What a strange world, built of random chance and long, difficult refining.
Elsa shifted her gaze to Leo. Now that he was settled in the confined space of the train with nothing pressing to do, he was acting oddly subdued. It seemed as if his nearness were an illusion, and if she stretched out her hand, she would find he was actually beyond her reach.
She didn’t like him retreating into the realm of his private thoughts after just last night cajoling her to share so freely of herself. It was hardly fair turnaround.
Elsa folded her hands in her lap and said, “So, now that you and all your closest friends know my secrets, are you going to tell me what your story is?”
Leo leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, and looked at her with serious eyes. “My father was chief cryptographer to the king of Sardinia, and my mother an Austrian spy, so you see their love affair was doomed from the start, and her inevitable betrayal—”
Elsa held up a hand, begging him to stop. He was really quite good when he committed himself to a story—so sincere with those mesmerizing tawny eyes and the smooth cadence of his voice. Revan had been a terrible liar. When they were children and got in trouble, he would always try to talk their way out of it, and Baninu would always see through her son’s improvised excuses. Revan hesitated when he lied, needing time to sort the details in his mind before saying them, but with Leo the words flowed as if he were reciting real memories.
Silence hung in the air between them for a minute before Elsa said, “Are you ever going to tell me the truth, or just keep making up ridiculous stories we both know are lies?”
“Oh, definitely the second option, I’d say.” He grinned and turned to look out the window, as if to deflect her question as neatly as he might parry a rapier thrust.
“Look, I know they’re all dead, all the people you cared about.” His head snapped back to stare straight at her, making her suddenly doubt the wisdom of saying it. She continued uncertainly, “So, you … ah … don’t have to keep up the pretense on my account, is all.”
He stayed silent so long she wasn’t sure he would ever answer. Then he quietly said, “Sometimes pretense is the only armor we have against the world.”
“But you still wear that every day,” she said, casting a significant glance down at the pocket watch chain hooked through a buttonhole on his waistcoat.
Leo looked down. “I saw the bodies. My father had this on him when he died.” He slid the watch out of his waistcoat pocket. “Forgetting was never the goal.”
“If you’re so convinced of the worthiness of your friends, why do you never speak of your own history, even with the people you claim to trust?”
He cleared his throat uncomfortably. “They know enough.”
Elsa cast him a skeptical look. “I have to wonder whether you’re trying to convince me or yourself.”
This time, Leo didn’t answer. His gaze shifted to the window, the beginnings of a scowl furrowing his brow.
Elsa bit her tongue, fearing she’d pushed him too far. She should not have been so forward, not here and now, not with Leo, whose help she needed.
Her mother had raised her to be forthright, to speak her mind. Never forget that words have power, Jumi would say, pacing the slate floor of the cottage while Elsa sat diligently at the writing desk. We use them to remake the world. Our best weapons are words. Jumi had taught her how to make war with words, but not how to make peace with them. And even a sword made of words has two edges.
7
POURING FORTH ITS SEAS EVERYWHERE, THEN, THE OCEAN ENVELOPS THE EARTH AND FILLS ITS DEEPER CHASMS.
—Nicolaus Copernicus
Leo found he couldn’t look Elsa in the eye for long—there was something disconcerting about her gaze. Maybe it was the chiaroscuro effect of her dark skin turning those green eyes startlingly clear and bright, like spotlights in an opera house. Or maybe it was the way she seemed to look right through him, as if she could read his thoughts as easily as she could the words on a page. Certainly, she had demonstrated an uncomfortable tendency to skewer the truth no matter how carefully he concealed it beneath layers of lies.
Leo did not want to examine why he felt the need to hide it in the first place. He did not want to admit to the disservice he did his friends, even if it was out of self-preservation. To share the truth would be to make it more real, and it already felt too real to bear.
It seemed safest to stare out the window, only acknowledging Elsa with the occasional sideways glance. She had a sharp beauty, and he fancied it might cut him if he gazed upon it too long. Exotic was the word he wanted to use, though Faraz abhorred it (Exotic, meaning “from the outside,” Faraz would say, someone who can never, no matter what they do, count as “one of us.”). But in truth, Elsa was exotic, she was as exotic as it was possible for any human to be: she was not from Earth. And if he read her properly, she intended to return from whence she had come as soon as physically possible. Yet another reason to keep her at arm’s length.
In the end everyone left, one way or another. Aris, who had seemed an unstoppable force of nature right up until the moment he was stopped. Little Pasca, brilliant and sensitive. Father, who had never fully been there in the first place, his mind always on matters larger than his sons. All of them gone.
Even Rosalinda—who had dragged Leo kicking and screaming from the house fire in Venezia, who for weeks afterward had sat up with him when the nightmares made sleep impossible. Even she let him go when the Order demanded custody, as they did for all mad orphans. Not that Casa della Pazzia turned out so bad for him, but as a frightened, traumatized ten-year-old, the last thing he’d wanted was to be dragged away from a familiar face and thrust in amongst strangers.
In any case, Elsa was not here to stay. So Leo knew very well he ought to keep his distance.
* * *
They changed trains at the station in La Spezia, and by the time they were pulling out to follow the Cinque Terre line, it seemed to Elsa that Leo had regained some of his usual spirit.
The terrain outside the window had transitioned from rolling hills to sharp little mountains. They passed through a series of tunnels and emerged quite suddenly into the glare of sunlight scattering off waves. The enormity of the ocean made Elsa’s breath catch. Her mind struggled to accept that any world could contain such a vastness of water; Veldana’s little sea seemed nothing but a puddle by comparison. The distant horizon filled her with an awe bordering on dread.
They pulled up at a train stop, and while other passengers were busy disembarking, Leo grabbed her hand and led her across the train to an empty compartment on the other side. Elsa was too shocked at the sudden physical contact to protest; his touch felt almost electric against her palm, like the buzz of a finished worldbook.
“We don’t have time for sightseeing, but you should at least get a glimpse of Riomaggiore,” he said.
Bright-painted buildings rose up on two sides of a narrow valley, blocks of red and orange, salmon-pink and white. The train tracks bridged over a narrow, sea-green inlet lined with colorful rowboats. The surrounding landscape was a jumble of exposed gray cliffs and greenery, with a mountain rising up behind the town as if to shield it from the rest of the world.
The whistle blew, and Leo and Elsa returned to their compartment. The train followed the coast from there—sometimes passing through tunnels, sometimes clinging precariously to the cliffside, the blue-green ocean lapping at the rocks below.
Soon the train was pulling into Corniglia station, and Leo was standing to retrieve the carpetbag from the luggage rack. They stepped out onto the open-air platform. It was the lone construct down near the sea, at the foot of the steep slope leading up to the town. Unlike the first two fishing towns they’d passed through, Corniglia was built atop a towering cliff.
“I’m afraid we have to proceed on foot,” Leo said. “The locals don’t have much use for hansoms in a village this size. Will you be all right?”
Elsa looked up. A broad set
of brick stairs switchbacked up the cliff side. It was, admittedly, a climb of perhaps a hundred meters, but it wasn’t as if he were asking her to scale the bare rock. “It’s not a problem.”
“Are you sure?” He gave her a worried look.
His skepticism irked her; she was Veldanese, not some soft highborn lady. “There are stairs. I doubt they were built for their aesthetic appeal.”
So they climbed. Despite her confidence, the corset was more of a hindrance than she’d expected, and Elsa felt quite winded by the time they reached the village at the top. The brightly painted houses clung together in tight, precarious clusters on either side of a main road that ran the length of the town. It took them only a minute or two to cross the width of the narrow village.
Terraced vineyards dominated the valley on the other side, and so they descended into a landscape of stone walls, rough-hewn steps, and verdant grapevines displaying clusters of tiny young grapes. It all looked startlingly overengineered to Elsa’s eye. Corniglia itself couldn’t have held more than two or three hundred people—close to the population of her own village in Veldana—but they had practically rebuilt the entire landscape by hand in order to grow sufficient crops.
“Why would anyone put a town here? Seems unaccountably foolish, to build on such unforgiving terrain.”
“This isn’t Veldana, we can’t just create more arable land when we run out of space. We have to work with what we have,” Leo said. “Besides, most of these families have probably lived here for centuries. A thousand years ago, somebody decided the remote location would be a good defense against, I don’t know, Ostrogoth raiding parties or something, and ever since then, they’ve kept living here because this is their home.”
Elsa tried to digest this idea, tried to think of cities like Paris and Amsterdam and Pisa as accumulations of their history, the strata of historical events layering atop one another over the long years. Pivotal moments with lasting consequences that no one could predict. It made her head hurt.
“Earth is weird,” she concluded.
As they crested the ridge on the far side of the valley and passed into the shade of trees, Elsa snuck a sidelong glance at Leo. He looked fresh and bright-eyed, as if their journey on foot hadn’t taxed him in the slightest. A trickle of sweat down the back of his neck was his only concession to the midday heat, his brown-and-gold-brocade waistcoat still buttoned. The climb hadn’t been too much of a challenge for her either, despite the corset, but Elsa often spent her days surveying Veldana and was well accustomed to getting places under her own steam.
They walked until Elsa could see the blue sea sparkling with sunlight between the tree trunks. Leo stopped at a small outcrop of sedimentary rock, its layers of deposition still obvious when viewed from the side, and set down the carpetbag. He hooked his fingers beneath the top layer of stone, and after a moment of flexing his biceps, it hinged up like the top of a storage chest.
“What—” Elsa said, coming over to look under the layer. There was a brass control panel with a keyhole fitted horizontally inside the hollowed-out rock. “Hidden controls?”
“Ah, yes…” There was a note of strain in Leo’s voice. “And I’d forgotten how heavy this thing is. Would you mind getting the key? In my left side pocket.”
Elsa reached into the pocket of his waistcoat; the key ring was stuffed in there beside his father’s pocket watch, and there was hardly room for her fingers. Through the fabric, she could feel the tense washboard muscles and the heat of his skin. She pulled her hand away quickly and felt her face flush as she fumbled with the key ring, looking for one that seemed a likely fit for the keyhole in the control panel.
“This one?” she said, holding up a key for Leo to see. Her voice came out a little unsteady.
“That looks right.” A bead of sweat was crawling down the side of his face. “Turn the key, then flip all the switches in order, top to bottom.”
The key fitted snugly and turned with a satisfying ka-chunk. The brass switches were stiff beneath her fingers, but she managed them all, then quickly removed the key.
“Done,” she said, and stepped away to give Leo space to close it. He let the lid down heavily and shook out his arms to release the tension.
Elsa looked up. Where before she’d seen nothing but a rocky outcrop dropping away into a seaward cliff face, now she saw a castle built into the steep slope above the cliffs. It looked ancient, the dark stone weathered and speckled with lichens. One of its towers had collapsed into debris that spilled over the sidewall and across the ground.
“An illusion?” she guessed.
“Yes,” he said, “the best cloaking projection I’ve ever seen. Designed by Fresnel himself, or so Gia likes to boast.”
Elsa had no idea who Fresnel was, but she was still impressed with the optical finesse it would take to hide an entire building in plain sight. The castle itself was impressive, too. Leo strode off toward the doors, but Elsa followed more slowly, craning her neck up to look at it.
“It’s so old,” she said in a hushed voice, too awed to want to break the silence.
“Nine hundred years or so. And the Roman ruins it was built on top of easily double that figure.”
Elsa gently placed her hand upon the weathered stone. “We don’t have anything old in Veldana. Our whole world is new.”
“Well, in this world, we’ve had to endure plenty of history. The castle’s believed to be the origin of the Order of Archimedes. The Pisano family made it the first official sanctuary for pazzerellones in Europe, dating back to the Dark Ages, when the Church liked to behead pazzerellones for heresy. It’s been more or less unoccupied since the Renaissance, when the Pisanos deemed it safe to relocate to Pisa and built Casa della Pazzia.”
“So, being old—does that make them important?” Elsa said, thinking of Porzia’s father in Firenze. “The Pisano family, I mean.”
Leo shrugged. “It certainly doesn’t hurt, but political influence is a complex matter.”
Elsa rubbed her forehead, frustrated at how much she didn’t understand about the real world. With Veldana, she’d walked every square meter of land, knew every person by name, and read every word of the worldtext—she was the master of her world. But the real world was impossibly large and complex. No matter how hard she studied and how much she learned, she would never fully understand Earth, because no one ever could.
And that thought filled her with a sort of existential terror she worried might never go away.
She felt a sudden, intense longing to go home to her finite, comprehensible world, or even simply to be sure Veldana still existed. What would she do if the fire had destroyed everything she knew?
Leo used another key on the key ring to unlock the bronze front doors. They stepped into a broad entry hall with a cavernous ceiling and a wide, once-majestic stairway that ended in midair, a pile of rubble scattered on the floor below. The air inside was cool and musty. Sunlight filtered in through the distorted glass of four tall windows, and each footstep Elsa took called up swirls of dust to dance in the light. Leo shut the doors behind them with a clang that echoed, and then an eerie silence followed.
Several archways led away from the entry hall, dark and sinister as gaping maws. Through one of them came the sound of uneven footfalls, loud against the stifling silence, and Elsa tensed. A pool of lantern light bobbed and jounced into view, followed by the man holding the lantern.
The man paused in the archway and declared, “Simo!” then hung the kerosene lantern from a wall peg and came toward them. He looked to be in his fifties or sixties, with graying hair and veiny hands clasped together in front of him like an overeager servant. His once-fine clothes were worn to rags. His face seemed stuck in a wide caricature of a smile, and there was something odd about his gait, too, as he loped over to them.
Elsa leaned toward Leo and said in a low voice, “I thought you said it was unoccupied.”
“I said ‘more or less.’ Simo is the castle’s caretaker. He’s simple,
and more than a bit insane, but mostly harmless.”
“Now you have me worried about your qualifiers. Define ‘mostly harmless.’”
“He used to be a scriptologist, but he accidentally rendered himself textual, and now it’s hard to guess whether there’s anybody left at home in the old noggin. Isn’t that right, Simo?”
“Simo!” said Simo.
Elsa had never before met anyone whose mind had been damaged by scriptology, and the sight of Simo made her a bit queasy. Of course Jumi had warned her of the dangers of scribing names into the worldtext—putting someone in the text would irrevocably link them to the worldbook in a way that eliminated their free will. The worldbook would control them. Jumi’s explanation, so technical and logical, had not frightened young Elsa, but it was a different matter entirely to view the results herself.
“He lives here all alone? It seems … I don’t know, irresponsible to leave him on his own like this.”
Leo shrugged. “I assume he manages well enough. The Pisanos saw fit to give him the caretaker job, anyway.”
She looked askance at Leo. “My confidence in the efficacy of this plan is not feeling especially bolstered at the moment.”
“We’ll see what we can do about that,” he replied.
Leo led her down a corridor, Simo walking ahead of them to light the kerosene wall sconces.
“Ah, here we are,” Leo said, and unlatched a wooden door on his right. Elsa followed him in.
They were in a very old, very dusty mechanist’s laboratory. The narrow windows were smudged with soot, as if the former occupant or occupants had been in the habit of lighting things on fire, but not so much in the habit of cleaning up afterward.
Ink, Iron, and Glass Page 10
