An Alchemy of Masques and Mirrors--A Novel

by Curtis Craddock

  Jean-Claude’s grin nearly dislodged his mustache. “I’m afraid he did that to himself.”

  Jean-Claude made a graceless bow—he’d had lots of practice getting it wrong—and wandered off, singing in a key only normally obtainable by braying donkeys.

  Isabelle turned her attention to the forum. Beyond the colonnade, Professor Henswort was just beginning his lecture. The Temple’s prohibition against female scholarship did not, as far as she had ever been told, preclude sitting on a porch painting harbor scenes while a lecture took place behind her. The presumption seemed to be that even if she overheard the forbidden subject, she could not possibly understand it.

  Professor Isaac said, “The proof of Agimestes’s Final Theorem begins with a discussion of limits…”

  Isabelle tuned her ear to the lecture, wiped her brushes clean, and dipped her finest point in paint thinned enough to flow like ink. She didn’t want to smear anything he said.

  She bent her mind to Isaac’s math and her brush to the canvas, sketching in dense mathematical symbols around the equator of the balloon. Only someone versed in Isabelle’s personal shorthand would recognize it as anything other than a fancy belt of stitching.

  Her pulse skittered and her face flushed as the proof built upon itself, tantalizing her mind with greater truths. Agimestes’s Final Theorem had remained unproven mathematically for over two hundred years. If it could finally be nailed down, it would revolutionize aetheric navigation and so many other things. Sweat broke out on her brow and ran down her nose as the logic web approached its moment of maximum complexity, a dozen threads of reason pulled tight as harp strings. Brilliant …

  But wait. Her brush faltered as one of the deductions struck a sour note. She double-checked her notation, hoping she was wrong … Damn.

  The proof was flawed, the intricate weave of reason snarled on a simple fallacy, easy to overlook in the deeper context of the proof. All that work for nothing. Well, not nothing exactly. She’d at least learned one more way the theorem wasn’t solved. She noted the snarl in his reasoning with hash marks in a trail of stitching up the side of the balloon.

  Unfortunately, being a woman, she couldn’t just march into the library and point out Professor Isaac’s mistake. That would be a job for Martin DuJournal in his next missive.

  * * *

  Jean-Claude ambled along the dilapidated docks of Windfall’s small harbor, pausing to take dry swigs from his magic sack. In the middle of the day, with the catch boats out, most of the people on the docks were sailors and marines from the warships.

  Every skyship to make port in Windfall in the last six months had carried a plague of rumors of war. King Carlemmo, the Glasswalker king of Aragoth, was dying, and there were competing claims to the succession. That meant a civil war was brewing in l’Empire Céleste’s nearest, largest, and most prosperous rival. If that actually came to pass, every one of Aragoth’s neighbors would likely become involved in the struggle. The uneasy peace the Craton Massif had enjoyed for the past decade or so was about to be shattered.

  The Célestial warships in the harbor now were likely part of a raiding force meant to strike at Aragoth’s colonies on Craton Riqueza. The new land was the source of that formerly minor kingdom’s great wealth and rise to power.

  The Célestial navy had tried to prize Aragoth’s iron grip from the new craton two decades ago but had been thoroughly rebuffed. At the time, common wisdom predicted that defeat would be the end of Grand Leon’s rule in l’Empire. As usual, le roi had proven his enemies wrong. It was true he’d never attacked Aragoth’s holdings directly again, preferring to undermine them indirectly, but during a succession debate, the Aragothic Armada might be divided, and Grand Leon must have imagined military conquest possible.

  The three warships in port today were the fifth group to land in Windfall over the last two months, and they’d descended on the town like locusts, stripping the town bare of provender. The warehouses had been left with doors open, their interiors picked clean. Only the locals with the most urgent or unavoidable business dared traverse the docks. They went about in carefully organized groups to deter press-gangs. Most families had made the grim calculation of sending their men, including boys as young as eight, into the hills, leaving the women to mind what was left of the shops and a few old codgers to crew the catch boats. The women might suffer, but at least they would not be carried away to feed the rapidly swelling Imperial Navy.

  Jean-Claude did as much as he could to combat this pillaging. There wasn’t much he could do about the plundering of stores, but more than one would-be rapist had found himself on the receiving end of Jean-Claude’s boot—any one of those girls could have been Isabelle—and he let every ship’s boatswain know exactly whose balls would end up being fed to pigs if he got wind of any misconduct. He’d only had to carry through on that threat once before word got around. When the castrated man’s captain had complained, he’d ended up in the market for a new set of teeth. Jean-Claude didn’t often call on his authority as King’s Own Musketeer, but when he did, it left a mark.

  Jean-Claude made his way in due course to one of the few businesses still in operation, a drinking den called the Bosun’s Ballast. It was a long, low, dingy building with narrow slits for windows. A noticeable tilt in the floor tended to concentrate most of the serious drinkers and their effluvia in one corner. There was a pile of them there now. The one on the bottom was moaning and making feeble gestures for help. None of the other patrons paid him any heed.

  Jean-Claude made the ascent to the bar and thunked his elbows down like pitons to keep himself from sliding away. “What ho, demoiselle?” he slurred. “A pint and a pie for your best customer.”

  The tapster, Demoiselle Planchette, was about ninety years old and might have been knotted together from old hawsers and sailcloth. She made a churlish snort and said, “I’ll let him know when he come in, belike. Now, what’ll you be having? Ain’t got no meat. Ain’t got no pies, neither.”

  “A pint then, y’auld witch. And none of that piss you’re selling the sailors.”

  “Ask for the moons while yer at it. Me special reserve got requisitioned two shiploads ago. Right now I’m making do on floor rushes and turnip peelings. This time tomorrow, it’ll be turpentine.” She slapped down a mug of something that was, he suspected, technically alcohol, but only because it had a good lawyer.

  “What news of the ships?” he asked. “There’s naught left for any crew to pillage, unless they be termites to gnaw on the wood.”

  “Doesn’t stop ’em from trying,” Planchette said. “Last I heard they were sending parties up t’hills to look for hidden caves full of food. Won’t find nothing but sheep camps.”

  Jean-Claude shook his head. “I hope they don’t find those, either.” Any sheep a provender party found up there would end up as mutton, yet another blow to the poor folk here.

  “If I was you, I’d be worried about your own job,” Planchette said.

  “What do you mean?” Jean-Claude asked, lacquering his tone with worry. The more unnerved he sounded, the more Planchette was likely to tell him, after she’d had her fun with him, of course.

  She gave a one-toothed grin. “Weren’t it you got sent here to watch the worm princess?”

  Jean-Claude didn’t have to feign puzzlement or alarm. “Aye. Why?”

  Planchette’s misty eyes gleamed with mischief, like candles in the fog. “Guess.” She had no malice in her, aside from the petty grudges all humans carried, but she could string out a tale until her customers died of thirst.

  Jean-Claude’s pulse quickened, but he pulled his hat down to obscure his eyes and asked the saints for patience and calm. She hadn’t actually said Isabelle was in danger. She hadn’t mentioned the emissary. He would gain nothing, and more importantly Isabelle would be no safer, if he bolted out of here and ran to check on her.

  “I’ve no idea, demoiselle. How should I?”

  “From what I gather, ’twas an Aragothic courtier
debarked this morning, all fancy-like in red robes lined with vermin.”

  “As far as I’m concerned, all nobs are vermin,” Jean-Claude said.

  “And here I thought you worked for le roi.”

  “That doesn’t mean I like him,” Jean-Claude said. Respect was not the same thing as like; neither was admiration. How could one like a man who had ordered the burning of cities and commanded the assassination of entire families, even if he had been compelled by inescapable logic to do so? Even the inestimable Duchess Sireen, who loved le roi with the dedication of a martyr, called him a heartless cur.

  “Any road,” he said. “What about this nob?”

  “Yeah. He was one of them Glasswalkers with the silver eyes.”

  Jean-Claude’s eyebrows lifted in surprise. As l’Empire Céleste’s high nobility were Sanguinaire, so Aragoth’s were Glasswalkers, descendants of a different saint line. They were capable of casting their reflections—they called them espejismos—from mirror to mirror and manifesting at the other end. He’d only seen it once, in the Célestial capital at Rocher Royale. An espejismo had stepped from a full-length mirror like he was coming through a door. It had been unnerving to watch, the glass rippling like water before settling back into a smooth plane.

  “What was a Glasswalker doing on a skyship?” Jean-Claude asked. If one of that ilk wanted to visit l’Île des Zephyrs, all he had to do was step through a mirror.

  Planchette said, “Come here to see about your princess I think. Least that’s what the coxswain said, though maybe he was trying to lift my skirt up.”

  “What would an Aragoth want with Isabelle?”

  “Didn’t tell me, but what does any man want with a woman her age?”

  Jean-Claude scoffed. “That’s impossible. He’s a Glasswalker. She’s Sanguinaire, at least by blood. Bloodlines don’t mix.”

  “Aye, but she’s got no sorcery, does she?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Jean-Claude said. “Not if her family had been unhallowed for six generations would the Temple permit a cross.” So why didn’t his argument sound convincing even to his own ears?

  “Temple’s not what it was,” Planchette said.

  “I suppose I should go talk to this Glasswalker then,” Jean-Claude said as casually as possible. Coming here had been a mistake. He should have hunted the emissary down straightaway. “Do you know where he is?”

  “I imagine he went up to the château with that other fellow.”

  Jean-Claude paused. “What other fellow?”

  Planchette’s smile grew even wider and more empty of teeth. “The other fellow is the one who brought the Glasswalker here.”

  * * *

  It was not until Marie had returned and packed up all of Isabelle’s paints that Isabelle’s mind spun down from the vertiginous heights of nonharmonic, countercyclical perturbations to the ordinary world of rude flesh and social morass. It was very hard to get up that mental mountain, but coming down was always a disappointment. Would that her body had no needs to attend and she could stay atop that peak forever, a being of pure mind and crystalline focus, grappling with a deeper and more beautiful reality.

  She gathered up her new canvas. The color and proportion were good. She could come back in later with some glazes to enhance the depth and increase the luminosity. A glance toward the forum showed that Henswort was in good hands amongst his admirers, so she shoved off.

  She wondered if Jean-Claude had made any progress on discovering the emissary’s purpose. She looked forward to hearing what he found out, though no doubt it was some business of her father’s.

  She was more interested in Jean-Claude’s idea to have her fake a marriage to Lord DuJournal. It seemed like a mad plan, but why not? She had very little to lose.

  Absorbed in thought, she ascended to the château and pushed open her door.

  “Welcome, Highness,” came a flat, metallic voice from within.

  Isabelle shrieked and nearly jumped out of her skin. Her tripod clattered to the ground. She wanted to bolt, but fear nailed her feet to the pavers.

  “My apologies, I did not mean to startle you,” said the intruder, stepping toward her and into the light. He moved with a mechanical clank, a hiss, and a gurgling sound like boiling mud. His back was rounded with a large hump. His right hand was made of clockwork mechanisms, gears and screws and pistons that emitted oily clicks whenever he moved. His right leg, too, sounded mechanical, and seemed slightly longer than his left one. A deep cowl shadowed his entire face, but a bright pinprick of emerald light gleamed out from beneath. More terrible than this was the staff he carried in his metallic hand. It was the same purple-tinged, spine-tipped implement that Hormougant Sleith had carried on the day her father had destroyed Marie.

  Yet this was no hormougant. This was an artifex. There was no mistaking the divine-eye symbol of his office or his quondam-metal limbs. He was one of the Seven Great Guides, each of whom the Temple made responsible for maintaining the purity of an entire sorcerous bloodline. They were subordinate only to the Omnifex himself.

  His vestments were of the most elaborate and ostentatious type. His cope was a tapestry depicting the awakening of the saints in the Vault of Ages after the breaking of the Primus Mundi. It showed their rise through the underworld and the founding of the Risen City of Rüul. His chasuble continued the tale with the anointment of the children of the saints, the Firstborn Kings, and of the clayborn women they took to wife. Those were the Blessed Queens, who gave birth in turn to the Secondborn Kings, who were, in turn, the direct ancestors of all living sorcerers … and unhallowed culls like Isabelle.

  Isabelle shied back one step. What terrible errand had brought an artifex here, to her very room? Her mouth moved, but she’d lost the ability to so much as squeak.

  The artifex said, “As there is no one else to do so, allow me to introduce myself. I am Artifex Kantelvar, from the Collegia Aragoth.” To her utter surprise, he took a knee before her like a supplicant. “And I have come to beg an audience.”

  CHAPTER

  Four

  Isabelle stood rigid, staring at Kantelvar. This was a trap. It had to be. No artifex would ever make obeisance to any woman, let alone her. But he remained down, waiting for her permission to rise.

  And what choice did she have? She wanted to run away, but she imagined that would be seen as suspicious. For a long moment, she could not bring herself to speak, but Kantelvar seemed determined to outwait her.

  “Greetings,” she muttered at last. Surely that could not be offensive, unless he took offense at her not using his whole elaborate title. “Exalted One,” she added for good measure. Only a very few clergy received the honor of melding with the Builder’s divine machines.

  Kantelvar rose, using the spine-headed staff as a crutch. “You are afraid of me.” His voice was like hammered copper. “May I ask why?”

  Isabelle fidgeted, trying to craft an answer that could not be used against her. If an innocent woman had nothing to fear, then a fearful woman must not be innocent.

  “Your staff,” she whispered. “Where did you get it?”

  Kantelvar turned to look at his staff as if noticing it for the first time. “The last person to hold this staff was a Temple hormougant. When he died, it was given to me as part of my Exaltation.”

  Isabelle took the tiniest measure of satisfaction in learning Sleith was dead, but she said nothing. She would not invite reproach, but why in the world was Kantelvar here?

  “Is this important?” asked Kantelvar, rolling the staff in his hand. His expression was shadowed, his body language impossible to read, but the question itself implied no censure.

  “Because that hormougant caused my friend to be murdered.” Isabelle gestured to Marie.

  Kantelvar’s attention shifted to the bloodhollow, and he was silent for a moment before saying, “That would have been over a decade ago.”

  “Yes,” Isabelle said.

  “And this is the same bloodhollow?”

&nb
sp; His toneless voice somehow made his sentence worse. “Yes,” Isabelle said, her throat tightening.

  “Extraordinary,” he said. “Most bloodhollows don’t last five years, much less ten, and in such good condition.”

  Impotent fury and despair filled Isabelle’s lungs. This heartless clockwork was talking about her friend as if she were some sort of antique vase. But good sense reasserted itself before she could say something for which he would be compelled to punish her. Better to get this conversation over with.

  “How may I serve you?” she asked. Whatever misfortune he had come to deliver would not be mitigated by delay.

  “That is a matter best discussed inside.” Creaking and sloshing, he ushered her toward the door.

  Isabelle steeled herself and stepped inside to find out what malicious surprise he had in store. A quick survey of the room gave her no clues. Everything was as she had left it. Marie trailed her in and automatically began putting art supplies away. Isabelle centered herself in the room and faced the artifex.

  Kantelvar shut the door and made a circuit of the room, examining her artwork as he went. This had to be for show, as he’d been lurking in the room when she arrived. He paused and waved his gloved hand over a painting she’d done two weeks ago while thinking about celestial mechanics. It was a scene of two of the three moons, Kore and Bruma, rising over the hills at twilight. The skin of the paint was not yet firmed up enough to stack the canvas.

  He said, “These are very good. You have an eye for detail and a soft touch with light.” His coppery voice clicked on the sharp edges of syllables. “These streaks of illumination are an interesting touch.”

  Dread wrapped a fist around Isabelle’s chest and squeezed; the streaks of light she’d painted chasing the moons were precise ratios of the arc length traversed by the moons against the backdrop of the celestial sphere over a fixed period of weeks. The difference in the length of the streaks clearly demonstrated elliptical orbital paths.

  “Yes,” she said, praying he took his observation no further. There were too many secrets in her artwork, things that could get her eyes plucked out and her ears staved in. She glanced aside at the printing press and tried desperately to remember if she’d left the acid etching of complex number multiplications loaded on the printing plate. That would be hard to explain.