Elsa set the coordinates and ported into her laboratory world with the boys in tow. Faraz and Leo looked around curiously, as if they’d never seen a laboratory before. Clearly, since it was her work space, she’d have to take charge.
“All right. Leo, we’ll need gas canisters, tubing, something to work as a face shield. Go through that door for mechanical supplies,” she said, pointing. He nodded and went, and she turned to Faraz. “If we’re constructing it as a closed system—inhaling from and exhaling into the apparatus—we’ll need a chemical to scrub carbon dioxide from the air we breathe out. What do you think, limewater? Caustic potash?”
He nodded. “We’ll need something porous to suspend it in. Make a sort of air filter.”
With three brains and three sets of hands, the construction process flew by. This project wasn’t nearly as difficult as the tracking map she’d designed with Porzia, but the same principle applied: with the right help, everything went faster. Soon they were shouldering four newly invented rebreathers and carrying them back through the portal.
“Look, you’re still alive,” Elsa said brightly, accepting the lab book back from Porzia.
“Alive and bored,” she said, taking the fourth rebreather off Leo’s hands. “Oof, this contraption weighs a ton. You call this quality engineering?”
Leo replied, “I swear, you could find something to complain about in paradise.”
“The oxygen balance is going to be high at first, so shallow breaths,” Faraz warned. “We don’t want anyone hyperventilating and passing out down there.”
Elsa adjusted the oxygen tank’s strap across her shoulders, held the facemask over her nose and mouth, and took an experimental breath. Everything seemed to be in working order, so she tied the facemask in place. She exchanged a nod with Faraz, who detached Skandar from his shoulder and—with some difficulty—convinced the beast to wait for them in the courtyard. Then the humans took the stairs down again.
“So what now?” Leo said, looking around the cavern. His voice came through the facemask, muffled but still audible.
Porzia said, “We investigate until we find another clue, like we did above.”
The cavern floor had the smooth but uneven feel of water-eroded rock. With the help of stalactites, the string of gaslights around the perimeter cast strange patterns of light and shadow on the ceiling. The unevenness of the stone and insufficiency of the lighting made it difficult to say if there was only one cavern, or if there were passages leading away to a network of caves.
Elsa walked forward, trying to get a better feel for the space, and a wave of nausea flowed through her. Her face flushed hot and her stomach clenched. She checked her air supply but found nothing amiss. So what was that feeling? Another kind of trap scribed into the world? She turned to warn the others and saw something exceedingly strange.
Her three companions were still there in the room, but they were moving so fast their features blurred and she could barely tell one from another. Then one of them sped toward her, resolving into Leo as he approached. He held one arm back, connected to the blurs that were Porzia and Faraz, and threw his other arm toward her, still moving faster than a person should.
She reached out—he was gesturing at her impatiently—and took his hand. He yanked roughly on her arm, and she winced. As he drew her closer, though, the nausea washed over her again, and everyone slowed down to normal speed.
“What—” Elsa said, baffled.
“Temporal pockets,” Porzia explained. “You were stuck in there for ten minutes—we weren’t sure how to get you out safely.”
Elsa blinked. “Felt like seconds. Good thing I stopped walking when I did.”
“If we’re not careful, we could spend centuries down here and not even know it. Montaigne does seem to love nested security measures, doesn’t he?” Porzia set her hands on her hips and glared at nothing in particular.
Leo adjusted his facemask. “There must be a way through to wherever the book is. Montaigne got out, after all.”
An idea occurred to Elsa. “Leo, do you have your pocket watch on you?”
“Of course,” Leo said, taking his out. “Name me a mechanist who leaves home without a pocket watch.”
Elsa declined to point out that she, obviously, did not own one; otherwise she wouldn’t have asked. Instead, she explained, “Hold it out in front of you at arm’s length. If the second hand slows down, we know not to walk in that direction.”
Leo did as she instructed. The progress was slow, but after a few minutes they had mapped out the pattern of temporal dilation in the cavern. The bubbles of slow-time were everywhere around them, with only one invisible passageway large enough to admit a person.
“I suppose it’s this way, by process of elimination,” Leo said. “Watch your knees and elbows, everyone.”
He inched forward, sweeping the pocket watch left and right to detect the curves of the passageway. Elsa and the others followed single file, carefully watching where Leo stepped and matching his route exactly.
At the front of the line, Leo stopped suddenly, and Elsa nearly crashed into him. They were close to one wall of the cavern, but other than that, nothing seemed odd about the spot.
“What is it? Another temporal bubble?”
“No,” Leo said, lowering his pocket watch. “I think we’ve arrived at our final destination.”
He stepped aside to give her a clear view. Set into the stone wall were four large, faceted wheels, each facet carved with a different number, zero through nine. A combination lock. Beside the wheels was a single lever, presumably to be pulled once the proper combination was entered.
“Four digits,” Porzia observed. “Possibly a year, but which one?”
Elsa reached out and thumbed the first wheel, setting it to the number one. Then, figuring that Montaigne wasn’t much of a historian, she set the second digit to eight. She withdrew her hand, considering what to do next.
Leo ran a hand through his hair, frustrated. “Even assuming the code is a date from this century, we still have ninety-one possible combinations. We don’t have enough oxygen left to try them all.”
“Hold on.” Elsa thought hard, trying to imagine this from Montaigne’s perspective. Even after everything that had happened with Jumi, Veldana was still his greatest accomplishment—the victory that Jumi had wrenched from his grasp. Could he really be so egotistical?
Elsa set the last two numbers. “1873,” she said. “The year he completed the Veldana worldbook, and made history as the first scriptologist to create sentient people.”
Porzia asked, “Are you sure?”
“One way to find out.” She pulled the lever.
From deep within the wall there was a click click click click, and a whirring of gears, a grating of stone, and on the floor two stone panels swung upward. Elsa had to back up hastily to get out of the way. When the hole in the floor opened, a pedestal rose out of it, and upon the pedestal was a large leather-bound volume. The spine was marked in Jumi’s elegant script.
“Careful,” Faraz warned. “Could be yet another trap.”
“Mm,” Elsa agreed.
She circled the pedestal, examining it from all angles. No hidden weapons compartments, no pressure plates, no suspicious-looking materials, no electrodes. She tapped the front cover with one finger and quickly withdrew her hand. Nothing.
Leo fiddled with his pocket watch impatiently. “Oh, just pick the damned thing up, already.”
“Fine,” Elsa said, “but if the ceiling caves in, I’m blaming you.”
Still, she hesitated. This was her mother’s secret creation, part of the legacy she was born to inherit. Jumi had chosen to hide it from her, and that knowledge pinched like a thorn between her ribs.
Elsa placed both hands on the worldbook. Even through the cover, the pages seemed to sing to her. The air close to the book vibrated, as if it were made of butterfly wings instead of paper. And Elsa found that she did want to pick it up—deeply yearned to, in fact.
She lifted the book.
The ceiling did not collapse, though Elsa might not have noticed if it had.
No one wanted to cut it close with the oxygen, so Leo led them back through the minefield of temporal pockets. As they climbed the stairs, Elsa cradled her mother’s book in her arms the way another person might hold a young babe.
“Don’t just hug it,” said Porzia, stepping out into the courtyard. “Let’s crack that cover and give it a read, shall we? Find out what sort of weapons are inside.”
An anxious tentacle tugged at Elsa’s skirt, but she had her hands full with the book. Faraz lifted Skandar to his shoulder while Elsa opened to the first page.
As she read through the text, she could feel the weight of their gazes upon her. She didn’t need to look up at Leo to know the wait was killing him.
“So?” he finally said. “What kind of worldbook is it?”
“It’s … not.” Elsa scanned the front pages a second time, but the usual properties—gravity, land, air, heat—remained stubbornly absent.
“Not what?” Porzia leaned closer, scowling at the Veldanese text as if she could understand it by force of will alone.
“Not a scribed world at all. You see these references here?” Elsa pointed to a particular section; though Porzia couldn’t read the words, she might recognize the structure and formatting. “The text is linked to Earth, like my doorbook.”
“Really? Oh, I see … but it’s so much larger than your doorbook.”
Elsa flipped through a few more pages, her heart sinking as she read further and her suspicions were confirmed. Dread settled in her stomach, and when she spoke again, her voice came out hoarse. “That’s because it’s not meant for traveling.”
Leo said, “What does the damned thing do, then?”
Elsa looked up to meet Porzia’s waiting gaze, but she could tell the other girl—for all her scriptological talents—had not guessed what the book could do. Elsa cleared her throat. “It makes … changes. It doesn’t contain a weapon, it is the weapon: this book is designed to edit Earth.”
All the color drained from Porzia’s cheeks.
Faraz said, “But—but that’s not possible. Is it?” On his shoulder, Skandar fanned its wings anxiously, picking up on the sudden change in mood.
“It’s preposterous,” Leo protested with a sudden, blustering confidence. “You can’t edit the real world! It’s the real world—it wasn’t made with scriptology.”
“There is precedent,” Porzia said quietly. “A person born in the real world can be changed. Think of Simo—he was textualized by a bad script. There’s no theoretical impediment preventing someone from designing a book to make intentional changes to reality.”
Faraz held his hands up in a steadying gesture. “Okay, okay. Let’s assume for the moment this … editbook, or whatever you want to call it, actually works. What’s Garibaldi planning to do with it? How dangerous is this thing?”
“It’s not just that he could edit the world to make Italy a single, unified state,” Elsa explained. “He could edit the world to force everyone to want unification. Of course if he tried that and mucked it up, he might accidentally textualize the entire population of southern Europe.”
Porzia sucked in a breath between her teeth, horror written all over her face. For her own part, Elsa struggled to hold down the nausea roiling in her gut. How could her own mother have given birth to such a diabolical invention? She felt unclean by association.
In a dazed voice, Faraz recited, “‘The world has entered a time of flux. Much depends on the choices you make.’”
“What?” said Leo.
Faraz wrung his hands. “That’s what the Oracle said to me. At the time I didn’t understand how our choices could affect the entire world, but now…”
Elsa exchanged a weighted glance with Faraz, remembering the rest of the Oracle’s prophecy. The waters writhe with eldritch horrors. A plume of ash ten thousand meters high blocks out the sun. She said, “We can’t let Garibaldi get his hands on this book.”
Porzia planted her hands on her hips, moving on from horror to decisive practicality. “Garibaldi thinks he has the advantage because he is willing to hurt Jumi—or whoever else, I’d imagine—to get what he wants. We have to beat him at his own game.”
Leo snorted. “How, hold a knife to my throat? He threw me away, remember.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, I’m not suggesting we threaten you,” she said.
“Then what?”
“We threaten to destroy the editbook.” A small, devious grin pulled at the corner of her mouth. “Or render it useless, at least. We don’t need the editbook to be functional, but he does. Garibaldi may not have realized it yet, but we’ll have a hostage, too.”
It took them much less time to find their way out than it did to find their way in. The walls seemed to have stopped shifting around, and they knew to keep to the southeast quadrant to avoid the giant pit in the floor. A good thing, too, since Elsa’s attention was focused more on the book in her arms than on the ground in front of her feet.
“So,” Porzia was saying, “we’ll take it back to Casa della Pazzia first. Agreed?”
Elsa nodded. “I’ll need a minute with it, before we go after Jumi.”
Leo said, “Best not to show it to Gia, though.”
Porzia’s mouth tightened into a grim, unhappy line. “With any luck, Mamma will be too busy repairing the house to even notice we’re back.”
Elsa shrugged, deferring to their judgment on the matter of Signora Pisano. Her natural inclination was to hide everything from everyone, so this seemed a perfectly reasonable approach. “Here we are, this should be the corridor where we came in,” she said, turning around the last corner.
Elsa stopped short. There was someone leaning in the entranceway of the labyrinth—dark hair, amber eyes, insouciant slouch. Aris.
“Took you long enough,” he said, smirking. “I was about to send in a search party.”
19
HE WHO DOES NOT OPPOSE EVIL COMMANDS IT TO BE DONE.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Leo went cold at the sight of his brother. It took him a moment to find his voice. “What are you doing here?”
Aris pushed away from the wall and strolled closer to them. “After our conversation in Nizza, I was concerned you might be getting ideas. Might try to trick Father—leave with Jumi and the editbook.”
It was disorienting, meeting him here so suddenly. Leo hadn’t had the chance to prepare himself for seeing Aris again. “But … but how did you—”
“Relax, little brother,” Aris interrupted. “I’m here to protect you. Protect your friends. You don’t want to find out what happens to people who cross our father.”
Beside him, Elsa’s eyes narrowed. “You tracked us.”
“Better. I tracked your portals,” Aris gloated.
That, at least, remained the same. Aris had always been one to brag about his accomplishments, to bask in praise of his brilliant inventions.
“Is that so,” Elsa said. She had a careful, calculating look about her, as if she were already running through scenarios in her mind. Leo could only be grateful that someone was—he felt too blindsided to think clearly about their next move.
Instinctively, the four of them huddled closer, forming a united front in the face of Aris. Porzia was doing something behind her back. Leo didn’t dare look at her, lest he draw Aris’s attention as well.
Instead, he stepped forward and reached for his rapier. Aris registered the motion and drew his own, and the tips of their rapiers met in the air with a clack.
Aris grinned. “Been a long time, brother. Do you remember how we used to practice in the ballroom in Venezia?”
“I remember beating you on more than one occasion,” Leo replied.
They exchanged a few lunges and parries experimentally, each trying to gauge the other’s skill. Every fencer’s fighting style evolves over time, and there had been plenty of time since t
heir last match. Leo feinted right, forcing Aris to circle him. He didn’t need to win; he only needed to hold Aris’s attention.
He drew Aris farther into the corridor, away from the labyrinth’s exit, always careful to keep himself positioned between his brother and his friends. He played just well enough to keep Aris’s rapier away from any vital organs, but let him believe he had the upper hand. He even allowed the sharp tip to graze him once, and tear his sleeve another time, all the while making room for the others to inch their way closer to the Edgemist.
“You’re out of practice, brother,” Aris crowed, slicing dangerously close to Leo’s cheek. “Pisa has turned you soft.”
“Or maybe I don’t believe you’re willing to skewer me just to get the book,” Leo countered.
“I’m confident I could patch you up afterward.” He flicked his wrist, the rapiers knocking together with a clack.
Leo deflected. “Emphasis on ‘confident.’”
Finally, he heard the sound he’d been stalling in anticipation of: the whoosh of a portal opening behind him. Leo glanced over his shoulder to see Elsa hesitating at the mouth of the portal. “Go!” he cried.
For once, she went without argument. Thank God for small mercies. Leo pushed in with a quick combination—riposte, counter-parry, counter-riposte—unbalancing Aris and buying enough time to disengage. Then he turned and dove for the portal just as it began to close.
* * *
Elsa skidded to a stop along the inlaid tile floor of Casa della Pazzia’s grand foyer. She glanced around. They’d all made it without any pursuers following them through, and the portal was already winking closed.
Faraz held a protective hand up to Skandar. “Is Aris coming after us?”
Porzia said, “If he could track our portals to Amsterdam, he can track us here.”
Faraz said, “But how is that even possible?”
“A recently opened portal leaves a residual weakness in the fabric of reality, even here on Earth, it seems.” Porzia spared a second to throw a rueful look Elsa’s way. “Aris must have invented some sort of device—like our tracking worldbook—that detects and locates these weak spots. He’d also need some way to exploit the weak spots, to link up his departure point with our destination portal.”
Ink, Iron, and Glass Page 26
