Illusionarium

by Heather Dixon

  Lockwood rolled his eye.

  “Ahhh—I—ah—I suppose?” Lord Glamwell wheezed.

  “Thanks!” I said heartily, and tucked it underneath my arm, Hope almost seeming to emanate from it.

  CHAPTER 14

  It was Lockwood who insisted we stay, undetected, in Lord Glamwell’s manor until I had the chemical structures in my head; then we would head for the theater. “Don’t you worry, Johnny,” Lockwood had said as I paced. “You won’t take long if you’re as smart as Captain Crewe said you were.”

  It was the first compliment I’d heard coming from Lockwood. I couldn’t tell if he was joking.

  Lord Glamwell had slunk off, back to his parlor, like a cuckoo clock figure getting ready for the next hour, and Anna cautiously led us away from the library, through the halls of fallen grandeur. The portraits along the walls had numerous bullet holes through them.

  “There’s Riven in the basement and attics,” she warned us quietly. “I’ve stayed here before.”

  “Stick to the devil we know,” said Lockwood. “Better Riven than the masked guard.”

  She led us to the kitchen, an enormous room with three stoves and numerous cupboards and fireplaces, and locked the doors behind us. Like everything else in Nod’ol, it was abandoned. Pots lay strewn about the stone floor, flour containers lay on their sides, licked clean. A broken table. The rancid smell of some vegetable gone liquid.

  “It’ll do,” said Lockwood, and he slung the rifles he’d brought from his shoulders and rested them against an overturned chair. His left arm sleeve had been torn and was soaked with blood. One of Lord Glamwell’s bullets had grazed him. I inspected it, declaring it “not bad,” but when Lockwood glanced at the wound himself, he grew sickly pale and averted his eyes.

  “Lockwood?” I said, realization dawning. “You’re not afraid of blood, are you?”

  Lockwood gritted his teeth and refused to look at his arm.

  “Poor ickle Lockwood!” I said.

  “Shut up and bandage it, Johnny.”

  I grinned. So! Here was one area in which I outdistanced Lockwood exponentially. Blood didn’t bother me in the slightest. I rummaged about the kitchen, shook the dust off a linen napkin, and had the wound bandaged in two seconds. The color returned to Lockwood’s face, which made Anna grin.

  “I have a healthy respect for mortality,” he said, examining the bandage. A grudging amount of respect glinted in his eye as he nodded a thank-you to me.

  To celebrate his Healthy Respect, we scrounged for food. Starved, all three of us. I regretted not eating breakfast that morning. Or dinner the night before. Or lunch before that.

  We found some old potatoes in a neglected bin, molding bread at the back of a cupboard, and a jar of preserves. Lockwood discovered a ginger tea biscuit, which he promptly bestowed upon Anna. Anna promptly split the biscuit into three even pieces and gave one to each of us. Lockwood promptly made a face at his.

  Meanwhile, I studied The Illusionist’s Handbook. It began with simple things, like temperatures and light. Fire and ice weren’t explained until halfway through. The breakdowns of wood and metals like steel were at the end. And it wasn’t just the formulas I needed to memorize—I had to learn how to form them, so several compounds and illusions would be happening at once.

  Anna quizzed me on the structures, which swirled in my head and solidified into bonds and letters. Lockwood quizzed me on the observatory entrance doors, which I had confessed were the doors I knew best.

  “Two doors, are they? Made of what?” he said.

  “Wood. Heavy walnut, with carved panels—three on each side. No—four. Four—I’m pretty sure there are four panels. Right. And there’s lions’ heads above the latches. And the latches are iron and have little florettes around the top and bottom, where they meet the wood.”

  “And you’re absolutely sure there are four carved panels in the door?”

  “Lockwood, you’re making it worse,” I said, digging my fingers through my snarled hair.

  Lockwood grinned.

  Anna quizzed me again, then Lockwood, talking to each other between intervals until they ignored me altogether, lost in their own conversation. I frowned at my book, trying to study. They wouldn’t shut up. Anna spoke of growing up on an airship, and how her father had so many books the ship was low-sailing, and he made a living for them by bartering at each port, though there wasn’t much to barter for. The world outside Nod’ol was, apparently, quite bleak.

  Lockwood, by contrast, talked about the places in the world he’d sailed to, places like Kowloon and Calcutta, their exotic foods and bustling ports and thousands of people and buildings. As they continued on, their conversation grew closer, and Anna asked him about his own family, drawing answers from him that I doubted he’d ever told anyone.

  “Actually don’t have a family,” Lockwood admitted, cleaning one of the rifles. “Mum died when I was four or something. Wasn’t much of a mother, anyway. So I grew up in the Arthurise gutters. Nearly starved to death before I was six. A boy found me and took me into his home with his family. Crewe, his name was. He joined the airguard and when I was old enough, I did, too. He’s a captain now.”

  “Where was your father?”

  “Don’t have one.”

  “Oh,” said Anna, coloring. “Right. Sorry.”

  “Why? I’m not. You know, I actually searched for him, before I joined the airguard. Thought maybe he’d want to see his long-lost son or something. Hunted him down through parish records and light sigs. Found him in Parii. Most pathetic man—coward, he’s not a man—you’d ever meet. Has maybe a dozen other children, not the same mother with any of them. Never knew about ’em, never cared whether they went hungry or not, only cared about his jollies. Piece of filth. I decided then I’d never be like him. Never.”

  “You’re not,” Anna agreed fervently.

  “Ha! Well, I’m not as noble as Crewe, anyway,” said Lockwood, though he looked pleased. “Crewe’s a straight bullet. Believes things, you know? Really believes them. Says the soul’s an airship, and you’ve got to steer straight for your destination, or the winds’ll blow you anywhere. So, I’ll stay on course or die lashed to the wheel rudder.”

  “My father believes something like that,” I spoke up, surprising them. I flipped thoughtfully through the handbook’s pages. “Every soul has a compass, he says. And if you don’t keep it pointed north all the time, you’ll end up miles away and lost. Even just a degree off.” I frowned and closed the book. “That’s what happened to Nod’ol, isn’t it?”

  Lockwood and Anna looked at me, confused.

  “It is,” I said. I pushed aside the broken chairs, pots and pans, clearing a space on the floor. I drew a line in the dust. “Nod’ol is a schism from Arthurise, right? Once we were the same world. But something changed. Something in the past made them split apart.” I drew a line breaking off from the other line, creating an angle.

  “What was it?” said Anna.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted to the floor. “Some of our buildings are the same. Like the Tower of London. So, after they were built. Fourteen-hundred, or something.”

  “And before Queen Honoria became queen,” Anna said, getting on her knees next to me. “She’s never been queen in your world.”

  “The airships here look stunted,” said Lockwood, setting his gun down and kneeling next to us. “Right? Like they haven’t progressed past the turn of the century. But they have airships, right? So, after they came ’round.”

  “—And we both discovered orthogonagen and fantillium at the same time—over a hundred years ago—seventeen seventy-nine—”

  I drew dates and events in the dust, marking each line and comparing historical events with each other. Venturing through the wars, massacres, discoveries, events of each world, we became more and more excited the closer to the schism we came. By the time we finished, a network of events and dates etched the dust all the way to the kitchen wall. Anna had painted a grim pictur
e of Nod’ol: an empire that had risen to massive power, building an undefeatable army of airships, then terrorizing the earth. Nod’olian monarchs, who had once been the same as ours, had been overthrown by those who mined the aether streams, and illusionists reigned.

  “Fantillium changed everything in our world,” said Anna, frowning at the timeline. “The rulers. Even the name. So many people went to illusionariums that my father said more people lived in dreams than real life, and he said it turned everything backwards. That’s when they started to call London Nod’ol.”

  “London backwards?” I said. “Wouldn’t that be Nodnol?”

  “Don’t use logic; they hate that here,” said Lockwood, which made Anna laugh. Lockwood looked dead pleased with himself.

  “Arthurise was once London as well,” I said. “But that changed, just after we discovered orthogonagen. And fantillium, too, I suppose. Everything changed after the discovery of orthogonagen. We suddenly had fuel to do anything we wanted. Aerial cities, rail travel over ocean—”

  “—Steel airships. Undefeated airguardsmen,” said Lockwood.

  “I mean, it frightened everyone. All that power,” I said. “It frightened the world. And we held an Assemblage—the Assemblage—where the people had Parliament meet, and they created a new government. Something that stood on principles and not power. The virtues of our past—of King Arthur and his knights. And we became the Arthurisian Empire.”

  Anna listened to all this with interest, fingering the ends of her curls like Hannah would always do during class. Lockwood unpinned the sword clasp from his collar and handed it to her. She turned the steel carefully around in her slender hands.

  “That’s the Excalibur medal,” Lockwood explained. “That means I’m an Arthurisian knight. Every time it pricks my throat, I’m reminded of the Assemblage and what Arthurise stands for.”

  “A knight,” said Anna, a curve of a smile on her face. “So, chivalry really does exist. . . .”

  Lockwood returned the half smile.

  “I wish Nod’ol had something like your Assemblage,” said Anna abruptly. She handed Lockwood the sword clasp, and pressed her finger at the end of the Nod’olian dust line, looking miserable. “But—Nod’ol did whatever Nod’ol wanted. And now—look at how far away we are.”

  We left the manor in poor humor, both learning Nod’ol’s unhappy past and anxiety of getting the cure weighing upon us. The late afternoon sun sent warped yellows and pinks through the never-ending Archglass above and cast shadows over the mess of bridges and ruinous buildings as we hurried through them.

  We had agreed that dressing like Nod’olians would be our best way to forge onward to the theater without getting caught, and we’d made a fast search of Lord Glamwell’s manor. It ended in the attic. Two Riven lay in the corner, beside pieces of furniture and old wicker baskets, dead. They’d appeared to have died long ago. I avoided looking at their numerous hollow eyes and splayed fingers as we dug through a trunk in the corner. The mess of clothes inside were torn and frayed bits of costume. We’d fit in nicely.

  I wore a black-and-white mask that fit uncomfortably over my face and squashed my glasses up against my eyes. Hannah’s mask was bright purple, and she jingled in an oversized man’s coat that drowned her in buckles and sleeves. Lockwood wore a combination of long black coats and a black mask. He could have been distilled into purified Dashing.21

  Now, minutes later, we rose from the lower levels of the city on Anna’s heels, drawing closer to the theater. And the closer we drew, the more labyrinthine the city became. Once we turned into an abandoned alleyway and drew up sharply; three Riven huddled over something with fur, smacking their lips as they plucked the flesh from its bones. A cat. Their many-eyed faces caught ours and instantly they dove for us, howling and snarling. We ran and ricocheted around corners and ducked under pipes until we lost them once again to the mercy of the maze.

  And we became lost ourselves, stumbling over walkways that twisted in on themselves, dead-ending through gates and up stairways that led to nowhere. I became more and more impatient. Dusk arrived, marking the fact that I had only one day left. Anna, seeing I was upset, put a hand on my arm. That rather made things worse.

  At times, civilization appeared. Airships hung by vertical docks, and the Nod’olians who lived inside them ventured down into the open areas of the maze, milling through broken brick shops and inns of rotten wood, laughing in hoarse voices and sharing fantillium masks, pressing them over their porcelain faces.

  “They don’t see illusions without an illusionist, do they?” I said as we carefully edged a group of gutturally laughing Nod’olians.

  “Of course not,” said Anna. “They just breathe it because—well, it makes them forget about how horrible everything is.”

  “Don’t know why; Nod’ol seems like such a lovely place,” said Lockwood.

  Masked guardsmen appeared among the crowd, walking through the people in even, measured strides. Everyone gave them a large berth, including us three as we casually walked away from them, turned a corner, and fled into more abandoned paths.

  “It won’t always be like this,” Anna said, rather defensively I thought, as we climbed over a giant fallen statue. The marble head of a former illusionist, years ago.

  “No, I don’t expect it can be,” said Lockwood.

  “I mean,” said Anna hotly. “It’s going to get better. There’s a—a—legend that things will get better.”

  “A legend?” I said.

  “Well—more of a . . . foretelling, or . . . a prophecy,” said Anna, twisting the curls of her hair, which Hannah always did when she was embarrassed. “The Writing on the Wall, it’s called.”

  Lockwood didn’t help things by “coughing” suddenly.

  “A prophecy? I mean, a real one?” I said as we picked our way over railway tracks. “Who made it? An illusionist?”

  “I don’t know the exact words,” Anna admitted, twisting even harder. “It happened ages ago. Over eighty years ago. The winter solstice festival that year, something really strange happened. During the main illusionarium. In the theater lobby, actually.”

  Lockwood and I had stopped, riveted.

  “What happened?” I said.

  “Words,” said Anna. “Words happened. They seared themselves into the marble above the doors. The head illusionist—that was King Ignis then—hadn’t illusioned them, and neither did any of the other illusionists. The words appeared on the wall by themselves. And when the illusion was over . . . the words didn’t disappear.”

  A shiver ran up my back.

  “What did the words say?” I said.

  “I don’t know the exact words,” Anna admitted. “But my father told me mostly what they said. They said the Nod’olian empire was going to be destroyed. And nothing would save it—unless everyone changed their ways and followed a virtuous path. And they said, a Virtuous One would come from another world and show us how to turn Nod’ol back into London.”

  Hairs rose on my scalp.

  “Everyone was frightened of it, at first. My father said because of The Writing on the Wall, everyone almost did change. But King Ignis laughed at it all, and he burned all the books and newspapers that printed the words, and he had the words on the wall destroyed, and—well, it all became a big joke.”

  “I saw that wall!” I said, remembering Queen Honoria and the reporter both staring at the marble that had been chiseled away.

  Anna sat on the metal rail of a track.

  “That’s why the winter solstice festival is called Masked Virtue,” she explained. “Because everyone made a joke of it. King Ignis changed his name to King Prudence, and since then, they’ve named all the illusionists after sort-of virtues, and they still have Masked Virtue every year. It’s all a big joke to them. It . . . it sometimes would make my father cry.”

  Anna’s eyes glistened at her hands.

  Lockwood adjusted the rifles slung over his shoulders.

  I placed a hand on Anna’s
shoulder.

  “It’s all right,” I said, kindly.

  “Done catching our breaths?” Lockwood said abruptly. “Theater isn’t far; I see the domes. Come on, Johnny, stop slowing us down.”

  Lockwood led the way after that, storming over the crumbling walkways. As we drew closer, the brick walls gave way to pocked marble and overgrown hedges. Laughter wafted over the foliage, and several minutes later we emerged from the weeds into an open pavilion filled with Nod’olian miners. Above us their ships bobbed, chained to the docking towers, and they milled and danced gracelessly about the terrace, drinking colored liquid from thin glasses, talking, laughing in rasping laughs, and sharing fantillium masks with each other. They all wore diseased-looking feathers, which hung from their coats and sleeves and masks, making the gathering look like a flock of drunken birds. Everything smelt of burned orthogonagen and sour sugar. Even the harpsichord music was out of tune.

  Lockwood took Anna’s hand and we pulled back against the hedge walls as crimson guardsmen appeared at the other end of the terrace. They silently dragged with them an overlarge man with a gray pointed beard, buggy eyes blinking through his yellow mask, and feathers jutting from his torn clothes like a ruffled blackbird. I recognized Edward—my miner—immediately.

  “His Highness!” said Lockwood.

  “Not in this world,” I said in a low voice. I hurried along the sides of the terrace, past the musicians and behind the table filled with scraps of food, still out of notice yet close enough to hear what was going on.

  At the end of the stream of masked guardsmen, Queen Honoria strode from the labyrinthine hedges, pistol at her hip. The music halted. Constantine flanked her side, wearing a tiger’s mask of orange and black jewels.

  Every miner in the pavilion ceased dancing, backed away, and bowed deeply. Queen Honoria ignored all of them, paying attention only to the mewling, whimpering mass of Edward that the masked guardsmen threw at her feet.

  “I—I—I’m not hiding him!” he whimpered, covering his face. “I swear!”