An Alchemy of Masques and Mirrors--A Novel

by Curtis Craddock

  She pinned on a thin demi-veil, just long enough to shade her eyes, as a nod to her noble status. A deep-throated glove fitted with adjustable wooden fingers disguised her wormfinger. Alas, there was not much she could do with her face. It was too long and lean for the current fashion and sported a nose like a rudder. At least she didn’t have boils.

  As soon as Marie had gathered her things, Isabelle pulled herself up, hefted her tripod easel over one shoulder, and faced the exit. By Temple order, the certificate declaring her officially unhallowed, signed by Hormougant Sleith and stamped with his seal, hung by the door for all to see. It was something on the order of an anti-diploma, a formal declaration of complete unworthiness and abject failure. She tried not to let it disturb her, but it was always there, an indelible mark of shame. It put her in mind of a sailor receiving his hundredth lash. What did his tormentor imagine the last blow would teach him that the first ninety-nine had not?

  She took a deep breath for courage and pushed out into the world. The morning had dawned fine and clear, not too cold for the month of Thawing, with a brilliant blue-white sky. It almost made her wish she could hit the footpath, turn right, and head for the Oreamnos Hills to paint skyscapes or dig into the collection of books on empirical philosophy, history, and mathematics she had cached in an old mine shaft.

  Instead, she turned left and descended into Windfall. She walked swiftly and without stopping, long legs striding out. Marie almost had to trot to keep up. Townsfolk saw her coming and paused in their business to point and whisper in each other’s ears. Isabelle had no desire whatever to know what lies they were telling about her. She’d given that up after being apprised of the widely held belief that she’d asked for Marie to be hollowed out as a favor, so she could have a bloodhollow servant like a proper Sanguinaire.

  That lie had shattered Isabelle in part because it lay so close to the truth. Isabelle had chosen for her friend to be destroyed. Or at least she had said yes, even if she hadn’t known what she was assenting to, even if the result would have surely been the same if she said no.

  Isabelle plowed through that bitter memory and mounted the steps to the town forum, a colonnaded square topped by a tiled roof. There a small group of well-dressed men had gathered, but neither Jean-Claude nor her esteemed guest was amongst them.

  She turned her back on the gathering and erected her easel facing the distant harbor.

  “Set up here,” she said to Marie, who proceeded to assemble the rest of her kit before retreating to the shadow of one grooved column to stare into the middle distance.

  Isabelle adjusted a spyglass to focus on the harbor, looking to frame a painting.

  There were three Célestial warships in the harbor today, and not the first set she’d seen lately. Jean-Claude had told her war was on the horizon, and the Imperial Navy was taking on supplies at every port, even one so remote as this. So thoroughly had the navy looted the town that the mayor had dared petition the comte to open his private warehouses to relieve the famine.

  The comte, of course, had refused. “If your ranks have grown so great that you cannot feed them, then a culling is in order. Begin first with the sick and the old, and then with the very young. Give to the sky those who do not carry their own measure, and you will find there is plenty for those who remain.”

  The mere thought of her father made Isabelle sick. Cruelty was his only delight. Isabelle turned her spyglass away from the warships, looking for a more cheerful subject.

  She settled on a colorful Gyrine clan balloon that was tethered to the harbor’s farthest promontory. Onto her canvas, Isabelle brushed in the distant sky, bright blue above, passing through a pale ocher horizon to a deep green-blue below. She scraped on a few cream and white clouds with her palette knife and began shaping the giant patchwork gas bag, catching the mounting morning light in shades of cream and amber.

  With quick, sure strokes, she captured the wood-and-fabric gondola the size of a three-story tower that dangled beneath it. Water barrels, cargo nets, ballast bags, and even cages of small fowl hung from spars that quartered each of the rickety-looking structure’s levels. The Gyrine were not particular about their breeding. Men, women, and children of all skin hues, clad in colorful clan motley, busied themselves about the hanging nest, clambering around the outside like squirrels on a tree, apparently oblivious to the fatal drop below. The balloon’s outlandish colors and patterns teased her imagination with wonder as to where all the bits had come from. What strange and wondrous places had these people seen? What must it be like to live untethered to a spot of land, unbound by law or tradition?

  “Your Highness!” boomed a great, round, impudently familiar voice. Jean-Claude ambled toward her, his solid frame weaving slightly as he tacked into a wind of faux inebriation. In one hand, he held a sack of some awful liquor, and with the other he guided a portly gentleman with a brown mustache and spectacles. This had to be Professor Isaac Henswort, the guest she’d been awaiting.

  She wondered why Henswort’s black wig was festooned with milk-colored ribbons. That must have been the latest fashion in Brathon … unless Jean-Claude’s sense of humor had got the better of him again, like the time he convinced a visiting silk merchant that a codpiece in the shape of a pistol would be appropriate to wear to an audience with the comte. She prayed he would not do that to her guest.

  Isabelle tried to put on a smile, but her imagination boiled up a hundred things that could go wrong. What if she offended him? What if she said something that betrayed her heretical pursuit of empirical knowledge and he ended up relaying it to her father? Henswort was of the right social class to be invited to dinner. Should she ask him not to mention to anyone that she had invited him here, or would that simply make him suspicious?

  Her expression stiffened into a pained grimace.

  “Highness,” Jean-Claude called again, waving his white-plumed hat as if to hail a far-off ship. Ever since that fateful day when he had saved Isabelle and Marie from one horror and unwittingly delivered them into another, he had never quite removed his drunkard’s mask—burying his own shame, she suspected—though he made his deception transparent enough for Isabelle that she could see through it. He staggered up the forum steps, leading the slightly embarrassed-looking Professor Henswort between the two clockwork sphinx statues that overlooked the plaza.

  Isabelle was supposed to say something to Jean-Claude, to acknowledge him in a princessly way, but her mouth was dry and her voice didn’t want to work. What if her father was listening in through Marie? Isabelle had cost Marie her humanity with one ill-chosen word. How much more damage might she cause with another?

  After a difficult moment, Isabelle muttered, “Musketeer,” which wasn’t so much a greeting as an unsupported noun.

  Jean-Claude favored her with a brief worried look, then folded it back into his usual insouciant mask. He swept his hat to present his guest to Isabelle. “Your Highness, allow me to present Professor Isaac Henswort of the Brathonian Fraternal Society of Empirical Philosophy, here at the request of your mutual friend, Lord Martin DuJournal.”

  “Professor,” Isabelle managed. “I’m glad you’re here. DuJournal will be pleased.” There was ever so much more she wanted to say, but even those few words made her voice shake. He’s going to think I’m an idiot, or mad, or both. Talking was like trying to force a wedge under a door; the harder she pushed, the more stuck she got.

  Professor Isaac smiled and bowed and started talking before he came all the way up again. “Is he here? Lord DuJournal, that is? I want to congratulate him on his solution to Grocephalous’s conjecture.” He craned his neck as if trying to see around her, as if Lord DuJournal were hiding behind her skirts.

  Which, in a sense, he was. Lord Martin DuJournal was Isabelle’s nom de plume, her key into the back door of the forbidden world of empirical philosophy. Three years ago she had made herself the patron of the fictional lord and published several mathematical treatises in his name, including The Epistles of a Ma
thelogician, in which she imagined him as a swashbuckling sleuth of numbers.

  DuJournal’s work had been very well received by the intelligentsia on Craton Massif, both for its literary content and for the fact that it resolved two outstanding problems in aethermechanical computation. Much to her delight, his works had even been reprinted by the major universities. That in turn brought in enough money to allow Isabelle to invite Professor Henswort to present his proposed solution to Agimestes’s Final Theorem, a fiendishly difficult problem of multiple symmetries.

  Still tongue-tied, Isabelle made a helpless gesture, but Jean-Claude broke in smoothly. “Strewth! I forgot to tell you. I saw DuJournal getting on a ship, I did. Said something about the war. Said he was hunting the Great Alagor—Algae—”

  “Algorithm.” The word popped out past the blockade in Isabelle’s throat.

  “Thassit,” Jean-Claude said. “Don’t know how he’ll bag it, though. Didn’t take any guns.”

  Henswort gave Jean-Claude such a stymied look that Isabelle feared the musketeer had overshot his joke.

  She lined up five words and pushed them out the hatch before they could protest. “DuJournal begs you carry on.”

  Henswort looked mildly crestfallen. “Ah. Of course.” Then he recalled his social duties. “My thanks to you, Princess, for agreeing to publish my proof.”

  “My pleasure,” she said, and that much was absolutely true.

  Unfortunately, Isaac did not seem to consider his obligations faithfully discharged, because he went on, “And give my regards to your family. I trust your father is doing well.”

  “Dying,” Isabelle said. “Red consumption.” It was a malady unique to the Sanguinaire, a prolonged and excruciating death. And good riddance to him … except it would also be the end of Marie. And would that not be best all round? There was no cure for being a bloodhollow—Isabelle had scoured every source she could obtain on that topic—and if there was no cure, wasn’t Isabelle keeping her alive only because all the alternatives were worse?

  And because she is my friend. And so she tended an animate corpse in the hope that somehow all her research was wrong. Was this what Marie would have wanted her to do?

  “Oh.” Isaac was nonplussed. “I am sorry. I did not know. But I do hear there is good news. Your brother is getting married, to Lady Arnette, daughter of le Duc du Troisville, isn’t it? A very rich man. Good for your fortunes.”

  Isabelle winced, for she was sure her good fortunes were the last thing on anyone’s mind. As like as not, the Duc du Troisville saw the marriage as a lever by which to wrest control of the des Zephyrs’s domain for himself on the occasion of her father’s death. Jean-Claude seemed to think Guillaume would be an easy mark; he had all of Father’s vices without any of his cunning.

  She only realized she had failed to respond to Henswort’s cue when Jean-Claude broke in, “Oh yes, rich as butter, her father. She’s no eyesore, either, but jus’ between you ’n me”—he leaned in conspiratorially—“she’s mean as a snake but not half so smart.”

  Henswort backed off quickly, waving a handkerchief to disperse Jean-Claude’s cultivated fume. “That’s no way to talk about a lady, or in front of a lady.”

  Isabelle put her left hand on Jean-Claude’s shoulder to warn him off. To Henswort she curtsied and said, “Your lecture.” She gestured him into the forum with her gloved right hand.

  Professor Isaac looked moderately flustered. He glanced into the forum, where the intellectuals were mingling, then made two quick bows to Isabelle and mumbled, “Princess. Builder keep,” before disappearing between the columns.

  “Savior come,” she replied to his retreating back, her tone as hollow as the custom. Someday the Savior would come and rescue the Risen Kingdoms from corruption, or so the Temple claimed, but she had never found someday on any calendar.

  Jean-Claude leaned against a column with the indolence of a cat in a sunbeam. He was apparently in no hurry to depart. Isabelle sent Marie to fetch fresh bread from a bakery at the base of the acropolis; there was no telling when her father might decide to take an interest in Isabelle’s business and peek out through his bloodhollow’s eyes. Even in his crumbling state, he still vexed her.

  After Marie had passed out of sight, Jean-Claude levered himself off the column and said, “Is everything well? You seemed uncomfortable.”

  Without Henswort’s presence, the knot in Isabelle throat unwound, but she couldn’t have Jean-Claude thinking she was an idiot, so she said, “You were rude to my guest.”

  He shrugged unrepentantly. “I was distracting him from the fact that you looked like you were about to vomit very vexing volumes—”

  “Of vitriol,” Isabelle said, unable to suppress a smile; they’d been playing the alliteration game so long it had become a private ritual. “And various voided victuals vouchsafed by the letter ‘V.’ I’m well enough, just distracted. I fear what will happen to me when Father dies.” It was hard to imagine a more wicked person than her father, but he’d mostly let her be since she had proved unhallowed. “Guillaume hates me, and he’ll be in charge of me, with Arnette egging him on.”

  Jean-Claude allowed himself to be diverted. “I have some thoughts on that. We might be able to get you out of here.”

  Isabelle’s hand went to her throat. “How?” Could Jean-Claude really procure her freedom? She hardly dared hope.

  “It occurs to me that there is a man of our mutual acquaintance, a mathematician of some renown, who might offer to marry you. Lord Martin DuJournal.”

  Isabelle snorted into her sleeve. “Are you mad? You want me to send a marriage proposal to myself?”

  “Certainly not. I suggest Lord Martin DuJournal write a letter to your father requesting your hand, suggesting a bride price, even. I’ll have some friends of mine vouch for DuJournal’s bona fides. Your father will stuff you on the first skyship to Rocher Royale.”

  Isabelle shook her head in disbelief. “It’s completely daft. No one will believe it.”

  “People believe what suits their desires. No more, no less. Besides, would you rather have Guillaume ruling your life?”

  Put that way … “What if I’m caught?”

  “What if you aren’t? You’d be technically married to a man who is always off having adventures. No one would expect him to be around. You’d be profiting by ‘his’ works and free to do as you please.”

  “I’d spend the rest of my days living a lie.”

  Jean-Claude gestured up toward the château on the acropolis. “The strangled life you lead cooped up in that miserable room is a lie. You should be free to fly.”

  “I don’t know,” Isabelle said. It sounded amazing, and terrifying.

  “At least think about it,” Jean-Claude said. “You’ve got time. I have to consult with Grand Leon before I do anything.”

  Isabelle raised her eyebrows. “Why would le roi care what happens to me?” She’d never so much as corresponded with her imperial cousin once removed.

  “He sent me, didn’t he? Not that he could have pried me away with a pitchfork.”

  Isabelle glowed with daughterly affection, which was more than she’d ever had for her real father. “You always told me His Imperial Majesty’s exact words were, ‘If you seek to foist my mother’s name on this deformed wretch, you can watch her yourself. Now get out!’”

  Jean-Claude said, chuffed, “His Imperial Majesty is wise in his pique. I would trust the job to no one else. Speaking of which…” He mimed a draw at his endless sack and slurred back into character. “Good thing I went t’docks to retrieve Professor Henpecked. Poor sod might have been trampled, or pressed, or worse. Soldiers everywhere, sailors and officers. You could tell the officers ’cause their pants were too small and their hats were too big. Comes from having big heads and small wassnames.” He made a point of adjusting his codpiece. “Stands to reason.”

  Isabelle shook her head and gave this blatant innuendo the bare eye-roll it warranted.

  Jean-Claude
carried on, “Thing is, there was a bit of news I weren’t expecting, a bit that needs looking into all careful-like.”

  “What sort of news?” Isabelle asked.

  “Henwarts mentioned that he’d been traveling with a royal emissary from Aragoth. Unfortunately, the emissary neglected to divulge the nature of his mission, and apparently the professor wasn’t interested enough to give it much thought.”

  “Should he have?” Isabelle asked. Jean-Claude found all sorts of intrigue … intriguing. He solved politics like she solved math problems. It was a domain she let him have all to himself. She’d never found anything but pain down that road.

  “It’s been my experience that nobody who wasn’t born here ends up on l’Île des Zephyrs by accident. It’s too far out of the way. And seeing that l’Empire may soon be at war with Aragoth, I find the unexpected presence of an Aragothic emissary disturbing.”

  “Are you going to the château? If he’s here to see my father, that’s where he’ll be.”

  Jean-Claude staggered backward theatrically. “Me, Your Highness? Alas, a lowly soldier such as I is not worthy to step foot upon such privileged ground. Besides, it’s such a horrible long walk, all uphill. Wine flows better downhill, methinks, into taverns, streets, and gutters. Builder prevail that I shall not find myself awash in sewage come the morn.”

  “I see,” said Isabelle. He would spend the night with all the sailors and soldiers and other passengers who had accompanied the emissary hither and who had no doubt seen or heard something that would give a clue to his purpose that Jean-Claude could cross-check. She wished … she almost wished she could join him on one of these dockside tavern tours, if only to verify his tales. They always sounded so … alive. So spontaneous.

  She was no good at spontaneous, though. She barely got by with careful planning.

  She changed the topic. “One more thing before you go. Those ribbons in Professor Isaac’s hair…” She made fluttering motions near her hair with her fingers.