Illusionarium

T
O MY GRANDPA
D
IXON
,
THE NUCLEAR PHYSICIST & PHYSICS PROFESSOR
.
A
MAN WITH AN UNFAILING COMPASS
.

H
E
'
S
PROBABLY ROLLING IN HIS GRAVE WITH
THE EQUATIONS
I'
VE PUT IN THIS BOOK
.

Fata Morgana (Class. A Aerial City)

December 16, 1882

W
hen storms like this hit Fata Morgana, the snow blew horizontal, glaciers formed over the buildings and walkways, and nothing—not airships, not light signals—could get through.

I sat at the top of Fata Morgana's semaphore tower, a tall, spindly telegraph structure in the center of our aerial city, looking out over the ice-encased rowhouses that receded into the howling blizzard. The sky glowed a bright polar blue.

Once more, I braced the levers on either side of the light signaler and twisted them forward, clicking and flashing a red-coded message out the shutters and into the bitter cold:

ATTN: LADY FLOREL KNIGHT -- VENEN INFO REQ. -- SYMPTOMS, TEST RESULTS, CHEMICAL BREAKDOWNS, ETC -- DR. H. GOUDEN -- ASAYAW

The message was dead important. It was a light signal to Lady Florel, the empire's head medical scientist, calling for more information. A highly infectious disease, the Venen, had sprung up in the center of the empire's capital city, Arthurise. Since we were residents of the northernmost mining city, we'd only just received the news by light signal two days ago. My father, the second-best medical scientist in the empire, had read the transcript with furrowed brow and had me, his medical apprentice, send out for more information.

And then the storm had hit, making it impossible for light sigs to pass through.

But that didn't stop me from trying. I stolidly braved the storm several times a day to send the sig out again. To no avail; the storm choked the light like a snuffed candle.

The movement of something below, traversing a nearby walkway, caught my eye. A figure struggled against the storm, seemingly headed nowhere, wrapped up in a thick coat, a scarf, and an academy skirt.

“You're
joking
,” I said. I only knew one person
stupid enough to come out in a storm like this.
¹

Slamming the sig shutter closed, I broke the ice from the door behind me and ran/slid down the twisted staircase and into the icy inferno outside.

The storm assaulted me in sheets of slivered glass, stinging my face. I could only just see the figure up ahead, clinging to a railing. Taking a breath, I plunged forward into the storm, ignoring the burn of the cold.

When I reached her, I gripped her around the waist, looked around frantically to get my bearings, and made for the nearest building: the observatory.

The observatory was the large, cavernous building, with massive wooden doors and marble pillars, where my father worked. We stumbled up the stairs and through the doors with difficulty. I pulled her down the entrance hall and into the empty library, where a large heat lamp hummed in the center of the room. The warmth seared my skin. Annoyed, I turned on the figure.

“Hannah, you idiot!” I said.

The figure had thawed enough to throw back her hood and scarf, revealing the beaming face of my fourteen-year-old sister, Hannah.

“Jonathan!” she crowed, her blue eyes bright.

“You nearly killed yourself out there, you know that?”

“Jonathan, there's a ship!”

“You were lucky I was there!”

“At dock seven! And not just any ship! It's the
Westminster
!”

That gave me pause.

“The
Westminster
?” I said, confused. “Not . . . the king's airship?”

Hannah nodded, so excited she couldn't stand still. “I was hurrying home from classes and I saw something through the snow at the top of dock seven and so of course I
had
to take a look and it
was
! It was the
Westminster
, Jonathan! And it's the most beautiful airship I've ever seen. It looks like a giant cake dipped in gold!”

“Oh, come on, Hannah,” I said. “The
king's
airship? What the devil would the king be doing this far north? In a raging storm, no less? Anyway, I've been in the sig tower all day and didn't see a thing.
You
were having a polarage.”
²

“No, Jonathan, I swear!” Hannah protested. “I hardly saw it, as well! Only because dock seven's near the academy. I'm not lying! Not this time, anyway.”

I warmed my hands in the aura of the heat lamp, and
examined her. With her drenched coat and dark, dripping hair, she looked like something the storm had chewed up and spat out.

It didn't diminish her a bit. Hannah was an
absolute
sort of person. She could stand there, leaving a trail of water on the dusty library rug, and yet command attention from just the delight in her eyes and the whip of her voice.

Unlike me, of course. I could only be described as
sort of
. Sort of tall. Sort of thin. Sort of brownish hair that was sort of curly and sort of not. I wore the same thing every day—a vest and cap and trousers that were all sort of beige. I was sort of smart, but not as smart as Hannah, who was two years younger than me but outdistanced me in every subject save anatomy, biology, and mathematics.

“I have a hypothesis,” Hannah said excitedly. “For why His Majesty's here. Would you like to hear it?”

“Not really, no,” I said.

“All right then, here it is: remember the sig that came a few days ago, before the storm hit? About that horrible disease in Arthurise?”

The Venen, I thought, remembering the light sig. A blood infection. Two weeks ago, it had reared its head in the Old London sector of Arthurise and had already claimed several dozen lives.

But the truly odd thing about the disease was this: it only infected women. And those it infected, it killed.

Hannah continued eagerly:

“I bet the research is going
really
poorly,” she said with delight, “and Lady Florel is having difficulty, and she needs another scientist's help, and that scientist would
have
to be Papa!”

I considered her.

“Polarage,” I said.

“Jonathan, it really is there!” Hannah cried. “I even took the lift to the dock!”

“Polarage.”

“I even saw the
queen
through the aft windows! She was in her nightgown and she really
does
wear all those long strands of pearls!”

“Right, now I
know
you were having a polarage,” I said.

“Jonathan!” Hannah wailed.

The library doors banged open, sending echoes fleeing to the ceiling. A gust of bitterly cold air blew over us, and we froze, seeing the man who filled the doorway. He wore a thick, perfectly fitted blue coat, had a graying beard that formed to a point under his round face, buggy eyes, and hands that could snap necks. He stomped into the library with such utter confidence that each stomping bootfall said
CLAIMED
.

I immediately recognized his sovereign visage. It adorned paintings and newspapers and Arthurisian coins. His Royal Highness King Edward VII had come to Fata Morgana. Hannah had been right!

Six men followed into the library after him in crisp blue uniforms and tall boots, sword clasps at their necks. Northern airguardsmen. The soldiers that patrolled the Arctic sector of our empire. Their ships often came to Fata to refuel or trade, and the men would even attend shows at our tiny theater. But now they stood guard, militaristic and grim.

“Where is Dr. Gouden?” the king boomed at me.

Hannah and I exchanged glances.

“In the laboratory,” I said, keeping my voice steady. “We could take you to him?”

“Good idea!” the king snapped.

My father, the only scientist who remained on Fata through the long polar winters, worked on the second floor of the observatory. I hurried through the dark, cavernous halls with ice growing up the sides, the king and the airguardsmen marching after me, feeling a bit stunned. Hannah, jittery with excitement, ran on ahead.

I was familiar with my father's laboratory. I'd been his apprentice for nearly a year now. It was stuffed with cupboards and counters and microscopes and tables, laden with koch dishes and books and every shape and
size of furniture crowded into whatever space was left.
³
It smelled of chemicals and old wood.

My father looked up from his work, with Hannah already hovering beside him, when I arrived at the doorway. The king and the soldiers brushed past me. My father smiled, carefully removed his reading glasses, carefully folded them, and carefully tucked them into his apron pocket. He was a careful man.

“
Goed sneeuwmiddag
,” said my father, who was from the Amsterdam sector of the empire and often spoke HoLander in greeting. “Your Majesty.”

He did not seem surprised at all to see the king here at Fata. Perhaps he wasn't. He wore his collar upturned in the old-fashioned way, and a heavy apron with his cravat tucked in, and the rest of him looked like me, thin, with his curly brown hair and yellow-brown eyes. He had a solidness to him that I didn't have, and wished I did.

“Are you Dr. Gouden?” the king said.

“I am.”

“You are the scientist who found the cure to the London Fever?”

“The antitoxin, yes. I did.”

“Three days ago you received a light signal. About the Venen. Since then, it has become much, much worse. We need your help.”

My father's brows furrowed.

“Will you have something warm to drink?” he said to the airguardsmen, noting their frozen state. “You're all quite ice.”

Within minutes, the king had seated himself among the eccentric furniture, the airguardsmen standing guard around him, their hands clasped behind their backs, and Hannah and I hurrying to make tea for them at the orthogonagen stove in the corner of the laboratory. I pulled a lone mug from the empty cupboard, and it looked like it hadn't been washed in a week. Hannah made a disgusted noise in her throat and swept from the laboratory to find more mugs in the other observatory rooms. I set a kettle of water to boil, listening to the conversation between the king and my father.

“Less than a hundred had caught the fever, two weeks ago,” said the king. “Now there are eighteen thousand. Everyone is under quarantine. Lady Florel is helpless.”

My father frowned, touching his clasped hands to his mouth as the king explained the Venen. I listened keenly, washing the mug over and over in the laboratory sink.

The highly contagious disease turned women's veins black. It robbed them of their strength and snuffed the life
from them in exactly six days. No one knew where it had come from, and no one—not even Lady Florel Knight, the empire's top medical scientist—knew how to cure it. The empire needed my father.

My father worried the pages of his research notebook.

“I am no Lady Florel,” he said.

“You don't have to be,” said the king. “I've brought her here with me. You will research with her.”

My father brightened and straightened up in his chair. He had apprenticed with Lady Florel when he was my age, and even now, years later, admiration shone in his face.

“That is wonderful!” he said. “Allow me to gather my things—”

“A moment,” said the king, cutting my father short. From the inside of his coat, he produced a tiny vial. It caught the light and danced and shimmered between the king's fingers. The black liquid inside glittered. I couldn't pry my eyes away from it.

“Lady Florel has found a new method of research,” he said. “A rather incredible method of research. And she insists you study it—now—before you see her.”

My father paced unhappily as the airguardsmen pushed the furniture to the sides of the room, opening an area of space around the orthogonagen stove. I could tell he did not like his laboratory changed about, and he did not like
being told how to do his research. He crossed his arms as the king instructed me to remove the lid from the boiling teapot. It sent steam billowing into the air.

“This is fantillium,” said the king, shaking the little vial. “It was discovered with orthogonagen, nearly a hundred years ago. We thought it useless—until several days ago, when Lady Florel discovered it to be a valuable research tool. And very unusual, too.”

My father and I drew back as the king uncapped the vial and held it over the kettle. Three drops fell like black pearls into the boiling water. The steam around the stove grew opaque and glistened.

“Breathe it in,” said the king.

“You are
certain
Lady Florel wishes us to use it?” said my father. “We ought to be spending this time collecting blood samples and speaking to Lady Florel, not playing with some unknown chemical—”

“She will not see you unless you do,” said the king.

And that was that.

My father inhaled the steam first, and cringed. Then it enveloped me, several feet behind him, and a strange sensation filled my lungs as I breathed it in. It was like swallowing frosted spurs, or a scoop of diamond sand. The air prickled, freezing my throat and coating my lungs with frost. The steam that had been hot in our faces turned burning cold. Frigid.

The light above brightened painfully. I winced. Every highlight on the jars and glasses around us seared my vision.

“Turn down the lights,” the king commanded. The airguardsmen, outside of the steam's reach, obliged.

The room fell dark, but I could see every piece of furniture perfectly. The clock in the corner ticked the seconds unbearably loud. I glanced at my father. His yellow-brown eyes had become black. He stared back at me, frowning, and removed my glasses to peer intently at my eyes.

“They're dilated,” he said.

“So are yours.” I smiled, and wasn't sure why. The pulse of blood through my veins gave my fingertips a fizz. My heart pounded. And yet, I was entirely calm. I felt asleep and awake at the same time.

“Lady Florel discovered,” said the king, “that diluted with steam and inhaled, fantillium can give
shared hallucinations
.”