“What ho, demoiselle,” Jean-Claude said. “A pie and pint for His Majesty’s finest.”
Demoiselle Planchette turned and squinted at him with beady eyes. “His Majesty’s finest are shoring up me foundations, but what are you doing here?”
Jean-Claude settled at the bar. There were few patrons at this time of day, and so he had the lady all to himself. “Ah, mademoiselle, it is a long story, and filled with shame, but the pain of its recollection would be much mitigated by a pint.”
She poured, and he began with, “As far as anyone is to know…” Sloshing the beer around, but not drinking it, he spun a tale about a drunken binge, missing Isabelle’s ship, and being left behind. “… And so I sit before you a defeated soul, doomed to the everlasting torment of my duty failed.”
Planchette shook her head and spoke sotto voce. “What a load of chicken droppings.”
Jean-Claude placed a hand across his breast and contrived to sound offended. “Madame, I have never dropped a chicken in my life.”
Planchette waved this away. “Oh, don’t worry. I’ll cover your sorry arse with the threadbare blanket it wants, but I saw you get on that ship, all bright and blue as a robin’s egg in your musketeer’s uniform, and so did plenty of other people. And now you’re back, and your sword’s on the wrong hip, and the feather in your cap is on the wrong side. My grampa, he was Aragothic, so I know all about what Glasswalkers kin do. What’s really going on?” A sudden look of concern crossed her face. “Nawt’s happened to the princess, has it?”
Jean-Claude patted her hand. “Her Highness is fine, thanks to yours truly, and I want to keep it that way. To that end, I’m here to see a man about a mirror…”
*
Restless in Jean-Claude’s absence and in no mood to be cooped up in her cabin, Isabelle poked her nose into the chart room, where the fire had started. A sudden sucking chill met her at the threshold, turning her breath to frost and bringing goose pimples to her skin. Rainwater and charred wood made a frigid slurry on the floor. At the very center of the room, an enormous cold had frozen the water into a lumpy sheet of gray ice entombing a scorched and twisted stump of bronze and brass that had once been the ship’s orrery.
Even more than the aetherkeel, it was the invention of the alchemical orrery, with its simulacrasphere filled with denatured lumin gas and sympathy engine, that had enabled the exploration and colonization of the deep sky. Everything on the deep sky moved and whirled on currents of air, making traditional maps useless for navigation. Only an orrery loaded with properly calibrated chartstone shards could be certain of its position relative to its origin and destination.
Unfortunately, as this orrery’s shattered sphere and cracked pedestal attested, hypervolatile lumin was extremely explosive. Presumably Thornscar had come into this room—had he looked for Isabelle in her cabin first?—then he had cracked the simulacrasphere; the lumin had sprayed into the room. He had set a light to it, mayhap while running out the door. There had been an explosion and a fireball, but Santiago’s quick thinking had extinguished the fire before it could spread. The rain cloud had put out the fire, but the remaining gas expanding from the cracked reservoir had frozen the water solid. Fire and ice.
Carlos, the Santa Anna’s navigator, was circling the damaged orrery and pawing at broken pieces with a badgerlike determination. Isabelle resolved to disturb him as little as possible, but she wanted to get a good look at the shattered device. Something about the whole sequence of events felt unbalanced, like a complex equation missing an unobvious constant.
She had spent a great deal of time researching the alchemical properties of aether, and while she had no practical experience working with full-scale alchemical machinery, she had detonated quite enough of her small-scale experiments to become acquainted with its capricious nature. Or, as Jean-Claude would have said, “It’s just not empirical philosophy unless something freezes, catches fire, throws sparks, dissolves into slime, or explodes.”
And yet all those pyrotechnic failures had left her with a rather clear and well-defined idea of the damage explosive aether was capable of inflicting. Therefore, once panic had worn off and she’d turned her head to the numbers, this sabotage just hadn’t summed up. The amount of aether in the simulacrasphere at the temperature and pressure at which it should have been operating would have caused a really impressive bang and a fireball, enough to blow doors open and ignite paper and cloth, as evidenced by the scorched sails, but it had clearly not been enough to blow the ship apart or set fire to the thick wooden structure. So had this been a failure of concept or execution?
Isabelle eased across the floor, dancing from dry spot to dry spot, to get a better look at the orrery’s broken stem.
“Princesa!” Carlos yelped, popping up from his task of collecting shattered formulae glass. “Come away from there.”
Isabelle froze in her tracks and looked around to see if she had missed any death traps. She saw none.
“Why?” she asked.
Carlos looked flummoxed by this question, as if the ship’s figurehead had come to life and spoken. “It’s not right. You … might get dirty.”
Such were the excuses conjured up when she trespassed on a man’s domain, no matter how feeble his claim to the territory. It was infuriating that the pressure of his disapproval actually backed her up a step.
She regained her balance. “I just want to have a look,” she said, seeking a justification with legs. “I’ve always found clockworks so beautiful.”
Carlos stood up and made a clumsy bow, making a sweeping gesture toward the door. “Princesa. Please … I am really very busy.”
“I can see that,” Isabelle said, stooping to pick up a section of the fractured viewing sphere. “Perhaps you would care to explain exactly what you are doing.”
Carlos tugged at his collar, clearly unnerved to have her hovering over his work. “It’s … complicated.”
“Hmmmm…” Isabelle waved the formulae glass over the open throat of the orrery. It didn’t glow, so there was no more aether escaping.
“Highness, what are you doing?” Carlos asked. He came toward her, perhaps with the thought of escorting her away, but he moved slower and slower the closer he got, the proverbial hare unable to catch the tortoise.