“Let me see your face,” she said, a mad impulse, but she had to know. Had to make absolutely sure this was not the same man who had condemned Marie all those years ago.
Kantelvar recoiled. “That is not a good idea. My visage is more than repulsive. I go hooded to prevent people from being afraid.”
Isabelle found this strangely heartening. Her left hand covered her right. She knew what it was like to generate revulsion in others. All she had to do was show her wormfinger to send some squeamish people into fits.
“I insist,” she said, though it was utter madness to demand anything from an artifex.
Kantelvar shifted from foot to foot as if wrestling with himself. At last he stilled and slowly peeled back his cowl.
Isabelle’s eyes widened in amazement. He was not Sleith, that much was certain. The right half of Kantelvar’s head was mechanical, or at least encased in mechanisms of quondam metal. How deep they went beneath his skull was impossible to tell. A telescoping tube with a glowing green lens bulged from his right eye socket. A clump of wires and hoses emerged from the back of his head, gathered in a queue, and snaked under his vestments.
The left half of his face was as scarred and pitted as a fortress after a siege, the skin pale and waxy. His left eye, bloodshot with an iris gray as dishwater, seemed to wander without reference to what the rest of him was attending. His mouth … by the Builder, his mouth had been sewn up around a circular grille that gave him the look of a permanent howl of anguish.
Isabelle’s amazement overwhelmed her disgust. How was he even still alive? Even the Temple, which claimed proprietorship of all quondam artifacts, didn’t really know how the mechanisms worked. The saints had passed on knowledge of how to use some of the leftover bits from the Primus Mundi, knowledge that was amongst the Temple’s most closely guarded secrets, but the fundamental principles underlying their function remained completely opaque.
A thousand questions fizzed in Isabelle’s brain, but none of them made it as far as her mouth. She could not show too much curiosity, nor speak any word that might suggest she possessed even a smattering of empirical philosophy.
“How do you eat?” Isabelle managed at last. Everyone had to eat.
“I ingest what sustenance I need through this tube.” He opened the lid on a tube that had been inserted in the hollow of his throat. A brief whiff of bilious stink wafted from the opening.
“Did it hurt?” She gestured at all of him.
“I felt no pain,” he said.
*
Isabelle’s skin crawled as she entered her father’s audience chamber, the white marble vault where so much of her life’s pain had been concentrated. Memories revisited themselves upon her mind: the razor-sharp sting of a bloodshadow attack, the helpless paralysis, the horrifying numbness of her mind draining away, the absolute horror of Marie’s hollowing.
She forced herself through the memories, like a foot soldier fording a deep, swift-running stream. Her past had been ruined here, her friend worse than murdered. She would not let her future be ruined here, too.
Kantelvar strode up the strip of white carpet that marked the aisle to the foot of the dais atop which her father sat. Comte Narcisse des Zephyrs had been poured into a white doublet that was much too big for his withering frame and propped up in his chair, his rheumy eyes half closed, in the center of his bloodshadow. The sorcerous manifestation was thicker and darker than ever, and it flowed over him, like a great tongue constantly probing a rotting tooth. The sorcery he cherished was consuming him from within, ravaging him like a cancer, growing stronger the more he fed it, feeding on him if he refused to give it other prey.
On the first step of the dais stood her brother, Guillaume, as tall and fit as their father was shriveled and weak, a direct contrast to their respective intellects. His white riding boot rested on the second step; he could not wait to climb into his father’s chair. Isabelle feared for anyone under his authority when at last all restrictions on his appetites were released. She might escape into this Aragothic marriage, but the people of Windfall would not.
Guillaume bestowed on Artifex Kantelvar a look of deep suspicion that turned into pure unmasked loathing when he gazed at Isabelle. His bloodshadow wriggled like a carpet of snakes at his feet.
“Ah, the traitress dares to show herself,” he said. “I might have seen her giving herself up to a dog, but I never dreamed she would stoop to be a Glasswalker’s whore.”
Isabelle returned his loathing but refused to rise to the lure. Father usually brought Guillaume when he wanted to taunt Isabelle to tears or bait her into foolish anger.
Beneath Guillaume on the step stood Lady Arnette, plump and healthy. Her round face might have been pretty were it not for eyes like chips of flint. “I don’t know about that, love. If the object is to weaken the Aragothic royalty, I can think of no better way than giving them Isabelle. I only wonder if the poor príncipe knows he’s getting damaged goods.”
Across from them stood an enormously fat man in a deep-red doublet with slashed sleeves showing cloth of gold beneath. His craggy face was brown as saddle leather, and his graying hair was brushed straight back and gathered in a queue. His eyes were orbs of pure silver.
He fluttered delicate fingers on hands that seemed much too small for a man of his girth. In a thick accent full of rounded vowels he said, “Comte, please, control your offspring.”
The comte replied, “Don Divelo, my apologies, but Célestial tradition requires that everyone be allowed to speak their mind in open court,” but he was looking at Kantelvar when he said it.
Liar, Isabelle wanted to say. Father was letting Guillaume carry on in the hopes of offending the ambassador enough to threaten the marriage contract and force Kantelvar to renegotiate whatever deal they had.
Kantelvar took no knee before her father, showing him less respect than he had shown Isabelle. “Pay them no heed,” he said to Divelo. “If dogs bark it is because their master allows them. These two curs are as toothless as their master is powerless.”
Arnette shot back, “Wolves howl when they hunt, when they come upon prey that is old, weak, and stupid.” Her bloodshadow flowed down the steps toward Kantelvar, a slow but inexorable flood.
Isabelle stepped back from the spreading crimson stain. She knew she couldn’t outrun a bloodshadow—they could snap out with the speed of thought—but that in no way reduced the urge to try.
Kantelvar raised his staff and slammed the heel down on Arnette’s encroaching stain. Sparks of green lightning shot through the bloodshadow, bright light scattering it in all directions. Arnette shrieked and toppled. Guillaume was too slow to catch her. She hit the marble with a thud and lay there twitching.