The mere thought of her father made Isabelle sick. Cruelty was his only delight. Isabelle turned her spyglass away from the warships, looking for a more cheerful subject.
She settled on a colorful Gyrine clan balloon that was tethered to the harbor’s farthest promontory. Onto her canvas, Isabelle brushed in the distant sky, bright blue above, passing through a pale ocher horizon to a deep green-blue below. She scraped on a few cream and white clouds with her palette knife and began shaping the giant patchwork gas bag, catching the mounting morning light in shades of cream and amber.
With quick, sure strokes, she captured the wood-and-fabric gondola the size of a three-story tower that dangled beneath it. Water barrels, cargo nets, ballast bags, and even cages of small fowl hung from spars that quartered each of the rickety-looking structure’s levels. The Gyrine were not particular about their breeding. Men, women, and children of all skin hues, clad in colorful clan motley, busied themselves about the hanging nest, clambering around the outside like squirrels on a tree, apparently oblivious to the fatal drop below. The balloon’s outlandish colors and patterns teased her imagination with wonder as to where all the bits had come from. What strange and wondrous places had these people seen? What must it be like to live untethered to a spot of land, unbound by law or tradition?
“Your Highness!” boomed a great, round, impudently familiar voice. Jean-Claude ambled toward her, his solid frame weaving slightly as he tacked into a wind of faux inebriation. In one hand, he held a sack of some awful liquor, and with the other he guided a portly gentleman with a brown mustache and spectacles. This had to be Professor Isaac Henswort, the guest she’d been awaiting.
She wondered why Henswort’s black wig was festooned with milk-colored ribbons. That must have been the latest fashion in Brathon … unless Jean-Claude’s sense of humor had got the better of him again, like the time he convinced a visiting silk merchant that a codpiece in the shape of a pistol would be appropriate to wear to an audience with the comte. She prayed he would not do that to her guest.
Isabelle tried to put on a smile, but her imagination boiled up a hundred things that could go wrong. What if she offended him? What if she said something that betrayed her heretical pursuit of empirical knowledge and he ended up relaying it to her father? Henswort was of the right social class to be invited to dinner. Should she ask him not to mention to anyone that she had invited him here, or would that simply make him suspicious?
Her expression stiffened into a pained grimace.
“Highness,” Jean-Claude called again, waving his white-plumed hat as if to hail a far-off ship. Ever since that fateful day when he had saved Isabelle and Marie from one horror and unwittingly delivered them into another, he had never quite removed his drunkard’s mask—burying his own shame, she suspected—though he made his deception transparent enough for Isabelle that she could see through it. He staggered up the forum steps, leading the slightly embarrassed-looking Professor Henswort between the two clockwork sphinx statues that overlooked the plaza.
Isabelle was supposed to say something to Jean-Claude, to acknowledge him in a princessly way, but her mouth was dry and her voice didn’t want to work. What if her father was listening in through Marie? Isabelle had cost Marie her humanity with one ill-chosen word. How much more damage might she cause with another?
After a difficult moment, Isabelle muttered, “Musketeer,” which wasn’t so much a greeting as an unsupported noun.
Jean-Claude favored her with a brief worried look, then folded it back into his usual insouciant mask. He swept his hat to present his guest to Isabelle. “Your Highness, allow me to present Professor Isaac Henswort of the Brathonian Fraternal Society of Empirical Philosophy, here at the request of your mutual friend, Lord Martin DuJournal.”
“Professor,” Isabelle managed. “I’m glad you’re here. DuJournal will be pleased.” There was ever so much more she wanted to say, but even those few words made her voice shake. He’s going to think I’m an idiot, or mad, or both. Talking was like trying to force a wedge under a door; the harder she pushed, the more stuck she got.
Professor Isaac smiled and bowed and started talking before he came all the way up again. “Is he here? Lord DuJournal, that is? I want to congratulate him on his solution to Grocephalous’s conjecture.” He craned his neck as if trying to see around her, as if Lord DuJournal were hiding behind her skirts.
Which, in a sense, he was. Lord Martin DuJournal was Isabelle’s nom de plume, her key into the back door of the forbidden world of empirical philosophy. Three years ago she had made herself the patron of the fictional lord and published several mathematical treatises in his name, including The Epistles of a Mathelogician, in which she imagined him as a swashbuckling sleuth of numbers.
DuJournal’s work had been very well received by the intelligentsia on Craton Massif, both for its literary content and for the fact that it resolved two outstanding problems in aethermechanical computation. Much to her delight, his works had even been reprinted by the major universities. That in turn brought in enough money to allow Isabelle to invite Professor Henswort to present his proposed solution to Agimestes’s Final Theorem, a fiendishly difficult problem of multiple symmetries.
Still tongue-tied, Isabelle made a helpless gesture, but Jean-Claude broke in smoothly. “Strewth! I forgot to tell you. I saw DuJournal getting on a ship, I did. Said something about the war. Said he was hunting the Great Alagor—Algae—”
“Algorithm.” The word popped out past the blockade in Isabelle’s throat.
“Thassit,” Jean-Claude said. “Don’t know how he’ll bag it, though. Didn’t take any guns.”
Henswort gave Jean-Claude such a stymied look that Isabelle feared the musketeer had overshot his joke.
She lined up five words and pushed them out the hatch before they could protest. “DuJournal begs you carry on.”
Henswort looked mildly crestfallen. “Ah. Of course.” Then he recalled his social duties. “My thanks to you, Princess, for agreeing to publish my proof.”
“My pleasure,” she said, and that much was absolutely true.
Unfortunately, Isaac did not seem to consider his obligations faithfully discharged, because he went on, “And give my regards to your family. I trust your father is doing well.”
“Dying,” Isabelle said. “Red consumption.” It was a malady unique to the Sanguinaire, a prolonged and excruciating death. And good riddance to him … except it would also be the end of Marie. And would that not be best all round? There was no cure for being a bloodhollow—Isabelle had scoured every source she could obtain on that topic—and if there was no cure, wasn’t Isabelle keeping her alive only because all the alternatives were worse?