As much as he blamed his father, Leo desperately wanted to trust in Aris. Aris, who had teased his brothers mercilessly, but would not suffer a single word spoken against them by anyone else. He’d once broken the stable boy’s arm in three places for making fun of Pasca. Leo remembered that day with perfect clarity, because it was the day when he thought, Nothing can ever hurt me, because Aris will protect us.
But he also remembered little Pasca, in tears, begging Aris to stop hurting the bloodied stable boy. And Aris, who’d taken a long time to stop.
*
“So this is where you put dead people, huh?” Elsa said, looking around. “It’s not what I’d imagined.”
They’d timed their arrival for after nightfall, and there were no gaslamps to illuminate the cemetery. By the light of the kerosene lantern Faraz held, she could make out a brick-paved walkway lined with skinny trees. Little stone buildings and statues cast a starburst pattern of long shadows away from where he stood. The cemetery stretched into absolute dark in all directions, so massive it was hard to believe they were inside the city. Somewhere in the darkness, an owl hooted.
“The grave’s just over here,” Porzia said, taking the lead.
They’d taken a portal directly to the gravesite to avoid attracting attention. Apparently, as Porzia had explained to Elsa, a group of foreigners entering a cemetery with a large machine in tow might be viewed with suspicion.
Leo said, “Hold on a minute.” He flipped a switch on the digger bot’s control box, but nothing happened.
Standing idle, the machine looked a bit like a giant ant. It had a narrow body almost two meters long, and three sets of multijointed legs. Leo gave the control box a good whack and tried the switch again, and the machine lurched into motion. It wasn’t especially skilled at walking, so now it looked like a giant drunken ant.
As they all followed Porzia, Elsa watched Leo out of the corner of her eye. His scowl suggested he’d like to disassemble the bot for proper repairs right here in the graveyard, the very sight of a poorly functioning machine offending his sensibilities. Elsa hid a smile.
“It’s this one,” Porzia said, checking the name engraved on the stone to be certain.
The machine positioned itself above the fresh-turned earth and planted its feet wide. With a high-pitched whine, its belly split in half, revealing a column of smaller scoop-shaped appendages. As the machine warmed up, the methodical scoop-and-dump motions sped faster and faster until the digging arms blurred together and the dirt was flying. The machine lowered its body into the rectangular hole as it progressed downward.
“I don’t get it,” Elsa declared.
Leo looked up from the control box. “Get what?”
Elsa waved a hand vaguely, indicating the graveyard as a general concept. “Take the grave markers, for instance. If you’re not supposed to dig them up again, why do they all need to be labeled so precisely? It’d be much harder to steal the right corpse if they weren’t all marked.”
Faraz gave her a look that suggested she was missing something. “The headstones are for the families. So they can visit their loved ones.”
Elsa frowned, perplexed. “Their dead loved ones…?”
Briskly, Porzia interjected, “Let’s save the theological discussion for another time, shall we? The machine’s almost finished.”
Elsa still had no idea why anyone would want to visit a corpse disposal site, but she agreed with Porzia’s assessment: this gap in her knowledge simply wasn’t high on their list of priorities at the moment.
Metal scraped harshly against wood, the digging arms slowed to a halt, and the dirt stopped flying. With a chuff of hydraulics, the body of the machine slowly rose out of the hole in the ground, a casket held firmly in its clutches. The bot scuttled to one side, deposited the casket on the grass, and backed away, settling into idle mode.
“Let’s see what we’ve got,” Leo said, setting aside the control box and hefting a crowbar. He wedged the crowbar beneath the pine lid and worked it up and down, the fabric of his shirt taut over flexing muscles. Elsa caught herself staring and flushed, embarrassed, but in the dark nobody seemed to notice.
The nails of the coffin lid squealed against the wood as they pulled loose. Once fully open, an unpleasant stench rose from the casket. It wasn’t the foul odor of putrefaction that Elsa had expected, though—it was something unfamiliar.
“Whew,” Leo declared, holding his sleeve to his nose and backing up a step. “Smells like burnt rubber, only worse.”
Faraz, on the other hand, stepped closer and crouched over the contents, holding the lantern close. His nose wrinkled, but otherwise he gave no indication of discomfort.
“I can’t believe they buried this stuff in a graveyard,” he scoffed. “No one could tell this isn’t human? It’s not even organic—looks like some kind of wax-based composite. Consider my faith in the intelligence of normal folk to be shattered.”
Porzia raised her brows. “Don’t rush to judgment. I certainly wouldn’t volunteer to perform an autopsy on that. It’s disgusting.”
“And charred human bits wouldn’t be disgusting?” Faraz countered. “Anyway, we have our answer. Montaigne is alive.”
Elsa leaned over the casket, breathing shallowly. A sticky black tar-like substance coated what remained of a fake skeletal structure. The corpse she’d tripped over in Paris had never been real; it was all a misdirection. Even though she’d known Montaigne had little respect for the Veldanese, she still felt a sharp stab of betrayal that he would risk destroying Veldana to serve his own ends.
Leo scrunched his face. “You’re not going to touch that mess, are you?”
“Oh dear Lord,” Porzia groaned, as if she might be ill. “I can’t look.”
“No, no,” Elsa reassured them, backing away. “Seeing it is proof enough. Faraz is right: Charles Montaigne lives.”
Stepping away from the stench of the burnt homunculus, Elsa took a deep breath and let it out. So far, everything the Oracle had told her was true: Jumi’s captor was a brilliant megalomaniac, and Montaigne—the man who had betrayed her—had the worldbook Garibaldi wanted. And what if the last piece of the Oracle’s prediction proved correct as well?
You will lose something precious to you.
*
Everyone seemed subdued as they opened a portal back to Casa della Pazzia.
Leo cleared his throat. “Casa, would you give the digger bot a good cleaning and return it to Faraz’s lab? Better not to track dirt all over Gia’s floors.” They were standing in the foyer, which meant the bot would scatter dirt through half the house to get back to the alchemy lab if it wasn’t cleaned first.
“How atypically considerate of you, Signor Trovatelli,” Casa mocked.
“Not really,” said Porzia. “He just doesn’t want to put Mamma in a mood before we talk to her.”
Leo shrugged. “Guilty.”
To Elsa and Faraz, Porzia said, “You two should go ahead to the library and see if you can track Montaigne’s location. I have to go convince Mamma not to lock us all in the wine cellar until this whole business is over with.”