“Why?”
Kantelvar said, his voice grating, “Because your safety was in doubt. Princesa Isabelle asked about you this afternoon. My men followed your trail as far as the building where the assassination attempt took place, where they learned you had been in an altercation with a local thug. They were told you had returned to the citadel, but you were not here. Fearing that you had been set upon, a search was launched, but to no avail.
“Then one of my contacts in the local Temple informed me that a reprobate named Nufio Tellarez had nailed a hat to his door. He thought it was a nobleman’s hat; you see, it had no reflection. I recognized it and sent my men to search for Nufio, who is known to wallow at the Cog and Crank. Now, I believe, it is your turn.”
Jean-Claude looked for a chair, saw none, and so leaned on the desk. “I was looking for Thornscar.” And I found you. “I might have found him if your men hadn’t stolen my bait.”
“Perhaps if you could be persuaded to share your plans with me, we might stop tripping over each other. I’ve wasted considerable resources looking for you that could have been looking for Thornscar.”
“I’ll take it under consideration. Where is Isabelle?” He wanted to ask her if she’d asked the artifex to look for him.
“At the masquerade by now, which, I must point out, you are ill dressed to attend, unless you intend to arrive as a bad smell.”
Jean-Claude considered the spectacle he’d make, stumping into the ballroom, ill kept, lurching, and smelly. It would almost be worth it, if not for its casting Isabelle in a bad light. “No, I think not.” Right now he needed about a dozen things to make him human again, starting with a bath. “I shall retire for the evening.” He clapped his much-abused hat on his head and limped out the door.
The warm night air tickled Jean-Claude’s skin and made him itch. He passed by the gaol wagon, which was still waiting at the bottom of the steps. Nufio lifted his head and gripped the cage bars. “Antidote,” he groaned. “Please.”
Jean-Claude shook his head wearily. “I didn’t poison you, dog, just gave you a bellyache. Stick your finger down your throat and puke it up.”
The swordsman’s eyes rounded. Waves of surprise, relief, and fury rolled across his face. “You unholy bastard. Breaker take your balls!” Then another wave of pain hit him and he doubled over.
Jean-Claude said, “A word of advice, friend. The next time somebody offers you money to kill a King’s Own Musketeer, turn it down.”
*
Getting dressed for the masque was an epic event, not helped by the fact that Isabelle fidgeted through the washing, the powdering, the painting, the primping, the fitting of layer upon layer of petticoats and a corset that assumed she had no further use for her internal organs.
Right now she didn’t care about the Aragoths and all their ridiculous squabbles. She just wanted to look through that book. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe there was nothing in it but disconnected fragments, as its title implied. Or it might tell her why the blood ciphers thought her father was not her father and why it labeled her l’étincelle. She had no powers … although she supposed it was possible to be an unhallowed l’étincelle instead of an unhallowed Sanguinaire, a difference that made no difference, surely.
At last her handmaids were done touching up everything but the train of her skirt, which she wouldn’t put on until she was ready to board the coach. She thanked the handmaids and complimented them profusely before shooing them out the door.
“But, Highness, the coach is waiting,” said Valérie, more subdued than usual; she was still rattled and grieving, but she was sticking to her post.
“Then I will be fashionably late. I just need a moment to compose myself. Alone. It’s not as if they can start without me.” She bustled Valérie out, closed the felt-lined door, and hurried to her desk. The Fragments awaited her. She opened it to its first page. It was handwritten, but definitely not two thousand years old. The pages, though yellowed like autumn leaves, were not so dry as to crack under her touch.
It was, thank the saints, written in Saintstongue and not some more esoteric language. The text of the first page read, “… fluctuations in the underlying aura … primordial infinitesimals are generated…,” which was annotated with a description that went on much longer than the passage itself of where and when the fragment had been found.
She tried not to get stuck wondering what primordial infinitesimals were and flipped another page, and another. The book was long and there was no way she was going to get through it all tonight. Did she have to put the answer together in pieces? Was there an answer? She needed more time.
The book was well worn, its tooled leather cover warped, the rough edges of its paper stained from the oil of many fingers. Maybe he had a favorite passage, something he kept returning to time after time.
She closed the book and set it, spine down, on the table, then let the covers fall open. There was the telltale crack of a broken spine, and the pages spread to reveal a longer passage much stained, smudged, and scribbled upon.
Isabelle stifled a cry of triumph; there was no guarantee this passage held what she was looking for, but she dove in:
I, Saint Céleste, inscribe this argument in defense of my beloved and innocent sister, Ur-Saint Iav.
Isabelle stopped and read the line again, and again, as if her eyes and her mind must have been playing tricks on her. Never had more heresy been encoded in a single sentence. Saint Céleste was Iav’s sister? Iav who had tried to steal the secret of life from the Builder. Iav who had unleashed the Breaker and shattered the Primus Mundi. And Saint Céleste named her innocent? Impossible.
Or was it? If this was a true transcription of the actual words put down by Saint Céleste, one of the blessed few who had survived the Primus Mundi, could Isabelle discount her words? If Céleste was her greatest-grandmother, then that made Iav her greatest-aunt.
With trembling hands Isabelle traced the rest of the passage. Much of it was broken and much more written in a technical language she had no way to decipher, words that no longer had meaning because the theory behind them had been lost. Near the end of the passage were a few clear uninterrupted lines.