Illusionarium Read online

  In spite of the cold, sweat pricked my scalp. I thought of the mechanics of a watch. Metal gears. Springs. Glass. The sweat dripped as I tried to create iron, forming gears and screws in my mind.

  The weighted thoughts expanded in my head and suffocated me. I gasped for breath as blotches filled my vision. Falling to my knees, I swallowed until my head cleared. It was like breathing water. No illusion appeared before me.

  “It must only work for small things,” said the king, disappointed.

  “This is a toy,” said my father, spinning the temperature wheel on the stove. The boiling halted, and the frigid air that had coated our lungs dissolved into nothing. It took my pounding senses and utter peace with it. The snow faded. The room darkened. Reality eased back in.

  “What use could Lady Florel possibly see in this?” my father continued. “It isn’t scientific. It is trickery.”

  “She has explained something of it to me,” said the king, picking a koch dish—a round glass bowl about an inch deep—from the counter. “You grow the Venen disease in these dishes, correct? Lady Florel has said that she can illusion time to go faster. So, the disease grows more quickly, and you can test it immediately.”

  My father shook his head unhappily.

  “I’m afraid you have no choice,” said the king, his voice growing hard. “We don’t have time to waste time. We only have four days.”

  “Four days—?”

  “The queen has fallen ill!” the king snarled.

  A crash sounded at the doorway. Hannah had dropped the mugs she held, her hands to her mouth, her face pale, shards at her feet. I grabbed the broom, suddenly feeling sick. So the queen was ill. No wonder the Westminster had braved the storm and the king’s face had such desperation in it. Everyone loved the queen.

  “Gather the things you need,” said the king, face red from either anger or shame. He nodded with stiff politeness and made to leave. “Captain Crewe will see us to Lady Florel as soon as you are ready.”

  CHAPTER 2

  “The queen is ill?” my mother whispered, arriving at the laboratory not long after the king had left, her face pale as a snowstorm. Hannah had run to fetch her from our row house, because our family was close and this was News.

  My father answered her by pulling her into his arms and kissing her in front of the airguardsmen who remained in the laboratory. Hannah nearly fainted.

  “Well, if anyone can cure her, our father can,” I said, smiling reassuringly at my mother as I prepared my father’s satchel. My mum was someone you never wanted to upset, as she was so quiet and sweet. Quite the opposite of Hannah, really.

  “In four days?” said Hannah. “It took nearly four years for Papa to find the cure to the London Fever.”

  “Working with Lady Florel will speed things up,” I said, shrugging.

  “But four days?” said Hannah. “Even with that awful chemical—”

  “Hold off, it wasn’t awful,” I said, remembering how calm I had felt, and my focused, bright vision. “It was different, but—”

  “It was awful,” said Hannah, whipping around to face me with flashing eyes. “All three of you, staring up at the ceiling like demons had taken up residence in your head—”

  “Hush,” said my father, and we both fell silent. I could tell he agreed with Hannah. “We will speak to Lady Florel and see what can be done. Jonathan and I shall probably be sleeping here, in the observatory,” he added to my mother, apologetically. My mother embraced him and promised to send Hannah with hot meals, and the four of us stood there in the laboratory, gathering strength from one another.

  I embraced my mother as well, gently, because I’d outgrown her at age twelve and if I squeezed her too tight, she might snap. You didn’t crush flowers, you didn’t squeeze birds, and you didn’t break your mum.

  “Jonathan, please don’t let your father bring the king in the laboratory again,” Mum whispered, looking sideways at the mismatched furniture. “Perhaps the library, where the chairs aren’t—so—”

  “I heard that,” said my father, with the hint of a smile.

  “Mum, is that all you can think about?” said Hannah. “The furniture?”

  “It is horrible furniture,” said my mother.

  “It is . . . unique,” said my father. He nodded to the clock in the corner with so many carvings and pendulums that it couldn’t possibly just be a grandfather clock. A grandfather clock had decency.4 “That clock, for example. I doubt a person could find another clock like it.”

  “I doubt they could,” my mother agreed.

  I grinned. This was an age-old conversation in my family.

  When Hannah and Mum left—Hannah sulking—the warmth they always had with them ebbed from the room, leaving my father with the cold and barren work.

  Captain Crewe, a man younger than my father but with that same raw, honest look, introduced himself as the head of the Northern Airguard, promising us that he would do whatever he could to speed us in our work. And he went straight to it. In moments, we were out in the storm and following Captain Crewe to the largest airguardsman ship looming above the city: the Chivalry.

  It didn’t take long. Though Fata Morgana was the largest aerial city in the empire, it was only half a mile in diameter. I could walk across it in eight minutes. I’d grown up here, used to the brutal cold and the twirl of sun or stars overhead. Used to the white buildings, walkways, and cloud canals. Used to the rumble of the city’s generator, its vibration like a heartbeat, keeping the city afloat above the Arctic Ocean. The inhabitants consisted mostly of orthogonagen miners and their families, but some, like my parents, lived here for the peace. Everyone knew one another. I’d be leaving Fata in just three months to attend the Arthurisian University, and I already missed the old thing.

  The Chivalry bobbed at the top platform of dock three, a sleek metal beast the size of a building, double rows of cannon along the hull. The entire ship hummed with power. It must have fusioned through a maddening amount of orthogonagen fuel. The massive balloon provided an umbrella against the gale as we entered the ship into the command deck, full of more airguardsmen, and found the king waiting impatiently for us. More composed now, he led us through the dim, narrow halls to see Lady Florel.

  Lady Florel was a legend. . . .

  They said Lady Florel might have been royalty. Her family was one of the empire’s wealthiest. They say she chose instead to become a surgeon and medical scientist.

  They say she was a warrior, braving the Crimean battlefield when she was only twenty-four, binding wounds and sewing bayonet gashes.

  They say she was an angel, curing diseases throughout her lifetime, like the North Pox and the Paraphi, and establishing hospitals all throughout the empire.

  They say that even now, at sixty-two years old, her spine was made of steel and her heart made of the sun, and when she spoke, no one disobeyed.

  My father assured me the rumors were true, even the steel-and-sun one, if you were thinking figuratively. Steel, particularly. She had whipped him once, during his apprenticeship, for not washing his hands.

  “Whipped?” I said, when he had told me the story.

  “They did things properly back then,” my father had said with pride.

  Foreboding grew in me as we descended another flight of stairs into the belly of the ship, with lines of weak lights stretching down the hall, tang of metal and clang of engine pistons. Why was someone like Lady Florel being kept down here? Surely she would have a civilian’s room?

  We reached the narrowest and dimmest hall yet, which I recognized as a brig hall, a sweltering corridor with pipes along the walls hissing steam. The king called out, “Lieutenant?”

  A uniformed boy, who had been polishing his pistol at the end of the hall, stood, holstered the pistol with sharp authority, and saluted smartly. His gun was so large the holster buckled to both his waist and his leg.

  “Highness,” said the boy.

  “This is Dr. Heinrich Gouden, the medical scientis
t. He will be working with Lady Florel.”

  The boy saluted again, so sharply it sliced the air. He looked to be my age, sixteen, and everything about him was sharp. Crisp. Starched uniform, piercing blue eye, and so confident it was off-putting. An absolute person, like Hannah. But with one irregularity—he was missing his left eye. He wore an eye patch over it.

  The name badge on his chest read Lockwood.

  “Why is Lady Florel in a guarded prison cell?” said my father, frowning as the lieutenant unlocked the cell door.

  “Because she tried to murder the king.”

  The lieutenant smiled at our shocked faces.

  “I—beg your pardon!” said my father.

  “I saw it myself,” the lieutenant said lightly. “She had an entire officer’s room for a laboratory, but she wouldn’t even pick up one of those wossnames you look through—”

  “Microscope,” I offered helpfully, and the lieutenant glared at me with his lone eye.

  “King went to speak to her,” he continued, ignoring me, “to tell her to hurry things up a bit, she daggered him in the chest. Or tried to, anyway. I was there, so . . . she didn’t.” He crossed his arms and peered at me with smug finality.

  “I do not believe it,” said my father.

  “Lady Florel is simply not herself,” said the king, waving the entire subject away with monarchal grace. “None of us have been, of late.”

  “Some of us have been even . . . better.”

  The voice echoed sweetly from beyond the unlocked door. Lady Florel’s voice. Attention now turned to the cell, we entered the tiny dim room under the lieutenant’s watchful eye. Stuffed with a table, stacked with empty koch dishes, and books lying about. In the glow of a single light, an older woman in a heavy coat turned and smiled at us.

  Lady Florel.

  She was smaller than me, with a severe face, noble nose, and tiny lips. Her eyebrows arched over her eyes, giving her smile an edge. If she recognized my father, it did not show in her face.

  “Have you brought me my illusionist?” she said.

  The king spoke as though he were peeling the words from the back of his throat.

  “Lady Florel,” he said to us, with pauses, “has agreed to find the cure . . . if . . . I could find her an illusionist . . . to help her in her research.”

  I glanced at my father to see what he would say. He said nothing, but instead had taken a step back toward the cell door.

  “That is not Lady Florel,” he whispered.

  “What? How do you know?” I asked in a low voice.

  “Lady Florel never smiled.”

  I turned and examined Lady Florel again, standing behind the table. She looked like every picture I’d seen of her in every medical journal I’d ever read. Older, perhaps—and certainly a lot more pleasant, wearing a smile. She never smiled in any of the pictures. Now she almost looked like a grandmother. I paused as my eyes caught something new on her face. A divot lay between her eyes. A dimple.

  I gnawed on my cheek. A person couldn’t have something like that on their forehead unless they were missing bone. . . .

  Warily, I picked up Lady Florel’s research journal, which had been tossed to the side of the table. I flipped through the pages and found them all blank. No notes. Nothing.

  “He could illusion water,” the king was saying, having introduced my father to Lady Florel, who looked pleased beyond measure. She still had not shown any sign of recognition.

  “Excellent!” she was saying. “That is a start. All I need is a vial of fantillium, and we shall get the cure straightaway!”

  “Capital,” said the king, looking relieved. “I’ll have Captain Crewe bring the vials—Dr. Gouden, you and your son—”

  “We will not.”

  My father’s voice hushed both of them.

  “Dr. Gouden—” the king began.

  “I once apprenticed with Lady Florel,” my father said, drawing himself up and clutching his satchel. His hands shook and his eyes blazed. “And I knew her well. You, Madam, are not her, and I will not use the unsound methods of an unsound mind! Jonathan, come, we have no time to waste!”

  I halfway tipped my cap to them, avoiding looking at the king’s face, red with the affront. My father was just half out the cell door when a hoarse scream tore the air. Lady Florel lunged at my father in a blur of coat. In her hand flashed a bladelike shard of broken koch dish.

  She plunged it into my father’s neck—

  BANG.

  —Almost plunged it into my father’s neck—

  The glass in her hand exploded into dust with the steam pistol’s bullet. Lady Florel retreated halfway bent, gloved hands held up in surrender. Standing casually at the door, Lieutenant Lockwood kept his pistol pointed at her. It steamed.

  “Don’t let’s do that again,” he said smoothly.

  “I—I—I don’t know what came over me. I’m so terribly sorry,” she said, pressing herself against the back wall and truly looking apologetic and frightened.

  Lockwood’s pistol remained at the ready.

  My father, stunned, touched his hand to his neck, where the glass had only just punctured his skin. His fingers brought back blood. The lieutenant had shot the broken glass from Lady Florel’s hand at just the right moment.

  “Right,” I said, clapping my hands on my bewildered father’s shoulders and steering him out of the cell. He looked as though he might collapse onto the brig floor. “No time to waste. Back to the laboratory, work to do!”

  I’d never seen my father distraught. Not like this. Back in the laboratory he paced and spoke in HoLander to himself, saying, “It is her . . . but it is not her.” He cleaned his glasses on his apron over and over. I was the one who reminded him that we needed blood samples of the Venen, if we were to do any kind of research at all.

  The task at hand focused his attention, and Captain Crewe was once again at our side, escorting us to dock seven, where the Westminster bobbed. We had clearance to see the queen. The king, Captain Crewe told us, was taking a cold walk around the perimeter of the city to keep from bashing the walls in.

  The storm had waned now, and a group of Fata Morganians gathered at the bottom of the dock’s lift, bundled in thick coats and scarves and peering up at the ship, talking excitedly among themselves. Professor Stromberg, my academy physics professor, stopped me as we entered the lift.

  “Jonathan?” he said.

  “Nothing to worry about,” I said jovially. “A hiccup, really. My father’s going to save the empire from a pernicious disease, you know, that old thing, nothing to worry about.”

  Everyone looked pleased beyond words. They admired my father as much as I.

  The Westminster was as royal and ornate as the Chivalry was austere. Captain Crewe escorted my father and me quickly and quietly through the airship, down long halls with crimson rugs so thick I sank into them with each step, and chandeliers that jingled with the ship’s engine rumblings. We entered the lush captain’s quarter’s moments later, and here I witnessed the Venen for the first time.

  Queen Alexandria lay on a bed by the fireplace, still among the mountain of pillows. She was familiar to me in the same way the king was—through newspaper prints and paintings—a slender and beautiful woman, always wearing pearls and her hair braided into a bun on the top of her head. Now she lay motionless, her eyes closed, her hair in tendrils around her, just as I’d imagined the Lady of the Lake. Even in her nightgown, she wore long necklaces of pearls.

  And the Venen. It mottled her fingers black. The blackness had seeped up her milk-white arms, splitting into spindly strands and tapering like vines. It was as though someone had penned ink over her veins. Her neck, too, had the Venen’s mark, threads of black reaching her ears.

  She spoke softly when we entered, not opening her eyes.

  “More doctors?” she said. She smiled, but a tear fell down her face. “I feel I have no blood left.”

  “Your Highness,” said my father gently. “It is our lif
e’s work to keep people from pain. My son will be gentle.”

  Ah, but no pressure, I thought.

  I was good at drawing blood, though. Remarkably good. Dr. Palmer, the physician here on Fata Morgana, often had me help in the infirmary. I had great plans to become a surgeon. Even so, my hands shook as I cleaned the queen’s arm and injected the needle. I almost expected ink to flow into it and was grateful for the deep purple-red instead. I drew three vials and then softly wrapped her arm. I don’t believe she felt a thing.

  My father asked questions of her condition and the fevers, which she quietly answered and I wrote down. He begged permission to see her hand, which she couldn’t move. It did tremble, however, as a gust of cold air blew over us. I turned and discovered that the mullioned windows along the walls were all partially open.

  “Hello there,” I said, stopping one of the servant boys who’d come into the room with fresh flowers. “Why are the windows open?”

  “The king says she’s to have fresh air,” said the boy.

  “Were they open earlier today? This afternoon?”

  “Yes, sir. They’ve been open the whole journey, on account of the good air.”

  I tugged on my ear, uncomfortable, as the boy scampered out of the room. I drew my father aside, out of earshot.

  “Hannah was by the ship this afternoon,” I said in a low voice.

  He glanced at the open windows, and his brow creased.

  “I am sure she had enough sense to not draw near,” he said.

  Near enough to see the queen’s pearls, I thought.

  The visit to the Westminster had shaken me. I hadn’t expected the Venen to be so . . . vivid. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the spindly black threads coursing up her arms. And it was raging through Arthurise.

  My father and I worked through the night and into the next day, labeling koch dishes with the Venen growing inside them and drawing diagrams of what it looked like under the microscope—spindly black creatures with diamond-shaped heads. The storm had cleared by now, and I jogged to the semaphore tower in the center of the city, signaling Arthurise for more information.