Oh, I want this place. Her pulse leapt at the thought of all the knowledge hidden down here and all the philosophical experiments that a woman might perform well out of the sight of disapproving eyes. She could give Lord DuJournal so much more to write about.
A glint of emerald light in a corner caught her eye. “An omnimaton!” It was a clockwork machine in roughly human shape, with bones of the same coppery substance as Kantelvar’s limbs, and muscles made of telescoping silver tubes, just like Kantelvar’s right arm and leg. Its flattened, clamshell-shaped head was set directly on its shoulders. A single cyclopean eye set in the leading edge of the clamshell glowed a dull green.
Isabelle veered toward the device, drawn like iron filings to a lodestone. “I’ve never seen one intact before. I thought they were all destroyed when—”
“Don’t touch it!” Kantelvar snapped, his voice sharp as a knife.
Isabelle halted, her hand close enough to its metal surface to feel it coldness. It was like standing in the doorway to an icehouse. “Why not?”
“Because it reacts badly to being touched. When I found it, it was much more greivously damaged. It took me ages just to restore its inner spark. Alas, its behavior is still erratic. The last time it was provoked, it reduced a man to a thin paste.”
Isabelle took a cautious step back. “How did you repair it? I thought nobody really knew how these things worked.”
“No one does. Nobody really understands how black powder works, either, but that doesn’t stop anyone from building cannons. Over the centuries, the Temple has retrieved enough functional quondam mechanisms to make at least an educated guess where the pieces are supposed to go and which fluids need to be present in what proportion to make certain things happen. Where possible, we compare our experimental results to the Instructions for confirmation, but even that is not the same thing as understanding.”
Isabelle hesitated; The Book of Instructions was the Temple’s holy book, its secrets forbidden to women. Isabelle had therefore made a point of reading it cover to cover, painstakingly translating every passage from the Saintstongue into la Langue until she had a better grasp of the saints’ language and of Temple lore and doctrine than most clerics.
“Do the Instructions contain information about omnimatons?” she asked as innocently as possible; she did not recall any passage devoted to them.
“It’s in one of the lesser-known apocrypha, the Twelfth Book of Fragments, cantos eight to twenty-seven.” He pulled a thick book from the shelf and thumped it down on the table.
Isabelle’s blood thrummed with new excitement; she’d never been able to get her hands on a copy of the Fragments. Yet in case Kantelvar’s bringing out the book was some sort of test of her moral rectitude, Isabelle repressed an urge to open it up and leaf through it. “I’m afraid it wouldn’t mean much to me.”
Kantelvar drummed his fingers on the book and scrutinized her with his unblinking emerald eye. At last he said, “Come, let us see to the bloodhollow.”
Kantelvar led Isabelle, who had never let go of Marie’s hand, into a small side chamber with a rope-sprung bed with a thick mattress and several blankets. Kantelvar had Isabelle arrange Marie in the bed while he adjusted an apparatus made of copper vessels, glass spheres, and lots of brass piping on a stand by the bedside.
“This matrix will deliver the infusion. The great unknown in this experiment is whether the subject’s soul will respond to the opportunity or whether it has atrophied over the years. The fact that the subject has matured physically during the intervening decade is hopeful but not necessarily predictive.”
As he spoke, he bathed Marie’s arm, located a vein, then jabbed in a needle that was connected to a tube leading to the still.
Isabelle said, “You aren’t going to leave that in there, are you? She’ll take fever!”
“Everything has been properly cleaned. I have some experience with this. Corruption is possible but not likely. It’s a risk that must be taken.” He tied the first needle down and moved around to her opposite side. By then, Marie’s blood had percolated all the way through the device and was starting to return through a second hose-and-needle. Kantelvar waited until a steady trickle of blood was coming out of the needle and then jabbed it into a vein in her opposite arm. The transparency of her skin at least made the veins easy to see, and the returned blood flowed through her glassy flesh like dark ink in a stream.
He said, “Now, if you will please instruct her not to fight the needles or pull them out…”
There followed several minutes of adjustments and fiddling wherein Isabelle summoned every scrap of hope and encouragement she possessed and whispered it into Marie’s ear. Finally Kantelvar took her arm and led her from the room, extinguishing the alchemical lantern, shutting the door, and plunging Marie into darkness.
Now that the process had begun, Isabelle’s heart should have felt lighter, but instead it was heavy as lead. She folded her arms to stop herself from fidgeting, wishing there was something productive she could do; anything would be better than nothing. What if Marie could not be revived? What if there was no hope at all? Then what? Should she continue as she always had, treating her once-friend like a precious but fragile heirloom, or should she take the hard step and a draw her maidenblade across Marie’s throat? The very thought made her ill.
She asked, “When will we know if the treatment is effective?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never dealt with a victim who has been entangled for so long. It could be anything from hours to weeks—”
“Weeks!” Isabelle was appalled. “But I can’t leave her alone. She needs someone to feed her and—”
“Be at peace. It will be taken care of. You are no longer alone,” Kantelvar said, his mechanical voice nearly guttering out as he softened it. He reached out with his fleshy hand to touch her shoulder in what was probably meant to be a gesture of reassurance. His fingers were gray and clammy as a corpse, with bruised-looking nails. She recoiled, her skin shrinking away from him.
Kantelvar hesitated, his hand in midair, before self-consciously withdrawing it up his voluminous sleeve.
Isabelle turned away to stifle her revulsion. Hypocrite. How could she ask people to accept her deformity if she did not return the favor? Indeed, she was usually fascinated by the strange and grotesque, but Kantelvar’s attempt at compassion, at familiarity, was more disturbing than all his obfuscations.
Leather scraped on wood. Isabelle turned in time to see Kantelvar heft the copy of Fragments he had put down earlier and weigh it in his hands. “Did you know one of your ancestors helped compile this?”
Thankful for relief from the blighted silence, Isabelle said, “No, who?”
“Saint Céleste.”