She climbed up onto the windswept deck of the sloop, where the high, cold sky raked thin, icy fingers through her unbound hair, and the pale gray light of evening stung her eyes. She peered over the rails, but the Craton Massif was nowhere to be seen. How far away was she? Did anyone down there have any inkling where she had gone? Was there anyone left to care? She clung to the idea that Jean-Claude was still alive, looking for her. To believe anything else was utter despair. She said a solemn prayer for him, wherever he was.
Stopping every dozen paces to catch her breath, she explored the ship from stem to stern. It had no launches that might be used to escape. She found Kantelvar’s cabin, the armory, the powder magazine, and the keel chamber barred, but beyond that, her captor seemed content to allow her parole. She found holds provisioned for a long voyage, stores of lumber, sailcloth, tar, paint, and all the other things required to keep a skyship functional. Practically every barrel contained some potential for sabotage—if she was willing to destroy the ship she was standing on—but now was not the time for such grandiose gestures.
She made her way to the chart room and, in the absence of anyone to announce her presence, rapped on the door.
There was no answer. She tried the latch. The door glided open on soundless hinges and she entered once more into quiet dimness, though neither so quiet nor so dark as the hold, owing to the emerald glow of the orrery’s simulacrasphere and the sibilant whisper of the aethervalve matrix under the pedestal.
The orrery was larger and more complex than the one aboard the Santa Anna. Its green-glowing, aether-filled simulacrasphere was wider than Isabelle could have stretched with two arms. The cubic expansion of volume with radius meant this display was a hundred times more detailed than the courier ship’s had been. Hundreds of blobs and specks of light floated in the tank, each one representing an individual ship or skyland. The great number and minuscule size of the images meant that Kantelvar had increased the scale to include as much of the deep sky as possible.
Kantelvar, hunched before the main instrument battery, did not immediately stir at her entrance. Bent over like that, with his hood pulled forward and his gurgling hump ascendant on his back, he looked a great deal more like the Kantelvar of old.
That hump had to have something to do with his serial immortality. Perhaps it was the seat of his consciousness, some kind of soul bottle. If that were true, if she could gain control of it, she could force him to unravel his own schemes.
Unfortunately, she had barely padded halfway across the room when the mad artifex lifted his cowled head. “G-goood d-day, Cél—Isabelle.” His voice was low and muddy.
Had he just confused her with Saint Céleste, or was he merely waking from sixteen-hundred-year-old dreams?
Kantelvar came around from behind the orrery. “I take it you have satisfied yourself of the ship’s integrity?”
“It does not seem likely to fall out of the sky. Where are we bound?”
“To my aerie, a skyland in the upper reaches.”
“Uncharted, I assume.”
Kantelvar chuckled. “No. If it was uncharted that would risk some fool coming along and discovering it. It’s just mislabeled. It was originally discovered by a merchant explorer with an eye toward selling its location to the highest bidder. I appropriated his chartstone from him and distributed the shards to all the skyfaring nations, along with a description that labeled it a broken reef, a very dangerous navigation hazard, an effective bit of occultation if I do say so myself.”
Isabelle smothered a grimace. So there was a chartstone shard in the fabled Naval Orrery at San Augustus that could lead a rescuer straight to her, if anyone was even looking for her, but instead showed her destination as a place to be avoided.
“And that is where my husband awaits, the man who tried to kill you. Don’t you think that will be a little awkward?” Julio, Thornscar, or whoever he was, ought to be a viable ally against Kantelvar, if she could convince him she too was Kantelvar’s enemy. Hard to do if she pretended to be Kantelvar’s ally.
“Fear Julio not. He is defeated. He escaped from confinement once, but not again. Ere your marriage is consummated, he will have had a change of mind.”
Isabelle was about to ask how Kantelvar could be so sure when understanding and loathing hit her all at once. She stared at the metal tube leading into the back of Kantelvar’s skull. Except it wasn’t his skull. It was the skull of his current body. Kantelvar’s mind was in that gurgling hump in his backpack. “You’re going to take Julio’s body,” she breathed.
“Julio made that choice of his own free will when he decided to oppose the Builder.”
Isabelle had never experienced sky sickness, but she imagined it paled next to this gut-sick, soul-deep dizziness. Kantelvar had expressed a deep devotion to Saint Céleste, but what if it was more than that? What if this was infatuation, an unfulfilled, unrequited desire, a festering obsession of sixteen hundred years? He wanted to prove himself to her across the millennia, to fulfill her prophecy and win her favor … her love. Now, in Isabelle, who apparently resembled her down to her sorcery, he had finally found … what? A proxy? A reincarnation? He meant to complete the circle, become the father of the Savior and the husband to his beloved.
By the Savior—the real Savior, not the abomination Kantelvar envisaged—she would not … she would rather die than be taken by this man. She would sooner throw herself from the rail and fall forever into the Gloom. But that was not the plan. The plan was to take his plan and run with it. If he really imagined Isabelle the reincarnation of Saint Céleste, his long-lost love, then she ought to be able to use that to her advantage.
She said, “I should speak with Julio before you … decant him.”
“There would be no point—”
“Is there not?” Isabelle asked. “He tried to murder me aboard the Santa Anna.” This was not true, but it was the official fiction.
“And I will not give him the opportunity to try again,” Kantelvar said, so caught up in his own lies that he’d forgotten that Isabelle knew better.
“Yes, you will be there to protect me,” Isabelle said, “but I have a right to confront the man who tried to kill me.”
“To what purpose? He is full of lies and deception, and he will only try to confuse you. Nothing he says can be trusted.”
“Damn his lies,” Isabelle said. “I don’t want to question him, but I cannot very well spit in his eyes after they become your eyes.” It was pure fabrication, but this struggle was not about the truth. It was about obsession and desire and madness.
Kantelvar twitched. He must have been suspicious of her enthusiasm, but he couldn’t resist drawing her deeper into his fantasy where Julio was the villain of the piece. “That might … be arranged,” he said.
“As soon as we make landfall.”
CHAPTER