“Really…” Porzia stretched the word out like caramel. She got up from the chair and came around to the front side of the desk. “Have you finally come to your senses? Going to tell me what it is Elsa’s hiding?”
“No time for that,” he said impatiently. “Grab the keys! We have to get into the Corniglia ruins.” Ruined or not, the castle was still presided over by the Pisano family.
Porzia cast him a skeptical stare and planted her hands on her hips. “First off, there are only two trains a day to Cinque Terre, so no one’s going anywhere tonight. And second, you’ve gone insane if you think I’m going to take a trip out to the ruins now, of all times. I can’t leave Casa unattended for a whole day with Mamma out of town.”
“No need to stay on my account,” Casa said placidly.
Porzia rolled her eyes, exasperated. “I didn’t mean to imply you needed supervising, Casa—but your occupants do.”
“Hmph,” replied the house. “I am perfectly capable of herding those squalling human progeny in your absence.”
Leo raised an eyebrow. “Right. Because referring to the children as ‘squalling human progeny’ really instills confidence in your caretaking abilities.”
“See? I simply can’t get away,” said Porzia.
He shrugged. “That’s fine. I know how to find the place, so if you lend me the keys—”
“Absolutely not!”
“Hmm,” Leo said, pursing his lips as if Porzia were a troublesome engine. “Think of it this way: Would Gia be angrier with you if you lent me the keys, or if you abandoned the children?”
“I’m not going to do either,” Porzia said through gritted teeth.
“Please. It’s important.”
She folded her arms cattily. “Important enough you’ll tell me what Elsa’s hiding, and why you’re going to such lengths to help her?”
“Her life is not a story written for your amusement! There are larger forces at work here than our ridiculous games. I keep quiet for her protection,” he said, though this was not entirely true. Actually, he thought it might be better to have Porzia and Faraz informed and ready to assist, but he knew he had to respect Elsa’s wish for secrecy if he wanted her to accept his help.
“You think this amuses me?” Porzia said indignantly. “Casa belongs to my family—I am responsible for everything that goes on under this roof. If I am overinquisitive, it is with good reason. Leo, she has you in her thrall. What if you are the one who needs to be protected from her?”
Was that jealousy he read in the tightness of her lips? Was that what it all came down to—Porzia and her carefully calculated plans to acquire a mechanist husband? He said, “You have no claim on me. We’re not betrothed. My life is mine to spend as I will.”
Porzia jerked as if the word betrothed had been a slap. Her eyes went wide, then she stalked across the room, fished a ring of keys out of a drawer, and threw it—hard—at Leo’s chest. He was caught off guard, and the key ring hit him and fell to the carpet. He knelt to retrieve it.
“There,” Porzia spat. “Go get yourself killed for all I care.”
Leo stared at the keys. He shouldn’t have said what he did. Whatever else Porzia intended, she’d been a good friend to him, and even now she did not withhold from him what he needed. “I hope it doesn’t come to that—anyone dying—but it might.” He paused. “I’m sorry.”
She made a frustrated noise in the back of her throat. “You’re impossible. Why can’t you simply explain what’s going on?”
“Because it’s not mine to explain,” he said, and left with the keys.
* * *
Elsa gently placed the burnt books one at a time into the carpetbag, which still held a lingering smell of smoke from the last time she’d transported them. She tried not to think too much about what she was doing. A grain of hope was necessary, but too much hope could easily transmute into crushing disappointment. She tried to think of Leo’s plan not as the miraculous solution to rescuing her mother that she so desperately wanted it to be, but simply as one more avenue of inquiry to pursue.
Elsa jumped when Leo burst through her door without knocking, and she nearly upended the inkwell on her writing desk. “By all means, let yourself in,” she called into the sitting room.
He came to stand in the doorway of her study. Instead of replying to her quip, he said, “I think we should tell Porzia and Faraz what’s happening.”
Elsa looked up from straightening her scriptology supplies. “What! Why?”
“We need Porzia, and not just for the keys,” he said, holding up the key ring. “The Pisanos are not a bridge we want to burn.”
“Have you told them all your secrets?” she asked bitingly.
“I’ve told them … enough. I know it’s a risk telling anyone, but I vouch for them both.”
Elsa scowled at him. How was it someone so proficient at lying could, at other times, manage such raw sincerity? His unguarded expression unnerved her. Jumi had raised her to be self-sufficient and taught her that depending on others was a kind of weakness. But here was this strange boy practically begging her to share her confidence.
Still resistant, Elsa said, “It’s not necessary for them to know.”
“You can’t know what’s necessary when you keep yourself sequestered away from anyone who might help you. If you hadn’t kept the books a secret, we could have gone to repair them two days ago. How much more time are you willing to lose because you refuse to trust people?”
“Says the boy who lies about everything to everyone,” she retorted.
Leo gave her a steady, serious look, his eyes catching the lamplight like twin pools of molten bronze. “My lies don’t matter—my family isn’t coming back.”
Elsa rubbed her face with her hands, wondering if all her meticulous hours of book repair had indeed been needless. “Fine. Fine! I’ll do it.”
Leo instructed Casa to ask the others to meet them in the library. Elsa dragged her heels on the way downstairs, still unsure this was a wise idea. When all four of them were settled in the plush library armchairs, Elsa told them about Jumi’s abduction as succinctly as she could, in a flat tone, without looking them straight in the eyes.
“Wait,” Porzia interrupted, “so you don’t know what became of the Veldana worldbook?”
“No,” Elsa said, her throat tightening.
Porzia covered her mouth with one hand, her eyes wide as saucers at the horror of losing such a world.
Faraz leaned forward in his seat. “And you think this Montaigne fellow may have left a clue behind in one of his worldbooks.”
“They—whoever ‘they’ are—could not have gotten into Veldana without Montaigne’s help, and he always kept his notes and papers inside scribed worlds.” Elsa turned to Leo. “We should get to sleep. It’ll be an early morning.”
She stood and left the library without giving Porzia and Faraz a chance to formulate any more questions. She’d done what Leo asked of her, but she didn’t relish the idea of hanging around to satisfy their curiosity with more sordid details. She’d made it halfway down the hallway before Porzia followed her out, running to catch up with her.
“Wait,” the other girl called.
Elsa stopped and turned. “I have nothing else to say on the matter.”
“But I do,” she said. “Elsa, I’m … I’m so sorry. You’re more than a guest in my home, you are a refugee in a sanctuary, and I fear I’ve treated you rather poorly.”
Elsa, taken aback, said, “I was not fishing for apologies.”
Porzia rested her hands on Elsa’s shoulders in a distinctly maternal gesture, and though Elsa had never thought of Porzia as much of a caretaker, she supposed being the eldest of four children might have something to do with it. “We will find your mother,” she said. “I swear it.”
* * *
Alek was beginning to wonder if the council meeting would continue all night. Perhaps some archaeologist of the future would unearth the Order’s headquarters in Firenze an
d find their bones still seated in their chairs.
A movement out of the corner of his eye caught his attention. The door stood ajar, with Gia Pisano’s face framed in the opening. Alek glanced across the table at Filippo, whose focus was so strongly locked upon the discussion that he had not noticed the arrival of his own wife. Alek hid a smile—paying attention to more than one thing at once had never been Filippo’s strength. So Alek levered himself out of his seat and slipped from the room as quietly as he could into the grand entrance hall.
The latch clicked behind him, and he bent to accept the kisses Gia placed upon his cheeks.
“How goes it?” she said, her voice lowered so as not to disturb the people inside.
Together they drew away from the closed council room door, with Alek saying, “About as well as you might expect. One pazzerellone murdered and another missing … it’s, well, it’s a madhouse in there.”
For that pun Gia cast him an arch look. “Too many hypotheses, too few data, zero plans of action?”
Alek nodded. “That about sums it up.”
“All right, then,” she said, ever the voice of practicality. “Let’s find ourselves a room with a blackboard and work through the problem, see if we can’t make some progress—something Filippo can bring to the table tomorrow.”
Alek let her lead the way, keeping the protests of his tired bones to himself. He really was getting too old for this.
* * *
Elsa lay in the too-soft bed that night, not sleeping, all the details of the day and concerns for tomorrow churning around in her brain. She considered offering the doorbook to shorten the journey, but eventually decided against it. The trip would only be a matter of hours by train, and she’d rather keep the doorbook a secret. Especially from Porzia. The doorbook was practically heretical by the standards of European scriptology, and Elsa already felt like enough of an outsider without having to weather the storm of Porzia’s shock and disapproval. Would they still accept her, still want to help her, if they knew about the doorbook? Perhaps; perhaps not.
Best not to mention the doorbook for now.
When that issue was settled in her mind, she moved on to worrying about de Vries. Not that she’d expected him to work a miracle in just two days, but the way Signora Pisano had been suddenly called away concerned her. What did the Order know? Would they fear Elsa more than they feared for Jumi?
Useless speculation. Elsa pressed her face into the pillow, trying to squeeze out the thoughts. She gave up on the bed and tried the floor again instead, and finally managed some sleep.
Elsa rose early and dressed in some clothes sent to her, via house-bot, by Porzia. She tried to decline, of course, but Casa insisted the clothes would make her less conspicuous for traveling in public. They were excessively complicated, and Elsa struggled into the chemise, the corset, and the dress only with some assistance from one of Casa’s bots.
Finally dressed, she lifted her carpetbag of books and met Leo in the foyer to depart for the train station. Porzia and Faraz were staying behind to watch the children and maintain the appearance of normalcy.
Instead of exiting through the front doors, Leo led the way out a side entrance and along a covered walkway to the carriage house. Elsa followed but cast him a puzzled look.
“I thought we were taking a train.”
“Certainly, but we’re not going to walk all the way to the train station.” He said the word walk as if it were blasphemy. With a flourish, he pulled open the carriage house doors. “Not when we have this. May I present: the spider hansom.”
Elsa peered into the semidarkness within. The spider hansom was an eight-legged walking machine with a small, open-topped passenger compartment in front of a moderate steam engine. Aside from a narrow smokestack sticking straight up in the air toward the back—to direct the furnace smoke away from the passengers’ lungs, Elsa presumed—it did rather resemble a spider’s anatomy. Despite herself, she was impressed with the uniqueness of the design.
“My invention, of course,” said Leo without a hint of modesty.
At rest, the passenger compartment touched the ground, making it a relatively simple matter to climb onto the seat. Leo’s European manners dictated that he should, nonetheless, help Elsa in, which she suffered with no small amount of irritation. When they were both settled, Leo set his hands and feet to the levers and pedals, and he fired up the engine. The cab rose in the air so they hung suspended between the eight legs and stepped out into the street with a jerk.
The motion startled a horse pulling a hansom of the more traditional kind, and the driver gestured angrily at them from his perch behind the cab. Leo hardly seemed to notice. Apparently the residents of Casa della Pazzia were so accustomed to enraging the regular citizenry of Pisa that a single irate driver did not merit Leo’s attention.
As Leo drove, Elsa watched the reactions of the pedestrians they passed. Some looked curiously at the spider hansom, while others didn’t give it a second glance. But she saw no fear or suspicion, no nervous ladies with parasols like on the streets of Amsterdam; Pisa was a city that accepted its pazzerellone residents as a customary feature of everyday life.
They drove through a broad piazza surrounded by impressive old buildings. Off to one side was a marble statue of a man standing on some sort of fantastic creature; Elsa squinted, trying to get a better look as the hansom clattered by, and wondered what in the world that was about. Then they took a bridge over the river to cross into the southern half of the city.
With Leo at the helm of a shiny brass walking machine, a manic grin on his face and the wind lifting his hair, Elsa felt like a character in one of the adventure novels she used to pilfer off de Vries’s bookshelves when she was small. The spring air seemed potent with possibility, and she could almost forget the sense of panic that had clawed at her ever since the moment she realized her mother had been taken.
While they rode, Leo talked at length about the walker and about engine theory in general. “There’s a German pazzerellone doing glorious things with thermal efficiency,” Leo was saying. “He had something of a setback last year, nearly blew himself up, but—”
“You call that a setback?” she interrupted.
“Well, you can hardly hold that against him.” He waved a hand, dismissing her concern. “If things aren’t exploding now and again, it means you’re not trying hard enough.” He flashed a roguish grin.
Elsa folded her hands in her lap and gave her carpetbag a worried glance. “If the spider hansom explodes while we’re in it, I hope you know I shall be very put out. It would cost me a substantial delay.”
“The mechanical theory’s all sound, so there really isn’t any cause for concern.” He schooled his expression, as if his invention could be held together with confidence alone.
The spider hansom let them down before the wide portico of Pisa Centrale station, and Elsa watched with interest as the machine proceeded to walk off on its own with no driver at the controls.
“Autopilot,” Leo explained. “It’s programmed to follow a homing beacon back to the carriage house at Casa della Pazzia.”
No longer safely sequestered in the high perch of the spider hansom, Elsa felt exposed. Her spine crawled with the sense that people were noticing her. Because she was dark and foreign? Because she did not act sufficiently urbane? She and Leo walked under an arch of the portico and through the front doors, and Elsa felt secretly relieved to have someone with her to handle the purchasing of tickets and the navigating to the correct platform. The station was crowded with people walking in all directions and with strange noises and smells, and she hadn’t expected the whole experience to feel so overwhelming.
Leo, on the other hand, seemed quite at ease counting change at the ticket counter and navigating the station, all while keeping one eye on everything else around them. They passed by a man hand-cranking a mechanical organ, and Leo handed a coin to the organ grinder’s monkey, which was dressed in a fancier coat than the organ grinder hims
elf.
Turning back to Elsa, Leo said, “That’s the worst rendition of ‘La donna è mobile’ I can imagine.”
Elsa gave him a confused look. She had no idea what he was talking about. For that matter, she wasn’t sure why there was a man playing music in the station, or why Leo had given the monkey a coin.
“‘La donna è mobile,’” Leo repeated, as if this were an explanation. “From Rigoletto. You should listen to it sometime.”
Elsa resisted the urge to ask what a rigoletto was. At least she wasn’t trying to navigate this utterly foreign country alone. She didn’t like to admit it, but perhaps there was some merit to the idea of accepting help. Leo was proving himself to be an impressively competent escort.
When they boarded the train, Leo selected a box on the left, and he hefted her carpetbag onto the luggage rack. Elsa settled herself on the plush bench seat across from him, uncomfortable in her borrowed clothes. The corset boning held her spine straight, making it impossible to slouch. But at least she attracted fewer stares dressed as she was.
“Have you ridden a train before?” Leo asked, perhaps mistaking the source of her discomfort.
“When I was younger, to visit de Vries in Amsterdam.” Before she’d scribed the doorbook, but she left that part out.
“We’re lucky the Kingdom of Sardinia has an excellent rail system. The modern infrastructure is rather spottier in the other Italian states, but I suppose that’s what happens when you conscript and imprison pazzerellones. Progress requires intellectual freedom.”
“Huh.” Elsa didn’t know much about the role of pazzerellones in European society, how they might be subject to the whims of their government. For that matter, she had never considered the process of how inventions went from prototype to common use on Earth; Veldana was too young a world to have seen much of anything invented.
The train rumbled and lurched forward out of the station, gaining speed as it headed down the track. Elsa watched out the window as the train crossed over the river again, heading north, and sped away from the city into the hilly Tuscan countryside. Every now and again, they would pass a field so overtaken by some kind of scarlet flower that the earth would seem like a frozen red sea. The flowers were quite striking, but Elsa caught herself wondering why anyone would scribe such a persistent agricultural weed—until she remembered that no one had.
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