An Alchemy of Masques and Mirrors--A Novel

by Curtis Craddock

  Kantelvar’s expression went slack with shock and wonder.

  Is this what you’ve been hoping for all this time? A great woman’s affection? Poor, poor man. Isabelle smiled beatifically at him and spread her arms. “Come, my valiant champion. Receive your triumph.”

  Kantelvar’s human puppet stumbled toward her. Even the spidery machine leaned in. Somewhere in the depths of his mind, he had to know he was being beguiled, but the part of him that wanted was ascendant over the part of him that thought. He croaked something in the Saintstongue too thickly accented for her to make out anything except, “… reflection times.” No, make that, “memory of … through the ages.” Builder’s breath; who ever thought the fate of the world would rest on her ability to conjugate in a dead language?

  “It was your memory and your love that kept me alive,” she said. How long would this trance hold? She had to pull him close. It was like trying to reel in a leviathan with a length of sewing thread.

  A piteous rage filled Kantelvar’s voice. “You required excessive diligence.”

  I made him wait too long. He didn’t just want Céleste’s attention, he wanted to be worshipped as he had worshipped her. She bowed her head and did her best curtsy on wobbly legs. “I am sorry, my champion. I was weak and fearful, but you have remade the world for me. I am forever in your debt.”

  Her legs gave out, but she made sure to land in an artful heap at his feet. “Can you ever forgive me, my lord, my love?” Now, if only he would bid her rise … if only she had the strength.

  While she was staring at her distorted reflection in Kantelvar’s polished boots, he brought the spiny tip of his staff down so close to the back of her head that the proximity of the sparks made her neck hairs stand on end. His body’s breathing was deep and hoarse, as if he were trying to draw air down a well of a thousand years. Should she kiss his boots? Perhaps later she would feel some humiliation in this prostration, if she was lucky enough to have a later, but for now, it was only a means to a chance, submission as a means of control.

  Finally he stroked her hair. A purely physical shudder ran down her spine. Could he tell the difference between a quiver of revulsion and one of desire? Then he knelt before her and gently lifted her chin until they were nose to patchwork nose. His cheek glistened with tears, but his sapphire eye burned. “I forgive you.” He leaned forward, and Isabelle, realizing what he wanted, gave it to him. His lips had been sewn into a rigid circle around his speaking tube, which jutted forward like a brass tongue. She kissed the obscene protrusion. The grille was rough on her tongue, and the abused flesh around it hot and rancid with leaking serum. His arms encircled her ribs and he lifted her easily to her feet.

  Even as her mouth accepted his grotesque intrusion, she raised her spark-hand and drove it through his skull. Her phantom flesh passed harmlessly through living skin, bone, and brain, but not the wire filaments permeating his gray matter or the solid metal tube of his oculus. The metal bit against her ethereal flesh. The shock of it jerked Kantelvar back. The sharp edge of his mouth tube took a strip of skin from her lip. His ordinary eye went wide, the pupil gaping, a dark fathomless window into the abyss. His arms fell nerveless to his sides and the spiny-ended staff fell away. She grabbed the ocular tube and gave a great yank, back and forth, like shaking a hen’s egg and scrambling the chick inside.

  The host’s corpse crumpled at her feet. For a moment, she could do nothing but stare, eyes wide and mind stunned, as all the terror she’d been suppressing flooded through her. Her knees wanted to buckle. Her gut wanted to heave.

  The umbilical tentacle shivered and then yanked back hard, ripping itself out of the back of the host’s head in a spray of brain and bone.

  The spider-thing whipped its other tentacles at her. She lurched out of the way. The tentacles gouged great grooves in the stone wall.

  “Let me up!” Julio shrieked, his voice brittle with panic. A half-dozen straps held him down. Kantelvar’s spider positioned an auger-tipped appendage over the back of Julio’s skull. The tool spun with a whine like a giant hornet.

  Another tentacle lashed at Isabelle. She gave ground. Razor-tipped appendages sliced air a centimeter from her nose. Kantelvar couldn’t stretch any farther without abandoning Julio. It made a surgical incision in the skin on the back of his skull.

  At the other end of the room the warder waited. Isabelle dove for the staff on the floor and prayed that it was the talisman by which his machines recognized their master.

  Pain exploded in her thigh. Blood sprayed as a whirring blade opened a long gash in her leg.

  Isabelle rolled to her knees, brandished the staff at the warder, and pointed to Julio. “Remember your orders! Let nothing harm him!”

  The warder blurred into motion, smashing into Kantelvar’s spider. A tremendous bang shook the air. The concussion kicked her in the side and knocked her into a wall. The constructs wrestled, like a kraken grappling with a black behemoth in the abyssal Gloom. The spider coiled its appendages around its assailant, trying to pin its arm long enough to ram the spinning, screaming auger through its central eye, but the warder lifted it from the ground and smashed it into the wall so hard that the stone cracked and rocks clattered from the ceiling.

  Isabelle lunged to Julio’s side and tore at the bonds holding his head. Another thunderous impact shook the room. Tearing metal screamed. A fan of razor-sharp splinters sprayed across the room. A needle pierced Isabelle’s left shoulder, and the pain shattered her concentration. She slipped and landed heavily on Julio’s back, covering him by accident. By the Builder, you had better be worth it! She forced herself up and plied the bindings with both hands, ghostly fingers fumbling on the metal buckles, sweaty, bloody flesh sliding on the leather straps. Calm. Calm. To go faster, work slower! Hard to do with her heart roaring like a cannonade. She ripped a strap free and then another. Too slow. And then Gretl was there on the other side of the table, unstringing Julio as fast as she could, bless her bold heart.

  Isabelle ripped the last strap off Julio’s head and moved on to his torso, arms, ankles. The whole world became a gauntlet bounded by metal monstrosities and barred by tongues of leather pierced by brass. The floor shook and folded, stone cracking and rolling as if in agony. Cracks raced up the walls and chunks of rock fell from the ceiling. The omnis were but a haze of glittering, oily edges. Julio screamed, but his words were lost in the din. Finally she loosed a buckle and found nothing else to grab. Done! Julio slithered from the table just as a falling slab of granite smashed it flat. Gretl grabbed him by one shoulder, Isabelle seized the other, and they propelled him from the room, a plume of gray dust rolling in their wake. Behind them, the machines continued their battle even as the room caved in.

  Pain jabbed Isabelle’s shoulder at every step, but they didn’t stop running until they stumbled and nearly killed themselves pelting down a flight of stairs. They heaped up against the far wall of the landing and slid to the floor, backs to the stone. Isabelle panted, trying to catch her breath.

  When the rasping sensation of sucking air into her frosted, burning lungs finally lost its grip on her attention, Isabelle took stock of her surroundings. The noise of the mechanical battle above had died down to a distant ringing, like a manic percussionist in a forge, accompanied by the occasional thumping quiver of the floor and the crunch of falling rocks. Eventually the thundering stopped. A thin pall of freshly ground dust floated down the stair and settled around them.

  “Do you think they destroyed each other?” Isabelle asked.

  Julio, sitting on her left, shook his head. “Or buried themselves. I don’t know. They’re notably persistent.” He had somehow thought to grab Kantelvar’s staff when he fled. Did he know how to use it? What would he do with it?

  Beyond him, Gretl sat hunched over with her head between her knees, panting, but not apparently injured. Good.

  Julio focused his mirrored eyes on Isabelle. “Has anyone ever mentioned that you’re completely mad?”

  I
sabelle laughed. She would have laughed at anything just then. Unbearable coils of tension unwound like clock springs loosed from their housing. She laughed until she cried, then coughed, and finally hiccoughed to a stop.

  When she lifted her hand to blot tears from her eyes, a jab of pain reminded her of the shard in her shoulder. Blood trickled from the wound, and every little motion scraped the jagged thing against her bone. That shoulder was going to be a mess, even if she didn’t die from an infection. “I think I need an infirmary,” she said, and then laughed again, drunk on pain and horror.

  Julio’s brows drew down in concern. “We should get that out of you.”

  Isabelle clamped her hand on his forearm as the world rippled, peaks and troughs of light and darkness washing through her consciousness. “I need you to go to San Augustus. Stop this war.”

  “First, Highness, I’m going to make sure you don’t bleed to death.”

  Isabelle felt consciousness slipping away, eroded by waves of shock and trauma, but she refused to yield it up. “Let Gretl get the shard. She’s a surgeon.”

  Julio looked doubtful.

  Isabelle squeezed his arm. “Trust me. Trust her.”

  Julio turned and tapped Gretl on the knee, drawing her attention to the wound. Gretl’s eyes went round and she shouldered into the narrowing circle of Isabelle’s vision. She gently peeled Isabelle’s clammy fingers off his arm and probed the flesh around the shard in her arm.

  Isabelle clenched her teeth and used her spark-fingers to help stabilize the ragged splinter and prevent its tearing any more flesh as Gretl teased it out of her shoulder. A long animal whimper escaped her throat, and pain forced her awareness deeper and deeper until the world was little more than a pinhole at the top of a bottomless, dark well. Only her need to focus on the shard kept her from slipping all the way into unconsciousness.

  With a whispered slurping sound, the quondam metal exited her skin. She gasped with relief and then groaned with the certainty that the pain that remained was hers to keep.

  * * *

  Isabelle woke to jostling and thence to pain. Her whole body ached, like burned-out acres of forest after a fire. Her left shoulder still felt like it had a burning arrow stuck through it. There was a dampness in the air like fog. She was lying supine. Covered in a blanket. The ceiling above was little more than a roughhewn blur of rust-colored light.

  The sound of movement drew her attention. Julio dragged a heavy crate across the floor. Gretl followed him with an alchemical lantern and a lantern hook. The cut on the back of his head had been stitched up, but his collar was stained with blood. He seemed to be setting the crate up as a weight to hold the lamp hook with the alchemical lantern suspended over a dark pit.

  Isabelle forced herself up onto her elbow, trying to get a better look. Every movement she made provided evidence that not moving would be a fruitful alternative to explore. She groaned. Julio and Gretl set aside their project and hurried over.

  “Princesa,” Julio said. “Don’t try to get up.”

  “What’s going on?” Isabelle asked. “Where are we?”

  “In the aerie’s Temple, making preparations to depart.”

  “What about Kantelvar?”

  Julio gestured to her left. A few meters away lay the tangled wreck of the spider jar. All but one of its legs had been ripped off, and its various tentacles reduced to stumps. The single remaining leg twitched occasionally, like the last limb of a crushed insect. Amazingly, the bottle with Kantelvar’s decaying skull inside seemed undamaged.

  “Do you think he’s still alive in there?” she asked.

  “I hope so,” Julio said. “Alive and screaming in impotent rage.”

  That thought made Isabelle queasy. A clean death would have been better. One didn’t torture frothing dogs; one put them out of their misery. “We should dispose of him, throw him off the sky cliff.” Though perhaps even the long fall wouldn’t kill him.

  “No good,” Julio said. “Even with the staff I couldn’t open the outer doors to get to the ship and there’s no guarantee we could control the ship even if we could reach it.”

  “You couldn’t … how long was I unconscious?”

  No longer eclipsed by despair, Julio’s manner was brisk and resolute. “An hour or so. I was going to have to rouse you soon if you didn’t come around. I need to know if you know where this skyland is. The last time I escaped, I was unable to inform my allies where to come rescue me. I know we’re on an uncharted skyland, but I was unconscious when Kantelvar brought me here and there are no windows.”

  “This skyland is not uncharted; it’s mischarted. It’s listed as a reef, about four days off the coast between Aragoth and l’Empire Céleste, and very high up.”

  Julio cursed. “A reef. Of course. Damn. I had Duque Diego looking in all the wrong places.”

  “Just how did you escape? I assume Kantelvar left you no mirrors.”

  “Let me show you,” he said, extending his hand to her. His grip was dry and strong, his fingers lean yet blunt. Calluses on thumb and forefinger spoke of countless hours with a sword in hand. She’d heard he was a great swordsman, but that was the sort of thing one always heard about royalty. His calluses proved he was at least serious about the discipline. As she recalled, Clìmacio’s hands had been softer. All those little clues we miss.

  Isabelle permitted herself to be assisted. Her balance was wobblier than she liked it, but at least she didn’t tip over. The Temple was a six-sided room with a domed ceiling overhead. Kantelvar had stuck as close to the traditional designs as possible. There were niches carved in the wall wherein had been placed icons of all the Risen Saints. In the center of the space, directly beneath the center of the dome, was a wide pool of dark water. Isabelle could not imagine that a skyland this small had a natural spring, so this had to be the outpost’s cistern. The only thing missing from the standard layout was an oculus in the roof.

  Aside from its sacred design, the room seemed to have been given over to practical use as a storehouse for the aerie’s supplies. There were shelves upon shelves of dry goods and tools, though Isabelle imagined anything vulnerable to the damp was stored elsewhere. There were also shelves loaded down with odd fragments of twisted metal, strangely colored glass, and partial pieces of quondam machinery.

  Gretl handed Isabelle a mug of water, which she gratefully downed. The chill of the liquid reminded her body of the gelid humidity. She shivered.

  “Is there a cloak you could bring me?” she asked.

  Gretl gave a positive hand sign and hurried off.

  Julio used the lamp hook to hang the alchemical lantern low over the water, pinning the hook in place with the heavy crate. The bright light in the dark room turned the surface of the pool into a smooth mirror.

  “I didn’t know Glasswalkers could send their espejismos through water,” Isabelle said.

  “It was a common practice during the Saintstime, but the technique was lost after the annihilation of Rüul. I’m the only modern sorcerer powerful enough to manage it, or at least the only one who dares.” Pride lifted his shoulders. “The reflection isn’t solid and there’s no speculum loci behind it to latch on to. Even Kantelvar thought it was impossible, or didn’t think of it at all, or he never would have left me the opportunity.”

  “So what do you intend to do when you get there?”

  Julio stared at nothing for a moment, his face grim, as if reviewing a decision. “I’m going to approach Duque Diego.”

  “He’s the one you went to before, the one who had a mirror placed aboard my ship so that you could attack Kantelvar.”

  “Yes. His name is a byword for honor.”

  Feeling woozy, Isabelle sat down on the crate by the edge of the pool. Her brows knitted in puzzlement. “Why? I thought he had recently switched factions.”

  “Yes, but Aragothic politics is like a peasant dance; people change partners all the time. Diego stands firm on the rule of law. His favorite son and named heir was accused of
murdering his bride. Diego believed his son to be innocent, and it was widely believed that my father would spare the son to avoid offending Diego. Instead, Father accepted the judgment of the court and had Diego’s son destroyed. Diego might have raised his banner in rebellion. Instead, he renewed his vows to the king. No one has had the cojones to challenge him on his honor since then.”

  Isabelle mulled this for a moment. “So he is your perfect ally. If you can convince him to argue your case to Margareta’s supporters—”

  “No,” Julio said. “Didn’t you hear? He values the rule of law. Once he learns … what I am, he will be compelled to turn me over to whichever príncipe he chooses to support. I believe I can convince him to swear fealty to Alejandro and turn me over as proof of his sincerity.”

  Isabelle’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Are you still trying to get yourself killed?”

  “No,” he said. “That was never my preferred option, but it seemed the only one left to me. I … underestimated you. As for my current plan, I like my chances better with Alejandro than with Margareta. We were close once, before Kantelvar poisoned our shared cup, and Alejandro has every reason to spare my life. If he holds me up as a counterexample to Clìmacio, it will bleed away Margareta’s support, and may significantly shorten the war.”

  Isabelle ran her mundane hand through her short-cropped hair and found it matted with blood. “I swore to Grand Leon that I would find a way to prevent this war.”

  “It isn’t possible to prevent something that has already begun,” Julio said grimly.

  “It must be,” Isabelle said. “There can’t be a war if no one fights. They have to choose it, and they’re fighting over a lie.”

  “No. The lie is just the most recent excuse for them to do what they’ve always done. Aragoth is divided in more ways than you know. There are feuds and rifts that go back centuries, even through the Skaladin occupation. The grandchildren of nobles who made bargains with the invaders are still considered traitors by the grandchildren of those who did not. Slights and injustices are handed down like precious heirlooms. My father was fully occupied stamping out these feuds wherever they flared up. Even opening up the Craton Riqueza for exploitation could not consume enough of their enmity to abate the hostilities. If anything it made them worse. Aragoth needs to change, even if that means letting the great houses drink each other’s blood until they the choke on the clots.”