Mist, Metal, and Ash Read online

  Inside the tracking world, a scale model of Europe stretched before her. She stood in the middle of the Adriatic Sea, towering like a giant over the landscape, the immensity of the Alps reduced to an inconvenience no taller than her shins. Turning left, she saw that the world now included the continent of Africa, and behind her was the Near East. The cuffs of her trousers were wicking up the water, so she stopped looking around and stepped across Europe to get to the podium-shaped machine that would control the tracking map.

  She set the mirror atop the podium and fiddled with the controls, then yanked down on a large lever to start the machine. Gears whirred, and the targeting settled in with a series of ka-chunk noises.

  When the machine was done, she sloshed back through the Atlantic to stand on Europe, staring down between her feet; on the map, a little red dot glowed over the location of Pisa within the Kingdom of Sardinia.

  “Excellent,” Elsa murmured. The mirror had enough ownership property for the machine to target its owner—apparently Signora Pisano, since her husband was currently in Firenze at the headquarters of the Order.

  Elsa grabbed the mirror and opened a portal back to her study in the real world. Then she shut the tracking worldbook to make room on her desk. Taking the frame in both hands, she whacked the mirror down against the desk’s hard wood. It made a soft crunching noise, and a spiderweb of cracks marred the glass.

  Now all she had to do was design a device that would repair the mirror without muddling the ownership property. The clarity that came with focusing on a task relieved her of anger, of hurt, of doubt. Elsa smiled.

  She would build the device, fix the mask, and track down Aris. Then she would make her mother proud by recovering the editbook. Leo meant nothing, she told herself. The task was all.

  * * *

  Elsa prayed to nothing in particular as the machine chugged and huffed.

  She was in the main room of her laboratory worldbook, with its smooth wood floor and ample worktables. The single broad window showed a view of waves lapping at the sandy shores of a barrier island, but the scene was an illusion; no outside existed beyond the laboratory walls in this world. The water was silent and bereft of the salt-and-decay scents of an actual sea, and the sight alone brought her little comfort. Elsa would have to scribe sound and smell sometime.

  She turned back to watch the machine she’d just built. It was approximately the size and shape of a steamer trunk, though the steel and brass construction rendered it much heavier. The pitch of its whirring gears lowered as they slowed to a halt.

  Elsa opened a pressure valve and waited a minute before reaching for the latch that held the machine’s lid tightly sealed. The lid opened with a soft hiss. She pulled on a pair of long, thick leather gloves and lifted out the still-hot oval mirror. Tilting it in the light, she held the mirror so close to her face she could feel heat wafting off the surface. Its cracks were sealed now, but there remained bubbly deformations in the glass where the cracks had been, like the glass equivalent of raised keloid scar tissue.

  “Damn,” she muttered, setting the mirror down on another lab bench to cool. She pulled off the gloves and threw them across the room, which was momentarily satisfying but in the end not terribly productive.

  Pressing one palm to her forehead, Elsa had to acknowledge she was exhausted. She had no notion of what hour it was—she deliberately did not keep a clock in her laboratory, since she disliked being reminded of the passage of time while involved in a project. Her stomach told her she had missed the dinner hour, though. She should take a break and eat something; perhaps a solution would present itself once she was refreshed.

  The portal took her back to her rooms in Casa della Pazzia. As soon as she was through, Casa’s voice startled her, saying, “Signor Hannachi requests your presence in the alchemy lab, when you’re able.”

  She squeezed her eyes shut, willing her heart rate to calm down. “Thanks for your, uh, diligence in delivering that message, Casa. I’ll go see Faraz now. Would you send some leftovers to the alchemy lab for me, please?”

  “It would be my pleasure, signorina.”

  As she navigated through the hallways of Casa della Pazzia, her mind drifted back to Leo. It was easy not to think of him when she was focused on calibrating the pressure gauge or tweaking the sealant formula to activate at a lower temperature. But as soon as she stepped away from the diversion of engineering, the betrayal and doubt came flooding back, and she felt as if she were walking through a marsh where at any moment the next step might be the one that sucked her under.

  At least she and Faraz were united in a common goal; Elsa needed that camaraderie. If she didn’t force herself to trust someone now, she might never be able to do it again. Not after what Leo did. Elsa paused outside the alchemy lab door, part of her wanting to withdraw, but instead she made herself go in.

  Faraz’s laboratory—in contrast to Leo’s—was immaculately clean, with the shelves of chemicals and cabinets of glassware all neatly organized. The white shards of the mask were laid out like puzzle pieces on the worktable in the center of the room, and beside them Faraz was sculpting a lump of clay with his hands.

  Elsa said, “What do you have there?”

  “Good evening,” Faraz said, glancing up. “I was thinking I could shape a clay mold, and stick the broken pieces on the outside. Then we’d just need your machine to fuse the cracks.”

  “If I can ever get it to work,” she said darkly.

  “Of course you’ll get it to work,” he said with utter faith. He motioned for her to come over. “Take a look at this.”

  This was a book he had open on his worktable. Elsa touched the pages, but the paper felt dead to her—it was just a regular book, not a worldbook. “What is it?”

  “A history of the plague,” he explained, pausing to rub his nose with the back of his hand. “I found a sketch of what the plague doctor mask looks like. It was actually worn by doctors in the seventeenth century, if you can believe it.”

  Elsa leaned close to look at the picture. The mask was designed to cover the entire face, with two round holes for the eyes and a long, downward-curving beak like that of a mournful ibis. “Well,” she said, “at least we now know what we’re trying to reconstruct.”

  A bot let itself into the lab, bringing Elsa a bowl. “Thank you, Casa,” she said as she accepted the food—white beans and stewed tomatoes with sausage chopped into it. She was too hungry to care that it was room temperature, and started shoveling it into her mouth.

  “How close are you with the machine?” asked Faraz, who had gone back to molding the clay, using the picture in the book as a guide.

  “No idea. I can predict the chemistry, but figuring out how to retain the ownership property is blind trial and error,” Elsa said between bites. The food tasted of garlic and sage, with bursts of spiciness when she bit into a piece of sausage. “Though I should test it on something ceramic to check my temperature and pressure calculations.”

  Faraz leaned away from the clay mold and shifted from side to side, examining it for imperfections. “Well, in about thirty seconds you’ll have an empty ceramic bowl,” he teased.

  “Ha-ha,” she said around a large mouthful.

  But by the time Elsa made it back to her rooms, the bowl was indeed empty, so she licked it clean and brought it through the portal into her laboratory.

  She set the bowl on a workbench, rested a narrow-bladed chisel against the bottom, and gave the chisel a good whack with a mallet—splitting the bowl into two neat pieces. Now that the machine would have some physical damage to repair, she lifted the lid, placed the two halves of the bowl inside, and applied a thin trail of liquid sealant to the crack. Then she checked her notes, adjusted the machine’s settings, and let it run.

  Elsa worked long into the night, running tests and more tests. They only had the one mask, so there was no margin for error. Casa brought her teacups and saucers and plates, and expressed only mild reservations about allowing Elsa to break
the Pisanos’ fine china.

  Once Elsa was satisfied with a visual inspection of the machine’s results, she began taking her repaired objects through a portal into the tracking world and testing the strength of their ownership property. She kept tweaking the fusion machine until its products consistently retained a strong, clear ownership signal, and only then did she admit to herself that it was time to give in to exhaustion.

  She took a portal back to her rooms in Casa della Pazzia. Outside her windows, dawn had already brightened the sky, and a songbird’s melody permeated the glass, muted but audible. Apparently she’d worked the whole night away.

  “Casa, I’m going to grab a few hours’ sleep. Please wake me when Faraz has finished reconstructing the mask.”

  “As you wish, signorina,” said the house.

  This was going to work. She would make it work—by sheer force of will, if she had to.

  * * *

  Faraz’s reconstruction of the mask was a work of art, as far as Elsa was concerned.

  “Will this do?” he asked as he rested the mask-covered clay mold on an empty worktable in her laboratory.

  For a moment, Elsa was too baffled to respond; she almost would have accused him of false modesty, if he didn’t seem so genuinely unsure of the quality of his work. “Faraz, don’t be ridiculous, it’s a thing of beauty—I can barely see the cracks and we haven’t even sealed them yet.”

  Together they prepped the mask with sealant, and Faraz carefully lowered it into Elsa’s machine. She set the dials, took a deep breath, and flipped the switch to turn it on. The machine hissed and hummed as the chamber got up to temperature.

  “How does it work?” Faraz asked.

  Elsa watched the gauges closely. The pressure needle was wavering a little, so she made a couple of fine adjustments. “The sealant lowers the melting temperature of the ceramic and the glaze just along the cracks, while the rest of it stays solid.”

  “Doesn’t that leave behind trace contamination?”

  “Nope.” There, that was better—the pressure needle held steady. “The sealant burns off when I increase the partial pressure of oxygen.”

  Keeping an eye on the built-in timer, Elsa let the chamber hold at peak conditions for another ninety seconds before she turned the dial to increase the oxygen content. When the entire process was complete, she opened a valve and vented the chamber to equilibrate it with the air in the room.

  Elsa said, “If you’re the praying type, now would be the time.”

  “That’s not really how prayer works … for me, at least,” Faraz replied, his expression turning wistful.

  Elsa shrugged. The Veldanese had no religion, so she grew up only vaguely aware of the concept; someday she’d have to get Faraz to explain it to her properly, but today was not the time for that.

  She handed her thick leather gloves to Faraz and opened the chamber lid for what would hopefully be the last time. Faraz pulled on the gloves and gently lifted the plague doctor mask out of the machine, leaving behind the clay mold he’d used for the reconstruction. The mask held together in his hands.

  Faraz set it down on an empty workbench, and Elsa leaned in for a closer look. The seals in the porcelain looked almost seamless—Faraz had done an excellent job of fitting the pieces together, and after a whole night of trials, Elsa had the machine running optimally.

  Elsa dared to hope. “So far, so good. We should let it cool before taking it into the tracking world—let’s not risk a rapid temperature change.” She worried the cold nothingness between portals would crack the mask if it was still hot.

  They let it sit on the bench for an agonizing few minutes. When the anxious impatience in her chest became too sharp to bear, Elsa tapped her naked fingertips against the mask, testing its temperature, and found it still warm but not painfully so.

  They both took off their boots. Elsa picked up a portal device and Faraz lifted the mask, and together they stepped through a portal into the shallow water of the Adriatic Sea. They walked across Europe and into the Atlantic, and Faraz placed the mask atop the tracking podium with a care bordering on reverence.

  “Moment of truth,” he breathed.

  Elsa grinned at him. “Truth is what we make it to be.”

  She adjusted the controls and pulled the lever to input the target. The mechanical innards of the podium chugged and whirred, and then the targeting was complete.

  Faraz said, “Did it work?”

  Elsa sloshed her way back through the ankle-deep Atlantic to continental Europe. “Check the map. Do you see the dot?”

  They stared down at the map beneath their feet. After a tense moment of searching, Elsa spotted the red dot of light, its glow partially obscured by the rugged alpine topography. “Here!”

  A location, finally—she’d found Aris, and he would lead her to the editbook.

  Faraz picked his way over and examined the location. “They’re in the mountains outside the city of Trento. That whole region north of Venetia still belongs to the Austrian Empire.”

  “Is that going to be a problem?” Elsa’s grasp of European politics was tenuous at best. For most of her life, she’d thought of existence as divided into two categories: Veldana and not-Veldana. The divisions between countries on Earth were trivial compared with this most important of distinctions, or so Jumi had encouraged her to think. At the moment, though, she was painfully aware that her ignorance of political matters was a weakness.

  Faraz’s features settled into a thoughtful expression. “The border crossing could prove problematic, but Rosalinda may have a solution to that. I’d be surprised if the Carbonari didn’t have someone who could forge papers.”

  “Papers?” Elsa asked, confused.

  “Identification.”

  “Oh,” she said, though she still wasn’t sure what exactly he meant. “Anyway, will you bring the news to Rosalinda for me?”

  “Of course,” said Faraz. “But what will you do?”

  The flood of elation at their success was gradually receding as Elsa focused on the next problem that needed to be solved. “The Carbonari are my way in, but I’ll also need a way out.” She took a deep breath. “And for that I’ll need Porzia.”

  4

  AH, CHILD AND YOUTH, IF YOU KNEW THE BLISS WHICH RESIDES IN THE TASTE OF KNOWLEDGE, AND THE EVIL AND UGLINESS THAT LIES IN IGNORANCE, HOW WELL YOU ARE ADVISED TO NOT COMPLAIN OF THE PAIN AND LABOR OF LEARNING.

  —Christine de Pizan

  Porzia was desperate for something to do that wouldn’t remind her of Leo.

  After her outburst in the library, she’d gone straight up to her study, taking the tracking worldbook with her even though the mere sight of it made her blood boil. She had hurled the book against the wall, and that gave her a moment of satisfaction. But the worldbook had fallen open where it landed, as if begging her to sit down and go back to work on the impossible problem of how to track the untrackable. She briefly considered finding a lit fireplace to toss it into, but in the end decided to leave it outside the door to Elsa’s chambers instead. If Elsa and Faraz wanted to keep banging their heads against the delusion of rescuing Leo, she supposed it was within their rights to do so—as long as they left Porzia out of it.

  Now she was wandering the halls of Casa della Pazzia, going up and down staircases at random, looking for a place that didn’t remind her poignantly of Leo. How could it be that every square inch of the massive house seemed to come with some memory of him attached to it? Porzia had lived here for eleven years before Leo turned up, and yet he seemed to be as much a part of the house as the army of little brass bots that kept the place running.

  Eventually she found herself on the main floor, outside her mother’s office. The door was mostly closed, but not latched, so Porzia let herself in without knocking.

  Mamma looked up from her desk. She had dark circles under her eyes, and strands of dark hair were escaping from her usually neat chignon. “Good evening, darling.”

  “You’ve been work
ing too hard,” Porzia fretted as she took a seat on the other side of the desk. The office was wood-paneled and cluttered and felt too cramped for her tastes, but her mother seemed to like it that way.

  Mamma offered her a tired smile. “Haven’t we all.”

  Porzia leaned forward a bit to peer at the papers laid out on the polished desk—mechanical diagrams of some sort, upside down from her perspective. Not that looking at them right side up would have made much difference to Porzia. She was a scriptologist through and through.

  “How are the repairs coming along?” she said. Courtesy of Garibaldi, the house had been infiltrated and sabotaged. Casa was still recovering.

  Mamma sighed. “We’ve rooted out all the bugs, and the maintenance and security protocols are powered and running. But I’m still concerned there may be lingering errors in the system.”

  The house’s disembodied voice cut in. “I do not have lingering errors.” Casa sounded quite affronted at the mere suggestion.

  Soothingly, Mamma replied, “No one’s blaming you, Casa. It won’t hurt to run diagnostics, just to be sure.”

  The house harrumphed, then fell silent so they could continue their conversation.

  “There must be something I can do to help,” Porzia said. “I mean, not help help, not with the mechanics.”

  Mamma said, “You can take yourself to bed and get a full night’s sleep for once.”

  That wasn’t at all what she’d meant. “Can I bring you an espresso, maybe?”

  Barely audible, Casa muttered, “I am perfectly capable of bringing Signora Pisano an espresso.”

  “It’s just that I’ve been feeling rather useless,” Porzia continued, “and I don’t know what to do with myself since … Leo…” Her throat tightened up and she couldn’t finish the sentence.

  “Oh, darling,” Mamma said. “It’s not as if he’s the last mechanist on Earth.”

  Porzia scowled. “It’s not my marriage prospects I’m worried about.” For Casa della Pazzia to remain in the Pisano family, there had to be a mechanist in each generation—by blood or by marriage—so the house’s systems could be properly maintained. Porzia was the eldest child, and decidedly not a mechanist. She could not fathom, though, why her mother thought that was the salient point here.