Mist, Metal, and Ash Page 3

  In any case, the boy waiting on the stoop shouldn’t have to suffer through Alek’s ruminations. “Good afternoon, Revan,” Alek said in Veldanese, his command of the language somewhat shaky.

  “Good afternoon, Honored de Vries,” the boy pronounced slowly for Alek’s benefit.

  He held the door wide to let Revan in. Alek still thought of Revan as the restless skinny boy who had followed young Elsa around everywhere. He was a grown lad now—tall for a Veldanese and filling out, his brown complexion made even darker by long hours in the sun. Still restless, though.

  Revan aimed straight for the cot set up against the side wall of the cottage. He crouched beside Jumi and they spoke in rapid Veldanese, the liquid syllables flowing off their tongues so fast that Alek caught only one word in three. Alek went back to the writing desk, turning his attention away to give them some semblance of privacy despite the smallness of the cottage.

  He ran a hand over the half-blank page of the worldbook open before him. The scriptology paper seemed to pulse slightly, like the slow heartbeat of some hibernating animal. The book wouldn’t truly feel alive until he’d finished it, though. Assuming he could finish it. He was attempting to duplicate a worldbook scribed by Elsa, which gave her the ability to open portals between two locations on Earth. Most scriptological scholars would call the doorbook—as Elsa had named it—a ludicrous impossibility, but Alek had seen it, and used it, and knew for a fact that it was real.

  He didn’t understand how she’d pulled it off, though. He had nearly five decades more experience and study, and he still couldn’t figure it out.

  Alek didn’t look up from his project again until Revan stood to leave. The boy’s gaze swept over the cottage like a searchlight before he made for the door. Alek frowned, but told himself it was nothing. The Veldanese simply had more of a cultural emphasis on awareness of one’s surroundings.

  “What was that about?” he asked, after Revan had gone.

  “Everything’s fine,” Jumi assured him, fingering a page of the novel still open in her lap. “Some of the villagers want to learn how to use the portal devices.”

  “Why?”

  “In case of emergency. When Elsa and I were both off-world, Veldana was entirely cut off from Earth.”

  Alek harrumphed. “With the editbook in Garibaldi’s hands, it’s probably safer here, inside the Veldana worldbook, than it is in the real world.”

  “Still, we need to be better prepared,” she said. He could tell the we, in this case, meant us Veldanese rather than you and I.

  Alek nodded, but in his mind he was replaying Revan’s visit. He couldn’t shake the feeling that the boy was up to something.

  * * *

  Leo kept himself awake by mentally reviewing what he knew about the layout of his father’s alpine fortress. He composed a blueprint in his mind’s eye, sketching all the places he’d been so far, and all the unknowns implied by the negative space around those places. He might need to know these things, and soon.

  Claw marks outside his window. Was he being watched? If he went digging for answers, would they immediately know? Was it Aris or Father, or some outside force trying to monitor him? The Carbonari, maybe, or the Order. Leo felt torn between a desire to act, to do something about it, and a desire not to tip his hand too soon. Assuming someone actually was watching him, they did not yet know that Leo knew he was being watched, and that could be useful.

  It was a quandary, when the thing you wanted to investigate was your own surveillance.

  The house had been quiet and dark for hours. Leo stared at the ceiling of his room, waiting. There was a grandfather clock at the end of the hall, and if he lay very still, he could hear the swish and clack of its pendulum as it measured time.

  Now, he decided, and slid off the bed. In the dark, he fumbled with the velvet-trimmed flannel smoking jacket that had been left in the room for his use, impatient to wrap himself tightly against the chill. The nights were as cold here in May as Casa della Pazzia was in the dead of winter.

  He lit a candle, eased his bedroom door open, and slipped out into the hall. Sneaking around the house, in and of itself, should not tip off his surveillants. There were a dozen reasons he might want to go exploring at night. One might even argue that if he didn’t go sneaking around, that would be a sure sign he knew he was being watched.

  So he padded barefoot down the hall. By the time he reached the bottom of the stone stairs, his feet were freezing, but that was the price he paid for moving silently.

  To his right gaped the dark maw of the entranceway into the ballroom, the large space swallowing the meager light of his candle. At the far end the moonlit windows seemed to hover in the air like specters. Leo turned the other way instead—north, into the bowels of the fortress, where the boundaries between the house and the mountainside blurred together.

  As he followed the dark hallway, he stopped at every door and listened for a minute, ears straining for any sign of movement within. When he heard none, he would try the knob. Some of the doors were locked, which would not usually provide much of a deterrent for Leo, but he’d left his lockpicks hidden in his room. He was saving those for when the need was urgent; he didn’t want to risk getting the lockpicks confiscated over some undirected exploration. Still, it was hard to walk away from those doors—the mere fact that the locks were denying him entry made him itch to get past them. Locking a room was as good as begging a mechanist to break in, and for a fleeting moment Leo wondered if this was some game Aris was playing with him.

  Now you’re getting paranoid, he thought, and moved on to the next door.

  Whenever he found an unlocked room, he did a quick sweep inside. A disorganized storage area full of empty shipping crates. A long chamber lined with empty cots, which might serve as a barracks or a hospital, perhaps. And then, deeper into the mountainside, a wide, tall room outfitted as a mechanist’s laboratory.

  Leo paused in the doorway, suspicious. Lit only by his candle, the hulking machines cast enormous, distorted shadows against the walls and ceiling. There was no heat in the air, no telltale smell of lubricant, no sign that someone had been at work that evening. So why, then, would the door be left unlocked? They were hosting a mechanist of questionable loyalty; they should have secured the tools the minute Leo arrived.

  Leo carried his candle over to one long workbench, and he did not have difficulty finding a place to set the holder down. Everything was quite clean and organized—meticulously, almost obsessively organized. Leo could not help but smile a little at that. Even as a boy, Aris had insisted on keeping everything in its proper place. Leo, on the other hand, would set a tool down any old place and have no trouble remembering where he’d put it the next time he wanted it. “Away” was wherever the tool landed when he let go. That had always driven Aris nuts.

  Leo idly ran his fingertips along the dustless, polished wood of the workbench. It was comforting that some things never changed. He still knew his brother, and it gave him hope that Aris could be swayed from the path Ricciotti dictated.

  Then the smile fell from his face. Neat was not the only thing Aris had always been—he’d also been possessive and manipulative. There was no way Aris would leave his laboratory unlocked by accident, which meant he’d left it open for Leo to find. What was this—an offering? A lure?

  Perhaps Aris wanted Leo to search the lab and find evidence of whatever had left those claw marks outside the window. Or search the lab and find an absence of evidence. Or the unlocked lab and the claw marks were unrelated, and Aris had some other motive. Leo turned over each possibility, mentally mapping them out like planning future moves in a game of chess.

  He picked up the candleholder again and moved deeper into the laboratory, examining his brother’s machines. Toward the back was another workbench, this one with a thin white sheet draped over the lumps and angles of some half-completed mechanical components. And atop the cloth was a note, the careful loops of Aris’s cursive standing out starkly against the
pale paper and paler cloth.

  It read: Don’t touch my stuff.

  Leo moved the note aside and gently lifted the sheet to see what lay beneath.

  A procession of tiny clockwork parts was spread across the wood, each gear and bolt and screw positioned precisely as if they were soldiers lined up for a march. Leo turned the cloth back farther and discovered a half-built mechanical hand, brass skeleton joints shining in the candlelight. He froze and stared at it—could this be the evidence he was looking for?

  But no, the size didn’t look right. Leo held out his hand for comparison, and the brass skeleton fingers were no longer than his own. This part could not belong to whatever creature dug those grooves into his windowsill.

  He uncovered more of the workbench and, with it, a second note. It read: Fine. Be that way. But for the love of God, put things back where you found them.

  Leo smiled again. Despite their years of separation, how well Aris knew him. And chess had always been Aris’s game.

  * * *

  Leo saw little of his father the next day, and even less of Aris. At first he treasured the solitude, but his relief at their absence soon transformed to suspicion. For them to leave him so unattended, something must be going on—something of import.

  Leo walked the empty hallways, pausing at each closed door, until he heard movement within his father’s study. He froze, then leaned in, pressing his ear to the wood.

  On the other side a voice spoke—muffled, yet still recognizably belonging to Aris. “You want to know how it’s going? Slowly. Like a snail. That’s how it’s going.”

  Ricciotti’s voice replied, “What can be done to expedite the process?”

  Aris let out a disbelieving laugh. “Father, the entire book is written in a language nobody can read. I have to decipher the grammar and syntax and vocabulary—all without any references—before we can even begin to use it.”

  There was a long pause, and Leo could vividly imagine the stare that must be passing between Aris and Ricciotti.

  Eventually, Aris broke the thick silence. “We shouldn’t have let the girl go. She’s valuable.”

  “Must you constantly second-guess my decisions?” Ricciotti said, half-amused and half-annoyed.

  “Do you know what the locomotive engineer told the police? I read the report. She left through a portal and came back with a device that put out the fire in the firebox. Father, she’s a polymath.”

  Ricciotti sighed audibly. “Yes, Aris, I am aware. But your brother made the conditions for his return quite clear.”

  “I was right that we should have retrieved Leo sooner, and I’m right about this, too. We need her skills. Even more, we need her language.”

  “But we don’t need her yet. For now, she is serving a different purpose—she gives Leo a reason to stay. In time, he’ll remember he belongs with us, and her freedom will no longer be a necessary bargaining chip.”

  Leo pushed away from the door, struggling to stay silent. His hands, he realized, were shaking. Panic lit his veins and buzzed in his brain. No, no, no, please no.

  After everything he’d sacrificed to buy her freedom, Elsa was still not safe from his father.

  3

  SCIENTISTS DELIGHT NOT IN ABUNDANCE OF MATERIAL; THEY REJOICE ONLY IN THE EXCELLENCE OF THEIR EXPERIMENTAL METHODS.

  —Jabir ibn Hayyan

  They walked back through the narrow, straight streets and wide-open piazzas of Pisa. There was a renewed energy to Faraz’s step, and Elsa had to hurry to keep up with his long legs.

  Back at Casa della Pazzia, he took the grand staircase two at a time. Faraz was the one to open the door and let them into Leo’s bedchamber, seemingly comfortable with the thought of entering his friend’s space uninvited. Elsa, however, stepped into the middle of Leo’s large room and looked around awkwardly.

  Afternoon sunlight streamed through the glass doors that led onto the balcony. Aside from the bed and a garishly upholstered wingback chair, there was a wardrobe and shelves and drawers, all overburdened with more possessions than one person could possibly need. She hadn’t noticed before, but apparently Leo was the sort of person who hoarded everything.

  “On the bright side,” said Faraz, eyeing the mess, “I find it highly unlikely that Leo would have thrown out the mask.”

  Elsa started with the wardrobe, hoping this would be the easiest hiding place to eliminate. It was packed full, so she felt around to confirm everything was made of cloth. She struggled to understand how anyone could accumulate so much junk—her own unsentimental upbringing had taught her that the value of an object was its practical use, but Leo’s collection of stuff was clearly about something more personal than utility.

  She said, “I don’t know about you, but I feel a little strange going through his things like this.” It seemed somehow intimate, as if exploring Leo’s private space would bring her closer to him—whether she wanted that or not.

  Faraz was searching the shelves, undeterred by such inhibitions. “Look at this,” he said, holding up a folded sheaf of paper. “Playbill from an opera we saw more than a year ago.” He put it down and pointed at a badly corroded, broken sextant. “Salvaged from a tall-ship wreck we explored when we were fourteen. Ticket stub from our first train ride to Firenze. And I don’t even know when this is from,” he said, fingering a wine cork that Leo had kept for some reason. “I swear, he’s worse than a magpie.”

  This seemed to delight Faraz, as if it were tangible proof that the Leo he remembered had, in fact, existed. But looking around, Elsa sighed. How could a person who clung with apparent sentimentality to every scrap of his life simply walk away from all of it, with nothing but the clothes on his back and the tools in his pockets? To Elsa, the clutter spoke of a desperate need to feel settled and at home here in Casa della Pazzia. Was Garibaldi now fulfilling that need?

  Were all of them—the Pisanos and Faraz and Elsa—nothing but a poor substitute for the true family he’d always yearned after?

  Elsa pushed the thought away, along with the sharp pain it gave her, and went back to searching. She concluded that nothing was hidden in the wardrobe other than a reluctance to dispose of old clothes, and she moved on to exploring the contents of an ornately carved cabinet with an abundance of little compartments.

  “Isn’t any of this organized?” she huffed, frustrated.

  “Oh, it’s all organized,” Faraz assured her. “But I’m afraid the method of organization is entirely opaque to anyone who’s not Leo.”

  Elsa sighed and opened another little door, then froze. “Um, Faraz?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What color did Rosalinda say the mask was?” she said, reaching into the compartment.

  Faraz shifted his weight, turning his attention toward her. “White.”

  Elsa held up a broken piece of white ceramic. “I think we have a problem.”

  * * *

  Elsa needed to break something.

  Hanging on the wall over the washbasin in her bedroom was a small, oval mirror with a somewhat tarnished silver frame. She lifted it off the wall and looked it over, familiarizing herself with every detail. It was heavier than she’d expected—not that she’d had much experience with such little luxuries before coming to Pisa. The Europeans value rarities, her mother once explained. Minerals and metals that are hard to find in their world. But what is rarity to us, we who scribe the stone?

  “Casa?” she said, addressing the empty air.

  The house’s smooth, low, artificial voice seemed to emanate from everywhere and nowhere. “Yes, signorina?”

  “Who would you say this mirror belongs to?”

  “Well.” Casa’s pause sounded thoughtful. “It hangs in your room for your use.”

  “Yes, but does it really belong to me?” It didn’t feel like hers; it was simply an object that had been left in the rooms she borrowed.

  “In what sense, signorina?”

  Elsa rubbed her thumb against a spot of tarnish. “In the scriptologica
l sense: the property of ownership.” The map world was a finicky invention—hence why the shattered fragments of the mask would not provide strong enough ownership for tracking—and Elsa needed a test object with clear ownership.

  “Scriptologically speaking, it cannot belong to me, as I am neither human nor alive,” said the house. “I belong to the Pisano family, and so by extension all that I contain is theirs as well. Does that help?”

  “Thank you, Casa. You are, as always, very helpful.”

  “I exist to serve.”

  Elsa nodded, padding barefoot through her sitting room with its absurdly lavish furniture upholstered in green-and-beige damask, and into her cozy, well-lit study, with its delightfully large writing desk. She should test the mirror first, to be sure, before breaking it.

  “And to protect,” Casa added.

  Elsa looked up. “What?”

  “I exist to protect,” the house said emphatically.

  “Riiight…,” Elsa said. She had no idea what that was about. “Thanks,” she said, to dismiss the house’s attention.

  She set the mirror down on her writing desk and opened the tracking worldbook to the first page. Elsa had found the tracking book waiting for her outside the door to her chambers. Apparently Porzia was done with the search, and Elsa and Faraz would have to continue without her assistance.

  Elsa read the coordinates listed in the front of the worldbook and set the dials on her handheld portal device. She picked up the mirror again in her other hand and flipped the switch to activate the device.

  A gaping black hole irised open, cutting through the air in the middle of her study. Elsa stepped into it. The cold, black nothingness of the in-between space washed over her, and then she passed through to the other side, stepping into ankle-deep salt water.