Isabelle felt like someone had knotted her innards in their fists. She wanted to scream, to run away, but there was nowhere to go, no exit but forward down the gullet of madness.
She said, “Let me guess. By now, everyone in San Augustus thinks we’re both dead. You chopped my arm off because that’s the surest way to identify me, and you shed your old skin like a locust. It was the only way you could be sure of making a clean escape.” And if it had worked, no one would ever come looking for her.
“Very good,” Kantelvar said as if to a pupil who had just solved a difficult conundrum. “Can you deduce what happens next?”
Isabelle summoned her court face, the mask of indifference that had served her so well in le Comte des Zephyrs’s house. “I imagine Carlemmo will die and there will be a war. What happens to me is, of course, entirely up to you.”
On that carefully balanced note, Kantelvar’s expression twitched rapidly between a scowl, a smile, and a grimace. It was a lot like watching lightning in the clouds, random, spasmodic, and violent. He didn’t have good control of this new visage, which only made sense. If having a phantom arm took some getting used to, having a whole new body must have been especially problematic.
Finally, Kantelvar smoothed his face and said, “You have a destiny—”
“At the moment, my destiny seems to be to freeze to death. I don’t suppose you managed to bring me any clothes.” If she could engage him on purely practical concerns, perhaps she could segue into acceptance of his plan.
Kantelvar hesitated a heartbeat. “Of course, but it will require you to let the door open.”
Isabelle didn’t want him in the room with her, but it would be impossible to win his trust if she showed her fear.
She stepped back. Kantelvar moved aside, and an omnimaton, the one she had seen in Kantelvar’s workshop, entered the room, carrying her trunk. The clockwork man looked most like great a copper skeleton with viscera made of cables, gears, cogs, and springs. Its chest and shoulders were clad in a carapace of coppery plates. Its head was a clamshell atop its broad shoulders, a metallic hillock set with a single gemlike orb that she could only think of as an eye.
As the door opened, Kantelvar’s gaze fell upon her spark-arm. Kantelvar’s quilted-together face was, as always, unreadable, but his backpack gurgled excitedly. “L’étincelle,” he breathed, the word leaking from his voice tube like a ghost loosed from Torment. “Your sorcery.”
Isabelle resisted the urge to recoil from his interest. Don’t demur, debut.
She turned her rotation into a ballroom pirouette and extended her arm in a graceful wave. “Is this your work?” she asked. “It’s beautiful.” And she was surprised to find that it was true. Its pure aesthetic delighted the eye despite the mutilation it represented.
“It is your birthright,” he said. “The shadowburns your father inflicted upon you before your maturity served to suppress it, but his influence has been expelled, as it was with your handmaid.” He gestured to the tubes and bottles on their hooks.
It was all Isabelle could do to keep the yelp from her voice as she asked, “Marie, where is she?” Please let her be on the ship.
“There was not time to collect her. I am sorry.”
Boiling outrage nearly shattered Isabelle’s reserve. You just left her there! Stowed away in a lost dark closet with no one to feed her or care for her! It was all she could do to keep herself from launching herself at him and trying to claw his mismatched eyes out.
Instead, she ate her fury and said, “I hope you have plans to replace her.”
Kantelvar hesitated. He had not been expecting such coldness from her. “Indeed, when we arrive at my aerie, I will provide you with a suitable handmaid.”
As if that would atone for his sins. “And when will that be?”
“By sunset,” Kantelvar said, drawing back into his usual, carefully clipped mode of speech. He gestured to the trunk. “When you are properly attired, the door is unlocked. I suspect you will want to explore the ship and assure yourself of its safety. When you are ready, I will be in the chart room.” He bowed himself out.
Isabelle leaned against the door, shaking with rage, but she dared not let it out. She had to cultivate pliancy and feign ambition. Not for the first time, she wished for Jean-Claude’s silver tongue. Her musketeer could talk birds out of their feathers and make the outrageous sound not only plausible but sensible, while she had trouble holding anything in her mouth that she did not also hold in her heart.
She waited for her fury to subside, then tried the door. It opened onto the quarterdeck, which was strung with an amazing spiderweb of ropes and pulleys, rigging even more complex than an ordinary skyship’s. The extra ropes were gathered at a single station amidships, manned, or rather machined, by the omnimaton. From there, the machine could do the work of twenty men without ever leaving its post. Someone could really disrupt the ship’s operation by fouling those lines, but to what good end? Kantelvar was taking her where she needed to go.
She considered her spark-arm. If l’étincelle sorcery revolved around giving life to the inanimate, the omnimaton surely counted. Might her power allow her to control the machines?
Alas, her sorcery was a phenomenon with no theory behind it. She felt no instinctive connection with the clockwork man, and she hardly dared experiment. The last thing she needed was to have another limb or three ripped off. Indeed, it occurred to her that she didn’t need limbs at all for the service Kantelvar wanted from her. She imagined herself limbless and bloated with child and shuddered in disgust. Sometimes it didn’t pay to have a vivid imagination.
A frigid breeze curled itself around her bare legs and chased her back inside. She opened the trunk and found her clothing the way she had left it. It took her some time to get herself dressed, especially since only one hand would interact with her clothing, and it was trembling with fatigue. She ended up looking like something a hurricane had thrown together, but it kept the cold out and the wind off. She found herself mentally sketching out ideas for a mail glove to wear on her spark-hand so she could use it to manipulate the otherwise inaccessible class of soft objects.
Kantelvar had said he would await her in the ship’s chart room, and she really did want to go in there and get a look at the ship’s orrery—hopefully, she could discover where she was relative to where she had been and where she was bound—but first she wanted an unimpeded look around.