Mist, Metal, and Ash

by Gwendolyn Clare

  Alek stepped closer, peering through the distortion of the thick glass and the murky water within. Something large floated in the tank, almost the size of a horse, but with a sort of amorphous shape, wrinkled and folded. “Is that—is that a giant brain?”

  Burak bounced on the balls of his feet. “Isn’t it the best? I can’t wait to tell Leo that I got to see it.”

  Gia said, “Indeed—the great Pisano secret to creating an intelligent mechanical house is to use more than just mechanics.” To her husband, she added, “Are you ready, darling?”

  Filippo scribbled in a small notebook. “Yes … just finishing the dosage calculations.”

  Alek handed the leather satchel to him. “I managed to retrieve all the chemicals on your list. Casa was suspicious, but I suppose I appear convincingly harmless.”

  A smile flitted across Filippo’s face but didn’t last long; the gravity of what they were about to do weighed too heavily on him. As he checked the bottles of chemicals, he said, “I don’t know how long I’ll be able to keep Casa under, so the rest of you will have to work fast. We’re invisible—or, rather, inaudible—in here, but the effects of what we do will be quite apparent.”

  Gia led Alek and Burak over to a wall panel that resembled a switchboard, but with a black cord plugged into every single jack. Alek looked up, tracing the cords across the ceiling and down into the tank. Gia explained, “Casa was never designed to be disconnected from the house systems, so we have to pull the neural connectors out individually—all two hundred and twelve of them.”

  Filippo mixed the chemicals in a tin bucket. “Ready?”

  “Go ahead,” Gia replied.

  He climbed a stepladder and poured the chemical mixture into the tank. “Flooding the chamber now.”

  Alek glanced at Gia for guidance, but she held up a hand, forestalling him. Filippo clattered down the steps and rushed back to the gauges. “And … there it is, brain waves are dampened. Go!”

  Squeezing in between Gia and Burak, Alek began madly yanking connectors out. The mechanists were fast and dexterous, but even so, each connector required two hands to simultaneously unlock the release and pull. And if Casa regained consciousness and realized what they were doing, Alek shuddered to think what their fate would be.

  “Brain activity is starting to rebound…,” Filippo called, anxiety thick in his voice.

  “Almost there!” said Gia, finishing with her rows and moving over to help with Alek’s last connectors—209, 210, 211 … done!

  “We did it!” Burak crowed, and Alek let out a giddy, relieved laugh. But Gia pressed the back of her wrist against her mouth, her eyes moist with tears.

  “I apologize,” said Alek. “This is no cause for celebration.”

  “Casa has never been isolated from all stimuli before—I dread the harm it will do to an already unstable mind. In doing this, we may be killing Casa,” she said.

  Filippo smothered her in a tight embrace, then pulled away to say, “I’m so sorry, darling, but Alek and I must get to Firenze posthaste.”

  “I know, I know,” Gia said, dabbing at her eyes with her sleeve. “Garibaldi on the loose, and the Order without a leader.”

  Alek kissed her goodbye on her damp cheeks, in the Italian fashion. “Keep your spirits up, Gia. There’s work still to be done.”

  21

  IN GOD’S NAME I HAVE RECORDED THE WEATHER DAILY AND WITH DILIGENT ATTENTION, AND IN ORDER TO SEE FROM WHICH ASPECTS THE CHANGES OF WEATHER MAY COME.

  —Maria Margaretha Kirchin

  Elsa let Faraz go after Porzia and stayed behind with Revan. He looked dazed and calm in a manner suggestive of shock, and she hadn’t the first clue what to do for him.

  “Revan, I … I’m so sorry, I never should have let you stay on Earth.” Speaking Italian with him felt like one more nail in the coffin of their old friendship.

  “Nobody ‘let’ me,” he said. Then, as if unsure what else to do, he offered her the somewhat battered worldbook he was holding. “There’s some old white guy still locked up in here.”

  Elsa took the worldbook from him and turned it over in her hands. Usually worldbooks felt inviting to the touch, vibrating like the purr of a contented cat, but she recognized this one as the linguistic laboratory from Aris’s hidden bookshelves. A hot wave of nausea rolled through her; she had kissed the person who’d then turned around and performed this horrific violation upon her oldest friend. The memory of her flirtation with Aris, however brief, felt like a putrescence she needed to purge from her body.

  She almost confessed all this to Revan, but decided against it. How could it possibly help for her to unload her guilt onto him?

  Instead, she said, “We were too young to remember this, but there was a time when Veldanese was stolen from all of us. Our world was rewritten to make us speak French. Once Jumi wrested control of our worldbook, she had to reconstruct our language from memory—no, not even from memory, more like from the silhouette shapes where the memories had been.”

  “So you think I can relearn it.” His voice held no hint of hope, and if she were being brutally honest, Elsa would admit she couldn’t guess whether Aris’s machine had done permanent damage without first examining it.

  Nevertheless, she said, “When you’re ready to try, I believe you can. For now, just rest.” She raised her voice to address the others. “We should all get some sleep while we still can.”

  Leo snorted. “You think my brother is sleeping tonight?”

  “I think Aris has hours of studying to do before he’ll be prepared to actually use the editbook. Reading Veldanese is just the first step.”

  Vincenzo’s mouth twisted into a grim line. “Besides, they could be anywhere. It’s a bit hard to run off to battle if we don’t even know where the battlefield is.”

  “We have one of Aris’s worldbooks,” Leo protested. “We should at least try using the tracking map.”

  Elsa tossed the worldbook on the table. “Aris knows I used his carnevale mask to track him to Trento—he won’t make the same mistake again. If we get a location off this book, it’ll be a diversion, or a trap, or some nasty combination of the two. We’re going to need fresh ideas.”

  So she went upstairs to find a bedroll and a spare patch of floor—for the few hours of night that were left, at least.

  Someone shook Elsa awake mere moments after she lay down. Or it seemed that way, until she peeled her eyelids open to see the glow of early morning through the window glass.

  Leo hissed in her ear, “I think I have it! Come on!”

  Blearily, Elsa shrugged on her leather vest and shoved her feet into her boots and—without properly tightening the laces on either—picked her way around the sleeping children to follow Leo. He’d roused Faraz, too, who joined them in the hall, running a hand over his mess of sleep-matted curls.

  As Leo led them down the narrow stairs, he kept glancing over his shoulder with a wild look in his eyes. Elsa couldn’t tell whether it was excitement or exhaustion. “Napolitano weather reports!” he announced. “I finally remembered.”

  Elsa exchanged a look with Faraz, but he seemed equally mystified. She said, “Are we … supposed to know what that means?”

  “My father,” Leo said impatiently. “He’s been receiving weather reports from Napoli. I found them in his study—didn’t think much of it at the time.”

  “And now you do think much of it?” Elsa rubbed the sleep from her eyes.

  Leo explained, “Napoli is the seat of power for the Kingdom of Two Sicilies—the kingdom my grandfather and uncle died fighting against.”

  “So it’s on Garibaldi’s vengeance list,” Faraz concluded.

  Leo nodded. “Right at the top.”

  They arrived at the former dining hall, now more of a strategic center, where Vincenzo was scowling over a half-sketched map.

  “Everybody here now? Good,” Vincenzo said. “I’m trying to work out the lines of sight from memory, but I can’t be sure.”

  At
Elsa’s blank look, Leo said, “Weather reports. You need direct sunlight to operate Archimedes mirrors.”

  “Are there mirrors in Napoli?” Elsa asked, trying to keep up.

  “Only the largest array ever built,” Vincenzo said sourly. “They’re set up to face the bay, to light enemy ships on fire, but if Garibaldi gets control of them he could turn the mirrors on the city itself. He’d be able to target both the royal palace and the garrison.”

  Elsa chewed her lip. “I don’t know … If his plan is to use the Archimedes mirrors, what does he need the editbook for?”

  “Maybe to take control of them?” Vincenzo said. “The mirror towers are well secured.”

  Faraz said, “Wait—if Aris can change anything with the editbook, why doesn’t he just scribe his father onto the throne of a unified Italy?”

  Elsa shook her head. “Not worth the risk. If he were too specific, he could accidentally textualize Garibaldi, damaging his father’s mind like what happened to Simo. And not specific enough would mean someone else received the instant promotion to monarch. Anyway, the editbook doesn’t change memories of the past; how long do you think the new regime would last with everyone remembering it wasn’t supposed to exist?”

  Leo said, “A show of power, though, forces the people to relinquish control more or less of their own will. War is familiar and therefore yields predictable results. And what would be more fitting than toppling the Kingdom of Two Sicilies with Archimedes mirrors—the same kind of weapon that sank my grandfather’s ships?” He winced, as if it pained him to get inside his father’s logic. “If there’s even a small probability that we’ll be able to intercept them, we have to go to Napoli.”

  Vincenzo jabbed his finger at a place on the city map he’d been sketching. “I should be able to get us into this tower. From there we can figure out how exactly Garibaldi plans to use the mirrors.”

  “All right, I’ll get the doorbook. But what about Porzia?” Elsa didn’t like the thought of going into battle with their team incomplete.

  Faraz shook his head. “I don’t think we could pry Porzia away from Sante’s side for the end of the world. And I mean that literally.”

  * * *

  They came through the portal into an open space that might have once been a courtyard or piazza, though to Elsa’s eyes it looked as if the city had cannibalized it. The back sides of newer buildings encroaching on an incomplete remnant of the old city walls. A round stone tower loomed large, built into the wall as a guard tower and later heightened and repurposed. The mirror tower’s door looked fortress-thick and was flanked by a pair of guards.

  Vincenzo approached the guard on the left and recited a code phrase that Elsa didn’t quite catch because he spoke it in Napolitano dialect. The guard on the right shouted at them to leave, and the guard on the left unholstered his sidearm and shot his partner in the chest. The gun’s loud report kicked Elsa’s heart into high gear, and Faraz muffled a yelp of surprise.

  Elsa was starting to get a handle on the differences in phonology and grammar, so she understood when the guard said, “It took me two years to build the cover I’ve just blown. You better be right about this.”

  Vincenzo patted down the dead guard’s body, retrieving a set of keys, and then he and the Carbonaro unlocked the door’s two-key system together.

  Vincenzo tossed his set of keys to Leo and waved them through. “I’m right behind you—just need to stash the body out of sight.”

  Inside the tower was a staircase, dimly lit by small square windows. The original structure was maybe three or four stories high, and the newer construction doubled its height. At the top was a locked hatch, but apparently one key was sufficient now, since Leo got them through. They climbed out onto the exposed tower top.

  An enormous metal hutch dominated the center of the tower; from the hinges, Elsa could tell it was built to fold down, presumably to reveal the mirror hidden within. Immediately below them to the south, a broad bay glittered with reflected sunlight. The choked streets wound up away from the water into hill country to the north, and on the eastern horizon loomed a conical mountain with two peaks.

  Leo produced a telescoping spyglass and held it to his eye, examining the other towers arrayed around the bay. “No activity.”

  “Perhaps we’ve arrived before them?” Faraz offered.

  Elsa shook her head. “Aris doesn’t require physical proximity to use the editbook. In fact, he must be off-world in order to scribe changes to this world.”

  Leo said, “Ricciotti will want to observe the fall of Napoli firsthand, but even assuming Aris took the airship back to Trento to get him, they had several hours’ head start.”

  “The sunlight’s less intense in the morning,” Faraz said. “It has to pass through too much atmosphere. They could be waiting for a better angle of incidence.”

  Vincenzo emerged from the hatch behind them. “Any sign of them yet?”

  Leo shook his head. “Nothing out of the ordinary that I can see.”

  They waited in tense silence for several minutes. Leo scanned the city with his spyglass; Vincenzo paced around the tower top. Elsa familiarized herself with the layout of Napoli as best she could from their vantage point, in case she would need that knowledge later; the city was difficult to discern from above, a jumble of red-tile roofs swallowing the streets.

  Vincenzo’s hands tightened on his weapons belt, and he finally said what they were all thinking. “Pig of a god! We’ve gambled on the wrong city.”

  But just as he finished speaking, a tremor shook the tower beneath their feet. Elsa held out her arms and bent her knees, like keeping balance on a moving train. She had no context for what the quake could mean, but she followed Faraz’s gaze: a great billowing mass of gray was pouring into the sky from the mountain’s highest peak.

  “What … what’s happening?” Elsa breathed.

  “That,” said Faraz, “is a Plinian volcanic eruption. They’re using the editbook to trigger a natural disaster.”

  Vincenzo stared in horror. “The prevailing wind is supposed to come from the west.”

  For a second Elsa didn’t catch his meaning, until she realized they were all looking east toward the mountain, and the wind was in their faces. The anomalous wind would carry that massive cloud of suffocating hot ash straight to the city.

  Grimly, Leo said, “Weather reports for Napoli. They were never about the mirrors.”

  On ground level below them, panic was already spreading. People flooded through the narrow streets, fighting their way toward the port. Elsa’s view of the docks was partially obscured from where they stood, but she was willing to bet there weren’t near enough boats to carry the entire population of Napoli out of danger.

  She said, “What do we do?”

  Leo shielded his eyes with one hand. “Judging from the wind direction, I believe our options are to run home and save our own hides, or stay here and get buried in hot ash along with the whole city of Napoli.”

  “There has to be something we can do.” Elsa pulled out her laboratory book and portal device. “We’ll … I don’t know, change the winds, if we have to.”

  “Elsa, it’s one thing to stick a nozzle on a canister of liquid nitrogen. That was merely impressive. This,” Leo said, gesturing wildly, “this is impossible! It could take days to design a functional weather machine.”

  To her surprise, Faraz—reserved, practical Faraz—was the one who said, “Then there’s hardly time to argue about it, is there? We have to try.”

  Elsa passed the lab book to Vincenzo to guard. He took it but protested, “I can’t just stand here doing nothing.”

  “Then stand here making sure the world we’re inside of doesn’t get destroyed by fire raining from the sky,” she said. “Good enough?”

  He reluctantly acquiesced, and Elsa took Faraz and Leo through a portal into her laboratory. As soon as they arrived, she began to delegate. “Leo, start designing a power source; regardless of the specifics, a machin
e that can alter the weather will require a great deal of power. Faraz, walk me through the atmospheric chemistry.”

  Faraz nodded. “We need to create a high-pressure system over the city, so the surface air currents are redirected away from the most heavily populated area.”

  “So essentially, we have to pull down on a very large pocket of atmosphere.” Elsa felt a nascent grin tugging at her lips, because Aris had already given them the solution in his maze world. “How do you boys feel about a directional gravity generator?”

  Faraz’s brow knit together. “Is … is that a thing?”

  “It is now.”

  “Completely impossible idea,” Leo added. “I love it.”

  * * *

  They rolled the weather machine through the portal in pieces, needing three separate trips to transport all the components to Earth. To complete it, they repurposed the Archimedes mirror into a parabolic dish, though it was so heavy Leo had to rig a small crane to detach it from its mounting and position it to face upward.

  The final stage of assembly atop the mirror tower was a race against time. Elsa checked the sky with Leo’s spyglass and fought against the shock of panic beneath her sternum. The volcanic ash cloud rose in a straight column for an incredible height and then spread out, as if intending to blanket the landscape. Lightning flashed around the column, and Elsa could make out red streaks falling in long arcs around the peak—masses of still-glowing lava ejected high into the sky, and cooling into hard rock as they fell.

  Veldana had no natural disasters. Witnessing one of Earth’s, it seemed impossible to Elsa that this wasn’t the end of the whole world.

  “We’re ready!” Leo called, as he climbed down off the machine, the last bolts tightened and the wrench tucked into his belt. It was a mad creation, cobbled together from whatever components they could think of, without any testing or time to double-check their calculations. Ready was a relative term.