Mist, Metal, and Ash

by Gwendolyn Clare

  “No. Not from the locals, anyway,” Porzia said.

  He eyed her. “But from someone else, yes?”

  She sighed. “I don’t know how much Elsa told you.”

  “Next to nothing.”

  “Well, suffice it to say, now that Elsa and Leo are both gone, we’re less likely to be of interest to anyone with ill intent.”

  By now the village was in full view, and Revan’s attention focused like a searchlight on the details of Manarola.

  “Why is the town so crowded and clumped together?” he said. “And the buildings so tall?”

  Porzia laughed, surprised. Had he even stepped outside Casa della Pazzia to see the rest of Pisa? Were the isolated villages of Cinque Terre effectively his introduction to Earth? “Wait until you see a real city like Paris or Roma. This is nothing.” After a pause, she asked, “Why are you still here, Revan? Why did you give the portal device to me instead of using it to go home?”

  Revan showed her a lopsided grin. “Well you did seem hopelessly in need of assistance.”

  “We also seemed rude—which I’m sorry about—and our situation was not your problem, which remains true now.”

  “I love my home, but … Veldana is so small. We like to pretend the real world doesn’t matter, that it can’t touch us, but after Jumi’s abduction we can’t cling to that illusion anymore,” he said. “If I’m to have any hope of keeping my people safe, I need to learn about Earth.”

  “Pazzerellones aren’t exactly the safest company to keep, and if anything happens to you, Elsa won’t be pleased with me.”

  “Elsa thinks it’s all on her to protect Veldana.” Revan snorted. “She’s wrong. In a community, people protect each other.”

  Porzia wondered what it was like growing up with strong ties to one’s village, with Veldanese the only aspect of identity that mattered. With no centuries-long familial legacy to live up to. Even imagining it felt like blasphemy.

  Past Manarola, the trail ran beside the railway on the inland side of the tracks. Both trail and tracks stayed low near the water, relatively straight and flat. But Porzia knew what lay ahead. They still had to scale La Lardarina, the stairs that switchbacked up the side of a hundred-meter-high promontory, atop which perched the village of Corniglia.

  By the time they reached the foot of the stairs, Faraz was carrying extra luggage and Revan had Aldo riding on his back. The fact that self-serious Aldo was tolerating this arrangement spoke volumes about Revan’s skill at handling children. He might not be a pazzerellone, but right now he was helping in exactly the way Porzia needed.

  Her feet were starting to hurt in a way that promised blisters. She was wearing her most sensible shoes—a pair of low-heeled ankle boots—but even these were not intended for rocky footpaths through the country. To add insult to injury, Sante had run ahead and was lounging on the bottom steps of La Lardarina, waiting for everyone else to catch up.

  Porzia sighed and resigned herself to the inevitability of how sore she would feel tomorrow. She was breathing hard after only a minute on the tortuous stairs, and she was deeply glad she’d had the sense to pass on wearing her usual corset. Meanwhile, even with the added weight of Aldo on his back, Revan seemed to be deliberately slowing his pace out of consideration for the rest of them.

  At the top of the promontory they crossed through the narrow streets of Corniglia, aiming for the opposite side of town. The locals stared at the bizarre procession of children, and Revan stared right back with naked curiosity. On the far side they picked their way through terraced vineyards, and then into the woodland where the ruins were hidden.

  Porzia shut off the optical defenses, and the ancient, crumbling castle appeared out of nowhere. Revan gasped in awe; Sante ran ahead, excited to see a place he’d been allowed to visit only a few times before. Everyone else was too tired to muster much of a reaction.

  Porzia pushed sweaty strands of hair out of her face, unable to remember the last time she had felt so disheveled. Nonetheless, she also felt a sense of accomplishment at having delivered the children to their new safe haven. She briskly ushered everyone inside.

  The cavernous entryway was cool, musty, and dim. Dust motes floated through the filtered sunlight from the high windows, and the children’s shuffling feet seemed loud in the sudden silence.

  Aldo scowled. “Are there books? I bet there won’t even be anything to read here,” he said darkly, as if this were the most damning criticism anyone could possibly level at a place.

  “Oh, come now,” Porzia said with forced brightness. “We don’t need stories—we’ve embarked on an adventure of our own. It’s fun.”

  Olivia wrinkled her nose. “It’s dusty, is what it is. I don’t remember it being this dusty.”

  Privately, Porzia thought “dusty” was a generous understatement. When she spoke, her falsely bright tone started to turn brittle. “All right, everyone. Leave your things here for now, and let’s get the bedrooms cleaned so we can set up sleeping arrangements.”

  The grand stairway in the entry hall ended halfway up in midair, above a pile of rubble. Instead, Porzia led them to the servants’ stairwell in the rear—narrow, steep, and dark, but at least all the steps were intact. The rooms above were mostly unfurnished, and the children grumbled about the absence of mattresses.

  Porzia asked Revan to coordinate the usage of brooms and mops, the bedrolls in need of arranging, and the blistered feet in need of doctoring. Then she snuck back downstairs to search the laboratories for a second portal device to replace the one Casa had stolen out of Elsa’s escape kit.

  By the time she found what she needed and returned to the entrance hall for Elsa’s box, Faraz was coming to look for her. “What are you doing?”

  “There’s still an escape plan that needs to be set up in Trento, in case you’ve forgotten,” she said, but she couldn’t find the energy to put any heat into the words.

  “I hadn’t,” Faraz said. “But are you up to it? The return portal will land you back in Riomaggiore, and you’ll have to do the walk a second time today.”

  “I am well aware of how portals work, thank you.”

  Their nascent argument was interrupted by the sudden appearance of Simo, the middle-aged housekeeper, ambling into the entrance hall while humming tunelessly to himself. He carried a lit candle in a brass holder and was using the flame to light the wall sconces. It was the middle of the day, with hours left until nightfall, but Porzia didn’t have the heart to point out his mistaken timing.

  When Simo spotted them still standing by the door, he broke into a wide grin and called across the room, “Simo!”

  “Hello, Simo.” Though it pained her, Porzia forced herself to return the smile. Then he ambled onward, down another corridor, doggedly pursuing his pointless task. Simo had been textualized years ago, before Porzia was born; when a specific person got added to the text of a worldbook, it wrought terrible harm on their mental faculties, and some scriptologists even hypothesized that textualization impaired free will.

  Porzia’s siblings didn’t know who Simo was—who Simo had been once—but Porzia had figured it out, and that knowledge felt like a briar grown around her heart, twisting its thorns into her. He was her uncle, her father’s brother, and even worse than Simo’s fate was the knowledge of how her own parents had dealt with it: sending him away, hiding him out of sight somewhere he could be conveniently forgotten. Telling the world he was dead. When Porzia thought about what they’d done, she choked on the shame of it.

  Growing up was defined by the realization that one’s parents were fallible, and Porzia never felt older than she did here. This was her parents’ most egregious mistake, staring her in the face every hour.

  “I hate this place,” she confessed to Faraz.

  “It’s not so bad here. I’ve seen worse,” he said.

  “No, it’s awful, being exiled from our own home to this horrid castle.”

  “You don’t get it. You can’t!” Faraz shouted, startling her
. “You have parents and siblings and cousins … you’ve lived your whole life in the same house where you were born, in a town where everyone speaks your language. You don’t know the first thing about what it’s like to have no family, no home—to be cast adrift on the world!”

  Porzia felt as if she’d been slapped. She couldn’t remember the last time Faraz had been truly furious with her, if such a time had ever happened. Raised voices were standard fare in the Pisano family, but tempers generally cooled as quickly as they flared. This was different—this was Faraz, who let nothing rattle him, who never raised his voice even when they argued. Faraz was supposed to be as steady and immovable as the sea. Who was this stranger wearing his face?

  Her expression of shock did nothing to slow the torrent of his words. “You might miss him, but you don’t need him. But me—he was all I had, Porzia! I told myself I could live without the parents I hardly ever knew, without the mentor who sent me away to a foreign country, because at least Leo and I had each other. Brothers by choice, forgetting the past and moving forward together. Hah! So much for that.”

  Tentatively, Porzia reached for his arm. “But … you are family to us…”

  “Ugh!” he said, pulling away from her touch. “Save your propaganda for an Order meeting.”

  He stormed out of the entrance hall, leaving her alone. She spread her hands in the air, at a loss, and said to herself, “My God, do I not have time for this.”

  Porzia decided to go as far as Manarola before opening a portal with the doorbook, just to be safe, since they’d discovered Aris had invented the ability to track portals. Best to protect their location. So she descended those infernal stairs and took the seaside pathway, then hid behind a rise in the landscape so none of the locals would see her disappear.

  The untested doorbook destination took her to Trento on the first try, and Porzia stepped through the portal into a broad piazza with an elaborate fountain and a Romanesque cathedral, all columns and arches and a large rose window. At right angles to the cathedral was a long building with a crenelated roofline that ended in a clock tower. It felt almost familiar from her research and scribing the destination with Elsa, and yet also disquietingly different—not exactly how she’d imagined it to be.

  Porzia shrugged off the sensation, put on her best air of I am definitely supposed to be here, and snuck into the clock tower to hide the supplies for Elsa.

  * * *

  Alek’s bad hip was already bothering him. The uphill hike from the village to the swirling Edgemist of Veldana felt steeper than it used to be, and the brief but intense cold of the portal worsened the ache. No way around it—he was getting old.

  Stepping out of the portal, Alek arrived in the cavernous octagonal library of Casa della Pazzia. Except for a pair of Casa’s bots standing idle, the library was empty, and the house sounded eerily quiet.

  “Hello…? Revan?” Alek called, and then immediately felt foolish. A whole day had passed since the boy’s disappearance; of course Revan wasn’t standing right beside the Veldana worldbook, waiting for an adult to follow him out.

  “Good evening, Signor de Vries.” The house’s disembodied voice echoed in the resonant hollow of the domed ceiling. “You have returned.”

  The pair of house-bots rolled up to greet him, one on either side, which Alek found a bit unnerving. “Good evening, Casa. Would you mind directing me—”

  The bot on his right snatched the portal device away from him, leaving Alek to blink at his empty palm.

  “I’m afraid I must confiscate that,” Casa said. “This is for your own protection, you see.”

  Alek frowned. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “I’ve lost so many,” the house lamented. “They’re out in the dangerous world, naked of my protection. I cannot bear to lose anyone else.”

  Alek ran a hand over his thinning hair, exasperated. This explained why Revan hadn’t returned; he felt certain Elsa would have sent him back to Veldana if she could have. But why would Gia instruct the house to confiscate portal devices?

  “Casa, take me to Gia, please—or Porzia, if her mother’s occupied at the moment.”

  “They’re gone, they’re all gone,” Casa bemoaned. “Everyone has abandoned me except the youngest of the squalling progeny. I am a failure.”

  Alek cleared his throat. “Uh, right.” The true depth of his present dilemma was beginning to dawn on him.

  The house said, “But at least I have you, now.”

  12

  I DO NOT BELIEVE THAT THIS WOMAN EASILY FINDS HER EQUAL IN THE SCIENCE IN WHICH SHE EXCELS.

  —Gottfried Liebniz, regarding Maria Kirchin

  In the afternoon, Aris insisted he had something to show Elsa, and Elsa alone. He led her through the house, his eyes alight with devious intent, and grudgingly she followed. They went up to the sleeping chambers and then kept climbing to the floor above that.

  “Where exactly are we going?” said Elsa.

  “I can’t tell you, obviously. It’s a surprise.” On the landing, Aris grabbed the banister post and swung himself around in a fast arc, angling toward the next flight of stairs.

  Up again, and they came to a long, narrow room tucked between the eaves. The walls were cut off by the sharp angle of the roofline, such that there was enough room to stand in the middle but not on either side. A track of clean floor was worn through the layer of dust, as if Aris frequented this route.

  Dryly, Elsa said, “Ooh, an attic. You always take me to the nicest places.”

  Aris simply tossed her an inscrutable look and followed the length of the room to a door at one end.

  “A closet in the attic,” Elsa amended. “Thrilling.”

  But when he grabbed the knob, the door opened onto bright daylight. It was a dazzling afternoon, the air crisp and dry, the sky a cloudless dome of blue.

  Aris stepped through, and for a moment Elsa expected him to fall to his death, but instead he stepped onto solid ground. She followed, thoroughly disoriented, and looked around. They were in an odd sort of courtyard cut into the bedrock so the stone bounded it on three sides. The last side abutted the house, though thanks to the dramatic slope of the mountainside, the ground was nearly level with the eaves.

  In the center of the courtyard squatted an enormous machine. Elsa’s gaze skirted over the aluminum frame and stretched canvas of the wings, and she knew it immediately for a flier, though it was the first she’d ever seen. It had a gasbag as well for additional lift, which seemed necessary given the probable mass—the main body of the craft was as long as a railcar and nearly twice as wide.

  Aris swept his arms open, as if presenting the airship to her. “Do you like it? I’ve just finished hooking up the engine to the flight apparatus. I thought you might care to join me on its maiden voyage.”

  “Yours then, I take it?” Elsa asked.

  “Of course mine. Leo’s been too busy sulking to do any serious work, and there are no other mechanists about. Besides, I like to think my signature genius is evident in the design,” he said, a manic glint in his eyes.

  “Perhaps,” Elsa allowed. “I’m afraid I don’t know your work well enough to tell one way or the other.”

  “Then allow me to introduce you.” He held out a hand as if asking her to dance.

  Elsa hesitated, then kicked herself for it; she was supposed to be pretending they were allies. She swallowed her reluctance and quickly took his hand, letting him lead her up a ramp into the cabin of the airship.

  The interior of the cabin was not set up for passengers, Elsa discovered. Instead the space was equipped as a mobile laboratory, with racks of well-secured tools and workbenches bolted to the floor. Toward the front hulked the steam engine, which reached up to the ceiling and down below the deck. Elsa walked up to the gap where the floorboards ended; upon closer inspection, it looked as if the wing mechanisms were located in a crawl space beneath the passenger cabin.

  Aris slipped past her and through a narrow passageway that
ran along the side of the engine. “Come on!”

  Elsa followed and found herself in a small pilot’s cabin, encircled on three sides with large windowpanes. The windows were angled to allow the pilot to lean out past the hull and see the ground below. In the center of the cabin stood a console covered in a complex assortment of levers and wheels and gauges.

  Aris went immediately to the controls and fired up the engine. “Retract the wings,” he said, pushing up on a large lever, “release the wheel lock … and we’re good to go.”

  The airship rolled forward, ponderous and slow. Elsa looked out the front window and spotted a shallow ramp that wrapped around one side of the fortress, giving the courtyard an outlet to the valley.

  “Ready for her maiden voyage?” Aris asked.

  “Wait.” Elsa threw him a glare. “You seriously haven’t tested this thing before? Not at all?”

  “There’s a first time for everything.” He grinned.

  They hit the top of the ramp and picked up speed, gravity assisting the steam-driven wheels. The fortress blurred by, close on their left. Ahead the ramp simply ended in a sheer cliff.

  Elsa frowned at the drop-off. “This is probably a terrible idea, isn’t it?”

  “Too late now!” Aris crowed.

  With a lurch that sent butterflies through her stomach, they dropped into the sky above the valley floor. Aris yanked the large lever, extending the wings; pistons churned and the wings pumped up and down, chuff chuff chuff, and their altitude steadily rose.

  Elsa squeezed into the space between the controls and the front windows so she could lean out over the slanted glass. She had never before seen the earth from a bird’s-eye perspective, and she drank in the sight. “It’s like how you picture a world in your mind’s eye when you’re scribing it, but … but to be able to actually see everything…”

  She couldn’t find the words for this. The mountains took her breath away. What had seemed merely impressive and aesthetically pleasing from the ground suddenly became something more when viewed from above: an ancient story written in the landscape, the incomprehensibly large forces of nature locked in a constant conflict, playing out over the eons.