Mist, Metal, and Ash

by Gwendolyn Clare

  The café’s walls were cluttered with paintings and gilt-framed mirrors, and below that were lined with benches padded in green velvet. Wooden stools and narrow, marble-topped tables were arranged in precise rows—all of them empty at this hour, though voices carried from somewhere farther in.

  Behind the polished-wood bar, the barista called out, “We’re closed!”

  Elsa raised her eyebrows. “Yes, I can tell from all the noise.”

  Ignoring the barista’s protests, she followed the sound of voices through a wide doorway into a second room. It was similarly furnished and decorated but held a greater sense of privacy, and most important, it was full of revolutionaries.

  As soon as she walked in, eyes turned to her, and the hubbub of conversation began to quiet as one after another noticed her presence. The Carbonaro nearest the doorway closed in on her and relieved her holster of its revolver so quickly she didn’t have time to protest, but after that was done, he looked to another man for instruction.

  This man rose to intercept her with a distinctive air of authority. His hair and stubble were more gray than black, and he had deep lines around his eyes as if from years of squinting in the sun. There was a stiffness in his posture, too, that spoke of age.

  He looked her up and down, taking in her trousers and battle vest with all its pouches and loops for carrying tools. “Are you lost, little pazzerellona?” he said with a mocking quirk to his mouth. He gave that word—pazzerellona—an undertone that Elsa had never heard before, as if it were a foolish way to be, something not worthy of respect.

  Elsa raised her chin. “I know exactly where I am. I require assistance from the Carbonari, and I am prepared to offer fair compensation for your time and effort.”

  The man snorted. “The Carbonari are not for hire.”

  “I’m called Elsunani di Jumi da Veldana,” she persisted. “And you are…?”

  “Domenico, at your service,” he replied, spreading his hands and giving a shallow, joking bow. The gesture made her notice that he had only nine fingers.

  Elsa kept her eyes on him, resisting the urge to search the room for Vincenzo’s familiar face. “Well, Domenico, I brought something for you…”

  She moved to open her carpetbag, but before she could reach inside, Domenico snapped, “Search her.”

  The Carbonaro who’d grabbed her revolver reached out again to take the bag, and another man came forward to pat her down. His hands were light and efficient, and his cheeks reddened as if he found the process embarrassing. He yanked on her watch chain—making Elsa suck in a nervous breath—but he only glanced at the pocket watch before handing it back to her to tuck away. If he’d opened it, he would have discovered Faraz’s sleeping potion.

  Next they started emptying her carpetbag. They lifted the miniature freeze ray suspiciously and laid it out on one of the café tables.

  “What is this?” said Domenico.

  “Something I designed for you,” Elsa quipped, “and I’ll even show you how to use it, if we can come to an agreement.”

  “And this?” Domenico barked, as his men removed the signal receiver she would need for locating where Porzia hid the doorbook. She’d thought it was clever to disguise the receiver as a portal device, but it hadn’t occurred to her that they might not know what a portal device was.

  “Oh, come on now, that’s standard scriptological equipment. Completely harmless.” Elsa felt prickly and hot, a slow sort of panic creeping up on her. Why wasn’t Vincenzo stepping in to help her? “Surely someone here has seen a portal device before?”

  Domenico peered at it as if he thought it might explode, then looked up to search the crowd. “Vico!” he called.

  Movement in the back, and finally Elsa spotted her inside man. Vincenzo rose lazily from his reclined position in the far corner, drained his wineglass, and edged between his compatriots to join them near the entrance. “What?” he said.

  “You’ve spent some time around pazzerellones,” Domenico said. “Do you recognize this?”

  Vincenzo set his hands on his hips, looking quite convincingly irritated at the interruption. “Yeah, it’s one of those … black-hole-opening things. For going inside mad books.”

  Domenico nodded, giving Elsa a considering look. Vincenzo shifted his weight as if to return to his table, but Domenico held out a hand to forestall him.

  Elsa feigned impatience. “The device I made for you is a sort of … universal key, if you like. It will freeze any lock hard enough to turn the metal brittle and easily shattered.” She shrugged. “Unless I’m wrong and you never have any need to access places that are forbidden to you.”

  To his credit, Domenico had quite the poker face, and for a moment Elsa wondered if she’d be thrown out instead of sealing a deal. But then he said, “And what do you ask for in return?”

  “From you? Just an introduction in Trento.” She could tell this answer did not satisfy him, so she elaborated, “There’s someone I need to track down. I have reason to believe he’s staying near Trento, but I’m unfamiliar with the area, and I need to catch up with him fast. He stole something from my people, and I can’t count on the Order for assistance in this matter.” Strange—Elsa had been preparing herself to lie, but as she finished speaking she realized every single word was the truth.

  Domenico set his hands on his hips and scowled. The air in the room nearly vibrated with tension as the men waited for his decision.

  “Look,” Elsa said, “as soon as I walked in here with that tech, I implicated myself as a collaborator. I’m counting on discretion as much as you are.”

  “True enough,” Domenico said, and he nodded as if deciding that having a pazzerellona in his pocket could be useful. “Very well, then. Vico, pazzerellones are your wheelhouse—you’ll take her.”

  “Stu gazz!” Vincenzo swore in a dialect that Elsa didn’t quite catch. “Are you playing with me? I just got back from an assignment.”

  Elsa carefully did not react to this, though inside she felt the burn of nascent panic. Why was he turning down the assignment? Their plan was so close to working, and here he was throwing it out the window!

  But his reaction only seemed to make Domenico more determined that Vincenzo should go. “Oh, my apologies, I didn’t realize your job was to hang around the café drinking wine,” he said sarcastically. “Are you a Carbonaro or a poet?”

  In a few short minutes, Elsa’s possessions were returned to her—all except the miniature freeze ray she’d offered them—and she and Vincenzo were reunited on the streets of Bologna. Now with the knowledge of how to find the revolutionaries in Trento.

  “I can’t believe that worked,” Elsa said, as they walked back to the train station.

  Vincenzo grinned. “I can’t believe you doubted me.”

  * * *

  They stayed the night in Ferrara and went to a lawyer’s office in the morning, where Vincenzo gave a cryptic pass phrase and the secretary handed him an envelope with travel documents for one Elsa Valenti. Rosalinda had wired ahead so the forged papers would be ready for them.

  The border crossing into the crown state of Venetia proved uneventful—a train attendant simply checked their papers and gave Elsa a curious look, but apparently he saw nothing amiss with her documents.

  After the attendant had moved on down the train car, she leaned closer to Vincenzo to ask, “So Venetia is its own kingdom, but it’s still part of the Austrian Empire?” She was never going to get all these bizarre political distinctions straight in her mind.

  “They’ve been granted autonomy to govern themselves, at least in theory,” explained Vincenzo. “But they still pay taxes to the Austrians, and let’s face it, it’s probably a puppet government.”

  They rode through a series of cities, which Vincenzo named for her: Padova, Vicenza, Verona, Ala. Finally they disembarked at the station in Trento, and instead of walking toward the city center, they angled north to the outskirts. Trento itself sat in a broad, flat river valley, but the hill c
ountry surrounding it was a sea of vineyards the scale of which Elsa could not have imagined if she wasn’t seeing it with her own eyes.

  With his long legs, Vincenzo set a pleasantly vigorous walking pace, though he kept glancing around in a way that made Elsa nervous. She found his constant alertness distracting; how anyone could focus when half their mind was scanning for enemies she could not fathom.

  They met their contact, Claudio, at a winery where he worked. Vincenzo maneuvered deftly through an exchange of pass phrases, dropping of names, and sharing of news.

  Then he leaned in confidentially and said, “Claudio, friend—may I call you friend?—I’m sure you can imagine why I came here, specifically, with a pazzerellona in tow.”

  “I don’t know what you’re implying,” said Claudio, suddenly very focused on wiping the grape stains from his hands with a rag.

  “I think you do,” said Elsa, catching a subtle cue from Vincenzo. “And his name is Ricciotti Garibaldi.”

  Claudio tugged the rag through his belt and narrowed his eyes at them. “Officially, Garibaldi is persona non grata to the Carbonari.”

  Vincenzo said, “His methods are extreme, but I assumed you’d be ready to do whatever it takes to break free of Austrian rule.” He shrugged and shifted his weight as if to go. “My mistake. We’ll leave you out of it, then.”

  Claudio held out a hand to forestall him. “Wait! Wait, friend.” He glanced around reluctantly, as if to confirm they were unobserved. “Yes, we’ve been in contact. Lately, he’s even been recruiting from among our numbers. I can’t approve of it, but … well, if your minds are made up, you certainly wouldn’t be the first.”

  “So, you can send us with an introduction?” Vincenzo said.

  “I can do better than that—I’ll take you up there myself. Today, if you’re ready.”

  “Yes,” Elsa said. “We’re ready.”

  Claudio drove the winery’s horse cart, with Elsa and Vincenzo riding in the back, and they followed the road up into the mountains, where it became steep and winding. While the rugged terrain was beautiful to look upon, all the jouncing and jostling made Elsa lament that they had not simply approached on foot.

  With the afternoon sun sinking below the peaks to the west, the air turned chilly. Elsa didn’t own an overcoat, and it hadn’t occurred to her she might need one this late in the spring. Weather—yet another aspect of Earth that mystified her.

  “There it is,” Claudio called over his shoulder, lifting a hand to point.

  Elsa sighted along the direction he indicated, across a valley floor and high up on the opposite side: the yellow glow of gaslit windows, shining like the eyes of a nest of spiders in the failing daylight. The massive house was built of the same dark gray stone as the surrounding mountainscape, and indeed it seemed to have been built into the side of the mountain, almost as if it had grown there of its own accord. It had very steep rooflines—the purpose of which was not immediately obvious to her—and an imposing, bulky shape. Not quite a castle, Elsa thought, though it nearly qualified.

  “Pig of a god,” Vincenzo swore under his breath, taking it all in. “It’s a damned fortress.”

  Claudio pulled the cart to a stop at the bottom of a narrow gravel path that switchbacked up the mountainside, providing access to the fortress. Elsa and Vincenzo climbed out of the back. There was tension written in the angle of Vincenzo’s shoulders; his eyes darted everywhere, and his right hand wandered to the hilt of his rapier.

  “Calmly now,” Elsa muttered to him.

  “We’ve been spotted,” he muttered back.

  Elsa didn’t doubt his assessment, though what noises she heard were indistinguishable from the montane wildlife settling down for the night, or in some cases waking up for it.

  They began the steep walk up the path, but they didn’t make it far before a disembodied voice shouted, “Stop there!” A man-shaped shadow stepped out from behind a boulder, pointing a pistol at them. “Hands,” he said.

  Vincenzo held his hands out wide, and Elsa set down her carpetbag and imitated the gesture of submission. She jumped when the ground behind them crunched beneath a set of boots, and a hand reached forward to take her revolver from its holster.

  “You must be lost,” the first man said. From his tone, Elsa imagined him smirking beneath his black cloth mask.

  Claudio stepped forward. “Is Stefano on duty? He can vouch for us.”

  “Visitors aren’t welcome here,” the guard argued.

  Elsa wasn’t sure how well they could see her through the gloom of dusk, but she pulled herself up to her full height and borrowed an imperious expression from Porzia’s repertoire. “I think you’ll find we will be,” she said. “Tell Garibaldi that Elsa di Jumi da Veldana has come.”

  9

  SCIENCE IS MADE UP OF MISTAKES, BUT THEY ARE MISTAKES WHICH IT IS USEFUL TO MAKE, BECAUSE THEY LEAD LITTLE BY LITTLE TO THE TRUTH.

  —Jules Verne

  Porzia had never felt much affection for Casa, the way a mechanist might, but she had taken for granted that the house was comfortable and familiar and safe. Now, as she passed through the corridors, she felt something vaguely sinister about that inhuman intelligence surrounding her. It was as if she had grown up on the shores of a placid sea and was just now seeing her first storm surge.

  On the first floor, security bars had lowered over the windows. On the basement level, a veritable army of small cleaner bots roamed free, so that she had to dodge around them lest she trip. She found her mother in the hall outside the generator room. Two large maintenance bots blocked the door, and her mother was deep in argument with the house.

  “Mamma!” she shouted, lifting her skirts so she could hurry.

  “Porzia, dear, you shouldn’t be down here. Casa has—”

  Porzia put a finger to her lips. “Come with me.”

  She took her mother by the hand and led her up out of the basement and down the hall toward Leo’s laboratory.

  “Wherever are you dragging me off to?” Mamma said, sounding as if her patience was wearing thin. “We’re in the midst of a crisis.”

  “I am well aware of that.” Porzia threw a significant look over her shoulder at her mother.

  She yanked open the laboratory door and rushed down the half flight of steps to the sunken floor. The room was just as Leo had left it—a chaotic mess of tools and machine parts that looked more like the aftermath of a natural disaster than it did a workspace. Fortunately, Leo’s disinclination toward putting things away meant that the device Porzia wanted was sitting in plain sight, exactly where it had been the last time they’d used it. Atop Leo’s favorite workbench sat the metal cube of the scrambler.

  Porzia was not insensitive to the irony of the situation: Leo had invented the signal scrambler so the adults could not use the house to spy on their conversations. Now here she was, using it with one of the very people it had been designed to foil.

  She took a deep breath, flipped the switch on top of the box, and said, “There we are—Casa can’t hear us now.”

  Mamma looked at the box critically, clearly displeased that Leo and Porzia possessed such a thing. “We’ll be having a talk later about that device.”

  “Won’t that be fun,” Porzia quipped. “For now, Mamma, let’s have a talk about how your house has gone insane.”

  Mamma planted her fists on her hips, setting aside her inner parent in favor of her inner mechanist. “It’s not a hardware problem, it’s … something more complex than that. Casa has found a way to leverage the safety protocol so that it supersedes the obedience protocol. The house no longer follows my commands.”

  “Well, it’s not ideal, but at least we’re safe,” Porzia said, though Mamma was looking at her in a way that made her think this was perhaps a naive assumption.

  Mamma said, “And what happens when Casa decides the best way to keep us safe is to store us in cryogenic chambers? Or replace all our fragile organic parts with mechanical ones?”

  “Oh.”
Porzia’s momentary relief melted like ice in the sun. “That would be bad.”

  “We need to evacuate as many people as we can manage. The older children are all still free to roam the house, so it shouldn’t pose too much of a problem to gather them together.”

  “And the younger children?”

  Mamma sighed. “Casa has the nursery on lockdown. There’s no way to get to them without alerting Casa that we’re attempting an escape.”

  Porzia stared at her mother, aghast. “We can’t just abandon them here, all alone.”

  “Not alone. I must stay behind to attempt the repairs.”

  Porzia protested, “Mamma—” but Gia held up a hand to quiet her, and Porzia clamped her jaw closed on her argument.

  “I need you to do this for me, darling. You must get the older children to safety, as many of them as you can.”

  “What about Burak? He’ll want to stay here with you.”

  Mamma pursed her lips, reluctant. “It’s too dangerous.”

  Burak was only thirteen, the difference in age sufficient for him to look up to Leo with a follower’s adoration. Porzia suspected that becoming Mamma’s right hand was Burak’s way of dealing with Leo’s absence. And losing his hero was making him grow up fast.

  “You should let him stay,” Porzia said. “He’s old enough, and serious enough. And I’m no mechanist, but even I can tell you’ll need all the help you can get.”

  As her mother went down into the bowels of the house, Porzia’s first task was to find Burak and clue him in to the situation at hand without tipping off Casa that anything was happening. She almost reflexively asked Casa where he was—her whole life she’d relied on the house for little tasks like that, and only now was she realizing how frustrating it could be to try to locate a particular person inside a multistoried mansion.