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

  Jean-Claude prayed the comtesse would die in childbirth … of course that would allow the comte to remarry, perhaps to a more fertile wife … Not desirable. Let her live, then, but crippled, and let the child be stillborn. Better for everyone that way, even the child; no child of the des Zephyrs would have a chance of escaping their corruption.

  Atop the acropolis’s plateau sprawled the Château des Zephyrs, sweeping arms of pale marble reclining indolently on a rolling, grassy sward. As daylight faded, alchemical lamps flickered to life in every window, as was the custom in Sanguinaire houses. For there can be no shadow without light.

  Jean-Claude leapt from the carriage before it stopped, alighted on the landing, adjusted the portrait, and burst through the silver-trimmed double doors even before the doorman could throw them wide.

  “The master bedroom, monsieur,” the doorman called after Jean-Claude’s retreating back, but Jean-Claude had already mounted the stairs and made the turn. From the wide-flung doors at the end of the corridor came a piteous grating wail. The comtesse had a voice like shattering glass at the best of times. Her distress in labor sounded like a cat fight in a porcelain shop.

  Jean-Claude slid to a stop just outside the threshold, straightened his rumpled tabard, and marched in. “Your Excellencies,” he said, for the comte stood, powdered and dressed in his finest whites, sipping a chalice of red wine and looking more bored than dutiful, at his wife’s bedpost. The air swam with a nauseating swirl of blood stench, wine fume, and sweat.

  Comtesse Vedetta lay in bed, breathing shallowly, her upper half absurdly dressed for a party, white wig askew, her lower half obscured by a privacy screen. When Jean-Claude had left on his errand, her thin face had been drawn and haggard. Six weeks on, she looked skeletal, an appearance exaggerated by the sweat-streaked white face powder and the black smudges of mascara around her eyes. Only the flint in her gaze gave notice of a jealously hoarded reserve of strength and malice. By the foot of the bed stood a worried-looking midwife and a man in clerical robes.

  The Temple man was short and squat and carried a heavy satchel slung over one shoulder. His cassock had a black trim, and he wore a black mantle embroidered with interlocking gears, screws, and pistons, the Ultimum Machina, sigil of an artifex. Where his left eye should have been was a bulging orb of quondam metal, the color of bronze with a purple patina, set with a large red gem. Such prostheses were common amongst the Temple’s highest ranks, marking their dedication to the Builder’s perfection. As far as Jean-Claude was concerned, anyone who thought plucking out their own eye was a good idea probably wouldn’t recognize perfection if it walked by naked waving a flag.

  But what in the darkness of Oblivion was such a potentate doing here? There were only seven artifexes in all the Risen Kingdoms, one for each of the remaining saintblood lineages. Only the Omnifex in Om stood closer to the Builder, and he only because he had a taller hat. Jean-Claude had to wonder what strings the comte had pulled to ensure the man’s attendance on his offspring’s birth.

  The artifex glowered down at the comtesse like a judge at a trial. The glow from his artificial eye cast her in a bloody crimson hue. With aspergillum in hand, he sprinkled her with blessed water while delivering the ritual litany of admonishment given to all women on their birth bed. “Remember that this is your duty, your penance for Iav’s great sin. She thought to steal the secret of life from the Builder, and so must new life be torn from your flesh.”

  “Silence, wretched cur!” the comtesse snapped, her mouth as foam flecked as a rabid dog’s.

  The artifex paid her no heed but continued in a gravelly voice, “This pain is your due. This trial is your judgment. Succeed and you may be forgiven, your soul restored when the Savior comes. Fail and you shall fall into the pit from which there is no salvation.”

  “Jean-Claude,” said the comte blandly, “how good of you to join us. I trust your mission is accomplished.” Only a slight tightening of his stance hinted at how desperate he was that his statement be confirmed; if le roi had rejected his petition, then these last nine months had been a waste, along with all the resources he had dedicated to shoring up his leaky dam.

  “You … servants’ … entrance,” the comtesse spat at Jean-Claude, her normally eloquent venom reduced to breathless grunts.

  Jean-Claude bowed to her. Vile harridan. “Your Excellency, forgive me, but I did not think you wished to insult le roi by bringing him through the chicken yard. By his decree, I present His Imperial Majesty le Roi de Tonnerre, Leon XIV.” He unveiled the portrait with a flourish.

  The comte made a leg for the painting, “Your Majesty.” The midwife curtsied. The artifex made a sign of respect. Even the comtesse managed to bob her head at it.

  Jean-Claude settled the painting on a long-backed chair. “His Majesty instructs me to inform you, from his lips to your ears, that as this portrait is his presence, so am I his eyes and ears in this matter.” He presented a letter affixed with the royal seal.

  The comte looked vaguely ill, which put him more on par with his wife, but accepted the letter. The thought of a lesser man judging the fitness of his offspring would no doubt disrupt his humors for days.

  The comtesse’s body convulsed weakly, and she groaned. The midwife ducked behind the privacy curtain. “One more push, Excellency.”

  The comtesse gnashed her teeth and curled her clawlike fingers into the sweat-stained silk sheets. “Wretched … sow!” she spat between contractions.

  So temperamental was her womb that the comtesse had been restricted to a peasant’s diet of boiled oats, beans, eggs, and garden vegetables for the whole duration of her gravidity. For the last few months she had been forbidden the slightest exercise. The physicians had even gone so far as to forbid her the use of her sorcery for fear of upsetting her delicate humors. Over the months, while her belly bloated, her limbs had withered. Now her carmine shadow looked thin and gray, almost ordinary.

  Please let the bloodshadow wither and die. There was no greater terror for the Sanguinaire than to be blighted and lose their sacred sorcery. Such unfortunates were called unhallowed and were deprived of much of their status.

  “One more push,” pleaded the midwife.

  “I’ll … show you … push!” The comtesse groaned, bearing down on the bulge in her belly.

  Jean-Claude assumed a parade rest and watched the comtesse’s struggle with as much outward dispassion as he could muster, even as he willed disaster and despair on her efforts.

  “It’s coming!” the midwife cried.

  The comtesse screamed and squeezed with a demonic strength.

  “I have its head, Excellency, just one more push.”

  “Curse your … damned pushes!” She grunt-pushed once more and then gasped, her flinty eyes open wide.

  “It’s out. I’ve got it.”

  The comte’s eyes lit up. “Is it a boy? A son?”

  The midwife examined the child. Her face fell.

  “What is the matter, you stupid cow?” the comtesse snapped. “Is it whole?”

  The midwife’s voice was very small. “It … it is stillborn, Excellency.”

  The comte’s expression hurried through a range of emotion from dismay to frustration. The comtesse sagged back in her pillow, limp and almost lifeless without the energy of her anger.

  Jean-Claude’s antagonism proved bitter, for his heart twinged painfully at the announcement of the stillbirth. Rationally, logically, this was probably the best outcome for everyone. Even so, it seemed unjust that the comte’s and comtesse’s heartbreak and despair could only come at the cost of an innocent life. The child was not to blame for its parents.

  The artifex produced a cloth sack from his satchel and stepped forward to take the child from the midwife. He rumbled, “Comte, Comtesse, you have my condolences. I will perform the rite of kind passing.”

  As the midwife made to shroud the baby’s face, a thin brief mewl cut through the silence. The comte’s head snapped up. “What was that?” />
  “Nothing, Excellency,” said the midwife without looking up. “Just the death rattle.”

  The comte subsided, but Jean-Claude lunged to the screen and peered over. The baby shouldn’t have had any breath to be its last. As a farmhand, he had witnessed the births of many animals, but never of a fellow person. This was definitely more alarming. Cows and sows didn’t have to distend like that. The midwife cradled the child in one arm and firmly pressed a cloth to its face with the other.

  “Witch!” Jean-Claude darted around the blood-soaked end of the bed.

  “No, monsieur!” the midwife cried.

  Jean-Claude tore the newborn from the midwife’s grasp and planted his boot in the woman’s belly, sending her sprawling to the floor.

  “Musketeer—!” the artifex bellowed, but Jean-Claude whipped the cloth from the little one’s face. It began to wail.

  Alive after all, the newest des Zephyrs was clearly a girl, and there was nothing wrong with her lungs. This was not as good for the des Zephyrs as a son, but certainly no cause for despair. She’d be worth a lot in the marriage market. So why had the midwife tried to murder her? Had she been paid, or was this to have been revenge for some past injustice, or …

  It took him a moment to see what the midwife’s trained eye must have noticed immediately. Under the ragged, slimy veils of birth, the child’s left hand was a pudgy fist, but her right wrist tapered off to a stunted hand with only one twisted finger. Poor thing.

  Jean-Claude’s heart sagged in its rigging. The Almighty Builder’s devout followers believed deformities such as this marked unclean souls, abominations, the Breaker’s get. Just as Jean-Claude would have slit the throat of a two-headed calf, the pious midwife meant to dispatch this child, deny her a name and consign her to the sky. Jean-Claude could not imagine the des Zephyrs would do any different once they saw the facts for themselves. They would not want their name sullied with rumors of impurity. They would kill the girl and bemoan the loss of their chance at dynasty and then carry on as before, but with extra self-pity.

  “By the Builder,” the artifex said, his posture and tone horror-struck. “Witch!”

  The midwife’s face went pale. She looked back and forth between the cleric and the comte. “No! Master, you—”

  “Silence!” roared the artifex.

  “You tried to kill my child,” growled the comte. His crimson shadow stretched and slid, an oily ribbon, across the white marble floor.

  “No, please!” the midwife pleaded, but the comte’s bloodshadow seized her shadow by its neck and shook her like a terrier with a rat.

  With a flick of his wrist, the comte flung the woman across the birthing chamber and onto the balcony. She struck a pillar with a resounding crack and then lay still.

  Too late, Jean-Claude said, “Excellency, stop! Ah, we should have questioned her, found out if she was working with others.”

  “Time enough for questions later,” the comte said. “Have I a son?”

  “A daughter,” Jean-Claude said. At least until they discovered her peculiarity, and then they would be thanking the dead midwife for her initiative and discretion. Perhaps they would affix a memorial plaque to the pillar where the comte had smashed her.

  The artifex reached for the child. “Allow me to inspect—”

  “Let me see her,” snapped the comtesse, “I must claim her.”

  “Of course,” Jean-Claude said automatically, even while shielding the girl from the artifex with his body, delaying the inevitable. These folk would give this poor helpless scrap to the sky, and there was nothing Jean-Claude could do to defend her.

  And then the squalling stopped with a hiccough. The babe opened her eyes. Blue eyes. Blue as the crystal cold sky of the uppermost heights, pale, translucent, and deep as the heavens.

  Her pudgy left hand reached up and touched Jean-Claude on the nose. There was a rushing in his ear and he felt as if he were falling, as if he’d finally managed to fling himself off a tilting skyship.

  “Hand her over.” The comte’s voice seemed to come from a very long way off, but it was no less menacing for that. He would murder the child.

  Over my cooling corpse.

  But Jean-Claude had no authority in this. The girl needed a greater champion.

  But the only man who could effectively lay his hand in protection over his smallest subject was Grand Leon, and he was not here, at least not in person. Jean-Claude’s gaze strayed to le roi’s picture on the chair. It was not a current likeness. It showed Leon XIV in the prime of his life, with broad shoulders and a head of dark ringlets that hung past his shoulders, not heavy jowled with hog fat around the middle as Jean-Claude had last seen him.

  But Jean-Claude was le roi’s eyes and ears. Why not his mouth and tongue? Except, he hadn’t been given permission to speak in Grand Leon’s name … or had he? “Do not let des Zephyrs’s line perish from the world,” seemed to authorize nearly any action to protect this child.

  Yet, if Jean-Claude dared invoke le roi’s name, he would be called to account, and he knew damned well Grand Leon cared only for this child’s value as a political pawn. Le roi would not be pleased to have an abomination so close to the royal blood … unless Jean-Claude phrased his explanation very carefully. The Comtesse des Zephyrs was le roi’s maternal cousin, and her mother had helped lever le roi onto the Célestial throne against the wishes of the Omnifex. I feared your dear aunt’s blood should fade entirely … a favor to her that she should be eager to repay … Yes, that had the right ring to it. I was only thinking of you, Majesty.

  What are you thinking, boy? You can’t lie to Grand Leon!

  Well, not a lie as such. He would leave certain things out of his report, edit it for brevity. There had been an entire class at, l’École dedicated to herding aristocrats. It had been deceptively titled Proper Obeisance. As it was listed as an elective, the academy’s noble scions had ignored it like a bad smell. Jean-Claude had found it … instructive.

  You are the Breaker’s own get, mongrel, and you are going to get yourself killed.

  “Give her here, you idiot,” the comtesse demanded.

  A wicked humor twisted Jean-Claude’s cheeks into a smile. Perhaps he would rue this day, but if so, it would be for defending a child, not for abandoning her.

  “Of course, Your Excellency,” he said. “But first, her name. As the duly appointed representative of His Imperial Majesty, le Roi de Tonnerre, Leon XIV, I present you with”—the name had better be a good one. Le roi’s beloved mother perhaps? Yes. May she rest in peace—“Princess Isabelle.”

  CHAPTER

  Two

  “Hurry up!” Isabelle called over her shoulder as she skipped and slid down the steep, narrow alleyway between the hostelry and the warehouse. She leapt over piles of garbage washed up from the last rain and squelched through slippery slicks of some nameless slime. Her house slippers were not meant for this sort of use, but when she slipped away from the nannies, handmaidens, and other handlers in the manor house in order to have an adventure, she took the shoes she had on. In the future, she would make sure to stow some outdoor shoes with her other secret treasures in the old millhouse.

  “Slow down!” Marie protested, picking her way down the treacherous slope behind Isabelle. She had gathered her skirt so as not to muddy its hem and was trying to walk on pointe like a ballerina so as not to muddy her slippers.

  Of all the noble girls her father surrounded her with—“As befits a princess,” he’d said—Marie was the only one to have earned the title of friend. She liked horses, didn’t cry at skinned knees, didn’t get all green at the sight of Isabelle’s wormfinger, and didn’t ever snitch.

  Marie asked, “Why are we going this way? Why can’t we take the road?”

  “This way is shorter,” Isabelle said. The road was made for horses and carts and meandered ever so gently from the docks, up a series of switchbacks, to the bluffs above the town. Taking the road took forever. “There’s a race-built frigate in the h
arbor. It’s supposed to be amazing.” This was entirely true, if not the entire truth.

  “Oh,” Marie said, slowing down still further. “You’ve been reading mathematics again, haven’t you?”

  “What makes you say that?” Isabelle asked, surprised and a little alarmed at her friend’s insight.

  “You’re never in this much of a hurry unless you want to try something philosophical, and that means you’ve been doing math. Besides, if you’d just wanted to see the ship, you could have just asked, and we could have taken a coach.”

  Isabelle clutched her shoulder bag to her side with her right arm. Her wormfinger twitched in response to her agitation. After several false starts, she thought she’d managed to distill some aether from the air and capture it in an aetherglass phial, but she wouldn’t know for sure until she tossed the phial off a sky cliff to see if it fell or floated.

  Isabelle didn’t want to fight with Marie over this, but she didn’t want to lie to her either, so she said, “So what? Math’s fun.”

  Her little brother, Guillaume, said math was hard and that’s why girls weren’t allowed to do it.

  “It’ll melt your brain,” he’d said.

  That was what made Isabelle interested in the first place, and she’d stolen her brother’s math primer and read it by moonlight. Maybe it was the moonlight that did it, but it was as if she’d wandered into a secret treasure cave. The numbers opened up to her, and they talked to her, and they said the most amazing things.

  Marie came to a halt on a dryish patch of ground. “You’re not supposed to do math or philosophy.”

  “You’re not supposed to steal cookies, or climb trees, or ride straddlewise, either,” Isabelle said. “If you think about it, if you don’t do anything you’re not supposed to, there’s hardly anything left. You might as well just sleep all day.”

  “The Temple doesn’t care about cookies, but they do care about math. It’s against the Builder.”

  Isabelle sniffed her contempt at the theological argument. “The Temple already thinks I’m Breaker marked because of my wormfinger and because I’m unhallowed. I don’t see how doing math is going to make it any worse.”