An Alchemy of Masques and Mirrors--A Novel

by Curtis Craddock

  To defend herself against accusations of being manipulated would be futile, so she took a different tack. “Perhaps Kantelvar has a goal for this meeting, but that does not preclude me having one as well. I need you to help me stop this war he has planned. If I can get you out of these chains and out of this room, can you get your espejismo back to San Augustus? I need you to put this before Carlemmo—”

  Julio’s expression remained stony but there was a hitch of suppressed grief in his voice. “It’s too late. My father … Carlemmo is dead. Kantelvar administered the last dose of the poison before he snatched you away. He’s dead and the war of the príncipes has begun.”

  Isabelle’s breath came short as the one thread of hope she’d been holding was ripped from her fingers. She could not be too late. There must still be time, but once the first pebble fell, was there any way to stop the landslide?

  No. She would not believe it. Not without more proof than Kantelvar’s word. She would keep fighting.

  Julio said, “Kantelvar wants to hollow out my head and use my body to get a child on you, which he will call the Savior. That child must never be born, but at this point I can do nothing to prevent it. That means the fatal deed must be in your hands.”

  Isabelle recoiled. “Are you saying I should kill myself?”

  Julio looked appalled. “No. I do not envy you the choices you have left to make, but I would not ask such a sacrifice of you, even if your life were mine to command.”

  His alarm faded into a dull, hot determination, a banked coal waiting for the breath of air. “I ask only for your help. I have no wish to be Kantelvar’s vessel, or the tool he uses to rape you or unmake the world. You won’t even have to strike the blow yourself. I had the mute smuggle me some leaves of queensmercy. They’re under my blankets.” He gestured to a pile of rags in the far corner. “Just put them where I can reach them and leave.”

  Isabelle struggled for balance in her mind. “I came here to free you, not murder you.”

  “You will be freeing me. When Kantelvar invades a body, the original owner does not die, not completely. He is mangled, shoved aside, crippled beyond saving, and cut off from the flesh that was once his, but he does not die. Some part of him lives on, a helpless witness to the atrocities subsequently performed under cover of his exalted name. I beg you, do not condemn me to that fate.”

  Despair clawed at Isabelle’s heart, but she did not relent. “But what about the war? Aragoth needs its príncipe.”

  Julio grimaced. “I … am not a príncipe of Aragoth.” His gaze flicked to the corner of the cell where lay an inert heap of blood ciphers. “My father is not my father. Even my name is not my name.” His hands balled into white-knuckled fists. “I am a changeling and both Clìmacio and Alejandro know it. They have no reason to treat with me.”

  “What about everyone else? Surely the presence of a third príncipe must give the nobles cause to doubt the rightness of their position.”

  “There is no time for such a ploy. Kantelvar intends to force himself upon me within the hour, and he will force himself on you shortly thereafter. That must not happen.”

  Isabelle’s hands balled in frustration, her spark-hand throwing motes of light. “Do you want to die so badly?”

  “I do not want to die at all,” he said, “but—”

  “No more buts,” Isabelle snapped. “If you want poison you can fetch it yourself after I get you out of these.” She reached for Julio’s chains. She had no key, but maybe her spark-hand could manipulate the locks on his manacles.

  Julio flinched. “Stop!”

  Isabelle froze. “Why?”

  “Kantelvar commanded the omnimaton to kill anyone who tried to either harm me or set me free.”

  “And poisoning doesn’t count?” Isabelle asked incredulously.

  “It only understands Saintstongue, and it’s used to people leaving things for me to eat. It wouldn’t know the difference until it was too late.”

  Isabelle warily backed up and turned to regard the machine. Could she give it an order?

  Easing away from Julio, she held up the amulet and spoke in the Saintstongue, “Warder, hear me and obey. Set Príncipe Julio free.”

  Isabelle half expected the machine to rip her apart, but it gave no sign of noticing her.

  She asked, “Did he give any special words to it? A verse from the Instructions, maybe?”

  “Aside from the Saintstongue, the only other consistency I’ve noted is the staff. I think it’s connected to the machines.”

  “Which is why you tried to grab it.”

  “That and I didn’t want him shocking me with it.”

  Isabelle straightened up and carefully approached the omni. “What exactly did Kantelvar say to it?” Every statement he uttered, and every deal he made, was all about word games and slicing meaning very thinly. Was it too much to hope that he might have given similarly precise commands to his mechanical servants?

  Julio squeezed his eyes shut as if trying to remember. “He was speaking in Saintstongue, ‘Neither unchain him nor allow him to be unchained without my permission. Likewise, neither harm him nor allow him to come to harm.’”

  Isabelle reached up to smooth her veil, realized she wasn’t wearing one, and settled for tugging her collar. The machine wouldn’t heed her, wouldn’t let her remove Julio, and wouldn’t let her harm him …

  “Ah!” Inspiration struck with the same thrilling terror as striking a match in the dark and finding oneself in a gunpowder magazine.

  “You have something?” Julio asked.

  Isabelle’s pulse raced, but she quelled the urge to act. Think first. She thought she could persuade the omnimaton to get Julio out of the cell, but what then? She had seen no indication of individual volition in any of the omnimatons she’d encountered so far, but the tasks they performed had to involve some level of decision making. “Can these things think for themselves?”

  “Not as such. They seem to have some measure of comprehension, but no free will or individual motivation. Why?”

  “Say an omni is in the middle of a task, and Kantelvar orders it to do something else. What happens when the interruption is over?”

  “It goes back to what it was doing before. Where are you going with this?”

  Isabelle chewed her lower lip and muttered, “He didn’t actually order it to keep you in the room.”

  “I would think that was implie—wait, where are you going?”

  “I have an idea!” Isabelle called over her shoulder as she squeezed by the omnimaton into the abandoned bedroom suite. She ripped the fine linens from the bed, took an ancient tapestry from its hanger, and rushed back into the cell, making a pile against one wall. She made more trips into the bedroom, clearing the way with Gretl’s Omnioculus amulet, bringing back more sheets and clothes from the bureau, antique chairs, paintings by the old masters. She heaped a thousand years of irreplaceable history into a pile as high as her waist. Even with just one arm to shuttle this mostly once-living material, it couldn’t have taken her more than a few minutes, but under the omnimaton’s soulless watch it felt like a year. Thank the Builder the machine seemed utterly disinclined to question her motive for this redecorating project.

  Julio, on the other hand, watched her frenetic gathering in evident alarm. “What in the name of Torment are you doing?”

  “Getting you out of here.” She met his gaze. “Do you trust me?”

  “Do I have a choice?” His voice almost squeaked.

  “You could opt to be Kantelvar’s vessel.”

  “That is not a choice.”

  Once more, she darted into the bedroom, pausing only to listen for some noise heralding Kantelvar’s approach. She could hear nothing but the hammering of her own heart. She snatched an alchemical lantern from the wall and returned to the cell.

  Julio’s silver eyes went wide. He surged against his chains. “What? No! Are you mad!”

  “No, just desperate.” A very fine distinction, as it turned out
.

  Isabelle backed up to the far corner of the room. She pulled the glass stopper out of the lumin gas reservoir with her spark-hand. The hyper-volatile liquid quickly began to vaporize, spewing a jet of vapor, like steam from a teakettle, but colder than ice. She hurled it at the wall above her pile of kindling.

  The glass shattered. The phlogiston core ignited.

  The bright green flash knocked her on her backside and punched the breath from her lungs. Purple sparks rained down around her. She dragged herself up in time to see flames erupt from the heap of oil paintings and cobwebbed tapestries. Black smoke billowed and spread across the ceiling.

  “Mad witch!” Julio screamed, or something like it. Isabelle’s ears rang with the bang.

  The omnimaton sprang into action. Emitting an ululating, earsplitting shriek, it began stamping at the spreading flames. Isabelle faced the omnimaton and jabbed a finger at Julio. How would it react to her as the fire starter? In the Saintstongue she shouted, “Do not permit him to come to harm!” Could it even hear her over the racket of its own alarm cry?

  The omnimaton hesitated, but its stomping had only spread the fire. It blurred to Julio’s side, pinched the iron chains between two massive fingers, and yanked the rings from the wall as if the stones were made of talc. Still shrieking its alarm, it hefted Julio like a child and hauled him from the room in a series of rapid jerks. Isabelle followed as smoke poured from the door. Surely that wail had roused the whole aerie. They had only heartbeats to be away from here.

  Unfortunately, the omnimaton did not stop outside the cell. It smashed through the outer door as if it were made of papier-mâché, then dashed into the hall and down the corridor.

  “Damn.” Isabelle hadn’t anticipated that. She hiked her skirts and gave chase. She sprinted by a stunned-looking Gretl, who joined the pursuit.

  “What now?” Julio barked. He squirmed futilely against the omni’s gargantuan strength.

  “I don’t know; I’m making this up as I go!”

  The machine accelerated, swiftly outdistancing her.

  “I think it’s taking me to the infirmary,” Julio called, his voice faint amidst the clangor, just before the omnimaton disappeared with him around a long bend in the corridor.

  The infirmary. That made sense as a standing order, one of Kantelvar’s endless, interwoven contingency plans. If the príncipe had to be pulled from his cell due to injury, the most logical place to take him was the infirmary, the surgery, where Kantelvar was now making ready to butcher his brain. Builder’s breath, all her stunt with the fire had done was accelerate his execution.

  Isabelle followed the receding noise through what seemed like kilometers of corridors, around corners, up a stairwell. The noise had brought the denizens of the place out of their holes and they were running hither and yon, though purposefully, without panic, as if they had practiced for this. None of them seemed to be going her way. She was hurrying along yet another dim gray tunnel, gasping for breath in the thin air and nursing a stitch in her side, when the noise suddenly stopped.

  A half-dozen side corridors led off this one. Which one? She leaned against the wall and listened but heard no sound louder than her own labored breathing. And what would she do when she found him? She could not fight Kantelvar and his machines.

  Just then Gretl caught up with her. She waved for Isabelle to follow and darted into one of several identical-looking side passages.

  Isabelle followed her along a short hallway to a small infirmary. A row of empty cots lay along one wall, and there was an arched opening at the far end. Weird grainy shadows flickered beyond the archway to the accompaniment of a high-pitched whine. Just inside the infirmary, Gretl stopped, quivering, at the very end of her courage’s tether. Isabelle laid a reassuring hand on her shoulder, then crept by her, down the aisle. Her own fear made the air thicker as she approached the archway, until it was like pressing through water … mud … tar. Beyond that opening waited Kantelvar, and somehow he would know what she had done. He would be furious, his wrath would be terrible, and there were far worse things he might do than kill her, but she could not leave Julio in his hands.

  She peered through the archway, and it took a moment for the scene to resolve itself in a way that made sense. In the center of the room, Julio was strapped facedown to a table with his head in a vise that restricted all movement. At his head stood Kantelvar, his hood cast back, revealing the glittering apparatus of his false eye and the still-angry flesh of his recent surgery.

  On the table between the two men squatted a bizarre omnimaton. In shape it was most like a spider, with four telescoping, spindle-like legs connecting to a central hub. From the top protruded half a dozen metallic tentacles, each tipped with a different tool.

  Dangling beneath the hub, between the legs, was a transparent bottle filled with a cloudy liquid … and the rotting remains of a head. Kantelvar’s head. His skin, what little remained of it, had sloughed free of his skull, and his eyes were bloated and putrefied, his tongue swollen, his lower jaw missing entirely.

  Isabelle’s skin felt cold and slick as ice. This was the gurgling hump Kantelvar hid under his robes and in his pack. This was the seat of his consciousness. Through hundreds of lifetimes he had survived like this, a pickled grotesquery. And he had done it on purpose, done it to himself.

  One flexible tendril was still fixed to the back of the skull of Kantelvar’s most recent host. Another gemstone eye oversaw a nest of tentacles making Julio ready for surgery, shaving the back of his head and injecting his skin with some vile potion in preparation for drilling through his skull.

  At the far end of the room the warder omnimaton gave its report to Kantelvar’s current host. Its central eye glowed, and the air before it shimmered. Fine corpuscles of greasy light coalesced into a sort of animate sculpture suspended in air.

  It was a half-sized, translucent image of Isabelle’s conversation with Julio. She could see her lips moving, but the only sound was the whir of the omnimaton’s gears. It was like watching a painting made of raindrops, wet and streaky, but still gut-wrenchingly recognizable. Soundlessly, her image piled kindling against the wall of Julio’s cell. A wave of irrational guilt washed through her, as if she had been caught in some wickedness. She watched herself set the kindling alight. She winced in memory of the bang. And there was Julio’s rescue from the omnimaton’s point of view. It yanked the chains from the wall and carried him from the room.

  A soul-curdling wail yanked her attention to Kantelvar. His host body was bowed and trembling as if in pain, his visage contorted with rage. His ordinary eye streamed with tears.

  Isabelle drew back out of view and turned to find Gretl, on her second dose of bravery, creeping up behind her. Her face was drawn taut as a sail in a hurricane.

  Isabelle mouthed, “I’ll try to draw him away. You free Julio.”

  Gretl swallowed hard and nodded.

  Isabelle steeled herself. This was a bad plan, but she had no time for a better one.

  Isabelle stepped into the room. “Kantelvar!”

  His sapphire lens fixed her with a murderous stare. “Traitress!” he spat. “How could you? How dare you?”

  Isabelle leaned back, to turn and run, but Kantelvar’s arm jerked like the spring-arm of a rat trap. The urchin tip of his staff flashed. A snap of lightning scribed a jagged path through the air and smote her in the chest. Her whole body convulsed, and she collapsed, twitching.

  “He is your husband!” Kantelvar shrieked. “Your destiny!”

  Spittle drizzled from Isabelle’s lips even as she fought for control of her thrashing limbs. He’d gone over the edge. She had to bring him back.

  Kantelvar rounded the table toward her. Arcs of lightning formed a menacing gloriole around the staff head, and his voice was the whine of a wounded animal. “He is your lord and master, the father of the Savior!”

  “N … nmmmnm…” Isabelle couldn’t get her jolted tongue under control.

  “You tried to kill
the Savior! You would have doomed the world to an eternity of chaos.” He sparked her again, and she convulsed, banging her head on the floor and her arm on the table leg. Her shoulder nearly wrenched from its socket.

  “S … stop. P … please … m-mercy…” She had to make him start thinking again. Thinking took time. She had to delay him until … what? There was no legion of musketeers to come riding over the hill. She could not best Kantelvar with force, he was impervious to reason, and he knew more about guile than anyone alive or dead.

  “You dare to beg?” Kantelvar shrieked. “After everything I have done for you?”

  Kantelvar raised his staff again, but Julio, facedown on the table, made a muffled shout. “And you, oh spider, are about to kill the Savior’s mother!”

  Kantelvar paused, arrested in the middle of a bestial snarl. He rounded on Julio, the cable on the back of his head whipping like a sheet in a gale. “Silence, you thrice-over traitor.”

  “Madman!” Julio said. “You very nearly killed your own broodmare.”

  Isabelle got her legs under her. It felt like worms of lightning were burrowing through her flesh. Kantelvar had clearly misinterpreted her actions in the cell as an attempt on Julio’s life rather than an attempted rescue. To him, life was a never-ending cycle of betrayal and revenge in which he was both orchestrator and victim.

  “Julio tried to kill me,” she improvised. “He tried to burn my ship out from under me. I hated him for that. I could not stand the thought of being his wife, with his body close to mine, his flesh inside me.”

  Kantelvar returned his attention to her, a thin, translucent mask of control stretched across his burning madness. “But only his seed can sire the Savior.”

  Reason had no hold on him, but his vision sank its hooks to the bone, this dramatic revenge he had plotted on the world. Give him Céleste!

  Once again she invoked her Saintstongue: “It is not the seed that makes the Savior. It is the soul! Your soul, my love. That is what I have waited for all these centuries, and that is why you brought me back.”