Mist, Metal, and Ash

by Gwendolyn Clare

  Elsa’s first instinct was to give the girl a patronizing promise, but something about Olivia’s wide, serious gaze convinced her otherwise. “I can’t swear to it, but if it’s possible, I’ll at least try.”

  Olivia gave a sharp, definitive nod, and then she lingered, finding the courage for another question. “Will it be dangerous?”

  “You needn’t worry about that—I’ll have an expert swordsman as my guide. Okay?”

  Olivia nodded again, slipped off the chair quiet as a ghost, and disappeared into the cluster of children who had finished with supper.

  Elsa turned to find Revan staring at her as if she were a stranger. “What?” she said defensively.

  Revan gave a one-shouldered shrug. “Nothing. Just … since when are you good with children? You used to despise them.”

  “I’m not good with them,” Elsa protested. “And I despise frivolous behavior in people of all ages.”

  “Mm-hmm,” he replied, clearly unconvinced.

  “Wait, does that mean you understood what we were saying?”

  He shrugged. “I think I caught most of it. Italian still feels a little…”

  “Elusive?” she offered.

  “Elusive, exactly. Like a slippery fish you’re trying to catch with your bare hands—you can grab it for a second, but then it wriggles away.” He paused. “You’re staring. What is it?”

  Elsa shook her head. “Nothing. It’s just … picking up languages the way we do … Jumi was the only one who ever understood this stuff. Before now.”

  Revan’s expression darkened and he leaned away, as if she’d slammed a door in his face. “Sorry to intrude on your two-person secret society.”

  She started to say, “No, that’s not what I—” but he had already pushed his chair away from the table and left her sitting there alone.

  Elsa made a low noise in her throat, releasing her frustration. Were all boys constitutionally prone to moodiness? For a minute there, Revan’s company had provided a comfortable respite from the tension hanging heavy in the air between Faraz and Porzia. She’d even managed to forget, however briefly, the sharp pain of Leo’s betrayal. But Jumi had been right all along: men could not be relied upon for anything.

  Elsa had half a mind to open a portal back to Veldana and shove Revan through it. Except that Casa had already offered to make up a guest room for him, and she couldn’t exactly renege on the Pisanos’ hospitality now that the house had extended it. Anyway, she had far too much to do to worry about whether Revan kept himself out of trouble.

  She excused herself from the table, letting Vincenzo know she’d need an hour or so to get everything sorted, and went up to her rooms. From there, she took a portal into her laboratory world.

  First she built a narrow-frequency wireless transmitter; then she gutted a spare portal device and built a receiver tuned to that specific frequency into the empty casing. It was nothing compared to the complexity and miniaturization that Aris had employed in the bugs he’d built to infest Casa, but it would do the trick. Lastly, she threw together a device composed of a small insulated canister and a nozzle—a much smaller version of the freeze ray she’d used to stop the runaway train.

  She took one last, lingering look around her laboratory before opening a portal back to her rooms in Casa della Pazzia. The lab book was scribed in Veldanese, and she couldn’t risk taking any Veldanese texts with her, lest Aris get ahold of them and use them to help decode the editbook. So the lab worldbook would be hidden along with the doorbook, the wireless transmitter, and her portal device. She wrapped the four items in oilcloth and tucked them inside a wooden box for Porzia.

  Then Elsa changed into a clean pair of trousers and the garment that Porzia affectionately referred to as her “battle vest”—a leather bustier with an overabundance of pouches and pockets and brass attachments, into which she stuffed her revolver, a pen, a small bottle of scriptological ink, and other such items as she deemed potentially useful. She fetched her carpetbag and packed what few clothes she owned, along with the small freeze ray and the receiver masquerading as a portal device. Last of all, she laid the plague doctor mask on top and closed the carpetbag.

  Elsa had never been sentimental about her possessions—Veldanese culture didn’t emphasize personal ownership the way European society seemed to—but she could not help comparing her own things to Leo’s cluttered room, so full of hoarded memories. Physical symbols of his connectedness to the people around him.

  Her wardrobe was largely composed of clothes Porzia had designed for her. The borrowed revolver had been a gift from Alek to Jumi. Even the carpetbag itself had been lent to her by Alek. Among all these possessions, all these personal connections, she had nothing of Leo.

  It was like their history had been erased that day when he shoved her through a portal without him, without the editbook. Or had it never really happened in the first place? Had it ever been real for him the way it had felt real to her? When had truth ended and the deception begun? A knock came at the door, interrupting her ruminations, and Elsa crossed her sitting room to let Faraz in.

  He said, “I have something for you,” and she laughed because his timing was impeccable.

  Faraz gave her a confused look, and Elsa said, “I’ve just realized everything I own is borrowed or a gift.”

  “Oh. Well, here’s one more for your collection, then.”

  He passed her a large brass pocket watch. A dysfunctional one, if the lack of mechanical vibrations against her palm was any indication. “Um, it’s beautiful…?” she said, puzzled.

  Faraz raised his gaze to the heavens. “Just open it.”

  She clicked open the lid. The space inside was empty of mechanical workings, instead taken up by a hollow glass disk filled with Faraz’s purple sleeping potion.

  “In case … you know, in case Rosalinda’s right,” he explained.

  “Ah.” In case Leo won’t come willingly, Faraz meant. A knockout drug for kidnapping the boy she’d once thought she loved.

  How had her life come to this?

  She clicked the watch case closed, her throat tight. “Thank you.”

  Faraz’s mouth twisted into a pained smile. “I hope you won’t need it.”

  She was about to throw herself into the dangerous world of the Carbonari, but the most frightening part was the thought of reaching Leo without incident, only to confirm that he was her enemy.

  6

  SELF-LOVE IS ALWAYS THE MAINSPRING, MORE OR LESS CONCEALED, OF OUR ACTIONS; IT IS THE WIND WHICH SWELLS THE SAILS, WITHOUT WHICH THE SHIP COULD NOT GO.

  —Émilie du Châtelet

  When the house fell quiet around midnight, Leo threw caution to the wind and brought out the lockpicks.

  The door to his father’s study provided little resistance to a mechanist like Leo. The lock was practically a waste of his skills. If Ricciotti wasn’t going to install better security, he might as well entirely abandon the idea of locking things with Leo around. Perhaps Ricciotti still thought of him as the obedient son he’d been at the age of eleven. That was another error in judgment his father would learn to regret. No one would describe Leo as obedient anymore.

  He slipped inside the study and used his candle to light a couple of the wall sconces within. Once he could see properly, he took a moment to orient himself. The study was larger than he expected, with armchairs set near a fireplace at one end. The other end was dominated by an enormous polished-wood desk, with floor-to-ceiling shelves built into the wall behind it.

  Leo stepped behind the desk and checked the drawers and pigeonholes first, but found little of interest. A few spare fountain pens, a report on the weather in Napoli, a list of price quotes for various chemicals, a half-written letter to a recipient whose name Leo didn’t recognize.

  He turned to face the shelves instead. Some of the contents were regular books: history, philosophy, and even a smattering of literature. Leo was unsurprised to find the writings of Machiavelli and Guicciardini, but he snorted at
the fiction, trying to imagine his father curling up by the fire with Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi. Ricciotti Garibaldi did not read for pleasure.

  There were a few worldbooks on the shelves as well, though of course the editbook was not among them. Leo flipped through them anyway, but he could glean little information beyond confirming they were worldbooks. Worldscript had always looked like Greek to him. If Porzia were here, the books might be informative, but without her to interpret them, they were effectively useless.

  The lower shelf held a series of hardbound journals. Leo selected one at random, a slim volume with a faded label on the spine. He set it down on the empty surface of the desk and opened the cover. The first page looked like a handwritten medical record: name, age, occupation, date admitted, and so on, all reported in a neat, slanted cursive. This information was accompanied by a photograph of a young, dark-haired woman pasted to the page. Below that, though, was a somewhat cryptic list.

  RESULTS:

  failed 9/10/68

  failed 6/2/69

  failed 18/5/69

  failed 11/8/69

  failed 23/9/69

  failed 26/2/70

  success: Subject A

  “Subject A,” Leo murmured, wondering what that meant. A successful result, and also the last trial of whatever this person was attempting.

  He flipped to the next page, where began a series of dated entries in the fashion of a laboratory notebook. Methodological details, chemical formulae, observations and results. Beyond determining that the experiments were alchemical in nature, Leo couldn’t make much sense of them. He wished Faraz were here.

  Leo took down another notebook. The contents were similar except for the results, which listed failures spanning 1866 to 1868, with no success at the end. A third notebook and a third photograph of a woman followed by a similar list of failures through 1872 into early 1873, ending in Subject L. Leo lined up the open notebooks on the desk to compare the handwriting, which was consistent among all three. He’d thought the research notes might belong to the women in the front, but now it seemed more likely they were the subjects, not the scientists. Did the handwriting belong to Ricciotti? Leo couldn’t remember well enough to say for certain. What an odd thing to forget. He supposed he should feel sad that he didn’t know his own father’s handwriting, but when he searched himself for the emotion, he found none of it.

  “What are you doing?”

  Leo jumped, his heart slamming against his ribs. It was Aris, standing in the doorway of the study with a smirk playing across his lips.

  Leo let out a breath, relieved he hadn’t been caught by Ricciotti. “Hello to you, too, brother.”

  Aris moved inside and softly shut the door behind him. He sauntered over, leaned one hip against the desk, and graced the notebooks with a cursory glance. “If you’re looking for a little light reading, you’ve come to the wrong place.”

  “I’m looking for answers.” Leo watched his brother’s face to gauge his intentions, but Aris did not look inclined to interfere. If anything, he seemed amused. So Leo reached for the shelves and retrieved another notebook.

  “You really oughtn’t look at those. It’s guaranteed to raise your hackles,” Aris said, but made no move to stop him.

  Leo opened the fourth notebook and froze. He recognized the woman depicted on the first page. In the photograph the woman was healthy and smiling, while in the depths of his memory she was sickly pale, hollow-cheeked, and lacking the strength to smile. Still, he knew this was her. He would know Mother anywhere.

  Her list of results ended with success: Subject P.

  “No,” Leo breathed, struck with horrible realization.

  Subjects A, L, and P. Successes in 1870, 1873, and 1877: the years in which Aris, Leo, and Pasca would have been conceived.

  In a daze, Leo went back to the shelves, hoping not to find what he now knew to look for: but there they were at the far end of the bottom shelf, three notebooks labeled A, L, and P on the bindings. These notebooks were much thicker than the ones with the women in them. He pulled out his own, brought it to the desk, opened it, all the while telling himself he must be wrong. But the first page had his date of birth written on it, beside a photograph of an infant. He opened to the middle and flipped through a few pages. In Leo’s notebook, the entries consisted of clinical observations on his behavior, his interactions with his brothers, and above all his performance as a pazzerellone.

  “What is this?” Leo shouted, though he already knew the answer. “What is this!”

  “Are you upset that Father was engineering polymaths,” Aris said, “or upset that it didn’t work on you?”

  “How can you—‘upset’ is hardly—” Leo choked on his own words. He ran his hands through his hair, wanting to tear it out in frustration. “What happened to all these women?”

  Aris just inclined his head and gave Leo a sad look, as if Leo were acting foolish.

  “Answer me, Aris: Did they all die the way Mother died?”

  “That woman you remember wasn’t your mother. She was just a brood mare—an incubator for Pasca. These,” he said with a dismissive flick of his wrist at the notebooks, “none of these mattered. They were never our family. We are family.”

  Leo searched his brother’s face for any sign that these were Ricciotti’s words parroted through Aris’s lips. But no, his belief seemed genuine. Leo shook his head slowly, too horrified to find words.

  Aris frowned. “I don’t see why you always have to make such a fuss about everything.”

  “I know,” he said. “That’s the problem.”

  Leo stared at the desk. Then he slowly, respectfully closed each notebook, letting the covers down the way one might let down a flower on a grave.

  * * *

  Leo refused to leave his room at breakfast, and again at lunchtime. He didn’t dare force food upon his roiling stomach. Ricciotti seemed ignorant of the cause, so Aris must not have told him what Leo had been up to in the middle of the night. Interesting. If nothing else, Leo had to be grateful his lockpicks weren’t getting confiscated, which was thanks to Aris’s closed lips.

  As difficult as it was to admit, Aris had been right about one thing: there were some truths Leo really didn’t want to know. After that first grim revelation, Leo had fled the room, leaving the notebooks largely unread. He justified it to himself because the records were old and had no bearing on the editbook or Ricciotti’s plans, but he knew that was an excuse. He should have stayed and read the notebooks. A stronger person would have. But Leo’s revulsion at how his father had used up the bodies of innocent women was too powerful.

  Thanks to Ricciotti’s alchemical meddling, Pasca’s mother had never recovered from carrying him, and though she clung fiercely to life she eventually succumbed to the damage the experiments had wrought. And Leo had never known his own birth mother, had killed her like some inhuman parasite. Did he want to go back and stare at the photograph in that wretched notebook, memorizing her face? Was it worse to see her through the lens of his father’s horrific science, or to have no concept of her at all? Leo felt as if he could lose his mind dwelling on those questions.

  His self-imposed confines began to feel oppressive, so he slipped out and went wandering instead. The stronghold was plenty large enough to accommodate his explorations without much risk of encountering other people. On the top floor of the fortress in the southeast corner, he found a circular glass-domed solarium. The hinges of the door were stiff with rust, but when Leo threw his shoulder against it, it screeched open. Inside, the stale air and silence had the feeling of a tomb.

  Four limestone pillars held up the ceiling, and thick, woody vines wrapped around the pillars, emerging from large ceramic pots at the base of each. The vines were long dead, botanical skeletons, and the soil was dry as dust. Other pots and planters scattered about the room looked equally neglected, with few signs remaining of what once grew there. It had been a long time since anyone tended the solarium garden.

 
Empty. Dead inside. This felt appropriate, given his mood. Even the slanted rays of sunlight added little in the way of warmth or life to the place; the light seemed more inclined to bleach the stone and wood of color, until everything was awash with gray.

  Leo was staring at how the sun hit the tiled stone floor when a shadow raced across the room, something large momentarily eclipsing the solarium. A bird? No, too large for a bird, he thought as he hurried over to the glass wall. Perhaps a flying machine? But the shadow had moved much too fast to belong to an airship.

  Shading his eyes with one hand, he searched the air for the object. The sky above was cloudless and powder blue, the valley below completely still. No sign of motion anywhere. Whatever else it was, it was good at disappearing.

  * * *

  In the evening a servant arrived to collect the silver tray of uneaten dinner, and to report that the master of the house requested Leo’s presence in his study.

  Leo’s mouth twisted in anger at his father’s manipulation. If he refused to make an appearance, the servant might be blamed for failing to deliver the summons. Leo had no desire to get the poor girl whipped or fired from her position—a sympathy that Ricciotti was now exploiting. Leo descended the stairs, knowing full well that Ricciotti moved him about the house as if he were a rook on a chessboard.

  In his father’s study, the desk stood empty. Instead Ricciotti sat in one of the high-backed armchairs, a fire crackling in the hearth beside him, the rest of the study bathed in the warm yellow glow of the gaslights. Leo took the remaining armchair, facing his father. If he didn’t know better, Leo would have thought the room had an inviting atmosphere. But Ricciotti wasn’t prone to giving invitations; Ricciotti gave orders.

  With his usual air of assumed authority, Ricciotti demanded, “Did you eat?”

  The question caught Leo off guard, and he paused too long. “I…”

  “If the food isn’t to your liking, I can have the cook whipped.” The words came out so casually, but the glare in his eye had edges sharp as a diamond.