An Alchemy of Masques and Mirrors--A Novel Read online

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  To Mom and Dad

  Who encouraged me to read whatever I wanted.

  Acknowledgments

  My sincerest thanks go out to Carol Berg, Susan Smith, Courtney Schafer, Brian Tobias, and Saytchyn Maddux-Creech, without whose endless patience and good advice this book would not have become half of what it is. Special thanks go to Jedeane Macdonald for holding the door open. Thanks also to my editor, Moshe Feder, for giving me this chance. Thanks to Caitlin Blasdell for taking me on. Also a very special thanks to Donna Hume for everything else.

  CHAPTER

  One

  Jean-Claude clung to the St. Marie’s guardrail with one hand and to his tether with the other. He wanted a word with Captain Jerome, who stood on the quarterdeck, an impossible distance away. Unfortunately, doing the impossible was a sworn part of Jean-Claude’s duty, so he slide-stepped awkwardly toward the skyship’s stern as the vessel climbed a tall ridge of turbulence. The whistling wind made jib sails of his tabard’s loose sleeve flaps, tugging him toward the rail and the emptiness beyond.

  All around him, deckhands scurried about, tugging on lines, adjusting sails in a madman’s dance choreographed to the boatswain’s cry. Jean-Claude reached the curling stair to the quarterdeck and climbed, stumbling as his leather riding boots slipped on cloud-slicked steps. He achieved the top of the stair just as the St. Marie crested the pressure ridge.

  The masts creaked, and the vast spiderweb of rigging hummed with tension as the ship’s enormous stresses shifted. For a moment, Jean-Claude hung weightless, floating free as a smoke puff on the wind. His toes strained to reach the deck beneath his feet but succeeded only in propelling him away from it. The skyship banked, bumping and tilting him halfway over the rail. Beyond that flimsy frontier and far below the turvy sails thrusting down beneath the hull awaited the Gloom, a fathomless abyss of lightning-shot clouds. Those clouds beckoned him like the pillowed embrace of a familiar paramour. Against all good sense, he yearned toward the abyss. His grip on the rail slipped.

  Then his own weight landed on him hard. He hit the deck with a knee-popping thump. His boots slipped and he tumbled to his backside. His heart rattled around his ribs like a die in a cup. Carefully, he eased away from the edge of the ship.

  He hated skyships. How many men before him had been claimed by the fatal impulse to let go? How many had felt the sick urge to fall forever, down to where the clouds never parted, the rain never ceased, and the wind ripped ships and men to pieces? Every time Jean-Claude saw it, it called to him.

  I should have stayed a farmer. If only he had been an obedient lad, dutifully following a plow through rocky fields, he would never have sneaked away from his chores to watch the Duc d’Orange’s forces bring battle to the raiding Mark of Oberholz. Then he would never have chanced upon the wounded duc or hidden him from the mark’s search parties. He would never have earned the duc’s gratitude or been shoehorned into l’École Royale des Spécialistes. He would never have been attached as liaison to the Comte des Zephyrs, and he never would have been ordered to get on one of these hundred-times-damned flying boats.

  From the forward rail of the quarterdeck, Captain Jerome watched Jean-Claude’s progress with evident amusement.

  “Six weeks aloft and you still haven’t got your sky legs,” Jerome said with an aloof, aristocratic delight that suggested he’d expected no better. A landless, penniless seventh son of minor clayborn gentry, Jerome treasured the singular noble privilege to which he was entitled: disdain for the lowborn. His sole redeeming feature, in Jean-Claude’s eyes, was that he was good at his job, an asset rather than an impediment to his crew, a circumstance all too rare in the gentry-swollen navy.

  Jean-Claude scrambled to his feet and tried to recover poise as well as balance as the skyship accelerated into the next aerial trough.

  “You said we were about to make land!” His own privilege, as King’s Own Musketeer, was deferring to no one outside his own very short chain of command. Of course, keeping that privilege meant completing his missions without falter or fail, no matter the distance or danger. Orders like “Deliver this message from my lips to the comtesse’s ears ere the baby is born” did not account for time spent evading pirates or allow for being blown a week off course by an unanticipated aetherstorm.

  Jerome stood on the rolling deck as if nailed to it, not a hair of his white powdered wig out of place. He jerked his chin toward the bow and said, “We’re coming in widdershins on the trailing edge,” as if that clarified the matter. “If we don’t undershoot and ram the light tower, we should make harbor within the hour.”

  Jean-Claude turned. With the St. Marie on a decline, l’Île des Zephyrs rose into view. There was the afternoon glitter of Lac Rond tucked in amongst the rolling hills. Nearer at hand, the green blanket of the forest crept out of the wrinkled uplands and took a peek at oblivion over the scalloped edge of the sky cliff. Thin plumes of smoke, the telltale signs of human endeavor, curled from behind a ridge to the left. There, on a promontory of rock overhanging the endless fall, was des Zephyrs’s light tower, its reflector flashing rhythmically.

  “Aren’t we coming in a little high?” Jean-Claude asked. Skyships could not fly over land—his academy instructors had said aetherkeels needed a certain amount of air to support them, and flying over rock robbed them of buoyancy—and the St. Marie seemed to be aimed at a hillside.

  Captain Jerome gave a long-suffering sigh. “You can’t steer a skyship to where her destination is. You have to steer her where that destination is going to be. Helmsman, make ready to slip. Steer to port on my mark. Reef the main sails and level the beam screw.”

  “Aye. Steer to port. Reef the mains. Level beam screw. Aye!” replied the helmsman. Farther down, the boatswain picked up the cry, bellowing a series of orders that must have made sense to the crew, for they scampered about as if the Breaker herself were nipping at their heels. Lines and canvas shifted. The ship shuddered as if in anticipation.

  “Steering a skyship requires forethought, strategy, calculation,” Jerome said. “Helmsman, now!”

  The helmsman leaned into the wheel, and the huge fantail rudder flagged to the left.

  “You might want to hang on to something,” Jerome said mildly.

  Jean-Claude grabbed a piece of railing that no one else seemed to be using and swallowed hard. The ship nosed to the left, turning away from land, then rolled over some invisible frontier and began to tilt and slide to the right, until Jean-Claude swore it was going to flip over and throw them all to their deaths. He clung to the rail as the ship tried to fall out f
rom under him. Wind buffets sent his feet sliding. Blood flowed from his mouth where he had bitten his tongue.

  The St. Marie veered to a course nearly parallel to the sky cliff, angling steadily downward, picking up speed … gliding. The turbulence dissipated. It felt like the ship was tobogganing down a smooth, icy hillside with only the occasional rippling bump. With effort, Jean-Claude unclenched his white-knuckled fingers. “What happened?”

  Jerome cupped one hand and twirled his finger over it. “Large masses like skylands produce an aetheric vortex, and the vortex has grooves in it. Poke a hole in the bottom of a bowl full of water and you’ll see what I mean. We’re riding one of those grooves down and toward the center. This one should take us right under des Zephyrs’s light tower. Then we deploy braking sails and pop up like a cork in the harbor. Of course … timing is everything.”

  “You are a madman,” Jean-Claude said, and Jerome tipped his tricorn, taking it for the compliment it was.

  The St. Marie drew level with the cliff wall, a pockmarked scarp a hundred feet high. Then they passed below the rim where the sinking Solar illuminated the belly of the skyland, a vast downward-pointing cone of rock bristling with an upside-down forest of salt-encrusted, aether-emitting cloud-coral stalactites that kept the skyland aloft.

  The last leg of the voyage progressed as safely and quickly as Jerome had promised, but not nearly fast enough for Jean-Claude. Six weeks he had spent on this cursed vessel, racing to the capital and back, to plead with His Majesty on behalf of the wicked, wretched Comtesse des Zephyrs. He would just as soon have pushed the vile woman and her villainous relations off a sky cliff. Alas, what duties le roi commanded, his most loyal, most junior musketeer must perform, and he had said des Zephyrs’s bloodline must not fail.

  In truth, Jean-Claude suspected that le roi’s position atop the house of cards that was the Célestial nobility was not nearly as stable as his public demeanor suggested. His most recent war had not been a success, and by its undue protraction it had seriously depleted the empire’s ability to compete for land in the unexpectedly profitable new continent, Craton Riqueza. The kingdom of Aragoth had found a way to traverse the Sargassian Still, that great belt of dead air between the northern and southern sky that had so vexed the navigators of the last century, and they had come back with wondrous tales of a new land, backed up with chests of gold and sacred quondam artifacts. As Aragoth’s fortunes rose, so did l’Empire Céleste’s fall, at least by comparison. Thus, Grand Leon was busy appeasing his nobles, including the execrable des Zephyrs, while he gathered his strength for some new far-reaching scheme. Grand it would be, of that there was no doubt. Le roi had no interest in any prize smaller than a craton.

  From his cabin, Jean-Claude collected a large painting of His Imperial Majesty, le Roi de Tonnerre, Leon XIV. The painted face glowered dyspeptically at him, as if to chastise him for his rude handling. Jean-Claude covered it with a sheet and secured it at all points by wrapping both arms around it. Damned ridiculous thing.

  When he scrambled from the shore boat onto the solid stone landing at the quay, his legs wobbled from sheer relief. It didn’t matter in the least that skyships were held aloft by precisely the same incomprehensible forces that held up skylands; the skyland didn’t feel like it was going to fall out from under him. He would have dropped to his knees and kissed the stable ground if he hadn’t been met by Pierre, the comte’s chamberlain, a diffident man with a rabbitlike twitch to his lip.

  “Jean-Claude, Jean-Claude. Thank the Builder and Savior you’ve come,” Pierre cried, breathless and flushed. “It is the comtesse. It is her time. Even now she awaits only her roi’s blessing.”

  “So soon?” Jean-Claude felt as if someone had slugged him in the gut. Even with all his delays in getting here, he ought to be well forward of the mark; the physicians had told him the Comtesse des Zephyrs was not supposed to deliver for another week at least. This was ill news … at least for des Zephyrs.

  “She is in considerable distress. Her wails were quite piteous.”

  “Haste then. Haste!” The strength of duty surged within Jean-Claude. Clutching the painting, he dashed up the cobbled street and leapt aboard the comte’s carriage, displacing the whip man toward the center of the bench. “Drive, man. Ply that scourge!”

  With a snap of his wrist, the whip man sent the coach horses racing. Pierre, not quick enough, chased after them for a few strides, then bent over, coughing in the dust. Jean-Claude’s heart thundered in time to the horses’ hooves. If only his honor would allow him to fail his sworn mission, this could be the end of des Zephyrs’s line. Le roi’s long-standing decree that Sanguinaire ladies must personally attend him at the hour of their delivery or else have their whelps denied names and decreed bastards was just another link in the endless chain by which he bound the nobility to his will. Normally, gravid dames were forced to travel to his palace to give birth, an inconvenience that kept most ladies of childbearing years from ever leaving Rocher Royale and required their husbands to visit them often.

  Ah, but the Comtesse des Zephyrs had already miscarried so many times, and this pregnancy had been so terribly complicated … and so Jean-Claude had been dispatched to plead the comtesse’s case to le roi. Would he deign to spare his dear aunt’s bloodline, or would des Zephyrs be allowed to perish? Alas for Jean-Claude’s eloquent tongue and His Majesty’s good sense, for he had sent his portrait as surrogate, his idea of a compromise, so the vile family might linger into another generation … if Jean-Claude was on time.

  Scattering peasants, townsfolk, goats, and chickens, the carriage raced through the town of Windfall and thundered out the hinterland gate, past the queue of carts waiting for nightfall to bring their goods inside the walls.

  Ahead, des Zephyrs’s estate stood atop a massive acropolis. At its foot stood the Pit of Stains, a half-round theater in the ancient Aetegian style, carved out of solid rock. Jean-Claude’s heart tightened as the coach approached that venue. In other cities, amphitheaters were full of life, used to enact plays and celebrate festivals, but the Pit of Stains was desolate, barren save for a pattern of reddish discolorations scattered about like fallen maple leaves, the lingering traces of the Comte and Comtesse des Zephyrs’s cruelty.

  Once a month, the comte’s white-liveried guards paraded ten condemned men, women, and children to that stage. Some of the victims were actual criminals, but most were rounded up for the spectacle on false pretense or none at all. Witnesses, the families of the damned, were herded into the theater seats, and everybody waited until the comte and comtesse arrived, at high noon, to perform the execution.

  The prisoners were unshackled and then the comte and comtesse released their sorcery. Des Zephyrs were saintborn, direct descendants of the Risen Saints. As such, they carried la Marque Sanguinaire, the mark of one of the ancient sorceries, in their veins. Their shadows were not gray like those of normal folk, but crimson, and they stretched away from the aristocrats’ feet like great elastic ribbons of blood. These bloodshadows flowed onto the stage, surrounded the prisoners, and slowly constricted.

  There were rules to this game. Only the first two prisoners to be touched by the shadows were killed. Nobody wanted to be amongst that count, so as sanguine shadows filled the amphitheater floor, the condemned huddled together on a shrinking island of light, scrambling to be as far from the creeping doom as possible, pushing one another out of the way, begging for a mercy that would not come.

  All too quickly, the victims turned on one another, the stronger thrusting the weaker into the oncoming flood. Sometimes, a brave soul would sacrifice himself or herself to save the others, but as a single selfless act was not enough to turn the tide, it rarely prevented a brawl to avoid the fate of being the second victim.

  Jean-Claude had borne witness to the ritual once and still shuddered at the memory. The comte had not smiled—he never smiled—but his eyes gleamed in delight as his bloodshadow devoured a man not much younger than the musketeer. The sorcerous
stain entered the boy through his shadow. His flesh turned transparent and melted, his body losing shape and coherence as the red tide absorbed him, destroying him down to the very soul.

  Terrified and horrified, Jean-Claude had done nothing to stop the murder. Legally there was nothing he could do. By most ancient and sacred law, the Sanguinaire were owed their due. Shadow feeding did not have to be fatal or even greatly hurtful. Other Sanguinaire nobles took their due from their subjects without recourse to murder. Many nobles paid quite well for the service and afforded their donors places of honor that had folk vying for the privilege. Not the des Zephyrs.

  “Only a full feeding gives full benefits,” the comte proclaimed. “Only fear satisfies the shadow. Only death sates it.”

  When the bloodshadows withdrew, nothing was left of the boy but a soul smudge, a patch of russet that seemed to writhe just beneath the surface of the stone, squirming in the sunlight. The remaining prisoners had been pardoned. They returned to the relief of their families, and, all too often, the reproach of the kin of the slain. “You killed my son.” “You pushed my sister in.” “You should have died.”

  And that was the elegant mechanism of the spectacle of slaughter. It kept the downtrodden divided, almost as resentful of one another as of the so-called nobles who commanded and performed the murders.

  The coach sped by the killing ground, and it seemed to Jean-Claude that he could hear the ghosts of long-ago screams. And this is the bloodline I must preserve. If the comtesse’s child lived and thrived, it would join its parents on that platform, and there would be three fresh smudges on that platform every month. That thought filled Jean-Claude with revulsion, but le roi’s desire had been specific. Three clayborn peasants a month to keep the des Zephyrs happy were but the crumbs wiped from a silver plate from Grand Leon’s perspective.