Illusionarium (9 page)

“What do you think you'll illusion tonight?” she said as I awkwardly and discreetly tried to brush the soot from my clothes.

“I—I don't know,” I admitted, my face growing warm.

“You don't
know
?” she said, turning around to face me, her eyebrows knit. “I've been studying for this for
months
!”

My palms suddenly started sweating.

“Well—ah, what do you think I ought to illusion?” I said.

“Hmmm. Well. What's your specialty?”

“Um,” I said. Illusionists had specialties? I scrambled.

“I'm—very good at . . . temperatures,” I finally managed.

Divinity coughed. It sounded very much like she was stifling a laugh.

“Well, all right,” I admitted. “I'm open to advice. I'm not terribly experienced, to tell the truth. It's my first real illusionarium. What do
you
think I ought to illusion?”

Divinity pursed her perfect lips together, thoughtful.

“Something sweet,” she said at last. “Sweet, and beautiful, and innocent. Oh
do
put some powder on him; he's
so
. . . messy.”

The masked guards attacked me with their brushes.

“Puh,”
I said, spitting powder.

I let her advice sink in through my Divinity-induced stupor—which intensified as she wove her arm through mine yet again, and, smiling, tugged and led me out of her suite. Something sweet . . . well. I knew how to illusion ice. And arsenic. Neither of which were exactly beautiful.

Sweat was running down the back of my neck when, after our long walk, she'd taken me to the theater backstage. The entire theater was so large the red velvet chairs seemed endless, and theater boxes gaped at us. The curtains disappeared into the ceiling, and chandeliers lit everything. So different from the Rosewine Theater, which had only a platform and lamps that worked but half the time.

Only a few minutes, and the doors at the sides of the theater opened. The floor rumbled with the miners assembling, filing into their seats. There weren't many—maybe seventy or so—and they wore outfits like Queen Honoria and the illusionists, except . . . more. Buckles and jackets and wigs, green tresses with ships sewn to them, and hats that tied under the chin, and overall, a mess of clothes that completely hid their forms. And masks. They all wore masks. White masks trimmed with gold, masks with pearls and lace hanging from them, even masks rimmed with glittering gems.
These
were miners? I warily eyed the crimson guardsmen, who lined the aisles. Next to me, Divinity chattered on about every miner who took a seat.

“He's new. Her, too—oooh, lovely mask. A half mask—definitely hasn't been a miner long. Oh, look—there's Edward the Pathetic Miner. I can't believe he's not dead yet.”

“Divinity,” I said, for she still had her arm around mine. “Why does everyone here wear masks?”

Divinity's chattering halted. Her brow furrowed at me.

“You . . . don't
know
?” she said.

I quickly clamped my mouth shut. I was doing a wonderful job of proving how stupid I was.

I remained in silence as the illusionarium began.

Lady Florel—face rouged and powdered white—swept from the wing and onto the stage. The crowd
hushed and no one applauded as she announced, “The Eighty-second Annual Masked Virtue Pre-ceremony” and the names of the illusionists taking part. Divinity. Constantine. The Young Promising Talent from the Far North, Jonathan Gouden. An honor. Please welcome.

And the raspy breaths of the audience indicated they were still alive.

Divinity slipped her arm from mine, leaving me bereft with a brush of her hair as she took Lady Florel's place onstage. I stayed back. Amidst her chatter, Divinity had let me know that I would be the last illusionist to have a turn, which gave me all the more time to worry.

A
hissssshing
filled the theater.

Gold-painted pipes along the perimeter of the seats in the audience, and the stage, hissed out thick billows of steam. A boiler somewhere backstage groaned. The steam around us grew in layers, billowing over the miners, who disappeared in the opaque white, then Divinity, on the stage, faded from view as well. I was alone in the dark, blistering steam.

I inhaled, slowly. My lungs froze and the lights brightened. The anxieties about Nod'ol, about illusioning and about the cure, all faded to nothing. The hissing roared and the steam thinned.

Divinity illusioned like her beauty. With grace, charm, and delicacy, sweeping her hands out and turning around,
twisting the steam around her in long strands of white. She caught me in her spell.

A figure formed of steam, growing from it with long arms and legs, a rounded form of a man. It burned white hot, then cooled and solidified transparent. I couldn't tear my eyes away. Glass! That was a structure I hadn't learned. And the glass man moved! It turned to her and bowed! She curtsied back to it, and they began a flitting dance. As she danced, she created more and more glass figures of men, melting up around her in the mist, elongated pillars of ersatz gentlemen. Light danced in long glass strands and highlights.

Divinity touched the shoulders of the nearest glass figure and rested her head against its chest, then flitted away, dancing around it, her dress brushing its legs in layers of lace. I marveled at how she illusioned the glass to bend and mold, and managed to control all the figures at once. She leaned forward, lifted to her toes, and kissed one of the figures on the neck.

Lucky glass man, I thought.

Something formed from the steam in Divinity's hand, and when she raised it, I recognized a dagger made of glass. She reared back.

And plunged it into the glass man's chest.

“Gah!” I croaked. The chest cracked.

Red light poured from it and drenched Divinity and
the stage. The glass figure fell to its knees. Divinity thrust her hand into its glass wound and retrieved a
beating glass heart
.

She held it up to the audience, red light dripping down her hands. They cheered hoarsely and clapped.

Divinity threw the glass heart onto the stage floor, shattering it into a thousand pieces. A shard of it skidded backstage and hit my foot. I stumbled back sharply.

The rest of the glass men lined up in rows on the sides of the stage and held as still as soldiers. Divinity bowed as the audience applauded broadly, her hand still dripping red light. When the clapping died, she hurried offstage, looking faint.

Constantine, who had been standing in the wings on the other side, glowering at me with beastly hatred, took his eyes away and strode out. He was still dressed like an animal, with crimson hair and coats that encased him like a badly stuffed pillow. He didn't bother with the formality of bowing.

And when he began to illusion, I saw he didn't need to. His movements were so powerful and sharp he commanded the audience into rapt silence. The steam billowed up around him into eight columns, then formed a large ceiling over him, connecting the pillars.

In his gazebo of steam, Constantine leapt and threw himself to the stage floor with a yell. The ground vibrated.
The steam swept instantly from its formed columns, revealing not a building—

—but a giant eight-legged spider, made entirely of metal and gear works.

My brain turned, fascinated and feverish. Bronze! And
steel
! And piping and pistons, connecting each reticulated leg to the center. The spider clicked and groaned and rose up, curling its two front legs high above Constantine, moving with his harsh movements. The center of the spider had an engine that whirred with steam. Incredible! I grudgingly admitted: Constantine could make the pocket watch King Edward had asked me to illusion.

Constantine threw his arms forward, and the spider leapt over him, striking the ground just before the front row of the audience—making them cry aloud and jump back—and then the mechanical spider clicked and reticulated forward to the wall of the stage, testing it with its pointed feet before climbing to the ceiling with each leg sucking itself against the wall. Peering up, I could see smaller mechanical spiders piled on its back, crawling over one another in a mess of mechanical legs and
hisshes
and clicks. I wiped my arms, trying to brush away the shuddery feeling.

The audience stood and applauded. Constantine didn't bother bowing—he didn't need to—and left the stage in a brooding hunch.

The giant spider remained curled at the top of the ceiling. My ears rang.

“Go, Jonathan,” Lady Florel whispered behind me, and two masked guardsmen pushed me out from the shielding curtains.

I stumbled onto the stage and couldn't even make it to the center. The miners, a cacophonic mix of all ages and clothes and masks, struck panic through me. I ran off the stage, to the safety of the wing where Lady Florel stood, unsmiling.

“I don't know what to illusion,” I said, panicked.

She said, coldly, “You'd better figure it out if you want the antitoxin.”

And with that, the masked guard shoved me back into the center of the stage.

I stood there, swallowing, as the steam misted around my feet, the mechanical spiders above me and the glass men behind me. A glance back at the stage's wing, filled with the crimson masked guardsmen, reminded me I was trapped.

The cure. The cure. Focus on the cure.

I closed my eyes, and all I could see was my family; Mum and Hannah ill in the hospital wing, their skin mottled black, and my father gripping my mother's hand as though if he'd let it go, he would drown. Interminable homesickness choked me.

The room hushed.

Sky came first, the thoughts pulling themselves from my head and fingers. I spattered stars over the theater with quiet movements, pinpricks of light, and willed them to sparkle over the room. You could reach up and flick them.

I envisioned ice, and it formed upon itself in the center of the stage. The energy radiated from my fingers and neck like a fever and I pushed it out, the wake forming into white tendrils and flakes and shimmering around the audience, in the aisles and up the gilded walls.

Towers grew. Rows of housetops, vertical docks, and the observatory dome. Bridges formed over the audience, making them gasp. Airships made of ice hung, connected to docking towers with delicate ice threads. The theater filled with ice of every transparency, forming the city I knew by heart. I'd even created canals of generator offal, the rivers of white rolling over the sides of the city and billowing into the feet of the audience.

I fell to my knees, gulping air. The theater and masked faces spun around me.

“Where is this, boy?” came a hoarse voice from the audience.

I swallowed.

“North,” was all I could say.

“Fascinating,” rasped another voice. “And how, exactly, will you fight with it?”

“Fight?” I said.

“And
begin
!” Lady Florel's voice rang out.

The world exploded around me.

Divinity's glass figures came to life, swarming around me and leaping onto my city of ice. They bashed the observatory dome in, smashing over cloud canals and destroying the walkways. The spider dropped down from the ceiling with a
clongggg
and the little spiders scattered from it. Stumbling away from them, I whipped sharply about to see Divinity and Constantine back on stage, bringing their illusions to life in violent, sweeping gestures.

“Just a ruddy minute!” I said, pulling together a gust of wind and shoving it at a trio of spiders skittering toward me. The wind picked them up and threw them into the audience, causing some of the miners to scream.

The glass men threw themselves at my illusion, bashing the towers and bridges, sending shards of ice raining over the audience. I cringed as they smashed my family's row house. With a sharp movement I illusioned a gale at the offending glass men, throwing them into the mass of spiders that skittered down the aisles.

The spiders crawled over them, puncturing the glass with their pointed legs. Divinity illusioned sharply; the glass men glowed molten hot and melted into the gears of the spiders attacking them, then solidified, causing the
spiders to stiffen and tumble to the side, useless.

I shoved another gale at a glass man kicking the dome of the observatory, and he smacked against an empty chair. His head broke off and he flailed to death like a struggling corpse.

The remaining glass men pivoted and turned on me, running back to the stage in a mass. Divinity's giggle screeched through the air behind me.

The giant mechanical spider, puffing steam, rose in gargantuan monstrosity over me. It kicked one of the nearest attacking glass figures away. I turned quickly, seeing Constantine at the helm of the illusion.

“You stupid idiot,” he rasped. “You let Divinity tell you what to illusion, didn't you.”

He swiped his hand sharply. The giant spider's front leg swiped and knocked me across the head with the force of a speeding train.

I folded up, joint by joint, and smashed face-first into the floor.

T
he masked guard had to remove me from the stage and escort me to a suite that was supposedly mine. It was like Divinity's, except gold. The furniture was gilded. The wallpaper was striped yellow. The chandeliers dripped amber diamonds. Even the flowers in the vases and growing at the top of the fountain were yellow roses. I was trapped inside a giant gold music box.

Fuming, I hurriedly washed in a steaming basin of water. The bruises I'd gotten from illusion-fighting had faded, but the humiliation remained. Divinity, that little viper.

As I dressed in new clothes however—all varying shades of gold and yellow, ridiculous with ruffles and carved buttons—hope began to replace anger. The illusionarium was over. I'd be back on Fata with the cure in just minutes! I quickly put on the mask left for me, a
gold half mask with smiling eyes, then placed my glasses over it. They rested neatly on my long nose. I grinned, thinking of what my father would say when he saw me wearing it.

One last glimpse in the mirror—I looked like a gold nightmare from a traveling circus—and I rushed down the long halls and stairs, leaving the masked guard behind, until I found the theater lobby, alive with more masked guards. They swept about in silence, carrying glass bowls full of punch and tureens of food, setting a long table in the center of the lobby floor.

I ignored everything and ran to the cabinet between the two staircases. It was still locked. The little brown bottle inside seemed to be mocking me. I paced around the cabinet until Lady Florel appeared at the top of the stairs, wearing a mask, descending in a lacy gown that looked like it was made of lumpy spiderwebs. Her graying hair fell over her shoulders, making her severity strangely softened.

“Hulloa there, Lady Florel!” I said jovially when she'd reached the last step. “Unlock the cabinet, that's the ticket!”

“Jonathan, what
were
you thinking?” she said, crossing her arms.

“Not much time, don't you know,” I said.

“That was the most useless illusion I have ever seen!”

“We've still got to illusion the door to—”

“I will not!”

I drew up short.

“Hold off,” I said, the glee inside me ebbing to anger. “Lady Florel, you said—”

“I
said
if you illusioned
well
, you would get it back. Your illusion was terrible. You earn
nothing
.”

“But—but—” I floundered. “You—you—you never ruddy told me I had to ruddy
fight
!”

“I'm sorry, Jonathan,” she said. “But you'll have to do better than that if you want the antitoxin.”

She smiled and turned away.

Anger building hot in my veins, I made after her.

Before I'd taken half a step, two masked guardsmen swept up, grabbed me in midair, escorted me forcefully to the end of the long table, and sat me in a chair. Hard.

Lady Florel was at my side as the pain cleared, arms still crossed.

“Illusion in the Masked Virtue illusionarium tomorrow,” she said. “If you illusion well, it may only last a few minutes.”

“But—I—I only have two days!” I said.

“If you illusion
well
, it may only last a few minutes,” she repeated. She smiled. “Do eat some food. You look starved.”

She strode away. The two masked guardsmen who
had shoved me into a seat took posts next to the cabinet and stared me down through their dark eyeholes as though daring me to come near them. I glowered at my plate.

Constantine, who sat the mirror-image distance across from me on the other side of the table, made a guttural noise through his lynx-shaped mask. It might have been laughter. It might have been a train running over its own engine. He sat with his feet kicked up on his plate, leaning back into his chair, arms crossed.

“Who's Anna?” I said, wanting a fight. “Your girlfriend?”

Constantine silenced, his orange eyes fixed stonily on my face.

“Only Lady Florel said she kept running away,” I said. “Sounds like she
really
likes you.”

It was Constantine's turn to be slammed back into his chair by additional masked guardsmen. Plates clattered across the floor.

Divinity's shrill laugh echoed down the stairs.

“Silly boys!” she said, descending like a waterfall to the table. Her eyes glittered when she saw me, and immediately she was at my side, lacing her fingers through mine and beaming.

“Your illusion was very good,” she said. “I was impressed.”

“You lied to me, Divinity.”

Divinity had the nerve to laugh.

“Wasn't that so
funny
?” she said.

“No, Divinity,” I said with an annoyed smile, unweaving my fingers from hers and pushing her hand away. “No, it wasn't.”

Divinity took a seat at the middle of the table, still laughing brightly. The table, an odd gathering of lanterns and silver, progressed in color from Constantine's end—orange, set with brown whole roasted birds—to the blues of tarts, purple-brown soups and stuffed vegetables, green salads, where Divinity sat—to platters of golden potatoes and bright yellow curried rice where I sat. None of us took any food.

“Sometimes I imagine this is what a real family's like,” Divinity said airily. “Getting in fights and all. And Queen Honoria is the mother, and Jonathan can be my brother and Constantine can be the family pet. . . .”

“Shut
up
,” Constantine and I said at the same time.

Her delicate lips turned up, as though we highly amused her.

I processed the evening in a haze of anger. Miners poured into the lobby, descending the stairs and taking seats at the table in their bizarre parade of priceless masks, wigs, corsets, coats. They spoke in croaking voices, and the chandelier shook with their footfalls. They flocked
to Constantine, already serving themselves the food as he sat among them, unmoving and cold. They doted on Divinity, who laughed like wind chimes and sat on the table and teased them and flicked ears. They bowed to Lady Florel as she directed the masked guard. And everyone completely ignored me, at the abandoned end of the table.
¹²

Not quite ignored. A thin—bordering on starved—man, a little younger than my father, broke apart from the assemblage of the crowd. He was different than the miners. He wore shabby, plain clothes that hung on him like a clothesline, his hair was parted in the middle, and he didn't wear a mask. He almost looked like an Arthurisian clerk. A little tag pinned to his pocket said P
RESS
.

He approached me, timidly fiddling with his notebook.

“Jonathan . . . Gouden?” he said.

“What?” I said.

“May—may I interview you? The paper would like an article on the newest illusionist.”

I didn't answer. He possibly took that as encouragement, and nervously sat on the chair next to me, pencil at the ready.

“Where are you from?” he said, keeping his eyes on his notebook.

“North.”

The reporter didn't press for more details on that score.

“It—ah. It has long been the duty of the press to come up with an illusionist's name for Masked Virtue. Do you feel there are any virtues that describe your nature?”

I paused.

“What?” I said.

“The Illusionists are . . . named somewhat after virtues,” the reporter ventured. “Queen Honoria used to be . . . Florel Knight, and Divinity was . . . Jane Miller, and Constantine . . . was . . .”

He trailed off and looked away. I followed his eyes to the marble above the lobby's main archway. That marred bit of wall, the same Lady Florel had been staring at. He drank it in with a starved kind of hope. And he really did look starved.

“Hey,” I said, a little concerned. “You look famished, what? Have something to eat?”

The reporter tore his eyes away from the wall.

“I'm not allowed to eat the food,” he said.

“What? Why not? What a stupid rule.” I took the plate in front of him and dumped a spoonful of yellow rice and a pasty on it. “Eat, already.”

I couldn't believe I hadn't offered him food earlier. He positively engulfed his plate with his mouth, spraying crumbs everywhere, a pasty in one hand and two yellow
pears in the other. It could do a person's heart good, if it didn't make them sick.

“May I take some for my wife?” he said, between mouthfuls.

“What? Oh. Yes. Do. Plenty here,” I said.

He stuffed his pockets. Either he was a very bad reporter, I thought, or Lady Florel had been right about things being dim in the rest of the city.

“Get out of here, begone, you little pencil-pushing whelp,” boomed a familiar voice.

The reporter grabbed one last pasty and fled, his frayed suit coat bulging.

The man who took the abandoned seat wore gloves the size of dinner plates and hulked over me in an array of ruffles and buttons. He wore a tiny mask over the upper half of his face, and a pointy gray beard clung to his cheeks and chin.

My silverware clattered to the table.

“Booooy!”
he boomed, and thumped me on the back. My glasses fell onto my plate. “What a show. What a
show
! So different from the other years; you have potential, I say,
potential
. Some would say aligning with you is a poor choice, but I say
otherwise
! Your illusion may not have won you the battle but it had
heart
, I say!
Heart
!”

“King Edward,” I said.

“Sorry I'm late, lad!” he thundered on. “Lost my way to the lobby, can you believe that? But now I am
here
and I am willing to offer you everything I have for the festival! It's not much, I grant you—I only have half an aether stream to my name—but you have my airship at your service and that's better than nothing! I have a good feeling in my
gut
about you. My
gut
!”

“King Edward!” I repeated.

And it was him. Right down to how he massacred the food on his plate and sniffed after each bite. I wanted to dive at him and give him a jolly good embrace. Instead, I leaned forward and spoke in a low voice.

“Right!” I said as he attacked the pears. “King Edward. You've found your way in. My father must have sorted out how to illusion the door! 'Course he did! Right. Your Highness—turn around slowly—don't attract attention—behind you, that cabinet being guarded?
The cure is in that cabinet
. If we can—”

I stopped. King Edward was staring at me with wide, buggy eyes, fruit dripping from his hands and mouth stuffed with food.

“Your . . .
Highness
?” he said.

I stood, slowly, put my glasses back on, slowly, and the world happened around me s-l-o-w-l-y.

This wasn't King Edward. Something about him . . . the hairs of his beard, or the grooves of his eyes, or something
in his face, or just . . .
something . . .
was . . .

. . . off.

In the periphery of my vision, masked guardsmen flurried, undressing the table, clearing plates and taking chairs away. King Edward, his mouth still full, clapped his hands with delight as the masked guardsmen took his plate and music sounded. An orchestra on the mezzanine had begun to play, and as the table was carried away in pieces, the miners filled the floor. Before I knew it, I was surrounded in a snowstorm of a dance.

They danced like everything here in Nod'ol. A mess of stitched-together steps pieced from various dances of the past two hundred years. There seemed to be no particular rules or partners or order to the rhythmic chaos. They danced on the mezzanine and they danced on the stairs. Some buckled fantillium masks over their regular masks, and their movements grew fluid and drunken. I guessed the experience was rather uninteresting without an illusionist.

In the whorl of chaos, a regiment of crimson order pressed through the mismatched crowd to Constantine, who stood petulantly still in the middle of the dancers, arms crossed. He straightened as the masked guards pushed the crowd aside, bearing a girl within their ranks. An utterly beautiful girl. Prettier, even, than Divinity.
¹³
She wore a long ballgown with odd bits of lace and purple flowers pinned in her dark brown hair, pulled back in curls. Her lips and cheeks were rouged, but I knew her instantly.

“Hannah!” I yelled.

“Anna,” Constantine rasped, hurrying to her, forcing his way through the crowd.

I plunged into the mass of dancers.
“Hannah!”

Constantine reached her first and grabbed her wrist.

“If I may have this dan—”

Hannah reared back and slapped him across his orange lynx face. It did not appear to affect him in the least. Hannah retreated, nursing her gloved hand. She turned this way and that, trying to pull from Constantine's iron grip. I shoved my way through, knocking miners to the ground.

“I
said
,” Constantine growled, “May I
have this dan—
”

“Nope, sorry, cutting in,” I said, throwing myself between them, breaking their grip and grabbing Hannah's gloved hand.

And in the .5 seconds of confusion between Constantine, the dancers, and the masked guardsmen, I broke into a run, dragging Hannah after. She stumbled but caught my lope, and we fled through the dancers, banging one of the arched glass doorways open and plunging into
the theater gardens before anyone could even react. We leapt into the garden hedges beyond, which gave way to a hedge maze. Hannah matched my stride, her dress billowing behind her.

“Find them!” Constantine hoarsely yelled.
“And don't hurt Anna!”

The walls of leaves became thick and snarled as we turned corners and ran on, thoroughly lost.

We only slowed when the yelling grew distant, the miners and the ballroom orchestra became a hum, and the hedge maze opened up to a small sitting area with crumbling marble benches and a dried-out fountain.