Aghast, Isabelle lurched between them, spreading her uneven arms. “Don’t! We need him alive.” She was painfully aware she had inadvertently foiled his escape. If not for her clumsiness, Kantelvar might already have been subdued and they might have been discussing how to get off this skyland … if Julio hadn’t killed her. If he hadn’t thought she was Kantelvar’s fellow conspirator before, he surely did now. Damn.
Kantelvar’s whole body trembled with fury, but the fire behind his monocle dulled to a sullen blue ember. He slowly lowered the staff. She proffered her hand as a balm to his temper. He took it and relaxed ever so slightly. His skin was hot and slimy, like a slug that had been basking on a warm stone.
“You are correct,” he said, though Isabelle barely heard him over the thundering of her heart. She smiled into the face of madness and prayed his unholy eye could not see her loathing.
“Won’t,” Julio gasped. “I won’t be your puppet.”
Kantelvar glowered down at him. “You have abused every privilege I have given you and done everything in your power to thwart the Builder’s plan. You are a foreskin on destiny’s prick and you will be cut away.”
Julio sneered at him, “So much for your boast that you never take a host unwilling.”
Kantelvar leaned in more closely and growled, “Believe me. You will serve the purpose for which you were spawned and you will do it willingly. By the time I am done with you, you will cut your own skull open and beg me to spoon your brain out like a custard.”
Isabelle recoiled from his madness. She felt light in the head, but she held on to her composure. “I have seen enough,” she said. More than enough. For a lifetime.
Kantelvar bent and picked up the tongue Julio had spit from his mouth. It seemed to be a sheep’s tongue. Kantelvar towed Isabelle out and snapped a command to the warder. The omnimaton slammed the door with such a shuddering force that dust fell from the ceiling.
Kantelvar stalked toward Gretl, who stood wide-eyed by the outer door.
Kantelvar brandished the tongue. “And how did he get hold of this? Water and gruel, that was all he was to have, slops for the swine that he is!”
Gretl backed out the door, her eyes round with terror and bewilderment. She made a series of rapid hand gestures that winged into a gesture of defense as barbs of green lightning danced between the spines of Kantelvar’s urchin-headed staff.
Kantelvar raised the weapon to strike. Isabelle touched Kantelvar on the shoulder—she could not stand to see one more person put to the spark—and said, “I would thank you not to damage my handmaid. I am sure she was an innocent dupe.” Or maybe, if she was very lucky, Gretl had been Julio’s coconspirator, a rebel in Kantelvar’s house. It was a tempting wish, brilliant and fragile as a soap bubble. “She is only a deaf-mute, after all.”
Kantelvar trembled with his fist on high, then slowly brought his staff down and extinguished its electrical flickering. He turned to face Isabelle. “You are right, of course. Julio is a silk-tongued beast, an inflamer of desire and a corrupter of hearts. A churl such as Gretl could hardly resist him.”
Gretl clasped her hands before her breast and gave Isabelle a heartbreaking look of thanks.
“I, for one, found the príncipe entirely resistible,” Isabelle said. She had to seem Kantelvar’s partisan and keep his attention away from Gretl.
Kantelvar took her hand in his muculent grip. “Yes. You see him for the beast he is.”
Isabelle resisted the urge to draw away from his corpselike touch. He wanted inside her, body, mind, and soul. It would be like being eaten alive by maggots.
“My dear friend,” she said—a calculated honorific, friendly but not too intimate; it gave him something to hang on to and yet left him something to work for—“I’m afraid all this excitement has left me flustered. I would be most grateful for a bit of peaceful quiet.” She needed time to think and to figure out how to communicate with Gretl.
“Of course, Your Highness,” he said. “I will show you to your chambers.”
“Not a bare cell, I trust.” She prayed.
“For the mother of the Savior, never.” His yearning tone made her want to gag.
Kantelvar sent Gretl off with a brief hand gesture, then led Isabelle through a web of tunnels to a well-fitted door carved with a relief depicting the Annihilation of Rüul and the death of the last of the Firstborn Kings nearly seventeen centuries ago. Astounding to think Kantelvar had been alive at that time. He might have witnessed it, or even caused it. Had his madness been in full bloom back then, or had it taken centuries to distill to this fatal potency?
What must the world have looked like to him? After only twenty-four years, Isabelle already took so much for granted. Often she did not pause to notice the spring of grass beneath her feet, and more than one full moon cluster had gone by unremarked. How faded and gray must the world have been to one who had already seen more than half a million sunrises? Was anything at all real to him save the light of his burning obsession?
Kantelvar opened the door and introduced her to a set of rooms sumptuously albeit eclectically appointed. At the touch of his staff, several bright alchemical lanterns humphed to life, revealing a trove of fine furniture and trappings she guessed he had collected over the long centuries of his life. There were intricately embroidered Skaladin pillows, faded tapestries from the First Empire of Om, spotted rugs made from the hides of long-extinct saber cats, marble candlesticks in the early-period Messigonean style, and a vast bed that might once have belonged to a Nybian god-king but was adorned with a midnight-blue baldachin from an Irisian saint’s chapel. They were not antiques in the usual sense but mementoes of Kantelvar’s vastly extended life. One couldn’t keep this much history in one’s head; there wasn’t room.
“It’s … stunning,” she said honestly. And he was trying to stuff her into the middle of this museum, as if by surrounding her with things of the past he could blend and brush her onto the canvas of his memory and pretend she had been there all along.
She turned slowly, opening herself to the room. If there was any way short of spending a thousand years to get to the root of his madness, it might be in this mausoleum of his memory. Her gaze settled on a painting, actually a fragment of a fresco that had been carefully chiseled from a wall and set into a gilt frame.
In the center of the composition stood the stylized figure of a woman in pale robes and a hood that covered her face down to her nose. The golden icon embroidered on her tippets revealed her to be Saint Céleste. A slight smile graced her lips and her left hand was raised in benediction, a peaceful gesture. Around her were arrayed a half-dozen other figures, all very small by comparison. Two carried jugs, one a newborn colt, one a falcon, one an open book, and one knelt at her feet, clutching at the hem of her skirt. The whole painting was cracked and discolored, yellowed from a coat of old varnish that had prevented its crumbling away altogether.
Fascinated, Isabelle drifted toward the artwork. Much of the surface was obscured by black smudges. Only Céleste and the kneeling supplicant had been kept meticulously clean. Isabelle raised her hand but did not quite touch the kneeler.