Illusionarium

by Heather Dixon

  Divinity had the nerve to laugh.

  “Wasn’t that so funny?” she said.

  “No, Divinity,” I said with an annoyed smile, unweaving my fingers from hers and pushing her hand away. “No, it wasn’t.”

  Divinity took a seat at the middle of the table, still laughing brightly. The table, an odd gathering of lanterns and silver, progressed in color from Constantine’s end—orange, set with brown whole roasted birds—to the blues of tarts, purple-brown soups and stuffed vegetables, green salads, where Divinity sat—to platters of golden potatoes and bright yellow curried rice where I sat. None of us took any food.

  “Sometimes I imagine this is what a real family’s like,” Divinity said airily. “Getting in fights and all. And Queen Honoria is the mother, and Jonathan can be my brother and Constantine can be the family pet. . . .”

  “Shut up,” Constantine and I said at the same time.

  Her delicate lips turned up, as though we highly amused her.

  I processed the evening in a haze of anger. Miners poured into the lobby, descending the stairs and taking seats at the table in their bizarre parade of priceless masks, wigs, corsets, coats. They spoke in croaking voices, and the chandelier shook with their footfalls. They flocked to Constantine, already serving themselves the food as he sat among them, unmoving and cold. They doted on Divinity, who laughed like wind chimes and sat on the table and teased them and flicked ears. They bowed to Lady Florel as she directed the masked guard. And everyone completely ignored me, at the abandoned end of the table.12

  Not quite ignored. A thin—bordering on starved—man, a little younger than my father, broke apart from the assemblage of the crowd. He was different than the miners. He wore shabby, plain clothes that hung on him like a clothesline, his hair was parted in the middle, and he didn’t wear a mask. He almost looked like an Arthurisian clerk. A little tag pinned to his pocket said PRESS.

  He approached me, timidly fiddling with his notebook.

  “Jonathan . . . Gouden?” he said.

  “What?” I said.

  “May—may I interview you? The paper would like an article on the newest illusionist.”

  I didn’t answer. He possibly took that as encouragement, and nervously sat on the chair next to me, pencil at the ready.

  “Where are you from?” he said, keeping his eyes on his notebook.

  “North.”

  The reporter didn’t press for more details on that score.

  “It—ah. It has long been the duty of the press to come up with an illusionist’s name for Masked Virtue. Do you feel there are any virtues that describe your nature?”

  I paused.

  “What?” I said.

  “The Illusionists are . . . named somewhat after virtues,” the reporter ventured. “Queen Honoria used to be . . . Florel Knight, and Divinity was . . . Jane Miller, and Constantine . . . was . . .”

  He trailed off and looked away. I followed his eyes to the marble above the lobby’s main archway. That marred bit of wall, the same Lady Florel had been staring at. He drank it in with a starved kind of hope. And he really did look starved.

  “Hey,” I said, a little concerned. “You look famished, what? Have something to eat?”

  The reporter tore his eyes away from the wall.

  “I’m not allowed to eat the food,” he said.

  “What? Why not? What a stupid rule.” I took the plate in front of him and dumped a spoonful of yellow rice and a pasty on it. “Eat, already.”

  I couldn’t believe I hadn’t offered him food earlier. He positively engulfed his plate with his mouth, spraying crumbs everywhere, a pasty in one hand and two yellow pears in the other. It could do a person’s heart good, if it didn’t make them sick.

  “May I take some for my wife?” he said, between mouthfuls.

  “What? Oh. Yes. Do. Plenty here,” I said.

  He stuffed his pockets. Either he was a very bad reporter, I thought, or Lady Florel had been right about things being dim in the rest of the city.

  “Get out of here, begone, you little pencil-pushing whelp,” boomed a familiar voice.

  The reporter grabbed one last pasty and fled, his frayed suit coat bulging.

  The man who took the abandoned seat wore gloves the size of dinner plates and hulked over me in an array of ruffles and buttons. He wore a tiny mask over the upper half of his face, and a pointy gray beard clung to his cheeks and chin.

  My silverware clattered to the table.

  “Booooy!” he boomed, and thumped me on the back. My glasses fell onto my plate. “What a show. What a show! So different from the other years; you have potential, I say, potential. Some would say aligning with you is a poor choice, but I say otherwise! Your illusion may not have won you the battle but it had heart, I say! Heart!”

  “King Edward,” I said.

  “Sorry I’m late, lad!” he thundered on. “Lost my way to the lobby, can you believe that? But now I am here and I am willing to offer you everything I have for the festival! It’s not much, I grant you—I only have half an aether stream to my name—but you have my airship at your service and that’s better than nothing! I have a good feeling in my gut about you. My gut!”

  “King Edward!” I repeated.

  And it was him. Right down to how he massacred the food on his plate and sniffed after each bite. I wanted to dive at him and give him a jolly good embrace. Instead, I leaned forward and spoke in a low voice.

  “Right!” I said as he attacked the pears. “King Edward. You’ve found your way in. My father must have sorted out how to illusion the door! ’Course he did! Right. Your Highness—turn around slowly—don’t attract attention—behind you, that cabinet being guarded? The cure is in that cabinet. If we can—”

  I stopped. King Edward was staring at me with wide, buggy eyes, fruit dripping from his hands and mouth stuffed with food.

  “Your . . . Highness?” he said.

  I stood, slowly, put my glasses back on, slowly, and the world happened around me s-l-o-w-l-y.

  This wasn’t King Edward. Something about him . . . the hairs of his beard, or the grooves of his eyes, or something in his face, or just . . . something . . . was . . .

  . . . off.

  In the periphery of my vision, masked guardsmen flurried, undressing the table, clearing plates and taking chairs away. King Edward, his mouth still full, clapped his hands with delight as the masked guardsmen took his plate and music sounded. An orchestra on the mezzanine had begun to play, and as the table was carried away in pieces, the miners filled the floor. Before I knew it, I was surrounded in a snowstorm of a dance.

  They danced like everything here in Nod’ol. A mess of stitched-together steps pieced from various dances of the past two hundred years. There seemed to be no particular rules or partners or order to the rhythmic chaos. They danced on the mezzanine and they danced on the stairs. Some buckled fantillium masks over their regular masks, and their movements grew fluid and drunken. I guessed the experience was rather uninteresting without an illusionist.

  In the whorl of chaos, a regiment of crimson order pressed through the mismatched crowd to Constantine, who stood petulantly still in the middle of the dancers, arms crossed. He straightened as the masked guards pushed the crowd aside, bearing a girl within their ranks. An utterly beautiful girl. Prettier, even, than Divinity.13 She wore a long ballgown with odd bits of lace and purple flowers pinned in her dark brown hair, pulled back in curls. Her lips and cheeks were rouged, but I knew her instantly.

  “Hannah!” I yelled.

  “Anna,” Constantine rasped, hurrying to her, forcing his way through the crowd.

  I plunged into the mass of dancers. “Hannah!”

  Constantine reached her first and grabbed her wrist.

  “If I may have this dan—”

  Hannah reared back and slapped him across his orange lynx face. It did not appear to affect him in the least. Hannah retreated, nursing her gloved hand. She turned this way and that, trying to pu
ll from Constantine’s iron grip. I shoved my way through, knocking miners to the ground.

  “I said,” Constantine growled, “May I have this dan—”

  “Nope, sorry, cutting in,” I said, throwing myself between them, breaking their grip and grabbing Hannah’s gloved hand.

  And in the .5 seconds of confusion between Constantine, the dancers, and the masked guardsmen, I broke into a run, dragging Hannah after. She stumbled but caught my lope, and we fled through the dancers, banging one of the arched glass doorways open and plunging into the theater gardens before anyone could even react. We leapt into the garden hedges beyond, which gave way to a hedge maze. Hannah matched my stride, her dress billowing behind her.

  “Find them!” Constantine hoarsely yelled. “And don’t hurt Anna!”

  The walls of leaves became thick and snarled as we turned corners and ran on, thoroughly lost.

  We only slowed when the yelling grew distant, the miners and the ballroom orchestra became a hum, and the hedge maze opened up to a small sitting area with crumbling marble benches and a dried-out fountain.

  “That—was close, right?” I said, panting.

  Hannah retreated against the leafy wall, twigs snagging her dress, her eyes wide with fear. A small curved scar marked her left cheek, just below her eye. I frowned at it.

  “Who are you?” she said, backing away further when I tried to get a better look at the scar.

  “It’s—oh—” I removed my glasses and pulled off my mask. Air cooled my face. “Hannah, it’s me!”

  Hannah gazed up at me with wide blue eyes—

  —and kicked me so hard in the knees I buckled over. Pain shot up my legs. My eyes watered.

  Hannah untangled herself from the overgrown twigs and fled.

  “Hannah!” I yelled, limping to my feet. My knees felt like they’d been kicked concave.

  I stumble-ran after her, catching glimpses of lace before losing her completely at wrong turns. I yelled her name, fervently, until my voice grew as hoarse as Constantine’s, and the stone beneath my feet became thick with weeds, and the hedge walls were a bramble of feral, untrimmed branches.

  “Hannah,” I said, coughing. I’d lost her.

  Or . . .

  Had I?

  My thoughts became as snarled as the maze. It didn’t make sense. Hannah was in the Fata Morgana infirmary, ill with the Venen. Wasn’t she? No—that girl was her, right down to the curve of her jaw and her rounded lips and devil of a temper. Hannah to the iota . . . except for that scar.

  And slowly, like the monstrous grandfather clock, my mind went clunk and everything suddenly came together like a well-oiled mechanism.

  That girl wasn’t Hannah.

  And she was.

  Lady Florel had said this world had schismed from ours. If Nod’ol had some of the same buildings as Arthurise, why shouldn’t it have some of the same people? That explained why Hannah was here! Or—no. Not Hannah. Anna.

  It explained King Edward, too. He wasn’t a king here in Nod’ol. Only an aether miner.

  Was I here?

  I laughed aloud, forging through the overgrown bushes, imagining myself running around in ugly Nod’olian clothes, then stopped when I realized I was running around in ugly Nod’olian clothes. I shook my head. If my Nod’olian self existed, Hannah—Anna—would have recognized me. Perhaps I hadn’t even been born.

  I’d stumbled into an overgrown topiary. The cats had grown into lions and the elephants loomed as woolly mammoths. In the distance, the theater, with its lit domes and pillars, glowed. Constantine’s voice still hoarsely yelled.

  Run, Anna, I thought.

  “Jonathan!”

  Lady Florel appeared at the arched entrance of the topiary, accompanied by two dozen masked guards. She gripped her dress, clumsily picking her way through the weeds. The crimson masked guard stood at attention around her, silent as always.

  “Well, that certainly was an exit!” she said breathlessly, though she didn’t sound impressed. “Jonathan, I would ask you not to leave the theater. It’s not safe here in the lower city. And far too easy to get lost. It took us weeks to find Anna, and now you’ve lost her again.”

  The guard poured around her and past me into the hedges of the twisted maze beyond. To find Anna, I supposed.

  “What, exactly, do you want with Anna?” I said, twisting a leaf around my fingers.

  “She’s a favorite of Constantine’s,” said Lady Florel.

  The twig snapped off in my hand. I wished it had been Constantine’s neck. I stormed through the hedge maze after Lady Florel with glowering anger, the remaining masked guard ushering me through the mess of leafy corners, bridges, and pathways, until the hedges behaved themselves into rows and opened upon the theater. The windows cast a glow over Lady Florel’s smiling face.

  Lady Florel never smiled. . . .

  I halted in the middle of the path.

  “You’re not Lady Florel,” I said.

  And for the second time that night, the gears clonked together and formed a whole mechanical picture. She wasn’t Lady Florel. And she was. I was speaking to the Nod’olian Lady Florel Knight.

  “You lied,” I said.

  Lady Florel—Queen Honoria—paused at the top of the veranda that ascended to the theater, and her eyes glistened at me.

  “No, Jonathan,” she said, smooth as a dream. “Not lied. It’s still the truth, all of it. Nothing means more to me than rebuilding Nod’ol. Nothing. If I have to find ways to other worlds to do it, to find more illusionists and orthogonagen and fantillium, I will. All I need is for you to illusion in Masked Virtue tomorrow. All I need is for the miners to enjoy the illusionarium. Then you will have the cure and can go home. I swear it. I’m not the Arthurisian Lady Florel, Jonathan, but I still am Lady Florel. It was a five-percent lie, at most. A small impurity.”

  “Where is the real Lady Florel?” I said coldly. “There weren’t two of you running around in Arthurise.”

  Queen Honoria smiled, then turned on her heels and hurried up the stairs back into the theater, the hollowness she left answering my question:

  Queen Honoria had killed her.

  CHAPTER 11

  I fell out of bed the next morning in my golden room, aching everywhere after the worst sort-of sleep of my life. My nose throbbed, my kneecaps hurt where Anna had kicked them, and oddly, my fingers hurt, too. I examined them. They looked swollen.

  I dressed haphazardly in a yellow arrangement of odd-ended clothes. Masked Virtue, their illusioning festival, began this morning, and the sooner I illusioned for it, the sooner I could get out of here. My door was locked—it had been locked and guarded all night—but on the floor next to it lay a steaming tureen of mush, toast, and eggs. Underneath the breakfast plate was a folded newspaper. I slipped it out and unfolded it, and found my picture staring back at me.

  It had been taken in the theater last night, just before I’d started to illusion. In varying shades of gray it portrayed me staring widely ahead, looking lost and frightened. My hair was a snarl of curls, and my soot-smeared clothes hung on me like a drowned rat. Around it, headlines percolated: Riven Restless. Sacrifical Speculations. And the largest headline of all:

  NEW ILLUSIONIST—

  A SAD DISAPPOINTMENT

  I frowned and continued reading.

  After her two-week disappearance to find a new illusionist, Queen Honoria reappeared with a new player for the Masked Virtue: a sixteen-year-old Jonathan Gouden. While his illusioning history is unknown, his first presentation to the Miners was considered a universal disappointment, as the boy inexplicably chose to illusion a miniature city made of ice, which, two minutes later, was destroyed and—

  I crumpled the paper and threw it across the room. You’re welcome, Press, for giving you my food!

  A gentle knock sounded; I pushed the plate of food aside just as Divinity opened the door a crack, revealing milk-white skin and one glittering green eye.

  “Queen Honoria sent me to fetch
you for the opening ceremonies,” she said. She opened the door a little wider and slipped in, wearing an emerald dress of corset and gathers and torn ribbons. She clutched the old biology book to her chest. “They start in about an hour. In the lobby.”

  Her eyes caught the crumpled newspaper I’d just thrown.

  “I read the article,” she said. “It was rather harsh, I thought. That reporter is so annoying; he always tells the truth. Are you all right? You look awful.”

  “I can’t wait another hour,” I said. “I only have a day and a half!”

  “That’s too bad,” said Divinity. She unfolded the biology book from her very fine chest and offered it to me. “You might need the hour, though. I brought you the textbook. I remember how nervous I was, last year. It was my first Masked Virtue. I hardly knew what to illusion. So . . . I thought you might like to study a bit. Before it begins.”

  I eyed her warily, hesitated, and took the book from her hands.

  “I—thank . . . you,” I stammered. I’d paced all night in agony, wishing I’d had a chance to get my hands on this book. Guilt engulfed me, remembering how I’d hated her. “I—I really mean it, Divinity. You have no idea how much depends on this, and . . . I . . .”

  I trailed off. Every page I flipped through had been drenched, blotted, splashed, and scribbled over with black ink, rendering the book entirely illegible. Divinity’s chiming laugh escalated as my hopes sunk like an airship on fire.

  I slammed the book shut, reared back, and threw it just left of her head. It ricocheted off the wall and thumped to the floor.

  “You know, Divinity,” I snarled, bearing down on her. She cowered against the wall, giggling like mad. “You are really lucky it’s against my upbringing to knock a girl’s head off!”

  “Do you even know what we do for Masked Virtue?” she said, countering me with narrowed eyes. “It’s a death pit! The entire Archglass fills with fantillium, and all the illusionists try to illusion-kill each other! And if you think I’m going to go through death again—”

  “Wow!” I said brightly. “We kill each other! What an absolutely unsurprising discovery and completely in keeping with this wonderful city of Nod’ol!”