“Are you going to the chateau? If he’s here to see my father, that’s where he’ll be.”
Jean-Claude staggered backward theatrically. “Me, Your Highness? Alas, a lowly soldier such as I is not worthy to step foot upon such privileged ground. Besides, it’s such a horrible long walk, all uphill. Wine flows better downhill, methinks, into taverns, streets, and gutters. Builder prevail that I shall not find myself awash in sewage come the morn.”
“I see,” said Isabelle. He would spend the night with all the sailors and soldiers and other passengers who had accompanied the emissary hither and who had no doubt seen or heard something that would give a clue to his purpose that Jean-Claude could cross-check. She wished … she almost wished she could join him on one of these dockside tavern tours, if only to verify his tales. They always sounded so … alive. So spontaneous.
She was no good at spontaneous, though. She barely got by with careful planning.
She changed the topic. “One more thing before you go. Those ribbons in Professor Isaac’s hair…” She made fluttering motions near her hair with her fingers.
Jean-Claude’s grin nearly dislodged his mustache. “I’m afraid he did that to himself.”
Jean-Claude made a graceless bow—he’d had lots of practice getting it wrong—and wandered off, singing in a key only normally obtainable by braying donkeys.
Isabelle turned her attention to the forum. Beyond the colonnade, Professor Henswort was just beginning his lecture. The Temple’s prohibition against female scholarship did not, as far as she had ever been told, preclude sitting on a porch painting harbor scenes while a lecture took place behind her. The presumption seemed to be that even if she overheard the forbidden subject, she could not possibly understand it.
Professor Isaac said, “The proof of Agimestes’s Final Theorem begins with a discussion of limits…”
Isabelle tuned her ear to the lecture, wiped her brushes clean, and dipped her finest point in paint thinned enough to flow like ink. She didn’t want to smear anything he said.
She bent her mind to Isaac’s math and her brush to the canvas, sketching in dense mathematical symbols around the equator of the balloon. Only someone versed in Isabelle’s personal shorthand would recognize it as anything other than a fancy belt of stitching.
Her pulse skittered and her face flushed as the proof built upon itself, tantalizing her mind with greater truths. Agimestes’s Final Theorem had remained unproven mathematically for over two hundred years. If it could finally be nailed down, it would revolutionize aetheric navigation and so many other things. Sweat broke out on her brow and ran down her nose as the logic web approached its moment of maximum complexity, a dozen threads of reason pulled tight as harp strings. Brilliant …
But wait. Her brush faltered as one of the deductions struck a sour note. She double-checked her notation, hoping she was wrong … Damn.
The proof was flawed, the intricate weave of reason snarled on a simple fallacy, easy to overlook in the deeper context of the proof. All that work for nothing. Well, not nothing exactly. She’d at least learned one more way the theorem wasn’t solved. She noted the snarl in his reasoning with hash marks in a trail of stitching up the side of the balloon.
Unfortunately, being a woman, she couldn’t just march into the library and point out Professor Isaac’s mistake. That would be a job for Martin DuJournal in his next missive.
*
Jean-Claude ambled along the dilapidated docks of Windfall’s small harbor, pausing to take dry swigs from his magic sack. In the middle of the day, with the catch boats out, most of the people on the docks were sailors and marines from the warships.
Every skyship to make port in Windfall in the last six months had carried a plague of rumors of war. King Carlemmo, the Glasswalker king of Aragoth, was dying, and there were competing claims to the succession. That meant a civil war was brewing in l’Empire Céleste’s nearest, largest, and most prosperous rival. If that actually came to pass, every one of Aragoth’s neighbors would likely become involved in the struggle. The uneasy peace the Craton Massif had enjoyed for the past decade or so was about to be shattered.
The Célestial warships in the harbor now were likely part of a raiding force meant to strike at Aragoth’s colonies on Craton Riqueza. The new land was the source of that formerly minor kingdom’s great wealth and rise to power.
The Célestial navy had tried to prize Aragoth’s iron grip from the new craton two decades ago but had been thoroughly rebuffed. At the time, common wisdom predicted that defeat would be the end of Grand Leon’s rule in l’Empire. As usual, le roi had proven his enemies wrong. It was true he’d never attacked Aragoth’s holdings directly again, preferring to undermine them indirectly, but during a succession debate, the Aragothic Armada might be divided, and Grand Leon must have imagined military conquest possible.
The three warships in port today were the fifth group to land in Windfall over the last two months, and they’d descended on the town like locusts, stripping the town bare of provender. The warehouses had been left with doors open, their interiors picked clean. Only the locals with the most urgent or unavoidable business dared traverse the docks. They went about in carefully organized groups to deter press-gangs. Most families had made the grim calculation of sending their men, including boys as young as eight, into the hills, leaving the women to mind what was left of the shops and a few old codgers to crew the catch boats. The women might suffer, but at least they would not be carried away to feed the rapidly swelling Imperial Navy.
Jean-Claude did as much as he could to combat this pillaging. There wasn’t much he could do about the plundering of stores, but more than one would-be rapist had found himself on the receiving end of Jean-Claude’s boot—any one of those girls could have been Isabelle—and he let every ship’s boatswain know exactly whose balls would end up being fed to pigs if he got wind of any misconduct. He’d only had to carry through on that threat once before word got around. When the castrated man’s captain had complained, he’d ended up in the market for a new set of teeth. Jean-Claude didn’t often call on his authority as King’s Own Musketeer, but when he did, it left a mark.
Jean-Claude made his way in due course to one of the few businesses still in operation, a drinking den called the Bosun’s Ballast. It was a long, low, dingy building with narrow slits for windows. A noticeable tilt in the floor tended to concentrate most of the serious drinkers and their effluvia in one corner. There was a pile of them there now. The one on the bottom was moaning and making feeble gestures for help. None of the other patrons paid him any heed.