Mist, Metal, and Ash

by Gwendolyn Clare

  Leo interjected, “Because even I can admit your little monster has come in handy in the past.”

  “Hold on,” Vincenzo said. “There are questions we haven’t asked yet. How did they know about Revan, and how did they know to find him here?”

  Faraz’s eyes widened. “You’re right—Porzia’s been very careful not to open portals near the ruins, so Aris can’t have traced her portal activity.”

  Leo got a cold feeling in his stomach. They’d been safely hidden here … until he showed up with his brother and a half-mechanical construct built by Aris. Aris, who could fit miniature transmitters inside brass bugs no larger than the palm of a hand, like those he’d infected Casa with last month.

  “Where is the creature right now?” he said urgently.

  Faraz said, “Skandar? I told—”

  “No! Pasca’s companion, the clockwork creature. We have to find her.”

  Elsa’s eyes widened. “You think…?”

  “That I hand-delivered Aris’s spy right into our midst?” Leo spat, furious with himself. “Yes, that seems probable.”

  After a few frantic minutes of searching, they found the clockwork creature in an unexpected place: the bedroom to which Faraz had moved Sante for recovery. The creature loomed over the bed and the unconscious form laid upon it, emitting a soft, wordless keening.

  “What are you doing?” Leo said, keeping his voice calm and even.

  Her head jerked up like an animal scenting a predator, except no—that wasn’t fear on her face. Those dark, glassy eyes locked on Elsa, her features twisted with a horrible realization. She began to sign emphatically, almost desperately.

  Faraz said, “What’s she saying?”

  Elsa translated, “‘It was me, the mad boy followed me. I didn’t know. It is my fault, my most grievous fault.’”

  The clockwork creature relaxed her hands, let them fall to her sides. There seemed to be something final about the gesture, even to Leo, who understood so little of her language. Then she turned and dove at the window, shattering the glass and spilling out into the night.

  Leo rushed to the window frame, shouting at her, “Wait!” but it was no use. He spotted a silhouette of wings against the moonlight reflected on the sea, and then the creature was gone.

  20

  YOU ASK ME WHAT FORCES ME TO SPEAK? A STRANGE THING; MY CONSCIENCE.

  —Victor Hugo

  Porzia came back to consciousness in a cage. The knockout potion they’d used on her when she came aboard left her with a pulsing headache and a slow, fuzzy sensation that made it difficult to orient herself. Cage bars and … someone in another cage beside hers … a round room, laboratory equipment, no doors—no doors! No doors and no rumbling vibration of an engine meant they were in a scribed world, not on the airship anymore.

  “Look here! Our surprise guest has decided to join us.” A dark-haired young man with Leo’s eyes came into focus on the other side of the bars. “And who might you be?”

  Porzia did her best to glare but doubted the look’s effectiveness, given that she was only just now managing to get her hands and knees under her.

  “Wait! Don’t tell me,” said Aris, despite the fact that she obviously had no intention of telling him anything. “You must be the legacy brat. Eldest of a prestigious line, guaranteed a seat at the table no matter how incompetent you turn out to be. She who buys all her friends at a discount, when they’re homeless and alone and desperate enough to trust any pretty face. Leo told me about you, Porzia.”

  She tried hard not to flinch, though the words stung. Surely Leo, even at his lowest, would not have made such nasty claims about her. But in the manner of all great insults, it hurt not because of its patent falsity but because of the grain of truth she recognized within. She was privileged. She had taken her friends for granted.

  Porzia grabbed the bars, pulled herself to her feet, and dialed her raised-eyebrows haughtiness all the way up. “As evil masterminds go, I can’t say I’m impressed.”

  “Oh, really?” Aris said, looking more amused than annoyed. “By all means, please do illustrate my failings.”

  “Well, you’re not especially creative. First Jumi, then Leo, now Revan. Isn’t the whole kidnapping routine getting a bit old? You really ought to branch out. Rob some banks, steal some horses…”

  Aris laughed. “I suppose now I know where Leo picked up that attitude of his.”

  “Leo is perfectly capable of scorning you without any assistance from me.” Porzia might have found more vitriol to sling at him, but that was when she realized the man in the cage next to her was not Revan, but Charles Montaigne—the original creator of Veldana and one-time thief of the editbook, who was supposed to be imprisoned by the Order. But if Montaigne was there, then where was …

  Porzia’s heart leapt in her throat. Revan was strapped into a device like some horrid combination of a gurney and a medician’s chair, standing but tipped back at an angle. An elaborate mass of wires encircled his skull, and he had a gag—no, a wooden mouth guard—between his teeth, to keep him from biting off his tongue.

  “What is this? What are you doing to him?”

  “Here’s the thing about scriptology, Porzia,” Aris said. “By itself, it’s an entertaining yet ultimately trivial endeavor. But when you scribe special physical conditions as the groundwork for alchemy and mechanics … well, then the possibilities are endless. As you were so quick to point out, creativity is everything. Like, say, a world where languages are neural imprints that can be taken out of one brain and transferred into another.”

  Porzia’s knuckles whitened as she gripped the bars tighter, and nausea threatened her stomach. “Stop. Don’t hurt him.”

  “I scribed and built all this to cure Pasca, but desperate times call for repurposed worlds.” Aris shrugged. “Don’t worry, it won’t kill him. I tested the procedure on that French nuisance first, and see? Still breathing.”

  Montaigne spat out a rapid string of words, most of which Porzia failed to catch. Her French was not as strong as her German or Latin. Montaigne’s tone, however, was quite obviously uncomplimentary.

  Aris ignored the Frenchman’s insults and kept talking to Porzia as if he weren’t present. “Unfortunately, his grasp of the Veldanese language was rather less sophisticated than I was hoping for. Hence, the necessity of your friend.” Aris turned to Revan. “I do hope you’ve been applying yourself when it comes to your Italian language studies, though. I’m afraid the machine will strip you of Veldanese. Terribly inconvenient, I know, but what’s to be done? I may be the smartest person alive, but even I’m not flawless, and the last stage of construction was a bit rushed.”

  Revan’s eyes went wide and his face turned ashen, but he could only make muffled noises with the guard wedged between his teeth.

  “You are sick,” Porzia spat. “There is something deeply wrong with you, and that’s why Leo took Pasca and ran away.”

  Aris froze; the smug superiority vanished. He slowly turned back to face her, and cold hatred shone in his eyes.

  “Your own brothers couldn’t get away from you fast enough because they saw you for what you really are!”

  “Shut your mouth!” he screamed. “You will shut it yourself or I will sew it shut for you!”

  Aris clenched his fists, took two forced breaths, and reined his temper back in. Then he spun away from her and went to Revan’s side, where he began fitting a matching cap of electrodes onto his own head, his hands working in quick, angry, purposeful motions.

  “No no no wait, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it,” Porzia babbled, desperate to keep his attention on her. “It’s not too late to get your brothers back, you haven’t done anything you can’t undo yet. I can talk to Leo! I can help you!”

  Aris ignored her. He climbed onto a second gurney and bit down on a mouth guard. Then he reached out a hand and flipped a switch.

  * * *

  For long minutes afterward, Porzia couldn’t tell whether Revan was breathing.
>
  Aris took what he wanted from Revan’s mind and then simply left him there, hanging against the straps like a forgotten rag doll. He did not so much as check Revan’s pulse before opening a portal back to the real world. But even through her horror, Porzia had the sense to watch Aris’s hands as he dialed the settings.

  Aris’s goons hadn’t thought to search her pockets. In Porzia’s experience, most men had no concept of how much a woman could hide beneath full skirts—including but not limited to her portal device.

  But first she had to check on Revan, which meant she needed to get out of her cage somehow. Porzia reached inside her overskirt to access her hidden pockets and pulled out a fountain pen and a thin volume of blank scriptology paper. It was more a pamphlet than a book—only a few sheets folded in half and stitched together—though given the constraints of their current predicament, she was equally worried she’d run out of ink before she ran out of space on which to scribble it.

  Could she scribe a doorbook with this? No, even if she understood Elsa’s doorbook well enough to replicate it, she’d run out of materials.

  Materials … this scriptology paper and ink weren’t just a way to define the properties of a new world, they were objects with their own material properties. She needed to think like an alchemist—what could Faraz and Elsa do with just this, if they were here?

  There existed certain syntactical constructions that every young scriptologist was taught to avoid. Recursive, self-referential text causes the ink to heat up and destabilize. Could Porzia amplify that effect somehow, so the paper would do more than smolder?

  She tore off a scrap of paper, and in tiny, tight lettering she scribed three lines of recursive text. Atop those lines she then overwrote another self-referential construction that directly contradicted the first. And so on and so on, layers of bad text building up until the paper was soaked through with ink and turning hot in her hands. She quickly folded the scrap of paper into a tight little wedge and, reaching through the bars, jammed it into the keyhole. She pulled her hand away just in time to avoid the fizzle and pop and rain of white sparks that shot out of the lock.

  “‘Smartest person alive’ my ass,” Porzia grumbled. She grabbed ahold of the bars and gave the cage door a sharp shove, and the abused lock gave way.

  Montaigne tried to grab her through the bars, saying something about help in French, but Porzia threw him a withering look and dashed to Revan’s side instead. She patted his cheeks, desperate to revive him. “Revan, can you hear me? Wake up!” His chest rose and fell, but that didn’t necessarily mean there was still a person inside. She fumbled with the buckle at the back of his neck and took the guard out of his mouth.

  Revan’s eyelids fluttered open. For a moment he stared, dazed and unseeing, but then his gaze focused on her face and his brow scrunched in confusion rapidly transitioning into panic, and Porzia felt sick with relief that at least there was a mind left to be confused.

  “Can you understand me?” she asked, over-enunciating the words.

  “Yes,” he croaked, coughed to clear his throat, then said it again. “Yes … in Italian, I can.”

  “I’m so sorry I couldn’t stop him.” Porzia busied herself unbuckling straps, so she wouldn’t have to see his face as he processed what he’d lost. “But I watched Aris dial a portal back to Earth; he scribed this laboratory using the German Standard for return coordinates. I can get us out now.”

  Revan rubbed his wrists where he’d pulled against the restraints. “But even if we get out of this world, won’t we just be stuck on an airship instead? With that maniac for company, to boot.”

  Porzia helped him off the gurney and, given how shaky he was on his feet, onto a wooden chair. “Do you trust me?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then rest here and leave the escape plan to me. I’ll see you again in a moment.”

  She pulled out the portal device, set the coordinates to return to Earth, and flipped the switch. There was no time to consider what might be waiting on the other side; portals returning to Earth always deposited the traveler near the physical location of the worldbook, and that was all she counted on.

  The portal spat her out into the belly of the airship, an open room with access to the cockpit in front and another chamber at the rear. She could hear movements and voices, but this area at this moment was miraculously unoccupied.

  The horrid worldbook from which she’d just escaped sat close at hand on a table secured to one wall. Porzia snatched it up, read the coordinates out of the front, and reset her portal device. Then she checked the view out the window.

  Even if she could find a parachute without someone catching her first, she didn’t know how to operate one. But books were excellent at falling; all she would have to do was get back inside while it fell. The round little window creaked on its hinge when she opened it.

  Porzia held the worldbook out the window with one hand and flipped the switch on the device with the other, opening a portal. She would need to time this perfectly—as the book fell away and the distance increased, the portal would lose its connection to the scribed world, and if Porzia wasn’t all the way through she could get stuck in the frozen limbo between worlds.

  She took a deep breath and bent her knees, readying to sprint.

  Just as she was about to go through with it, Aris dashed in from the cockpit. “What are you doing? Stop!”

  “How’s this for creativity?” Porzia quipped, then she let go of the book and dove into the portal.

  The cold nothingness between worlds lasted two seconds longer than usual, long enough to give Porzia a spike of terror, but then she made it through into Aris’s lab world.

  “Hah! I knew it would work,” she said, giddy with the success of narrowly avoiding oblivion. “I don’t suppose you know the air resistance of a falling book?” She could work out the Newtonian mechanics if she had the variables, but there’d been no chance to sneak a look at the altimeter, so any calculation would be educated guesswork at best.

  “Falling book?” Revan held up a hand and half rose from his chair. “Wait—are you saying…”

  “Yes, I dropped us out the airship window. The fall would kill a person of course, but since we’re flying low and not over the water, it won’t destroy a worldbook.” Porzia took in his expression; he looked like he might be ill. “So we’ll just wait here a while until the falling part has finished. Err on the side of caution, shall we?”

  Revan gave a weak nod and collapsed back into his seat. “Please.”

  * * *

  The airship had been idling low and hidden amongst the rugged hills inland of Cinque Terre, not having traveled especially far from Corniglia. Even so, it took Revan and Porzia several hours to make their way through the treacherous countryside with nothing but moonlight to help them. Porzia counted it as a minor miracle that they managed to navigate their way back to the ruins at all.

  No one greeted them at the door, but she followed the muffled sound of argument and discovered the whole crew camped out around the dining room table. It was looking more like a war room than an eating area, with maps and diagrams and worldbooks scattered everywhere.

  “Thanks so much for the daring rescue,” Porzia announced.

  They all finally looked up, noticing her and Revan in the doorway. There was a flurry of questions and explanations and embraces. Porzia did the talking, sensing that Revan wasn’t ready to discuss what had happened to him; she would’ve preferred to keep silent about it until he was, but necessity was a merciless mistress. Everyone needed to know that Aris now possessed the linguistic knowledge to use the editbook.

  She was about to explain their gravity-assisted escape when her eyes fell on a bin of bloody bandages shoved in the corner. “What happened?”

  Leo said, “It’s … it’s Sante.”

  Porzia felt suddenly cold inside, as if her guts had been replaced with the emptiness between portals. “Where is he?”

  Faraz said, “He’ll live, P
orzia—he’ll be all right.”

  “Where is he?!” she screamed, and then she was racing for the stairs, with Faraz trailing behind her.

  She stopped short in the bedroom doorway; the sight of Sante lying in the bed, so pale and still, felt like a stiletto between her ribs.

  “It’s not as serious as it looks.” Faraz squeezed her shoulder. “We were actually quite lucky.”

  She knew he meant well, but it was cold comfort. Sante had been hurt. It was her job to take care of her siblings, but while her brother lay bleeding in the grass she’d been chasing after Revan, who was practically a stranger by comparison. Porzia had failed—failed spectacularly—at the one task that mattered the most.

  Who needed an editbook, anyway? This right here was what it felt like for her whole world to fall apart. Shattered like an inkwell dropped from the ruins’ highest tower.

  * * *

  Alek descended the stairs into the subbasement of Casa della Pazzia, a leather medician’s satchel in one hand, his heart hammering from more than exertion.

  Burak was waiting for him in a side corridor at an access panel, his eyes wide with a youthful excitement that Alek envied. “Did it work?”

  Alek squeezed the boy’s shoulder with his free hand. “An old scriptologist puttering around an alchemy lab isn’t much of a threat, it seems.”

  Burak grinned. “Come on, they’re almost ready.”

  The boy slipped through the access panel into the narrow space between the walls, and Alek ducked to follow him. Burak had become irritatingly adept at navigating these hidden passageways, but Alek still found them awkward, wood lathing close on his left and pipes crowding in on his right.

  They emerged into a large round room, the secret heart of the house, full of humming machinery and the gurgle of fluid through massive tubes. Gia and Filippo had their heads together, discussing the readings from a set of gauges—gauges on the side of an enormous glass tank that occupied the center of the room.