crowd.
“What do you think this demonstration is about?” she asks, looking at Bayne.
“I’m not certain, Majesty. I suspect a show of might, especially after my blustering last night. I apologize.”
She’s clutching the edges of her stole more forcefully than is necessary. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like to sit, Majesty?”
Again that glance, this time filled with warning.
“No. We shall stand until everyone is here.”
It’s not long until Tesla and Charles, looking dapper as ever, are announced.
Vespa arrives just before everyone is to be seated. I am fortunate to be seated across from Olivia. Bayne, as the new Regent, sits wherever he pleases, which happens to be next to me.
The banquet is even more lavish than before, making the meals at Virulen seem silly by comparison. Suddenly I understand why it was whispered that the Virulens weren’t very well-off anymore and needed the alliance with Grimgorn to solidify their future. Compared to the Grimgorns’ table, the Virulens may as well have been hosting their gatherings in a Tinker clan car.
The dishes are like scenes from some underwater spectacle. Servants hoist giant clams, out of which flow any number of seaborn delicacies. At first I think they’ve brought in a roasted, stuffed mermaid until I see that it’s part fish, part beautifully sculpted torso. There is also, of course, a nest of Wyvern eggs with a baby just hatched in the center, carved from fruits and vegetables but somehow gleaming with their own inner light. I suspect they’ve been sprinkled with myth. But the crowning jewel is a magnificent cake in the shape of a Kraken, its tentacles wrapped firmly around a great merchant vessel.
Olivia doesn’t show any sign of being impressed by any of this, and I have to wonder if she ever saw anything like it in the Tower. Her predecessor wasn’t known for pu
tting on such extravagant shows. I’d guess he was too busy spending the treasury on developing new devices to torment Elementals.
Olivia stays quiet, speaking only when spoken to, until there’s enough of a lull in the murmuring conversation that she raises her voice and says, “Saint Tesla.”
All talk ceases.
Tesla stands and bows. He looks so young that I can’t imagine how anyone could ever view him as a saint. “With respect, Majesty, please remember that I am no saint but a humble servant of this noble family, having but lately taken up a post as Chief Artificer.”
“Ah yes. Old habits are hard to break, however. Please grace us with the tale of what you are about to demonstrate today.”
“Very well, then.” He clears his throat and moves over to the canvas-covered tower.
Tesla bows again to his audience. He begins by telling us of his homeland—a place called Serbia—and of how he had lately just come from University and was bound for another place called America because there was a rich man—Edison (another saint, as I recall, though far less important in the Church than Tesla)—who had promised him a great sum of money for his inventions.
But on the way he had met a man—he looks aside at Charles—who had promised him far more than any sum of money. He had promised him freedom and a world full of inexhaustible resources and the time and space to create such things, if only he would . . . Here Tesla pauses.
“Yes?” Olivia says. “Do go on.” She coughs slightly and reaches into her pocket for a handkerchief. When she coughs again, I’m alarmed to see spots of what looks like blood before she folds it away. She is worse, much worse.
“Well, perhaps it’s best if I just show Your Majesty. That would probably be better than any other paltry words I could summon.”
Olivia nods.
“My pleasure, Your Majesty,” Tesla says. He goes to the canvas-covered object and pulls off the drape in a flourish.
I glance at Olivia. Her chin rests on her hand, and there’s a spot of color on her gray cheek. I think I can see a red weal creeping up over the edge of her stole. I turn my gaze to the tower of welded steel that thrusts toward the autumn sky.
“Steel,” Tesla says. “The finest, strongest steel this world can produce, so I am told. It took a great deal of convincing Charles to allow me to have it built here. He was worried it would never come down.”
There’s a bit of nervous laughter about the table. Everyone else was thinking the same thing.
“But I assure you, it will. And with none of your myth or magic. Anyone care to venture a guess as to how?”
“You have a trained Dragon waiting in the atrium?” a lady calls.
“Apparently that is less strange here than one would guess,” Tesla says, smiling. “But no.”
“Acid from a Sea Serpent!” Vespa ventures.
“You are clever, but I doubt we could convince the Sea Serpent to produce what we’d need willingly. No,” he says, pulling a strange device from his pocket, “we will do it with this.”
It is so small that I can’t really see much but a black box the size of a matchbox or a small cigar case, when Tesla holds it up. It has no distinguishing features. We all look at it, perplexed.
“There’s no magic about him whatsoever,” Bayne whispers to me. “I don’t understand.”
Tesla touches something on the box. At first nothing happens. Then the wine in the glasses trembles and the jellied mounds shake. The intricate settings of knives and little forks begin a merry jig about the vibrating plates.
Next the sound begins. A high-pitched whine that makes me want to throw back my head and howl. Vespa claps her hands over her ears. The steel tower begins to sway and shudder.
Bayne stands, throwing down his napkin and clutching the trembling table. “What devilry is this?” he shouts. But his voice is lost in the din.
People cover their ears, the tentative smiles vanishing from their faces.
“Syrus,” Olivia says, clutching at me from across the table, “you must get me out of here!” At least, that’s what I think she says. Her lips make the words, but the sound from Tesla’s device drives out all others. Her face is dark and she’s sweating. Her eyes are a terribly wrong color as well—black voids, as if the pupil has swallowed the pale iris entirely.
“Syrus!”
I move around the table, take her elbow, and help her up. She stumbles and nearly sprawls face-first before I manage to catch her and help her out of the Hall. Just as we make the corridor, the steel tower collapses in a heap.
Olivia is half dragging, half hanging on to me for dear life down the corridor toward her chamber. I don’t know where I’m going, so I just listen to her sighing directions. Guards are following behind us; two detached themselves from the doors. I hope Bayne and Vespa aren’t far behind.
“Almost there,” she gasps. “I had to get out of there; that . . . noise . . .”
She trips up the stairs; I see her ankle twist too late. There’s an odd, metallic gleam and a ringing snap that didn’t sound at all like bone. Unthinking, I sweep her up in my arms and carry her.
She puts her arms around my neck and her forehead into my collarbone like one of the baby cousins I’d carried through the Forest back home. Only this is nothing like that. Her body is cool and soft and strangely heavy. And the smell of her—so strange, like some foreign metal, yet also the faint odor of rot. I ignore the million things racing through my mind and get her into her bed.
“Shall I fetch a physic?” I ask, trying not to notice that her dress is askew or that her hair has come unbound in the process of being carried. I feel foolish for even asking—her ankle is broken!
I try to help her, but she moves away as best she can, trying to cover herself with the blankets. “No, don’t,” she rasps. “Please don’t fetch anyone but Vespa or Bayne.”
I frown. “Why, do you think I can’t help?”
I look down at the ankle.
Where the foot swings loosely, there are no tendons or bone, just metal and wire. There is blood and rapidly putrefying flesh, but Olivia has a skeleton made of metal, not bone. A memory of a nightmare surfaces—a silver skeleton overlaid with human flesh—and I shudder.
“I think,” she says, “only magic can fix this. Or perhaps you’re right. Perhaps you are all I need.”
She tries to smile, but I can only stare as my stomach sinks into my boots.
The one I love is not human.
Bayne and Vespa come as soon as they can after the banquet.
“Everything is in an uproar,” Bayne says as the guard shuts the door behind them. “Are you well, Majesty?”
Olivia shakes her head; I gesture to the dangling foot with its wires and gears.
Bayne and Vespa just stand there with their mouths hanging open. Bayne manages to assume his mask again first, though I can see by his face that there is much more going on in his mind than he’s letting on.
Vespa’s emotions, on the other hand, are naked on her face for all to see. Tears leak out of her eyes before she dashes them away and comes to Olivia’s side to take her hand.
Olivia says it doesn’t cause her pain, but I find that hard to believe.
Bayne kneels swiftly by the bedside. “With your permission, Majesty,” he says.
“Yes.” Her voice is gritty. She pushes a strand of pale hair where it had come unbound back behind her ear. How delicate, how real she looks. My mind races, still trying to understand this. Surely this could not be true. Surely it could not. And yet there’s a curious déjà vu here. I remember someone telling me this. I remember hearing that Olivia was neither Elemental nor human.
“Your Majesty,” Bayne says, looking up into Olivia’s face, “I don’t understand.”
“Nor do I, Pedant,” Olivia murmurs. “Nor do I. Can you fix it?”
“I am no physic, Majesty, nor am I an Artificer of Tesla’s caliber . . .”
Olivia’s mouth twitches, whether from pain or amusement, I can’t tell.
Vespa looks like she wants to say things that she can’t. “I can try,” she says softly.
Bayne nods. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him this nervous. Vespa releases Olivia’s hand to go stand near Bayne. She puts her hand on his shoulder.
“Let’s just try a simple spell of mending first,” he says.
I watch the wires and gears as Bayne and Vespa stare at them. Even as they begin to glow, I think I see a way I could put them back together.
Strain etches lines on their faces. I hear Vespa gasp, and Bayne closes his eyes. There’s a sudden snap in the air, and Bayne reels back, throwing Vespa straight onto her duff. He rises, clutching at the bedpost, and pulls himself upright. He leans against it as if he were boneless. I help Vespa up.
The glow fades from the Empress’s ankle. It will not mend. And where the break is, the flesh around blackens and rots, so rapidly that it’s as if a fire has caught and is unraveling her into smoke. The gears and pistons of her calf above her ankle are fascinating.
“We cannot,” Bayne gasps.
“I don’t understand,” Olivia says.
Bayne takes a handkerchief from his pocket and mops sweat from his brow. I help Vespa to a chair, where she sits with her head in her hands. I think I hear her mumble, “The doctor was right.”
“What?” Olivia says.
Vespa looks up, surprised.
“We’ve both been trying to find some way to treat you. Doctor Parnassus told us that we would do better to find an Artificer than an Architect. We had no idea what he really meant. We had no idea there was any other possibility besides human or Elemental.” She meets Olivia’s eyes, but they are both so distraught that she has to look away.
“And you kept this from me?” Olivia asks.
“I . . . I didn’t know how to say it. I didn’t know how to ask. Did you know this about yourself, Olivia?”
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