An Alchemy of Masques and Mirrors--A Novel

by Curtis Craddock

  “Yes,” Jean-Claude said, “that’s the crux of it. He was trying to throw us off, make us think there was nothing left to search for, but he missed again. We already know he’s faked Isabelle’s death.”

  “Actually we don’t know that,” DuJournal said. “It could have been someone else, parties yet unknown.”

  “It could,” Jean-Claude said, “but I don’t believe it and neither do you.”

  “Touché, but what I don’t see is why. Why would he go through all the trouble to bring Isabelle here, only to fake her death?”

  Jean-Claude said, “I’ll warrant he wants to drag l’Empire Céleste into the imbroglio everyone is sure must happen when Carlemmo dies.”

  Diego made a derisive sound and looked to a map displayed on the wall. “L’Empire’s troops have been massing along our borders for months. I think they require no encouragement.”

  Jean-Claude said, “Right now, Grand Leon is ‘allowing’ his barons to occupy the frontier. That means they’re all doing it at their own expense, bleeding money by the day. He was counting on Isabelle to broker a peace between Julio and Alejandro, so that he will not have cause to unleash them. If there is no war, he can recall them back to their own territories, much poorer for their ambitions, much easier to control. But news of Isabelle’s death adds injury to insult and must be avenged. If you want to stop that from happening, we need to find Isabelle.”

  Diego rubbed the back of his neck, clearly frustrated. “Even if both príncipes were here, I doubt their followers would accept a peace between them. Everyone is too far extended. I happen to know that at least three of my fellow duques have mortgaged their estates to arm and equip their forces. They cannot afford not to fight.”

  DuJournal said, “It seems to me that, for the moment, you are a man without a faction. You can hardly be sworn to Julio if you do not know which Julio is the true príncipe. Indeed, you cannot allow either of them to take the crown.”

  “Si,” Diego said. “And that is one reason I am grateful to see you, Lord DuJournal. You are Xaviera’s man.” He paused, staring into space as if searching the horizon for some sign of cavalry riding to his rescue. When no promising dust clouds were forthcoming, he snapped his finger and a servant entered carrying a silver platter on which lay a small, tightly rolled scroll wrapped in a black ribbon. Diego lifted the scroll and presented it ceremoniously to DuJournal. “If you will please bear this to Princesa Xaviera.”

  “From your hand to hers,” DuJournal said.

  “And what is it?” Jean-Claude asked.

  “A declaration of submission,” Diego said. “Without precondition. I place myself at her husband’s service and at his mercy. Julio must not be allowed on the throne, not while any doubt lingers as to his legitimacy.”

  “I shall go at once,” DuJournal said.

  “Go carefully. Margareta and her subordinates are utterly committed to victory. She must either put her puppet príncipe on the throne or face the Hellshard.”

  DuJournal said, “Then we’ll just have to present them with duplicate Julios; then they’ll face the same dilemma you do. They won’t dare back either of them. It will be easier for Alejandro to offer them amnesty if they turn on Margareta.”

  “I doubt it will be that neat,” Diego said, “but a quick war is better than a prolonged war, and this gives Aragoth a better chance than the alternative. What I still don’t understand, though, is how Kantelvar thinks to profit.”

  “I don’t know, but there’s one person left who might.” Jean-Claude turned his attention to DuJournal. “When you deliver that petition to Xaviera, ask if she can arrange an audience for me with her brother-in-law, the one with the wooden leg.”

  “What makes you think he’ll expose himself to you?” Diego asked. “I questioned him extensively, and he survived every question I put to him. It makes me doubt I chose the right príncipe.”

  “I have leverage; you don’t,” Jean-Claude replied. Or at least he could pretend he did. To DuJournal he said, “Have Xaviera tell Julio that I have a message from l’Empire Céleste. Imply that it is an official message, too delicate to be routed through the ordinary channels.”

  DuJournal nodded. “That can be arranged.”

  DuJournal took his leave and Jean-Claude returned his attention to Diego. “I have one more question. Where was your man’s corpus when his espejismo contacted you? Surely you tried to follow him back to his point of origin, or at least asked where he was being held prisoner.” Wherever Thornscar had been kept was likely where Isabelle had been taken.

  “He did not know. He had been rendered unconscious when he was taken there, and the place had no windows. He said it was somewhere very cold, and I believe him, for his espejismo’s breath steamed in the air. I tried to follow him, naturally, and he tried to lead me, but the portal at the other end … I have never witnessed anything like it. He said he had managed to cast his espejismo through his reflection in water. That is an art that has long been lost to us, but after what I witnessed, I believe him, at least about that. One moment, he was there in the Argentwash, and the next, gone. He did not pass into any speculum loci I could detect, though I searched for hours. It was as if he had vanished into mist.”

  Jean-Claude swore under his breath. Someplace cold and windowless could be anywhere: a mountaintop cave, an icehouse cellar, a skyland in the upper air. Isabelle could be lost forever, gone like an exhalation, completely beyond recovery.

  He could not think like that. There was still too much work to do. “By your leave, I have another errand to run.”

  Diego looked puzzled. “Aren’t you going to wait for DuJournal to return?”

  “No, but I would be much obliged if you would let him know to find me in the royal infirmary.”

  “Are you injured?”

  “Only my pride and vanity for having been so blinded for so long. Yet, if I am to confront the false príncipe, it behooves me to first find out who he is.”

  * * *

  Jean-Claude limped into the palace infirmary, where a few of Isabelle’s household staff still convalesced. Despite a long wall of open windows, the whole room stank of ruined meat, bile, pus, soap, and stinging tonics.

  If Diego’s tale was true, somebody had been impersonating Julio for months, and so effectively that Diego doubted his own judgment as to who was who. The circle of people who knew the príncipe well enough to mimic him that convincingly had to be tiny, and Jean-Claude thought he knew someone who might be able to winnow the list down even further.

  Adel sat, doubled over, on a padded bench, coughing dark flecks of blood into a white cloth. Her swarthy face had gone pale as soured milk, and her flesh seemed to have shrunk around her bones. Her plight sent an ache through Jean-Claude’s soul. She was good and kind, and he hated having been suspicious of her even in the course of his solemn duty.

  Jean-Claude eased himself down beside her. “Mademoiselle.”

  Adel turned a rheumy gaze on him and a brief flash of happiness darted across her face. Her voice came as a hoarse whisper. “Jean-Claude, what are you doing here?”

  “I came to see you,” he said, half the truth. By every oath he had ever sworn to le roi and to Isabelle, he ought to press his questions on her immediately, but she deserved better, and if there was not some higher justice that commanded compassion, then there bloody well ought to have been. “I see that you are out of bed.”

  “Oh, yes.” She beamed weakly, like the sun through a dense fog. “Now if the cursed doctors would just let me get back to work—” A spasm of coughing interrupted her bravado, and Jean-Claude wrapped a tentative arm around her shoulders. She leaned into him and he held her tight to his chest as she expectorated blood, serum, and bits of rotted lung. When the spasm passed, she leaned her sweating forehead against his chest. Fever heat rolled from her in waves, and tears rimmed her eyes.

  “Why did you come to see me?” she asked.

  Jean-Claude fought back an urge to lie, to make Adel the center
of the universe, at least for a few moments. “I need to ask you a question about Príncipe Julio,” he whispered in her ear. “I think someone may have betrayed him.”

  She stiffened, but with anger, not disbelief. “Who?”

  “That is what I hope you can tell me. Did he have any servants who went away or disappeared about the time he had his riding accident?” Whoever replaced the príncipe must have studied him closely, and the only sort of person who could know the príncipe that well and still be able to disappear without drawing undue attention was a servant. Every nobleman knew servants ran away at the drop of a hat; it was one of those facts that no amount of evidence to the contrary could refute.

  “Servants? No, not that I can think of.”

  Jean-Claude gritted his teeth. There had to be someone. Someone whose appearance had somehow been altered to match the príncipe’s.

  “Someone with a bad leg,” he guessed. Why else maim the puppet prince except to cover up some deformity? After all, Kantelvar had been willing to cut Isabelle’s arm off … a fact that made his vision red with rage.

  Adel looked up at him in surprise. “Clìmacio,” she said. “He had a clubfoot. He ran away a month before the accident.”

  “The whipping boy?” The idea stunned Jean-Claude with its pure vindictiveness. Kantelvar needed a pawn to replace Julio, and he had offered the job to Clìmacio; what better way for a whipping boy to get back at the whole family? Replace the prince, assume the throne, disgrace the queen. It was an ambitious revenge, more than a whipping boy might conceive, but easily the sort of thing Kantelvar might have invented, the means to some greater, more twisted end. But how was such a deception possible?

  “Did Clìmacio greatly resemble Príncipe Julio?”

  “No, why?”

  “Just a thought,” Jean-Claude said, and a major hole in his speculation. Yet either Julio had to have a twin nobody knew about, or someone had to have been altered to resemble Julio. A Goldentongue glamour could disguise one’s appearance, but they tended to be temporary effects, not the sort of thing one could rely on for months.

  Adel huddled against Jean-Claude, shuddering in her distress. “I am sorry. About la princesa.”

  “Nay nay, take comfort. She is alive.” That particular secret would be all too safe with Adel, he feared.

  Adel gasped in a way that had more to do with surprise than suffering. “Truly?”

  “She is kidnapped by the same villain who betrayed Julio, and I seek to find her.”

  “Even so. Good news.”

  Jean-Claude embraced her through another long shudder. It was cruel to trouble her further, but there was yet another question she might be able to answer. Would she not take some comfort, even now, in serving the príncipe and princess?

  He said, “But we do not know what became of Marie, Isabelle’s bloodhollow handmaid.”

  Adel said nothing for a long moment, and Jean-Claude thought she might be too lost in her own pain to respond, but at last she said, “La princesa took her. With the artifex. Don’t know where. She came back alone.”

  Jean-Claude denounced himself as a dunderhead. Kantelvar had promised Isabelle to lift Marie’s curse; it was an obsession she could not resist, her biggest blind spot.

  Someone cleared his throat behind Jean-Claude. He turned to find DuJournal standing there and cursed his inattentiveness; that could have been an enemy. Indeed, it might still be.

  But DuJournal said, “I think I know where the bloodhollow might have been taken. There’s an old Temple not far from the guest residence. It was razed years ago, but the basement vaults are still there.”

  Jean-Claude wanted to ask, And just how do you know that? but decided not to kick the messenger in the teeth.

  “Someplace dark and cold without windows?” he asked.

  “Yes, indeed.”

  He shifted his weight to stand but then remembered Adel. “Mademoiselle…”

  She stirred and eased away from him. “Go, Jean-Claude, rescue your princesa.”

  He stiffly stood and bowed to her. “I will return, mademoiselle,” he said. It will be too late, I fear, but I will return.

  She smiled at him again. “I thank you for your concern, brave musketeer.”

  Tears obscured Jean-Claude’s vision. He groped for DuJournal’s shoulder and allowed himself to be guided from the room, Adel’s racking cough echoing in his ears.

  CHAPTER

  Seventeen

  “Who designed this madhouse?” Jean-Claude said as DuJournal led him through a maze of dusty rooms and corridors, antechambers and staircases filled with clinging cobwebs. Leaving Adel to her fate had been inevitable and needful, but it left him in a foul humor.

  “Half a dozen different architects, each with his own rampant ego, all at the same time, without any sort of effective oversight,” DuJournal said dryly.

  “Wasteful,” Jean-Claude said.

  “On purpose,” DuJournal said. “The gold and silver being brought back from the colonies were swamping the kingdom. Carlemmo threw as much as he dared into roads and harbors and ships and aqueducts, but there was still too much. The value of the doubloon was starting to dissolve, hence this extravagant money sink.”

  Jean-Claude tried to bend his thoughts around the idea of a kingdom with too much gold, but right now he hadn’t the mental resources. “So how far is this Temple vault?”

  “Not far.” They took a right-hand turn. No hesitation. Jean-Claude wondered, not for the first time, if his guide was leading him into a trap. He made sure to do a bit of extra limping, just in case he needed DuJournal to underestimate him.

  “I take it you’ve been here before,” Jean-Claude said.

  A pause before answering and then, “When I first began my service on Princesa Xaviera’s behalf, I followed Artifex Kantelvar down here in an attempt to discern his place in the scheme of things.”

  A lie, Jean-Claude thought, or at least the truth dressed in beggar’s clothes. Clearly DuJournal had been down here often enough to know the place. He had quite probably been looking into Kantelvar, so what omission was he troweling over?

  “When did you start working for Xaviera?”

  DuJournal chuffed and said, “A few months ago.”

  A few months and already he knew the minutiae of this sprawling project that had been going on for decades. “And did you manage to arrange for me to have an audience with the false prince?”

  “Yes. Xaviera is arranging it now.”

  Jean-Claude took note of the informal use of the princesa’s name, a liberty he took with no other noble except Julio. “I can only assume that her interest is primarily in seeing the imposter exposed.”

  “Hmmm. Yes. I suppose it must be. At the moment, though, she has more immediate worries. King Carlemmo did not wake up this morning. He still breathes, she says, but she fears his spirit has already left him.”

  “Damn.” Jean-Claude’s guts coiled nervously. “Why have I not heard this before?”

  “Margareta is keeping it hushed while she moves her forces into position for the coup. Her enemies have already been warned and are making countermoves. It’s only a matter of time now before someone decides that shooting first is better than being shot.”

  They reached an intersection where the dust on the floor had been disturbed by the passage of several sets of feet. It was impossible to say just how long the footprints had been there. So dead was the air that the dusty plume of Jean-Claude’s passing hung in space behind him, as persistent and obfuscating as a bad rumor.

  Jean-Claude grunted and squatted down by the tracks, briefly wondering if his creaky old knees would allow him to get up again. He made out four sets of tracks, one male, two female, one too large to be human.

  DuJournal made a hissing noise through his teeth and looked around nervously. “That’s an omnimaton.”

  “I thought they were all destroyed in the cataclysm.”

  “The Temple has rebuilt a few, and if there’s one loose in the
corridors then we are in grave danger. Any one of them is worth a whole platoon of soldiers.”

  “What would I do without good news like that?” Jean-Claude grumbled. He pointed to the tracks. “Looks like they came from that way.”

  “That’s the direction of the old Temple.”

  “Carefully then.” Jean-Claude readied his pistol and cursed the need for his cane. DuJournal shifted his lantern to his off hand and drew his sword, and Jean-Claude noted the maker’s mark just below the quillons. That weapon came from one of the most renowned sword makers in Aragoth. Jean-Claude almost sighed as the pieces of one mystery lined themselves up neatly on the game board of his mind: victory in two moves, though this was not the opportune moment to push his pawns.

  A brace of fears yoked Jean-Claude’s heart as they skulked down the hallway, listening for some sound more ominous than their own breathing and muffled footsteps. First, that some trap would snap them up unawares before they reached Kantelvar’s hole; second, that they would find the hole empty and all trace of Isabelle lost. The foot tracks and the column of dust that followed them like a parade of stealthy soldiers suggested that this place was forgotten, but surely if Kantelvar had intended to hide down here, he would have found some way to obliterate these footprints.

  At last they reached a locked side door through which all of their quarry had passed.

  “This is the place I remember,” DuJournal whispered. “There should be a stairway beyond this. I know not what awaits us at the bottom.”

  Jean-Claude’s doubts grew. Surely Kantelvar would not leave any place important unguarded. So either there was a guard he could not see, or this place was not important. Even so, it must needs be checked. Jean-Claude put away his pistol and drew his knife, sliding it into the crack between door and jamb. The lock was new, but the door was old and the gap quite roomy. While he worked at prizing the bolt out of its hole, he said, “The question is, what do you hope to find? It occurs to me that it is in Príncipe Alejandro’s interest to see the false prince unmasked—and I don’t mind being the cat’s-paw for that—but it does not serve him to see either the real Julio or Isabelle recovered.”