“Why would anyone put a town here? Seems unaccountably foolish, to build on such unforgiving terrain.”
“This isn’t Veldana, we can’t just create more arable land when we run out of space. We have to work with what we have,” Leo said. “Besides, most of these families have probably lived here for centuries. A thousand years ago, somebody decided the remote location would be a good defense against, I don’t know, Ostrogoth raiding parties or something, and ever since then, they’ve kept living here because this is their home.”
Elsa tried to digest this idea, tried to think of cities like Paris and Amsterdam and Pisa as accumulations of their history, the strata of historical events layering atop one another over the long years. Pivotal moments with lasting consequences that no one could predict. It made her head hurt.
“Earth is weird,” she concluded.
As they crested the ridge on the far side of the valley and passed into the shade of trees, Elsa snuck a sidelong glance at Leo. He looked fresh and bright-eyed, as if their journey on foot hadn’t taxed him in the slightest. A trickle of sweat down the back of his neck was his only concession to the midday heat, his brown-and-gold-brocade waistcoat still buttoned. The climb hadn’t been too much of a challenge for her either, despite the corset, but Elsa often spent her days surveying Veldana and was well accustomed to getting places under her own steam.
They walked until Elsa could see the blue sea sparkling with sunlight between the tree trunks. Leo stopped at a small outcrop of sedimentary rock, its layers of deposition still obvious when viewed from the side, and set down the carpetbag. He hooked his fingers beneath the top layer of stone, and after a moment of flexing his biceps, it hinged up like the top of a storage chest.
“What—” Elsa said, coming over to look under the layer. There was a brass control panel with a keyhole fitted horizontally inside the hollowed-out rock. “Hidden controls?”
“Ah, yes…” There was a note of strain in Leo’s voice. “And I’d forgotten how heavy this thing is. Would you mind getting the key? In my left side pocket.”
Elsa reached into the pocket of his waistcoat; the key ring was stuffed in there beside his father’s pocket watch, and there was hardly room for her fingers. Through the fabric, she could feel the tense washboard muscles and the heat of his skin. She pulled her hand away quickly and felt her face flush as she fumbled with the key ring, looking for one that seemed a likely fit for the keyhole in the control panel.
“This one?” she said, holding up a key for Leo to see. Her voice came out a little unsteady.
“That looks right.” A bead of sweat was crawling down the side of his face. “Turn the key, then flip all the switches in order, top to bottom.”
The key fitted snugly and turned with a satisfying ka-chunk. The brass switches were stiff beneath her fingers, but she managed them all, then quickly removed the key.
“Done,” she said, and stepped away to give Leo space to close it. He let the lid down heavily and shook out his arms to release the tension.
Elsa looked up. Where before she’d seen nothing but a rocky outcrop dropping away into a seaward cliff face, now she saw a castle built into the steep slope above the cliffs. It looked ancient, the dark stone weathered and speckled with lichens. One of its towers had collapsed into debris that spilled over the sidewall and across the ground.
“An illusion?” she guessed.
“Yes,” he said, “the best cloaking projection I’ve ever seen. Designed by Fresnel himself, or so Gia likes to boast.”
Elsa had no idea who Fresnel was, but she was still impressed with the optical finesse it would take to hide an entire building in plain sight. The castle itself was impressive, too. Leo strode off toward the doors, but Elsa followed more slowly, craning her neck up to look at it.
“It’s so old,” she said in a hushed voice, too awed to want to break the silence.
“Nine hundred years or so. And the Roman ruins it was built on top of easily double that figure.”
Elsa gently placed her hand upon the weathered stone. “We don’t have anything old in Veldana. Our whole world is new.”
“Well, in this world, we’ve had to endure plenty of history. The castle’s believed to be the origin of the Order of Archimedes. The Pisano family made it the first official sanctuary for pazzerellones in Europe, dating back to the Dark Ages, when the Church liked to behead pazzerellones for heresy. It’s been more or less unoccupied since the Renaissance, when the Pisanos deemed it safe to relocate to Pisa and built Casa della Pazzia.”
“So, being old—does that make them important?” Elsa said, thinking of Porzia’s father in Firenze. “The Pisano family, I mean.”
Leo shrugged. “It certainly doesn’t hurt, but political influence is a complex matter.”
Elsa rubbed her forehead, frustrated at how much she didn’t understand about the real world. With Veldana, she’d walked every square meter of land, knew every person by name, and read every word of the worldtext—she was the master of her world. But the real world was impossibly large and complex. No matter how hard she studied and how much she learned, she would never fully understand Earth, because no one ever could.
And that thought filled her with a sort of existential terror she worried might never go away.
She felt a sudden, intense longing to go home to her finite, comprehensible world, or even simply to be sure Veldana still existed. What would she do if the fire had destroyed everything she knew?
Leo used another key on the key ring to unlock the bronze front doors. They stepped into a broad entry hall with a cavernous ceiling and a wide, once-majestic stairway that ended in midair, a pile of rubble scattered on the floor below. The air inside was cool and musty. Sunlight filtered in through the distorted glass of four tall windows, and each footstep Elsa took called up swirls of dust to dance in the light. Leo shut the doors behind them with a clang that echoed, and then an eerie silence followed.
Several archways led away from the entry hall, dark and sinister as gaping maws. Through one of them came the sound of uneven footfalls, loud against the stifling silence, and Elsa tensed. A pool of lantern light bobbed and jounced into view, followed by the man holding the lantern.
The man paused in the archway and declared, “Simo!” then hung the kerosene lantern from a wall peg and came toward them. He looked to be in his fifties or sixties, with graying hair and veiny hands clasped together in front of him like an overeager servant. His once-fine clothes were worn to rags. His face seemed stuck in a wide caricature of a smile, and there was something odd about his gait, too, as he loped over to them.
Elsa leaned toward Leo and said in a low voice, “I thought you said it was unoccupied.”
“I said ‘more or less.’ Simo is the castle’s caretaker. He’s simple, and more than a bit insane, but mostly harmless.”