Emma was calm and keenly alert. Although there was nothing on her person that an uneducated eye might recognise as a weapon, she had her hands and her feet, the silken cords woven in her hair, the pins that secured her veil, and the veil itself with the golden pomegranates hanging heavy from its corners. She was as deadly as she had need to be.
Mistress Artemisia led her up three steep flights. Each landing was barred by a door: the first of red oak, the second of mahogany, the third and last of night-black ebony.
There was no latch or bar on that door. It opened silently before Mistress Artemisia.
The passage beyond was ivory and ebony: Ceiling of ivory crossed with beams of ebony. Walls of ivory silk brocade. A parquet of marble in a pattern of ebony and ivory.
The air was starkly clean. It smelled of winter, of new snow and cheek-numbing cold. Nonetheless it was no cooler than it should be in an English summer, though that was wintry enough by the measure of India.
Very little ever surprised Emma, but this raised her brows somewhat. The mind that had conceived this place was of a most unusual bent. It was not, she suspected, Sir Willoughby’s. His art was of a different nature, tending more towards the mechanical than the architectural.
Mistress Artemisia glided down the long hallway. Her passage was silent even yet, though Emma’s feet in silken slippers whispered on the marble floor. She turned towards none of the doors that lined the passage.
At the end was another door, again of ebony. The rest had been starkly plain. This seemed so until Emma stood in front of it. Then she saw the subtle graining of the wood, and realised that it transcribed a swirl of images.
A wood by night, faintly illumined by starlight; a hint of shapes, human and animal. In the heart of them lay a face limned more in shadow than in light.
She had little time to study it: the doors had already begun to part. She committed as much of it to memory as she could: a curve of cheek, of lips, a pair of eyes wide set and seeming to look deep into her own.
There could not be a soul in those eyes.
Terrible enough that an automaton could be ensouled. If the very house one lived in could trap a divine spark, then nothing in the world was safe, and no soul could truly escape.
Emma shook off the chill of the thought. The door was open. Beyond lay a wide circular chamber like the chapter house of a cathedral. Its roof soared upward in Gothic splendour. Its floor like that without was parti-coloured black and white.
Here a central boss of pure white marble fanned into rays of ebony and ivory. Each ray culminated in a bay of carved stone. A canopied seat, likewise of stone, rested within.
In each seat, with the stillness of statuary, sat a figure. Here at last Emma recognised Sir Willoughby’s handiwork. She counted seven and twenty, three times three times three.
They were truly marvellously wrought. Not all partook of the Classical canons, though there were Adonises and Helens and dark-eyed witty Thaïses enough. She saw several that would hardly have looked amiss in the Rani’s palace; several more whose countenances bespoke the beauties of China and the even more distant East; Red Indians of the Americas, and full-lipped dark faces that Ratisbon would have found familiar.
All the world of human beauty seemed gathered here, male and female in equal measure—all but the last. That one, seated opposite the door, wore a face out of old Egypt. Its skin was ivory; its brows and the plaited locks of its hair were ebony, its long eyes painted dark with kohl.
At first she took it for the likeness of a female. The fullness of the cheeks and chin, the delicate curve of its mouth, had little in them of the male. And yet—and yet. Its shoulders were wide, its hips less broad than narrow. The hands that rested on its thighs were long-fingered and elegant, but with a suggestion of manly strength.
“Ah,” said Mistress Artemisia beside Emma. “A most interesting choice.”
Emma opened her mouth to deny that she had chosen. But the words never left her lips. She was here not for pleasure but for a dark and serious purpose. In her fascination with this place, she had nearly forgotten it.
She bent her head regally. “It will do,” she said. “Does it talk? Walk? Dance? What are its uses?”
The eidolon stirred. The effect was subtly disturbing, as if a graven image had come to life. It opened eyes of ebony set in ivory, and rose with a dancer’s studied grace. “I do whatever you wish, Highness,” it said.
Even its voice hovered between genders: deep for a woman’s, light and melodious for a man’s. It was a near match for Emma’s height: tall if it was female, middling if it were male. The long robe of pale silk that covered it betrayed little that would resolve the question.
And why should it? It was a machine. It had no gender but what its maker chose to impose upon it.
Emma gathered her wits before they scattered too perilously far. She had agreed with Ratisbon to linger at least until the sun had set. That was, by the light that slanted through high louvered windows, another hour or slightly more.
In the person of the Rani of Majipur, she leaned towards the eidolon, running a long, gilded nail down its flawless ivory cheek. If that cheek had been flesh, the skin would have parted and the blood sprung forth. This, whatever it was made of, did not even show the mark.
She drew back. Her lip curled. “Pretty,” she said to Mistress Artemisia, “but false. Have you nothing more convincing?”
Mistress Artemisia waved the eidolon back to its niche. As it retreated, its features showed a subtly disturbing hint of disappointment.
Mistress Artemisia ignored it. “How do you wish to be convinced, your highness?”
“I wish…” said Emma. She pursed her lips. “I wish to see a thing that I have not seen before. Something more than pretty. Something divine. Have you such a thing here?”
Mistress Artemisia’s brow arched. “Many have professed to find that very thing in this chamber.”
“It is very pleasant,” Emma said. “Your courtesans are prettily made; almost as much so as those of the Sublime Porte. Yet I had been assured that in Xanadu there is something more.”
Mistress Artemisia did not respond at once. Emma suppressed the urge to hold her breath. She had cast in the dark, thinking only to purchase time for Ratisbon’s enquiries.
It seemed that she had struck a mark, though what exactly that was, she could not yet tell. Mistress Artemisia’s expression yielded nothing. She studied Emma with care, as if with eyes alone she could pierce the paint and the veils to the spirit within.
If she had had such a gift, she would have called down the wrath of Xanadu upon the impostor. At length she said, “What you ask for comes at a price.”
“Indeed?” said Emma with evident lack of interest. “Does not everything?”
“I do not speak of gold,” Mistress Artemisia said. “You ask for something more. We require the same. Something above the ordinary. A thing that not every patron will possess, or if he possesses it, be willing to relinquish.”
“What is that, then?” Emma asked. She exercised herself to betray neither apprehension nor great interest.
“Give me your hand, your highness,” Mistress Artemisia said.
Emma’s suspicions were up and quivering. She fixed Mistress Artemisia with her haughtiest stare. The Rani of Majipur would most certainly not submit to the will of a common and casteless mortal.
“Your highness,” Mistress Artemisia said with studied patience, “if I am to do as you ask, I must receive this in return.”
Emma weighed the choices swiftly, while cultivating an expression of utmost annoyance and high-bred pique. At worst she would be unmasked and cast out. At best? She would discover a secret that, if Ratisbon had known, he had not seen fit to reveal.
Emma raised her hand without visible enthusiasm, barely troubling to extend it. Mistress Artemisia grasped it with surprising strength.
Emma recoiled from a sharp, pricking pain, but the strong white fingers held her fast. A bead of blood swelled on
the outraged fingertip. Mistress Artemisia captured it in a pipette and secreted it among her garments.
“How dare you—” Emma began.
‘Your highness,” Mistress Artemisia said a fraction too sweetly, “we take this drop of your living essence as a surety—and a promise. You will share this secret with no one not apprised of it, nor speak of it to anyone outside these walls. Will you so swear?”
“What will you do with my blood?” Emma enquired icily.
“We will keep it safe,” said Mistress Artemisia.
“By whose measure of safety?”
“This is Xanadu,” Mistress Artemisia said, “where crowned heads may rest assured that no word of their presence here shall ever be spoken. They have sworn as I ask you to do, and we keep their essence in our vaults, for our protection and for theirs.”
“Name one,” said Emma.
“You know that I cannot.”
Emma tossed her head so that the discs of gold sewn in the hem of her veil chimed softly, like flattened bells. “Very well, then. I shall keep your secret.” For exactly as long as it serves my purpose, she added in her mind.
She stiffened slightly under the keen edge of Mistress Artemisia’s glance. But it passed on. Mistress Artemisia released her hand. The wound had closed already, though the finger stung with disconcerting persistence.
Mistress Artemisia turned in silence and glided from the chamber. Emma followed, nursing that tiny yet nagging pain. It was meant for a reminder; it might serve also, in its way, as a threat.
o0o
Xanadu’s secret resided in the most ancient portion of the house, in the remains of a Roman villa. Time and later builders had altered its walls and imposed a roof, but the original shape was yet discernible: the rectangular atrium and the rooms surrounding it.
Where the pool must once have been was a pavement, brought perhaps from elsewhere. It too was Roman: a mosaic of strikingly brilliant colours, depicting dread Pluto on his throne among the shades of the Underworld, and Proserpina with her pomegranate, and the Earth above them white with winter as the goddess’ mother mourned her loss. Emma hesitated to set foot upon it, for she had never seen a pavement so fine, but Mistress Artemisia glided forth without a pause. Emma steeled herself to follow.
Past the image of the dark god on his throne lay a door. The chamber to which it led ran the length of the atrium’s far side.
There sat Pluto in the subtly inhuman flesh, with his Queen beside him, crowned with gold. Their crowns were set with dark jewels that glinted in the light of lamps—for there were no electric lights in this antechamber of Tartarus.
Their faces were pale and stern and still. Hers was pure classic beauty, almost characterless in its perfection. His…
That Grecian profile, those lowered brows, that full and faintly sullen mouth—for all its beauty, it lacked the purity of Classical statuary. This was modelled after a living face.
It teased her with familiarity. She had seen it once, or one like it. But where, or whose it had been, she could not recall.
That was rare enough to be aggravating. She took care to commit each line to memory. She would discover his name, oh yes, and know why his likeness had been set in this place.
Mistress Artemisia bowed before the eidola. As she turned, her face was solemn; she said, “These are the triumph of the master’s art. Before I speak further of what they are and what you may expect, I must exact from you a promise.”
“Of perpetual silence?” Emma asked, replete with royal boredom.
“That you swore before you entered Xanadu,” said Mistress Artemisia. “For this, more will be asked of you. What it is, and when it will be asked, I cannot tell you. Only that, at a time of our need or choosing, we will require payment.”
“My life? My kingdom? My soul?”
Perhaps Mistress Artemisia’s glance flickered. Perhaps it did not. “Your kingdom remains your own.”
“My life or soul, then,” said Emma. She was remarkably unafraid. This was a precipice, and she stood on the edge of it. She could leap, or she could flee.
She should withdraw. Ratisbon had had two hours and more to investigate. She could easily consume another hour in extricating herself from this predicament.
Here was mystery within mystery. She could not bear to leave it unsolved.
“I will swear your oath,” she said.
Her breath came quick. She made no effort to hide it. Even the jaded Rani would rouse for this, the alluring unknown.
Mistress Artemisia bent her head, though whether to Emma’s bravery or her folly was difficult to tell. She approached the wall behind the eidola and touched a hidden spring. With a soft click, the wall slid aside.
Within was a glittering maze of gears and wires and tubes. It was somewhat like the Catalogue in the Book View Café, but much more finely wrought. In the centre gleamed an equally familiar shape: a cabinet of mahogany and glass.
Emma had seen its very image in Sir Willoughby’s hidden laboratory. This was empty, its lid raised on hinges of brass. Its interior was thickly padded with crimson leather.
Now Emma had to force herself to breathe at all. “What,” she managed to ask, “does this signify?”
“A great thing,” Mistress Artemisia replied, “and a wondrous thing, and a thing that few others in this world have conceived of. Would you be immortal, your highness? If only for an hour or a day?”
“Is that not a contradiction?”
“Here you may escape the flesh,” said Mistress Artemisia, “and dwell in the purity of metal and glass, and be free of mortal frailty. There”—her elegant white hand stretched towards the automata on their thrones—“are the vehicles of your liberation. Or you may choose another: any that sits in the tower, that also has been granted this capability.”
“Transfer of souls,” Emma said. She nearly forgot to speak in the Rani’s accent. Even with the lilt of India, her voice was flat. “But…not permanent?”
“The limit,” said Mistress Artemisia, “is three days. So long and no longer may the body be preserved apart from its soul.”
Emma’s eyes widened slightly. Was this, then, what had befallen Sir Willoughby Smythe?
Too late she mastered herself. Mistress Artemisia fixed her with a penetrating stare. “You are not unfamiliar with these mysteries.”
“No,” said Emma.
“Where—” Mistress Artemisia restrained herself. “You in your travels, of course, would have seen marvels of which we in England can scarcely conceive. Yet this, I think, is somewhat of a novelty even to you?”
“Somewhat,” Emma conceded. “The ability to return—that is a new thing. Is it invariable? Has it ever failed?”
“Never,” said Mistress Artemisia. Emma detected no sign of falsehood, no hesitation.
So might Sir Willoughby have been, until he failed—or was caused to fail.
Mistress Artemisia rested her hand on the rim of the sarcophagus. “Here your body will rest, preserved in every semblance of life, while your self, your soul, takes pleasure in its freedom.”
“And there is your price,” Emma said. “If I break my promise, I lose my living body.”
“None of our patrons has yet done so,” said Mistress Artemisia.
Emma drew breath to refuse, or at the least to delay her fate. Before she could speak, an automaton appeared at Mistress Artemisia’s side.
It was, after those that Emma had seen, exceptionally ordinary and unassuming: a mechanical servant, rather tall, rather narrow, with a pale leather mask of a face, and glassy blue eyes. It was not ill made of its kind, but where those others but for their beauty could have passed for living flesh, this was incontestably a machine.
It spoke in Mistress Artemisia’s ear, too low for Emma to catch the words. She did catch their urgency, and Mistress Artemisia’s slight change of expression.
Emma braced herself. If the guardians of Xanadu had discovered Ratisbon, then she too was betrayed.
Mistress A
rtemisia turned back to Emma, but there was nothing in her face or demeanour to suggest that the imposter had been unmasked. “I cry your pardon, your highness,” she said, “but I am called away, and I cannot refuse. In my place I offer this servant, who has been instilled with every essence of the secret knowledge. All that I could have done, it also may do. I leave you in excellent hands.”
“Inhuman hands,” Emma said.
“Hands unmarred by human weakness. I might err. This automaton will not.”
Emma was in no way reassured. As she moved to say so, the servant moved also, brushing her living hand with cool leather over steel. Its eye caught hers.
Her mind emptied of words. Here was a soul, a living consciousness, laid bare for her to see.
But not, she took note even in her shock, for Mistress Artemisia. Its head was turned somewhat away.
Mistress Artemisia nodded briskly, oblivious to the communication that passed before her face. “May you take pleasure in your journey, your highness,” she said.
Even as she spoke, she had begun to withdraw. As the last words fell into silence, she was gone. Emma stood alone with the automaton.
“What—” she began.
“Later,” the servant said. “There’s not much time. Come.”
Its voice was completely different than it had been before Mistress Artemisia: quick, light, sharp. Its accent was educated, the intonation that of Oxford, with a suggestion beneath it of Belgrave Square.
Emma gripped its—his—arm. “Sir Willoughby?”
He nodded jerkily. “Go now. Explanations later.”
Emma held her ground. “Ratisbon?”
“Waiting for us. But not for long. Please, will you come?”
Emma let go his arm. Even as she took the first step, he sprang into motion. He strode out past the Lord and Lady of the Underworld, pausing only to touch the mechanism that restored the wall to itself.
o0o
The automaton set a pace that Emma could, with some effort, match. His gait was long, loping, a little ungainly, but it covered a great deal of ground.
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