Illusionarium

by Heather Dixon

  This mask covered my whole face. The eyes were furrowed to slits, and the mouth opened to rows of pointed teeth, as though it were yelling. I put it on without hesitation.

  Noon, December 22: my family would die in just hours.

  I would make certain they weren’t the only ones.

  The masked guard flanked me as I limped from my suite, escorting me into the vast halls and up stairways to the roof. It was like swimming; Nod’olians filled every inch of the halls, a susurrus of hoarse voices and masks and all of them wearing either orange or green. Venders swam among them, selling sticks with dingy ribbons attached for people to wave around. They had abundances of yellow.

  That didn’t bother me. I wouldn’t be winning for them.

  We arrived at a far west door on the roof, which was filled with more Nod’olians. High above, the sea of airships had congregated over the theater, with dozens docked at the docking towers that extended across the roof. In the distance, across the landscape of slopes and domes, I saw the pinprick of a beast mask skulking among the crowd: Constantine. Another distance away: Divinity. Each of them was headed to a docking tower that hosted a mass of airships with pennants in their color.

  I peered up at the closest tower; a single airship with frayed riggings and patched envelope bobbed at the top. Gold pennants hung from it like dead fish. Edward’s airship—my only airship in the game.

  It was at a disadvantage, of course. The idea was, we would sail to different parts of the city, fantillium mist would fill the air, and then we would drop into the city and hunt each other down on foot. Constantine and Divinity could disappear anywhere into the city with the help of their multiple airships, but I could not.

  A delicate cough sounded behind me.

  It was the dangerously thin reporter. He tremulously clutched his notebook, and, I noted, still wore the torn piece of yellow fabric pinned to his lapel. He hesitated, then produced a newspaper page from his vest.

  “I wrote about the girl,” he said haltingly. “I tried to give her a proper eulogy. Perhaps you would like to see it?”

  I fixed a frigid glare on him.

  He nodded and folded the paper back into his vest. He opened his mouth to say something, then closed it, then opened it; then finally, words came out.

  “What you did,” said the reporter. “Standing up to Queen Honoria. It was—noble—and—and good—and—virtuous—and—your name shows up nowhere and you’ve come at just the right moment in history—it—it all makes sense—”

  I stepped into the lift that led up to the docking platform, squeezed between two guardsmen. The reporter dared to follow, stopping short before entering.

  “The press,” the reporter continued, stammering, “well—me, anyway, that’s all that’s left of us—we’ve named you.”

  He beamed expectantly at me. I stared back at him.

  “Hope!” he burst. “Your illusionist name is Hope.”

  “Hope is a girl’s name!” I snapped, and slammed the grate shut in his face.

  At the top of the lift, Edward greeted us, wearing a tiny gold mask and huddled at the docking plank of his ship, a great hulking mass of Cower.

  “So,” I said, when we reached him. “You’re still allowed to help me in Masked Virtue, are you? After everything that happened?”

  “Oh—yes. Well,” he said. “The miners all agreed the game wouldn’t be much fun if no one supported you. But—but, my boy! I have great faith in you! Great faith in you, indeed!”

  “It won’t be misplaced,” I said, striding past him onto his ship’s deck. “I’ll make certain they both die within minutes.”

  “Oh. Wonderful,” said Edward, paling.

  Edward’s ship sputtered to life, engines churning, propellers spinning. The airships docked across the roof did the same, casting off their docking chains and all of us rising to the top of the Archglass. Among them flew an ornate ship with a bloodred balloon and crimson pennant hanging from it. Queen Honoria’s ship. I could see her on the edge of the deck, a dot of red, with something over her face. A fantillium mask. No—a fresh-air mask, so she wouldn’t breathe in the fantillium. Schisming underneath all those clothes, Queen Honoria? How close are you, exactly, to becoming a Riven?

  I stood on the deck, watching the waves of airships repositioning themselves against the backdrop of glass and broken city, memories choking me. I tried not to look at the deck floor, where Anna’s blood had been scrubbed away from the wood. Edward distracted me by thumping me on the shoulder, jolly as ever, as though he hadn’t been such a spineless fool the night before.

  “Where shall we sail, boy?” he boomed.

  I glowered at the landscape of ships. Oranges and greens. Where would Constantine and Divinity hide? Divinity would be the sort to tuck herself away, hiding until she could sneak up behind you and slit your throat. Constantine, on the other hand, would fight head-on.

  One of the airships from the ocean of balloons broke free of the rest and whirred closer to where we flew. It was the largest Nod’olian ship I’d seen, carved tiers lined with window and cannon and sails—though I doubted the sails did much in this stagnant city.

  “Sail to that ship,” I nodded. “Constantine’s on that one.”

  “The Argus? How do you know?”

  “It’s headed right for us.”

  “Head-on attack, then,” Edward said, laughing tremulously. “Very, ah, bold! As you say, of course! As you say!”

  Edward’s navigator steered us forward, and we drew near to the abomination of an airship. From the theater roof, now in the distance, fireworks boomed, glittering and dropping to embers in the watery daylight. The beginning of Masked Virtue. Distant cheering filled the air. A low groaning with harmonics of hisssssssssssh echoed through the buildings. And so it began.

  All along the city, in the distant beams of the Archglass, great clouds of mist and steam roared. Steam rose from aqueducts along the middle of the city. The mist masked the city below us, and soon the airships disappeared into the white billows as well. Steam masked the Argus. And when the fantillium mist hit us, I let it wash over me and coat me with ice. It deadened my soul and sharpened my senses. I felt alive again. Anna was right. Fantillium dulled the pain.

  Edward’s manservant handed me a line attached to the docking anchor. The same line Lockwood and I had slipped down to the theater with. He smiled encouragingly as I stepped onto the railing, ship creaking under my feet. Below, the abandoned city skyline rose from the mist.

  “Constantine first,” I muttered, towers slowing beneath as the ship slowed. “I will kill him like he killed Anna, but ten times slower and a thousand times more painfully.”

  “I—I say,” said Edward tenuously from behind me. “That’s rather—bloodthirsty—”

  “Says the man who eagerly watches Masked Virtue every year,” I sneered.

  I pushed off, line in my hands, and free-fell, my coat a shimmering sail behind me. I jolted and skated down the rest of the line, gloves burning, and it slid between my palms. I fell into an abandoned street at a crouch.

  Broken houses and pubs stared down at me. The line flipped back and whipped away into the mist.

  Masks appeared from the white billows. Orange masks. They fleshed and surfaced into figures of torn orange and brown coats and dresses. I twisted sharply; every inch of open street was now filled with Constantine’s supporters.

  They converged on me, drowning me in orange. They wrenched my hands behind me, grew bold when I didn’t illusion, and cheered with raspy voices. I waited for Constantine.

  And he came. Moments later, the crowd parted to receive him.

  His yellow-and-red eyes took me in, and he shook his beast-masked head.

  “You must really want to die,” he said.

  CHAPTER 19

  Grit, mud, and centuries-old cobblestone filled my vision as Constantine’s supporters shoved my head down, making me bow to him. Everything smelled sharply of rotting sewage.

  “’Lo, Con
stantine,” I said, friendly-like, as he knelt next to me. His boot had so many buckles it was obscene.

  “Ten times the illusionist I am, Jonathan?” he said, tangling his fingers in my hair and wrenching my face up to meet his. “You pathetic little scab!”

  I smiled at him beneath my mask.

  He released my hair, and without another word, moved his hands in and out quickly. The air between them flashed of metal and wisps. The illusion glowed.

  Above us, lightning flashed. The mist around us had begun to draw upward into storm clouds. Without meaning to, I was illusioning a storm. The pent-up anger inside me eked from my eyes and mouth like a fever. Raindrops began to ping on the people around us, surprising them. They must never have felt rain in their lives.

  Do you realize how powerful you are? Anna’s voice echoed in my head.

  My mind whipped into action as a rifle formed between Constantine’s hands. He was going to illusion-kill me the way Anna had died.

  Numbers. I wasn’t good at mechanics like Constantine, but I knew numbers. I knew how to manipulate them. And I knew chemical structures. Steel. Iron. Steam. An idea took hold of me, and I pulled to mind the first chemical I’d memorized from The Illusionist’s Handbook: iron.

  And placed a negative sign in front of it:

  I did this with lightning speed for each molecule and metal bond, forming an anti-rifle, with anti-pistons and anti-bullets, and as Constantine finished forming his rifle, a sleek construct of black iron, I had created a negative rifle. It emanated from me in flash-wisps of thought. Constantine raised the rifle to his shoulder, aimed at my chest, and shot.

  Almost shot. The rifle dissolved to nothing. His hands fell together, and he stumbled forward, as though he had missed a step. The crowd cried aloud, and Constantine stared at his empty hands.

  I exhaled slowly, regaining my swimming thoughts.

  “Nice try,” I said.

  Rain pattered across the crumbling cobblestones in watery staccatos. Thunder rumbled.

  Constantine’s eyes narrowed. Instantly he formed a misshapen pistol and pointed it at my head. He shot it in a flash of illusioned orthogonagen—

  BANG.

  The bullet went:

  Phffzz.

  And dissolved into the air. I’d managed to illusion an anti-bullet of iron just in time. The crowd at my hands released me and began to back away.

  “Ten time the illusionist you are,” I said. I rose to my feet, facing him with my mask of bared fangs.

  Constantine backed away. He shot bullet after bullet, illusioning new balls in the chamber. The steam offal encased us in haze. I met each bullet with anti-bullets, dissolving them in transit with the sound of ffzzt. Constantine yelled aloud.

  I took that moment and illusioned an anti-pistol out of it, casting it at Constantine. His pistol dissolved in his fingers just as he pulled the trigger. The bullet inside fell to the ground.

  “How are you doing this?” he yelled.

  The rain fell in sheets. I harnessed the wind, dropped the temperature, and conjured a gale of razor-sharp ice. It blew Constantine off his feet, sending him flying in a flapping mass of orange-brown before hitting the pavement.

  Thunder crackled. The Nod’olians around me drew sharply away.

  “Run,” I snarled at them. “Or I will kill you next.”

  They fled into the mist.

  Fair-weather supporters.

  Now I was alone with Constantine. He shakily tried to pull himself to his feet. I threw him back with a gust of frozen rain and, drawing from my experience with Lockwood, froze his hands and feet to the ground, solidifying his clothing stiff with ice so he could not move.

  I casually walked to him, smiling, as he struggled in a desperate attempt to illusion warmth. I anti-illusioned every wisp from his head.

  “Ice, that old thing,” I said conversationally. “I’m good at temperatures, you know. Because temperatures are numbers. And as it turns out—I am very good at numbers.”

  I illusioned a pistol. It was an ugly thing, with a misshapen barrel and tiny steam pistons that whined and leaked. It lay in my hands like a wet brick. It would have to do.

  “You’re him,” Constantine rasped as I drew near. He almost sounded frightened. “You’re—you’re the person—that—that writing—wall, whatever it was, legend talked about—”

  I laughed, incredulous.

  “If I were the Virtuous One, Constantine,” I said, “I wouldn’t want to kill you so badly. You disgusting animal, you half-human filth, you snarling little piece of muck, before I fantillium-kill you, shall we see the hideous remnant of human that lives underneath that mask? I can hardly wait.”

  With the illusioned pistol still in my hand, I brought my fingers up beneath his mask, tearing it away from its leather buckle. It skittered across the street. Constantine held his chin up, eyes burning with hatred.

  He wasn’t human.

  He had three faces. Like mine, his nose split at the bridge. It continued on to form another nose next to the first, with five nostrils. His mouths—all three of them—gaped open on the other side of his face, revealing sinews at his jaw, with extra tongues. They foamed at the edges.

  And his eyes. They were everywhere. Eyes and slits of eyes melted down his cheeks, misshapen and crusted. A thin sliver of gold-brown ringed the dilated pupil. The same gold-brown as my eyes.

  His curly white hair, brown at the roots. The same color as mine.

  What was left of his face. The same face as mine.

  He was me.

  Constantine was me.

  I yelled and stumbled back.

  Lightning flashed. Thunder crashed so loudly the pistol fell from my hands and clattered against stone. Deep gray of a virulent storm encased us, wind whipping and hiding the airships above in thick black clouds. I needed to rein it in. But I couldn’t illusion. My thoughts couldn’t form a thing.

  “Silly boys!” came a jingly voice from behind us. “I’ve found you!”

  Divinity.

  She rose from the alley across from us, laughing her horrible laugh that made the hairs on my neck stand on end. The pouring rain drenched her, her stringy yellow hair dripping over her sodden green coat, her dress clinging to her figure. An entourage of green-masked miners flanked her as she emerged into the open street. I glanced upward—a green ship was anchored to the nearest vertical dock. She’d followed Edward’s airship.

  “You know,” she said, beaming at me, “you accidentally taught me something, Jonathan. When you had taken over Queen Honoria’s illusion. I realized I can harness illusions, too! I’ve been in control of this storm for nearly the whole time!”

  Sparks ignited at her fingertips. The black pools of her dilated eyes echoed the flash, and the rain came in sheets, clouds fizzing above us in a whorl of black.

  “Divinity!”

  “You stole my airship ticket!” she screeched.

  Lightning struck.

  Every individual bit of me—esophagus, lungs, stomach, heart, spleen, all my splitting fingers and toes—suddenly splintered into a thousand shards, all at once, in blinding pain. White blew my senses out.

  My eardrums exploded.

  My nerves splayed.

  My vertebrae ruptured.

  My heart burst.

  My vision filled red and I surrendered, each minuscule piece of me crying for mercy from the excruciating pain.

  And—

  It disappeared.

  Cool washed over me, soothing my burns, and faded the pain away completely.

  I gathered my consciousness in pieces. It wasn’t quite an awakening, but rather, pulling myself together, becoming aware in shades and shards, like a dissected picture piecing together, settling into a world of white. It tasted of ice and snow. The pain I’d just felt was distant, like a faded memory, replaced in my soul with Quiet. Not happiness, not sadness. Just, quiet.

  The white receded into polar blue shadows. Shapes formed around me. Telescopes mounted on stands. Be
nches. I was on Fata Morgana! Dock three! The southern platform! That ruddy old thing with telescopes that played a tune and a lift that only worked sometimes! I walked down the platform, brushing the railing and benches with my fingertips. My splayed fingers and extra thumbs were gone.

  I’m dead, I thought. I said it aloud: “I’m dead.” And then I amended: “But—not actually dead. Fantillium-dead.” I examined my clothes and saw my gold coat and mask had gone, replaced by what I’d always worn on Fata: shirt, vest, trousers, cap.

  The mist receded further. Docked at the end of the platform was a Nod’olian ship, with creaking riggings and a pennant, held up by a balloon envelope that had been patched numerous times. Faded words across the hull read: the Compass Rose. And from the airship, a figure ran toward me, her footfalls clanging on the platform.

  Anna.

  I knew it was Anna and not Hannah, even though her scar had disappeared. I simply knew.

  She wore a purple ribbon in her dark hair, tied neatly in a bow, a long skirt, and a thick Nod’olian coat that flapped around her ankles.

  “Jonathan!” she said as she drew near.

  I scooped her up into a tight embrace, lifting her feet off the ground. All the pain and hurt and horror of her death released itself from me, the anger leaving me in tears, and I was glad she couldn’t see my face. I released her finally, after the bone-crushing hug, and dried my face quickly.

  “It’s the cold, you know,” I said. “Stings the eyes. It does that here.”

  “Oh just,” she said, grinning.

  She looked curiously around her, taking in the expanse of black ocean and bright colored ribbons of the northerly sky. Far away, lightning flashed in a distant storm.

  “Is this your home?” she said. “It’s beautiful.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. Cold air whipped my face. The city behind us faded in white layers of mist. “At least—it’s like my home. Is this real, Anna?”

  “No,” said Anna. “Not at all. I’m an illusion. This dock is an illusion. It’s all part of an illusion, inside your head.” She reached up and knocked gently on the crown of my head.

  “Hmmm. Ah,” I said, smiling, confused. “Quite an illusion. Is that what I would actually see? If I were truly dead?”