Illusionarium (11 page)

Calm settled over me like a blanket of snow. I couldn't remember what I had been so upset about.

Queen Honoria, standing by the raised platform, closed her eyes and exhaled. Glimmering strands formed from her fingers. They filled out and grew opaque, then melded together and formed steel. I watched, fascinated, as it molded and blazed white hot in her gloved fingers, then cooled to a spike of a dagger the length of my forearm.

The frenzy of the crowd multiplied as the masked guards on the staircase behind parted and carried a struggling person with them. The sacrifice: a girl dressed in the best clothes I'd seen a Nod'olian wear, only a few
patches sewn to her white, simple dress. Her hair was an array of soft dark curls over her shoulders.

Anna.

I curiously watched as they wrestled her to the raised platform.

Someone probably ought to do something, I thought.

Constantine was on his feet and at Queen Honoria's side.

“I thought it was going to be the reporter!” he growled over the crowd.

“Anna,” said Queen Honoria coldly, “needs to be taught a lesson, Constantine. We spent all night looking for her. If she's not punished for running away, she'll keep doing it.”

Constantine's black eyes flashed. His hand twitched, as though he very much wanted to box Queen Honoria's head off.

He did not. Instead, he lowered his masked face, took a step back, and slowly sat down.

Queen Honoria raised the illusioned dagger. Anna gave a sob, pressed against the platform. Memories suddenly drowned me. Hannah gasping for air on the laboratory floor. Hannah trembling in the infirmary bed.
Might as well just die now and get it over with—

Stronger than the pull of fantillium, something in my chest went
click
.

“Stop,” I said in a strangled voice. It was like lifting an anvil from my soul.

Queen Honoria raised the dagger over Anna.

“I said
stop
!” I yelled, leaping to my feet. I reared back and illusioned a stream of air so powerful it whipped the knife from Queen Honoria's hands and set it spinning to the wall. It hit the base of the ceiling dome point first, vibrating with a
wuhwuhwuhwhuhhh
. A collective gasp sounded from the crowd below.

“I'll be hanged if I let you do this, Queen Honoria!” I said.

Queen Honoria's eyes narrowed at her empty hands, then at me.

“Hold him,” she said quietly, and the masked guard herded around me and pinned my arms back. With sharp gestures, Queen Honoria illusioned a new dagger, this one poorly formed in haste, with a mottled blade.

I tried to illusion wind again, and found it difficult without my arms to gesture the illusion away from me.

Temperatures, I thought desperately. I was . . . good at temperatures.

I sensed the heat of the knife, still warm from being illusion-forged, and mentally brought it to a searing point. I multiplied that point in my head. Squared it. Cubed it time and time again, the equation swirling through me. I exhaled the thoughts to the knife.

It sizzled, then glowed in Queen Honoria's hands. Her gloves caught fire. She dropped the blade in a flash and batted the fire out in her skirts.

Just as fast, I imaged the heat of my hands and arms squared a dozen times over, multiplying into unbearable temperatures at the guards' hands that held me. Flames sprang from their gloves. They released me.

I hastened to Anna's side, focusing on the guards' hands that held her down and multiplying their heat by a thousand. They jolted back, burned. The crowd stirred with excitement.

The temperature plummeted, and not by my doing. It dropped so low that as I grabbed Anna's hand, ice froze our fingers to the platform. Queen Honoria loomed over us, smiling so coldly it matched the temperature.

“What you are trying to tell us,” she said very calmly as I gathered my scattered thoughts of warmth together, “is that you don't really
want
to return to Arthurise. You wish to stay in Nod'ol forever. Is that what you're saying, Jonathan?”

In spite of the cold, I began to sweat. At the bottom of the stairs, the reporter scribbled in his notebook like mad.

“Step
aside
,” said Queen Honoria.

I managed a rise in temperature—just enough to melt the ice at our fingers. I gripped Anna's wrist and pulled her into my arms.

Queen Honoria lunged. Arrows of light streaked from her hands, and past my cheek, striking Anna in a spray of white sparks. My grip broke. Anna cried and fell back. The light faded, revealing a gash in her arm.

The crowd burst into roaring cheers. A masked guardsman threw me back from Anna, and I hit the marble stairs. Queen Honoria threw another arrow of light, this one slicing Anna's leg, just below her skirt. The exultant cries of the crowd could have shattered windows and broken the chandelier.

I stumbled to my feet and ran to Anna again.

“What is
wrong
with you?” Divinity yelled above the crowd.

“What is wrong with
you
?” I countered. “What is wrong with
all of you
?”

Queen Honoria reared back to shoot another arrow at Anna, who lay on the platform, a bleeding mess.

I logarithmed the flame just as it left Queen Honoria's hand, and it exploded into a fireball, throwing her and the masked guard across the landing and stairways. It burst into tongues of flame and set the velvet carpet alight, streams of fire arcing into the audience and walls below. Everything caught fire. Flames licked the air.

“Jonathan!” Queen Honoria yelled.

Anger had taken over. It multiplied the heat in me, sucking the warmth from my skin. The fire consuming the
lobby transformed into a firestorm. Hot wind whipped us in stinging strings. The painted cupids above bubbled and burned. Divinity's hair combs fell out and her hair tangled. Constantine's many layers of vests and jackets snapped in the wind, and hats blew from the crowd. They screamed.

Queen Honoria tried to feverishly illusion away the blaze, but the illusion had grown too strong.

“Make it stop, Jonathan!” she yelled. “End the fire or you can forget ever going back to your precious Arthurise!”

A burning wind swept over the staircases, cinders stinging our faces. It threw Queen Honoria to the ground and tumbled the masked guard down the stairs. I alone withstood, illusioning a cool, swift airstream in a maelstrom around me. I hurried to Anna's side, willing the cool air to gust over her as she lay on the platform. Blood streaked her clothes. She shook like a sig shutter caught in a storm.

“Han—
Anna
,” I said, scooping her up into my arms. She hardly weighed a thing. Blood trailed from her leg as I ran down the left staircase and into the crowd. Above us, the masked guard fought the raging fire. Divinity and Queen Honoria illusioned water, which evaporated from their fingers in an instant.

“Constantine, illusion a pump!” Queen Honoria yelled above the inferno.

“Hang the pump!” Constantine roared, leaping up the stairs. “I'm shutting off the boiler!” He disappeared into the flame.

The crowd pressed us, shoving us to the staircase balustrade. My funnel of cool air put the licking flames out before we touched it.

“It's all right,” I said in a quick stream of words to Anna, who trembled in my arms. I wove my way through the hundreds of masked Nod'olians pressing through the arched doorways in a rush to escape the fire. “We'll be out of this soon. One whiff of fresh air and the illusion goes away. Put your arms around my neck, there's a good
poppetje
.”

I fell in line with the panicked crowd, burying us in the chaos of masks and rags. Sparks and ash rained over us.

The crowd pulled us through the bottlenecked doorway. I leapt over fallen Nod'olians, stumbled across the marble and, like the night before, made lopes across the terrace and plunged into the maze of gardens. My ears roared.

One gasp of air.

The fire and smoke and singed air faded. The soot on everyone's masks disappeared. I dared a glance back at the lobby. The panicked Nod'olians inside pushed one another out like mad and ran from an invisible nothing.
There was no fire. As soon as they inhaled a true breath of air, they slowed and looked back at the panic inside the lobby, and laughed raspily.

In my arms, Anna's wounds faded. So did the blood over her clothes. Her skirt lightened back to white. Mended in record time. I picked up my pace, escaping into the maze as the crowd behind us poured through the theater doors, red figures among them. The crimson guard was coming.

Anna writhed out of my arms but gripped my hand as we ran, once again, deep into the maze, a tangle of hedge that descended into the metal and grit of the city beyond. The figures in red fell farther and farther behind us as we escaped into the labyrinthine city.

I
t wasn't until our lungs nearly burst that we stopped running. Our escape took us beyond the weeds of the theater and plunged us deep into the city, a mess of crumbling buildings and rusting pipes. Here, on grimy locomotive tracks, we paused for breath, gasping on stale, gritty air. I leaned against an abandoned railway car, in the middle of an abandoned train, in the middle of the abandoned rail yard, muscles aching and feeling . . . well, abandoned.

The immensity of what I'd just done poured over me. My one ticket back to Arthurise. I'd just torn it up. How could I be so
stupid
?

Still bent halfway with stitches, Anna leapt forward and grabbed a broken pipe from the piles of rubbish around us and backed away from me, sharp, brandishing it like a cricket bat, her blue eyes flashing. It looked as
though she could barely lift the thing.

“All right, who are you?” she said. “Why did you help me escape?”

“Oh, ah,” I gasped.

“You helped me last night, too. Why?”

“Well, I—”

“Do you know me? You act like you do. I have no idea who you are. I should bash your block in right now and run!”

“I say,” I said, rather hurt.

She lowered the pipe a little and considered me. I considered her right back, taking in her mud-streaked skirt and tangles of hair. She was thinner than Hannah, with hollow cheeks, and her hair had overgrown like weeds, lending her prettiness an edge of feral. And then there was that scar. . . .

“Anyway, hello,” she said, backing away warily. “Nice to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you, too, I think,” I said, still eyeing the pipe in her hands.

“We're lucky we ended up in this part of the city,” she said. “I know this section. A little. I've been lost here before.” She nodded to the misty railway around us, then, eyes still narrowed at me, slowly set the pipe down.

It
clanged
against the metal of railway track at our feet.

A snarl emanated from the railcar at my back. Claws
scrabbled on the metal inside. I jolted away from the railcar.

“Riven,” Anna whispered, and she began to tremble all over.

“Riven?” I said, trying to decipher where I'd heard that word before. “What's—”

She clamped a thin hand over my mouth, cutting me off. We stood as still as death until the thumping in the railcar subsided. I exhaled, unsure what I was relieved about.

BANG
.

In shrieks and howls, three figures smashed themselves through the railcar door between Anna and me, bending it off its sliding railing and sending iron plates across the tracks. Anna cried aloud. I grabbed her by the arm and shielded her from the . . . creatures.

That's the best word I could find for them. They were human only by default. Their torn clothes flapped wildly around them. Remnants of vests, dresses, coats. But it wasn't the clothes—it was their
faces
. It looked like someone had molded two faces from clay then squished the faces together. Where a human had one nose, the noses of these creatures had split off in the center of their faces, creating two noses. One of them even had three, the third growing on her cheek. Extra eyes, too, pocked their faces, blinking at us or swollen shut.

They gathered around Anna and me, hunched. Their legs had been wrapped in rags, and instead of tapering to the ankles, they grew
wider
, until they had actually split into two extra pairs of feet, stunted and purple. The creatures stumbled on both pairs.

“Lookee here,” croaked one with five eyes, two of them swollen in the folds of his neck. “Fe upper crust come to visit us poor folk belo-w-ow.”

“Lookette them fine clothess,” said one, who probably was a girl, because she was shorter and thinner than the other two. She had two mouths. Complete with two sets of teeth and two tongues. They grew sideways down her neck, like a melting wax figurine. When she spoke, I could see the other mouth through her teeth, separated only with strings of sinew.

“All themsss flessh on themsss bones,” drooled the third.
¹⁶
“'N' I bet thems is too high 'n' mightsy to share. . . .”

O-kay, I thought, turning as they hungrily circled. Anna had grabbed the pipe again. I carefully removed my golden coat.

“Han—
Anna
,” I whispered, nodding to the rusted ladder attached to the car behind us. “Start climbing over the rai—”

Anna dropped the pipe with a
clang
and threw herself up the rungs in a blur of white skirt.

The creatures lunged. I flung my vest into their faces and dove forward, shoving my fingers into their extra eyes, digging into soft tissue. I kicked and gouged again, until their many-fingered hands ceased clawing me for a fractioned moment. I leapt onto the ladder and pulled myself on top of the iron car—it clanged a giant echo—and rolled over, falling knee first onto the gravel on the other side of the train. I grabbed Anna's hand, and we fled.

The chorus of shrieks and bangs grew to a symphony of chaos. Every single railcar behind us burst open and more of them poured out and became an advancing army. Creatures with three legs. Extra arms and heads splitting faces. They hissed and howled and ran on all twos and threes and fours, blazing in the morning light.

“There's hundreds!” I yelled. “Anna, there's
hundreds
!”

“I
know
!” she yelled.
“Run!”

Their stench of unwashed human grew closer, their craggy breaths at my heels. Anna and I halted short at the end of the pavement, the river slogging below.

Anna leapt first, throwing caution to the wind. I followed after, and as soon as I'd smacked into the sour black water, I realized: I grew up on an aerial city.
I didn't know how to swim
!

I flailed and sloshed, spitting mouthfuls of filthy water, and fell into a rhythm of not-drowning by swiping the water. I swiped after Anna through a stone archway.

I'd swallowed my body weight in foulness by the time I lunged my last water stroke to solid stone and inhaled precious air. Steps rose from the water, led up to a decaying door, and beyond, a very familiar courtyard. Anna and I staggered to our feet and broke into one last run through the old door. I found myself, once again, in the knee-high courtyard weeds of the Nod'olian Tower of London. And we did not stop running until we were up a crumbling set of stairs along the wall to a familiar tower. We dashed into a cell, and Anna shoved the door closed and threw her weight against a rusty deadbolt. It slid into place with a heavy
dooong
.

Outside, there wasn't a scritch of sound.

“We should be safe here,” said Anna, between breaths and shivers. “I know there's a few Riven in that big building in the courtyard, and there's some on the other towers along the wall, but I've hidden here before, no trouble. I know a bit of the unRivened places left, here in the lower part of the city. There's not a lot. That's why most everyone here lives in airships or the theater. Are you all right? You look pretty sick.”

I felt green with moat water, and wiped my head on my sleeve. I recognized the walls around us. This was my
cell—the one I'd been prisoner in before. The Nod'olian version had most of the same names scratched into the stone. It lacked everything else, except a pile of old ragged blankets. It had Smell in spades, however. Foul Air of Moat.

“What,” I said, letting my heart settle to individual beats, “were
those
?”

“Riven,” said Anna, pulling a ragged blanket from a pile in the corner and wrapping it around her wet self. “You know. People who've had too much fantillium. You must be from pretty far north, to not know what the Riven are.”

“People who've had too much fantillium?” I echoed.

“Mm. They're practically all that's left in Nod'ol. Are you hungry?” she added lightly.

I tugged my ear. “Well, yes, actually,” I admitted.

“Me, too,” she said sadly.

She stood there, drenched, the spitting image of Hannah the day I'd dragged her into the observatory library and she told me about the
Westminster
, her hair black and curly with water and her boots squishing with each step. Anna brought me back to the present by looking at me curiously.

“It's nothing,” I said, quickly lowering my eyes. “You just—you look like my sister, that's all.”

Anna hesitated, then grabbed a blanket from the pile
and threw it at me in a wad. It smelled rancid.

“I'm Anna,” she said. “Anna Goodwin.”

Goodwin, I thought. A schism from Gouden.

“Everyone knows who you are, of course,” Anna continued, entirely as cheeky as Hannah was. “Jonathan Gouden, the newest illusionist. You're not bad at it, either. But don't let that go to your head. Anyway. Thank you for—for not letting me die.” She turned away from me, digging through the pile of blankets for nothing in particular. “I—I fantillium-died last year,” she stammered in barely discernable tones. “During last year's Masked Virtue. It's—horrible.” And then, with the mental gymnastics of an acrobat, she flipped to a new subject with a glance back at me. “You look a lot like my father. And I'm from the north, too. Maybe we're distantly related!”

“Oh, I suppose it's possible,” I said vaguely, pulling the blanket around my shoulders. “Is your father here in the city?”

“No,” she said lightly, peering into an old rusty kettle, which she had dug up from the bottom of the pile of blankets. “I have some old tea leaves, fancy chewing on those? It's something, at least.”

I remained silent, my eyes fixed on her, waiting for the rest of her answer.

She threw the kettle aside and began digging through the blankets again.

“He's on our ship,” she finally said to the pile of rags. “Outside the city. The
Compass Rose
. That's why I'm trying to get beyond the Archglass. There's no way out of the city from down here; you have to get permission from the miners and Queen Honoria to even get on an airship. And it's not often they open the panels above to let ships in or out. But I'll get out, right? I've gotten out of the theater four times this past year. So how hard can it be to leave the Archglass? I'm pretty much halfway there.”

She said it all carelessly, but her voice was taut. I dared to lean forward and put a hand on her shoulder.

And that's when I got a clear look at my fingers.

My fingers, which had been swollen this morning, had widened slightly. The thumb of my right hand had swollen so much it was beginning to split. My thumbnail had widened to two thumbnails, the skin smoothing over another thumb tip protruding from the side. It eased down into my knuckle.

I jerked my hand back sharply, examining it with horror. Anna quickly wiped her eyes and leaned in.

“Oh,” she said, not sounding concerned at all. “You're Rivening.”

“
What?”
I said.

“You've been breathing in too much fantillium. That's what happens. You'd better not breathe in any more until it heals.”

I bit my lip and examined my other hand. The fingers on the left hand were wider, too, and a thumbnail had started to grow by my thumb's knuckle. I felt my face. The bridge of my nose was wider. I'm splitting in two, I thought. I'm schisming.

“I'm turning into one of them,” I said hoarsely.

“Look,” said Anna, kneeling in front of me, matter-of-fact, and tracing the thin purple scar below her eye. “Do you see this? That's when I started to split apart, during last year's Masked Virtue. It was an eye. It had eyelashes and everything. I saw things all broken, probably like what you see through those.” She pointed at the broken lens on my glasses. “But,” she continued, “I didn't breathe any more after that, and it healed up all right. And yours will, too. It's not too far along. It will take a few weeks, but all the extra bits will shrivel and scab over. Just don't breathe any more of the stuff, and you'll be fine.”

“And what happens if I do?” I said warily, prodding my extra thumbnail.
¹⁷

“You'll turn full Riven. Your face will split into two faces and your hands into lots of fingers and you'll have extra eyes and ears and toes and pretty soon your heart
can't push blood to all of it. And then your
brain
starts to split, and that's when people
really
go mad, all those disconnected thoughts, and that's when you die,” she finished.
¹⁸

I fell back into the pile of blankets, my head throbbing. Perhaps my brain was splitting already.

“So that's why everyone here wears masks,” I said. “To cover their extra faces.”

And that's why Queen Honoria wore a mask over that divot on her face, I thought. By now, it must have developed into a full eye. And Divinity—well, now the eyelashes on the back of her neck made sense. She was growing a face down her back.

And
Constantine
. I didn't even want to imagine what Constantine's face was like. He wore a mask with a
snout
.

Anna sat next to me and pulled the blanket tight around her shoulders.

“I—had an older brother,” she said. “Once. He died, when I was six. His name was Jonathan, too.”

So I had existed in this world. I shifted uncomfortably. It was rather like attending my own funeral.

“How . . . did he die?” I said.

Anna shrugged.

“The masked guard,” she said quietly. “My—mother
was pretty.
Really
pretty. I mean, the sort of pretty that poets write sonnets about and men duel over. Anyway. Queen Honoria sent the masked guard to the countryside to find the prettiest and smartest people to take back to Nod'ol, and they found my mother, and it all went bad. At least, that's what we think happened.”