An Alchemy of Masques and Mirrors--A Novel Page 3

  “Maybe not for you,” Marie said.

  “You can go back if you want, but you won’t get to see what I’m going to do. Besides, if you quit now, you’ll just have to climb up the way you came, and you’re already more than halfway down. Going down and then taking the road back up is much easier.”

  Then Isabelle bounded away.

  “Hey!” cried Marie. “No fair. Wait for me!”

  By the time Marie caught up to Isabelle at the bottom of the alley run, her shoes were sodden and her hem was muddy, and since she couldn’t do anything about it now, she apparently decided it didn’t matter. “Race you to the point,” Marie said.

  Isabelle almost darted away, but she heard a familiar adult voice singing, loudly and without musical merit, “… but a woman’s shift and apron they were no use to meeee…”

  Isabelle grabbed Marie by the back of the shirt with her good hand and pulled her behind a mucky rain barrel just as the musketeer Jean-Claude staggered by, a quart mug in one hand and a wine sack in the other. He fetched up against the rain-dampened corner of the warehouse and stood nose-to-brick with the building, as if challenging it for the right of way.

  Isabelle wrinkled her nose and whispered, “He’s drunk.”

  Marie said, “He’s always drunk, my mother says, a disgrace to the uniform, doesn’t know why your father keeps him around.”

  “He has to; le roi makes him,” Isabelle said. “I don’t know why.” Or at least she didn’t believe the story she’d been told, that the king had foisted Jean-Claude on her parents as a punishment for having Isabelle. Who exactly was it supposed to be punishment for? Whatever the case, she could not remember a time when the beer-stained musketeer hadn’t been around, staggering into and out of her path, mostly oblivious to her presence, mostly at inopportune moments like this one.

  Unfortunately, Jean-Claude was just the sort of adult who could take Isabelle by the ear and drag her back to the manor house without fear of repercussion, and if he didn’t shove off soon, Isabelle was going to miss her chance to try out her experiment, and she might not get another chance for weeks and weeks. She was just about to climb back up the slope and come down a different way when Jean-Claude heaved off the wall and lurched down the street at an angle that suggested a skyship at odds with the prevailing wind.

  Isabelle traded glances with Marie. Marie looked ready to scamper back the way they’d come, but Isabelle gestured for her to follow and sneaked to the mouth of the alley. She peeked around the corner in the direction Jean-Claude had gone just in time to see him disappear into the next alley down the street.

  Isabelle hesitated; the next alley was a dead end. There wasn’t any place for Jean-Claude to go except the butcher’s hanging closet. Should she and Marie try to sneak past before he came out, or should they wait? As like as not, he’d gone in there to make water and would be facing the other way … maybe.

  Isabelle screwed up her courage, gestured for Marie to follow, and scurried past the mouth of the alley. The quick glance she risked showed what looked like the musketeer wrestling with his trousers and losing.

  She didn’t slow down until she’d reached the next intersection and slipped around the corner. Marie joined her. They held their breath, listening for pursuit, then locked eyes with each other and broke into giggles.

  They hurried down to the wharfs, past the net makers and the lumberyard and the warehouses that would soon be full of fine spring wool from the skyland’s famous Lande Glacée sheep. They climbed up on a bale of sailcloth to stare up at the race-built ship, a two-masted schooner of the newer, flat-bottomed style, long and lean like a reef pike with the turvy masts slightly longer than the tops, the bowsprit horizontal like a fencer’s thrust. It was clearly a merchant’s ship, brightly painted with a sprawling mural of great colorful birds carrying long silk banners. Isabelle itched with the desire to sneak aboard and get a look at the aetherkeel, to see, just once in person, how the great machines were put together.

  Marie got bored with the ship before Isabelle and said, “Come on, let’s go see this secret philosophy thing of yours. People are staring.”

  Isabelle spotted a cluster of ragged-looking men loitering by the schooner’s gangway. Their faces, tattooed with sigils of the saints, marked them as Iconates. They believed something about the Risen Saints being ghosts that got involved in people lives, which seemed like an awful lot of bother for a bunch of dead people.

  Marie was right, though; several of the men were bestowing them dolorous looks. Isabelle slid off the back of the bale. She and Marie looped around a warehouse to get out of sight and then hurried to the far end of the quay, which was usually abandoned at this time of day. Isabelle looked back along the docks. The Iconates were still huddled like supplicants at the foot of the schooner.

  Satisfied that they hadn’t been followed, Isabelle crouched amongst the piles and unlimbered her shoulder bag. She withdrew two glass phials, one with a cork painted red, the other green. She held up the green one proudly. “Distilled aether.”

  Marie eyed her accomplishment dubiously. “Looks empty to me.”

  Isabelle considered trying to explain how she’d contrived a galvanic compressor to pump the sublimating infinitesimal proto-gas into the phial, but Marie didn’t stay up nights worrying about things like that.

  Instead Isabelle said, “Only one way to find out. The red one really is empty; if it falls faster than the green one, we know the green one had aether in it.” Otherwise it’s back to the books.

  She stepped up to the very edge of the docks and peered down. The cloud tide was low today. A vague greenish tint along the top of the clouds indicated a rising Miasma, hopefully one that the sun would bake away before it reached the level of the town and sickened those who could not reach higher ground.

  Marie eased up beside her, getting down on her knees and clinging to a bollard in order to peek over the edge. She winced as a sudden updraft caught her hair. The wind lifted Isabelle’s skirt and whipped it around her calves.

  “I wish you’d at least hang on to something,” Marie said.

  “I’ve only got one hand and I need it for this.” Isabelle waited for the gust to subside and, holding her breath, dropped the phials into empty air. The bottles tumbled and fell, like glittering jewels. Yes, yes, yes! The green bottle drifted downward fluttering like a leaf on the wind while its twin dove straight for the crushing depths.

  Isabelle squealed in delight. “It worked. It worked!” Not that she’d ever had any doubts. Not many. A few. She hopped up and down, much to Marie’s consternation.

  “Saints, Izzy,” she gasped. “You’re going to fall off!”

  Isabelle skipped back from the edge and reached down to pull Marie to her feet. “Did you see that? It worked!”

  “Yes,” Marie said, looking more relieved to be away from the precipice than excited for Isabelle’s achievement.

  Isabelle babbled on, lifted by the force of her own ebullience. “That means the lodestones in the flux oscillator don’t have to be continuous as long as they’re balanced.”

  Marie gave her an exasperated look that was much older than her thirteen years. “Which means what?”

  “It means I can build a bigger distiller.”

  “I mean, what are you going to do with it, build a ship?”

  Isabelle stopped hopping about, her attention arrested. “Maybe I could.” And wouldn’t it be wonderful if she could just sail away, escape forever her wicked father and brother?

  “You’re mad!” Marie protested, though the spark of adventure rekindled in her eyes.

  “Maybe,” Isabelle said faintly, retreating to that inner dark place where she could concentrate and the good thoughts happened. She knew how aetherkeels worked, but that wasn’t the same as being able to build one.

  “Witch!” bellowed a ragged masculine voice. “Breaker’s get.”

  Isabelle snapped out of her reverie to see three of the Iconates stalking down the pier toward her, hat
red etched into their faces. The one in front was a gaunt man with hollow eyes. When he spoke, ropes of yellow spittle, thick as phlegm, dangled from his lips, a sure sign of the galfesters. Indeed, his voice sounded as if his tongue were made of mud. “Caught you in the act, didn’t I? Throwing potions in the air, calling sickness up from the depths. Breaker take you back!” He shambled toward her.

  Fear drained thought from Isabelle’s mind. She stepped back but realized she had nowhere farther to go.

  “Stay back!” she shrieked. This was just the sort of thing her governess was always threatening would happen to her if she stepped out of bounds. The wicked men will get you, barbarians and heretics.

  “Leave us alone,” Marie said, stepping forward. “My father is Lord du Bois and she is the comte’s own daughter.”

  Galfesters laughed, spitting up bubbles of slime. “Think I don’t know that, little witch? Great lord’s daughter had the mark of corruption. Now the sheep die on the hillside. Now the nets bring up no aerofish. Now good, faithful people die while the corrupt thrive. You think we don’t know why? You think we don’t know where the curse comes from, Breakerspawn? You murdered my wife! You killed my son!”

  Shock and disbelief overcame Isabelle’s fear. “I did not,” she protested, but there was no arguing with the madness in those eyes. People had been accusing her of being the Breaker’s get all her life. Even the household servants whispered it when they thought she couldn’t hear.

  “Pit worm,” Galfesters muttered, shambling straight for Isabelle. She scampered left but his friends spread out to block her escape. Two more steps, and he’d be on her. There was no place to run. Marie whipped out her maidenblade.

  “Marie, don’t!” Isabelle cried. The short blade was supposed to be a girl’s last defense against dishonor, meant for her to cut her own throat rather than allow herself to be ruined by a rapist. Isabelle’s governess had spent many hours drilling Isabelle on exactly how to make the cut, always with the breathless suggestion, “Think of the great honor you will do your family.”

  But Marie aimed the knife at Galfesters, a kitten hissing at a mad dog.

  Galfesters rounded on Marie. “Cursed b—”

  There was a loud ceramic crack and an explosion of pottery shards around Galfesters’s head. Someone had hurled a crock at him. He toppled in a spray of baked clay and landed hard on the edge of the pier. Isabelle skipped aside. His club flew end over end out into empty space. His cronies blinked at him, then whirled to see what had felled him.

  Jean-Claude, rushing from the alley, bellowing like bull, was on the first one before he could react. The musketeer threw an elbow at his head. The Iconate spun halfway around in a shower of blood and teeth and sprawled on the ground. The last one thrust a boat hook at Jean-Claude but hit only air as the musketeer glided to one side, seized the haft, and yanked his assailant off balance. A swift kick and a thudding blow to the neck laid him out like a rug.

  Galfesters groaned and pushed himself to his elbows.

  Marie, still livid, stepped forward and gave him a sturdy kick in the ribs. “That’s what you get!”

  The Iconate waved an ineffectual hand at his attacker. “Pit spawn.”

  Jean-Claude stepped in, planted his knee in Galfesters’s back, grabbed a fistful of hair, and yanked his head back. “If Isabelle is the Breaker’s get, then I am her hellhound. Now, who ordered this attack?”

  Galfesters’s wild stare fixed on Isabelle. “Pit spawn! Cursebringer! Your fault—”

  He lunged against Jean-Claude’s hold, ripping out clumps of his own hair in his frenzy.

  Isabelle extended a trembling finger down the quay. “He was standing by the schooner.”

  With a grunting effort, Jean-Claude wrapped an arm around Galfesters’s throat. Isabelle circled away from him. Her heart was pounding, and a wild urge to flee kept clawing at her mind.

  Jean-Claude glanced Isabelle’s way. One glinting blue eye caught her wide-eyed stare.

  “Stay put,” said the musketeer in a tone of such steel conviction that Isabelle’s normally restless soles felt nailed to the ground. Jean-Claude squeezed until Galfesters stopped twitching, then let him go with a plop. There must have still been some life in him because he coughed, and phlegm drizzled from his mouth. Jean-Claude searched through his clothes. The musketeer muttered imprecations under his breath and moved on to the next man.

  Isabelle’s thoughts slowly came unstuck, and she assembled all she had seen. People had been calling her names as long as she could remember—worm child, Breaker’s get—but no one had ever tried to kill her before. Her skin felt cold and she was shaking like a leaf. Marie was breathing heavily and her grip on her knife was so white knuckled that Isabelle thought her fingers might fuse like that.

  Jean-Claude finished his search of the downed men, then faced Isabelle and Marie. A somber look darkened his face, but there was no sign of the drunkard about him. “I think I should get you two home.”

  “Are we in trouble?” Marie asked shakily, as if the fire that had sustained her had now burned out.

  “I should think not,” Jean-Claude said. “At least, not if you get changed into clean clothes and put yourself back where you are supposed to be before a general alarm goes up.”

  Stunned and subdued, the girls followed Jean-Claude up the long, winding cart road toward the manor, but even the brisk pace he set could not entirely quell Isabelle’s curiosity. “Who were those men?” she asked after she got used to his rolling rhythm. “Iconates?”

  Jean-Claude did not answer immediately, and his face was screwed up like Isabelle’s brother’s whenever he was dealing with a tricky bit of arithmetic or grammar. Finally Jean-Claude said, “The man who attacked you is named Tallie. He used to be a fisherman until he took his boat too deep into the Miasma, brought up a catch of the galfesters, and passed it around to his family. That broke his mind and drove him into the embrace of the Iconates.”

  “Oh,” Isabelle said, flustered by the humanity of her erstwhile assailant. “But you said someone ordered them to attack us.”

  “It’s one of the possibilities I’m investigating,” he said. “I doubt those three were part of an organized plan, but someone may have put a worm in their ear.”

  “But … why?” She knew people thought she was a witch, but she couldn’t get her mind around Galfesters’s hatred. It had been spilling off him like heat from the Solar.

  “Because the world is full of men who think that Her Highness Princess Isabelle des Zephyrs, cousin once removed to Grand Leon, should have more fingers and less intelligence. They think she should be beautiful, brainless, beatific—”

  “Boring,” Isabelle supplied. “Barmy.”

  Jean-Claude smiled down at her fondly. “And a bounty of other brevities beginning with ‘B.’ Yes. Fortunately for you, I find their arguments unconvincing.”

  Isabelle forged into new territory. “You said you were my hellhound.”

  “Perhaps an unfortunate choice of words. Say rather that I am His Majesty’s sheepdog. I wander around distant fields, stick my nose in other people’s privates, and growl at curs.”

  Emboldened by Jean-Claude’s frankness, Marie said, “My mother says you’re a disgraced uniform.”

  “Only on Templedays. The rest of the week I am a sot, a drunkard, a reprobate, a clown, a fool, a dolt, and a dullard. Except, of course, on Feastdays, when I take upon myself the duties and responsibilities of chief glutton, and on Fastdays, when I indulge in inestimable digestible, comestible heresy.”

  Isabelle untangled Jean-Claude’s meaning from his sideways words. He was playing with her, an adult game of everything-means-something-else, but he wasn’t playing it in the same way her father did, with words full of cutting traps. This was more like a puzzle she was meant to solve.

  “So you’re just pretending,” Isabelle said. “Why?”

  “Because no one is afraid of the village idiot.”

  Isabelle’s mind was still swimming fro
m these revelations when Jean-Claude guided them into a narrow lane between the pickers’ tenement and the bluffs below the manor yard. He took them straight to the old millrace that provided Isabelle’s and Marie’s usual method of secret egress from the manor grounds … or maybe not so secret after all, since Jean-Claude apparently knew exactly where it was.

  Jean-Claude shooed them toward the steep, narrow channel. “You two should stay away from town for a few days. This is a dangerous time, and I need you to be alert for anything strange or unusual. If you do that for me, I’ll let you know when it’s safe to sneak out again. Do we have a bargain?”

  Isabelle was surprised. A bargain? No adult had ever made a deal with her before. They just told her what to do and then mostly pretended she wasn’t there. But would he keep his end of the bargain? Adults were always failing to keep promises, but Jean-Claude had apparently been aware of their excursions for … how long? And he had done nothing to stop them thus far. And she had a great many questions for him, just as soon as she could figure out how to put them into words.

  She put on her best princess voice, which was rusty from disuse, and said, “We have a bargain, monsieur.”

  Marie held out her hand palm up. “Builder keep you.”

  “Until the Savior comes,” Jean-Claude replied, completing the traditional farewell. He doffed his hat to her and swept a low bow. He waited until she and Marie squirmed through the curtain of vines overhanging the millrace before turning and sauntering away. By the time they’d climbed ten feet, they could hear him singing a bawdy drinking song. They did not understand all the words, but it made them blush anyway.

  The long, familiar ascent of the millrace gave Isabelle time to think of other things, such as how brave Marie had been. How had she done that? Isabelle’s whole mind had gone blank, white with fear. Even now, she didn’t feel normal. It was like she was running on a bog. As long as she kept going she’d stay on top, but the minute she stopped, she’d sink and be drowned.