An Alchemy of Masques and Mirrors--A Novel

by Curtis Craddock

  “She does not share your enthusiasm for our celebration,” Don Angelo explained. “She has retired for the evening.”

  DuJournal seemed to have disappeared as well, though now that everyone was unmasked, she had lost her one real point of reference for most of the guests. Kantelvar had also disappeared. She disliked having him present, but his absence made her cold with dread. What could he be plotting now?

  To Don Angelo she said, “And if you could please have someone summon Kantelvar for me? I have had a thought pertaining to his investigations that I would share with him personally.” Even if Kantelvar refused her summons, the fact that he had people looking for him might deter him from doing anything diabolical. She wished she could have someone go check on Marie, but she had no precise idea where her hollow friend was.

  And then she was back to dancing—it was the safest place she could be—and thinking. Diego had put Thornscar’s mirror aboard her ship. He had to know about the prince. Was he trying to help Julio thwart Margareta and Kantelvar by killing his potential brides? Isabelle felt like she was one obstinate variable short of an equation. No matter how she turned it around in her head she kept coming up with a tautology. She needed one more factor. One more substitution.

  Substitution. One expression that serves exactly the same purpose as another.

  She looked up at Julio. A man without a scar. A man with a wooden leg who would have been no good at all running up and down stairs in a burning ship.

  “Oh merde,” she breathed.

  * * *

  Jean-Claude sucked in his gut as Adel buttoned his doublet, snowy white with silver buttons in the shape of the thundercrown, epaulets, and lots of silver braid. Formal uniforms were a lot like coffins, in Jean-Claude’s opinion; both were methods to present stiff old sticks in public. He’d rather have been trolling the unlit streets, the taverns, the filthiest gutters stocked with the lowliest scum of the world than spending one minute amongst the oh-so-noble throng, but tonight, for Isabelle’s sake, he had to put on the proper show.

  Adel examined him. “You must have cut quite a dashing figure in your youth.”

  Jean-Claude put on a pained expression. “Are you implying I no longer do?”

  “Hah! Time has made you more solid than dashing, I think. A redoubtable profile.”

  “Mademoiselle.” Jean-Claude smiled. “No man’s pride may survive your scrutiny.”

  Her eyes twinkled. “Oh, but, señor, I have not had the opportunity to scrutinize your manly pride.” Jean-Claude’s eyebrows rose. It had been a very long time since he had been propositioned so; the women in Windfall had quite given up on him. He had always been so preoccupied with guarding Isabelle. And was he any less so now? Hardly, but Adel seemed to move in the same layer of pressure that he did. She might understand … or she might have an ulterior motive, perhaps trying to peel him away from Isabelle or divide his loyalty. Not that Adel seemed the type, but he had not known her long or well, and, for Isabelle’s sake, he simply could not take chances.

  Sluicing himself with self-deprecation, he said, “Alas, I doubt it would be able to answer your call. It has been some years since the regiment has mustered.” Thank the Builder for a codpiece that covered his lie. He bowed over her hand but did not kiss it.

  “Oh.” She flushed with embarrassment and retreated to more formal tones. “Builder keep you.”

  “Until the Savior comes.” He took up a polished walking stick, donated by Don Angelo; made his way out of Isabelle’s chambers; and girded himself for the hobble to the grand hall. At the front door, he was very nearly bowled over by a royal page coming the other way.

  “Oh, excuse me, señor,” said the child. He was about to brush on by when his gaze focused on Jean-Claude. “Are you the musketeer? I am supposed … I mean, Princesa Isabelle invites you to attend her.”

  Jean-Claude chuckled indulgently. “Very good, boy. As it happens, I am heading that way now.”

  “Oh. Uh, if milord pleases, a coach awaits.”

  “I have become fond of coaches in my old age.” Jean-Claude followed the boy into the torch-lit night. A whole fleet of conveyances ringed the courtyard like ships in a harbor. The creak of wood and leather and the grunting, snorting conversation of horses underlay the muted, mingled gossip of servants.

  At the foot of the steps awaited a dark coach. Jean-Claude asked, “How did Princess Isabelle know I was here?”

  “I don’t know, señor; I don’t get explanations, just orders.”

  Jean-Claude grunted. “You and me both, boy.” Isabelle would want to know what he had learned about Thornscar and Nufio. She would be particularly keen to hear his deduction about the hinges. He only wished he had more of substance to share with her.

  A footman in royal livery opened the door to the coach and stooped to lower the carriage step. Jean-Claude’s wounded leg throbbed, and he hesitated, contemplating the vexing problem of which foot to climb with. The footman rose smoothly and swiftly, his hand blurred. The truncheon slammed into Jean-Claude’s gut just as he lifted his unwounded leg. Agony doubled him over, his planted leg buckled, and all breath left him in a gasp. Strong arms prevented him from falling, and someone slapped a moist rag to his face. Vapors stung his eyes. He couldn’t hold a breath he didn’t have. Against every command of his will, his body rebelled and sucked down a lungful of the rag’s vile poison.

  Jean-Claude twisted in his attackers’ grip, but his boots slipped on the cobbles. He had no leverage. He wanted to cry out, but his face had gone numb, and his tongue was a dead snake bloating in his throat. The light of the torches bubbled and blurred. The colors and patterns of the night smeared. The world turned upside down and he fell toward the sky.

  * * *

  The opportunity for Isabelle to gracefully exit a party held in her honor did not come until King Carlemmo himself declared weariness a little after third bell, by which time Isabelle’s eyes were crossing. She’d spent most of the night evolving ever-wilder speculations about Julio and/or Thornscar. Could they be long-lost twins, or was one some strange doppelganger conjured by Kantelvar’s eerie arts, or, or, or … She couldn’t remember four words she’d said in the last few hours, or whom she’d said them to, and she was going to have a terrific headache when she woke up, assuming she ever got to sleep. Despite multiple appeals to Don Angelo, she had received no news of either Jean-Claude or Kantelvar.

  The exodus from the ball took place in order of rank so that the greater might not be inconvenienced by the lesser. In less civilized times, dickering over the order of precedence had been known to lead to duels. Tonight, it merely produced bluster. Thus did civilization advance. The king and queen departed first. Isabelle made a curt farewell to Julio, who might have been Thornscar—had the intruder on the ship been missing a leg?—and took herself off quickly.

  Stifling yawns, she mounted her carriage and returned to her chambers. The night guards outside her doors saluted. Though she had drunk but a little, her brain was a fog of indistinct faces and half-remembered names. Her body wanted nothing more than to strip out of these hot, heavy clothes and collapse in a comfortable bed for a week, but she called for Valérie instead.

  Her handmaid appeared with remarkable alacrity for someone who ought to have been asleep. “Highness, how may I serve you?”

  “Has there been any word from Jean-Claude?”

  Valérie looked puzzled. “He left here several hours ago. He was going to find you. Some of Don Angelo’s men came looking for him shortly thereafter, and we sent them back to the palace.”

  Isabelle’s heart faltered at the dread possibilities that simple statement implied. Had Kantelvar gotten to Jean-Claude first? Isabelle resisted the urge to run out in the courtyard and shout the musketeer’s name. “Has anyone else come by?”

  “No, Highness, just the guards changing an hour ago.”

  “Send a runner to the palace,” she began, but who to contact? Don Angelo had not told her that Jean-Claude was supposedly on
his way, but perhaps his scouts had not given him the complete message. He remained her best wager. “Tell Don Angelo that Jean-Claude has been waylaid.” If it turned out not to be so, she would live with the embarrassment. “And send another runner to the dock, to the berth of the Santa Anna, find Captain Santiago, and do whatever it takes to put him on retainer.”

  Valérie’s eyes grew round. “Are you running away?”

  “Not yet, but I want an avenue of retreat if it becomes necessary.” Nothing in the Aragothic court was what it seemed, and she would be damned before she married a man whose doppelganger had tried to kill her, at the behest of an apparently ancient artifex who might have killed Vincent and been complicit in Jean-Claude’s disappearance.

  Valérie nodded, and her expression became sharper. “Is there anything else?”

  “No.” Except there was. “Yes, curse it. I have to find Marie.”

  “Don’t you know where you took her?”

  “Yes, generally, but this place is a maze.”

  “If you are in danger, you will need guards.”

  “I’ll take some of Vincent’s men. Nobody from this household should go anywhere without a companion, including you.”

  “I’ll rouse the others,” Valérie said with a decisiveness the warmed Isabelle’s heart. Thanks be that her ordeal hadn’t broken her.

  Valérie disappeared into the waiting ladies’ bedroom. Isabelle stumped through her vestibule to her bedroom on legs that felt like wooden pilings. The door, with its padded edges, shut with a sound like a pillow being squeezed. Silence enveloped her, so thick and heavy that she imagined she could hear the alchemical lamp flames whispering to each other. It was by far the quietest space she had ever inhabited, not just noiseless, but armored against sound. She made her way to the trunk at the foot of her bed, unlocked it, and extracted the pistol she had worn yesterday as a guard. Jean-Claude had shown her once how to load a pistol. She meticulously repeated the process now, powder, wad, and shot. She closed the lid of the trunk and tucked the pistol in the sash round her waist.

  “It is good for you to arm yourself,” Kantelvar rattled.

  Isabelle spun so fast she felt like she’d left all her innards facing the other way. And there was Kantelvar, with that huge hump on his back, bent over and leaning on his staff. And there was a hole in the floor next to him, a secret trapdoor. How had he moved so silently?

  “There is going to be a war,” he said. “A war like no other in history, a conflict that will draw in all the kingdoms of the world and consume them to the last ash, and you must be protected from it.”

  Isabelle judged that she was closer to the outer door than he was, and she had the pistol. She put her hand on its grip. “And how can you know that?”

  “Because I have worked very hard to arrange for it to be so. Carlemmo will die, his true heir and his false heir will vie for the throne, and between alliances I have brokered and greed that needs no help to grow, the whole world will be sucked in. Only then, when chaos consumes all civilization, will the world be ready to receive the Savior. Only then will the Builder be compelled to yield him up through you.”

  As jaded as she had become to Kantelvar’s assertions, this prediction stunned her in its audacity and scope. “You can’t force the Builder’s hand just by arranging events to resemble the outcome of a prophecy.”

  “Can I not? I have been bidden, commanded, condemned to this course. Céleste herself bade me redeem her word.”

  “You? But Saint Céleste died over sixteen hundred years ago.” Just when she thought Kantelvar could not get any more lunatic …

  The artifex shuddered and his hump gurgled. “She did not tell me how long it would take. Did she think I would refuse? For a thousand years I waited and watched as the world grew corrupt and the Builder’s holy blood thinned in the veins of each new generation. His sorcery grew weak, and His will was forgotten, and Céleste’s prophecy went unfulfilled, a prophecy she had given only to me. To me.

  “Only then did I realize she had given me the prophecy not to watch for, but to construct and complete, and so I have reordered the heavens. All of the bloodlines have been distilled and concentrated into just two lineages, two people who hold the blood of all sorceries. Julio the false prince, the changeling raised by Margareta’s hand. Her taking him in exchange for her true son was my price for arranging the queen’s ascendancy.”

  Isabelle knew she ought to run, but Kantelvar had made no hostile move. While he remained content to squat there rattling and spewing madness like an overboiling kettle, she might chance to learn something useful to thwarting him.

  “Julio is not Margareta’s son?” Isabelle was less surprised than she should have been; she’d been surprised so many times she’d lost the capacity. “So he is not Carlemmo’s, either.”

  Kantelvar scoffed. “What matters the blood of a mongrel king when Julio has the pure blood of true saints in his veins? You are both descended without dilution from the saints. Your blood is as pure and potent as that of the Firstborn Kings.”

  Isabelle slowly reached over to her desk and drew the portrait of Thornscar out of her portfolio. She displayed it to Kantelvar. “How do you explain this?”

  “Unfortunately, when I told Julio of his destiny to be the Savior’s father, he responded irrationally. He called me mad and threatened to expose me, though, being a changeling pretender, it would have meant his own death. I had no choice but to confine him until it is time for him to do his duty. He resisted, and that was when I marked him with that scar.”

  “Wait,” Isabelle said, feeling she’d missed a turning. “If Julio is Thornscar, and Thornscar is confined, who sits now at Margareta’s side?”

  Kantelvar chuckled. “His name is Clìmacio, Margareta’s actual son, and an unhallowed wretch to boot. He spent the last twenty years as Julio’s whipping boy.”

  “But he looks like Julio’s twin.”

  “The Risen Saints left gifts. Primal Clay, the very stuff from which the clayborn were fashioned. Clìmacio was sculpted to be Julio’s exact replica, a true changeling.”

  Isabelle recalled the false DuJournal saying Kantelvar promised Margareta that her son would be king, and also promised Príncipe Alejandro that Julio would never sit upon the throne. He’d also promised Isabelle he’d help her make peace between Julio and Alejandro. She saw now how all three of those things might be literally true, and without any of Kantelvar’s marks knowing what they had actually bargained for.

  “But Thornscar, the real Julio, found out a way to escape you through a mirror. He came straight from wherever you have him imprisoned; that’s why he didn’t have a weapon. He didn’t attack me at all, he was trying to kill you, but he failed. You detonated the orrery with your lightning, then you blamed Lady Sonya’s death on him to confuse the issue. Then you killed poor Vincent and tried to kill Jean-Claude with that bomb because you thought they were the only ones who could make the connection between Julio and Thornscar. You didn’t count on this.” She shook the portrait of Thornscar.

  Kantelvar made a palm-up gesture, as if granting her the point. “You are so much like she was. So clever. You are mostly correct, except that I have, in fact, finally succeeded in disposing of that meddlesome musketeer. He will trouble us no further.”

  Isabelle’s skin chilled like a threefold winter. “No. Not Jean-Claude.”

  “Do not mourn him,” Kantelvar snarled, his voice creaking like an overstressed mast. “He is the villain. He is the one who has kept you from your destiny all these years. If he had not stopped me from taking you from your parents when you were born and placing you in a position to be married to your destined mate without any fuss, then this complex marriage never would have needed to be arranged, and the blood required would never have been spilled.”

  Outrage rang in Isabelle’s voice. “How dare you blame him for your wickedness.”

  Kantelvar rose from his crouch. “Céleste bade me bring the Savior into the world. She entrusted t
he Builder’s most sacred work to me, and I will see it done. I swore to her. I. Swore!” He pulled back his hood to reveal his corpselike visage, his waxy gray skin stretched over a distorted, hairless skull. His emerald-green eye burned with the cold light of madness.

  Kantelvar’s voice rasped from the grille. “I am the Builder’s breath, the word He whispered to the universe to make His will come true. Sixteen hundred fifty-three wretchedly long years ago, I swore I would not rest until the Savior came. Little did I know—indeed, how could I have possibly understood—what that would mean.”

  Isabelle tried to wipe dread and dismay from her face. Kantelvar had cracked an axle, and his wheels had come completely off. She had to get out of here. She had to summon help, right now.

  “I think I need a drink.” She turned and strode, not too quickly, for the doors. All she had to do was slip out and set guards rushing in to bring this whole scheme crashing down. Damn her curiosity; she should have bolted long ago, just as soon as she had enough of an admission from him to justify arrest.

  “Highness, don’t go.” Kantelvar’s voice carried a double edge of threat and despair.

  “I’ll be right back,” she said. With lots and lots of reinforcements. Her heart hammered, and the air had gone thick as lamp oil. When did that door get so far away?

  “I’m afraid I must insist.” Kantelvar’s words were like a knife blade against her neck.

  Isabelle wrapped her hand around the butt of the pistol. “Just stay put.” She willed him to obey.

  Damn, she needed to let go of the gun to work the door latch. She opened her grip.

  There was a bright flash and a pop. An electric needle jabbed its way from her crown to her soles. Excruciating pain followed instantly by total numbness. She didn’t even have time to scream. Her whole body twitched, and she slumped forward, her face dragging down the padded door. Her good hand clenched and unclenched spasmodically.

  Across the room, Kantelvar took several deep, hollow breaths, like tearless sobs. Isabelle tried to extend herself into her body, but there was no response from anything between her toes and her tongue. Kantelvar limped slowly to her side. His shadow loomed over her, and her blurry vision could barely make out his hand wrapped around his quondam staff. Its spiny tip smoked with vapors from its discharge.