She opened her eyes and gasped. Pink and purple light limned her stump, like the stormfire that caught on the masts of ships during a squall. The strange glow extended, sketching the shape of her phantom arm in the air. A glowing mist of pink and violet filled the volume, and glittering motes of rose and lilac sprang to life in the mist. She might have been wearing a glove made of stars in a nebula. And in the grip of those stars hung the buckle.
“How extraordinary,” she breathed. She swished the buckle around, marveling at the feel of it, fascinated by the cold sparks that sprayed and spiraled away from her arm whenever she moved it. This was l’étincelle, it had to be … and that fact had more implications than she could begin to consider right now.
She dropped the buckle and picked it up again several times, just to be sure she could. Her phantasmal fingers were as clumsy as a toddler’s, but perhaps ease would come with practice. She tried to pick up the belt by the leather, but no matter how she focused, her spark-flesh passed through leather as if it weren’t there.
She moved on to grabbing other things. Her spark-hand passed right through the wooden planking, the blanket fabric, and her own flesh, but found good purchase on a metal sconce and the glass from the portal. So what did all these things have in common? Fabric, wood, and flesh were or had been living things, whereas neither metal nor glass ever had. It was a correlation that bore further investigation.
Now that the spark-limb had manifested, it showed no inclination to disappear. Every sorcery had its blazon: crimson shadows, silver eyes, a crest of feathers instead of hair, or … this.
And if she could not find some way to rid herself of it, she could never return to civilization. L’étincelle was not one of the canon sorceries. No one would recognize it as a saintblooded gift. The Temple would dub her an abomination, and for that the remedy was Absolute Confession, excruciation unto death.
No doubt that was part of Kantelvar’s plan, to bring forth her blazon and thereby isolate her from all possible allies, to convince her beyond all hope that there was no way out for her, just as he had done to that wretched imposter on the throne.
Change the Rules, she had told him, a participant in the ubiquitous delusion that other people’s problems were easier to solve than one’s own.
So make them someone else’s problems. Even if she had no future, others might, Jean-Claude and Marie first and foremost, and her handmaids and everyone else who had been kind to her. She would not leave them a future of war if she could help it. If she could not return to Aragoth, if she could not warn them of Kantelvar’s manipulation, she must get someone else to do it for her.
Príncipe Julio. If indeed Kantelvar intended to breed her to the not-actually-a-prince, he had to take her to wherever he was standing stud.
Having a goal was good, but it did not tell her how to reach it. She sat in the corner of the cabin, her feet braced on the chilly floor, massaging her face with her flesh-hand. Think! She had no other weapon but her mind. What is inconceivable? To Kantelvar? She could not overpower him, nor, she admitted ruefully, outwit him. He had arranged everything to force her to capitulate, to bend to his will or be broken. He had blocked off every possible retreat.
Or was that the answer? Isabelle’s head came up and she stared into space with the same tentative extension she felt when a new proof suggested itself to her imagination. If only she could reel it in without breaking the gossamer thread of reason.
Deep in his warped and bitter mind, Kantelvar expected her to fight him. He did not expect her to give up. Her capitulation was inconceivable. So what if she inverted the equation, agreed wholeheartedly to his plan, dragged him forward instead of pulling him back? He would not have prepared for that. Once she had the bit in her teeth, she would run as far and as fast as she could. Could she snatch control from him?
It was not a game she was well equipped to play, but she had no better idea. Besides, a plan like this would make Jean-Claude … cackle. The idea twisted her mouth in a painful smile, but it also gave her the strength to shove off the floor. She adjusted her blanket cloak and knocked loudly on the cabin door. Several minutes of repeated hammering finally brought footsteps to the door.
Keys rattled in the lock. Isabelle checked her posture and steadied her nerve. The door swung inward on well-oiled hinges. She stopped it with her foot when it was just wide enough to see out. An artifex stood beyond.
Not Kantelvar, was her first impression. Though he wore the Temple’s saffron and a deep cowl and carried the artifex’s quondam staff, this man was tall and straight and lacked mechanical appendages. Yet it was in Kantelvar’s voice that he said, “Good day, Your Highness. I am glad to see you awake at last.”
“You’ve changed,” she said. She had no trouble keeping her tone harsh. She had to convert to his cause quickly, but not so fast that he doubted her sincerity.
Kantelvar chuckled, an eerily familiar sound, and pulled back his hood to reveal an unfamiliar face, square jawed and blunt nosed, but festooned with a sapphire lens where his right eye ought to have been, and his mouth sewn in a circle around his speaking grille. Long angry incisions, crudely stitched together, radiated from the implanted metal. His left eye was glazed and unfocused. His head had been recently shaved, and a segmented metal tube ran from the base of his skull, down the back of his neck, to a large backpack.
Isabelle had thought there was nothing left in Kantelvar’s repertoire of madness that would shock her, but this left her throat tight. His mind is in the machinery. That was how he had survived since the age of Rüul, passed down from artifex to artifex with occasional stopovers in other useful clerics. His hosts thought they were being Exalted and honored by being conjoined with the Builder’s mechanisms, when in fact they were being hulled out like an apple infested with a worm.
He said, “The body you saw was not the first I wore, or the second, or the sixteenth. The flesh is not made to endure as the soul is. When muscles rot and bones break, they must be exchanged. Céleste promised that the Savior would come. I must redeem her word. The prophecy must be fulfilled. She promised she would come back to me.”
Kantelvar’s ardor gave Isabelle an extra chill. He had been serving Saint Céleste for over sixteen hundred years, and he expected her to return. Oh, unfortunate woman if she did, for who could live up to so much accumulated expectation?
“What happens to those whose flesh you conscript?” Isabelle asked. Was Kantelvar’s latest victim still alive inside his skull, awake and aware of what had happened to him? His left eye swiveled and seemed to focus for a moment on Isabelle, an expression of despair rippling across that side of his face, before swiveling away again.
Kantelvar said, “My hosts are volunteers, eager to pledge their souls to the Builder’s service.”