Illusionarium (7 page)

The bells were drowned out by my heartbeat thudding in my ears. I sank onto the stone under the window and buried my face in my hands, despair seeping into my soul. The queen. Our symbol of Avalon. My father had not been able to save her.

She had looked so much like my mother. . . .

I bit my tongue to keep from showing emotion in front of Lockwood, though I fear my shoulders shook. He silently watched me from the other side of the cell.

I must have somehow fallen asleep in the following hours, because abruptly I was shaken awake by Lockwood, his face so intense you could have sparked fires with it.

“Get up,” he said shortly. “Something's going on.”

I groggily pulled myself to my feet and squinted out the window, Lockwood poised beside it as tight as a wound spring. He nodded his head at the courtyard below, where the four dim pinpricks of the patrolling yeomen's lanterns swung.

“Two of them aren't patrolling anymore,” he said in a low voice.

I saw he was right, even through my broken glasses. The two lanterns farthest had fallen to the ground, still lit but unmoving. As I watched, a third lantern tumbled, and the yeoman made not a sound when he fell. The winter air held its breath.

My heart began to thud.

The fourth lantern fell.

“Hello!” I cried out. “Hello, ther—”

Lockwood grabbed me by the vest and flung me away from the window.

“Idiot!” he seethed. “You don't make a move until you know what's going on!”

Silence encased us. It wasn't normal silence. It was the silence of a thick fog. The sort of silence you'd find in Fata's cloud canals. Suffocating silence.

“They're after us,” said Lockwood.

“What? After us? How do you know?” I whispered back.

“We're the only tower in this direction. Don't you notice
anything
?”

“Of course I do,” I snapped. “Just because it's all under a microscope—”

The hairs on the back of my neck rose. The silence had become thicker. Lockwood pressed himself against
the wall next to the door, ready to pounce on whatever tried to come through. I copied him on the other side of the door. The silence was so strangling now a dropped pin would be a cannon.

A pin did not drop, but a voice beyond the door whispered, “
Jonathan
.”

And the door exploded.

The force threw me back against stone. Splinters rained over me; twisted iron and broken wood staccatoed over the wall. Smoke choked me. My ears rang and I couldn't inhale, the wind knocked out of me. Dust stung my eyes.

It settled like a snowfall. I coughed, my swollen nose throbbing, and in the thinning haze, a grandmotherly figure faded into view. She was surrounded by an odd assortment: a dozen men in facemasks and long red uniforms. They settled themselves about her in military formation.

“Well, Jonathan,” said Lady Florel, beaming. “Shall we fetch that cure?”

I
stared. The scene could only be taken in by pieces, as everything all at once was too much whole.

Piece 1: Lady Florel. She wore a small red mask that covered the upper half of her face, and a costume that covered almost every inch of her in striped rags and gathers. She looked like a seabird that had got caught in an airship engine.

Piece 2: The guards that stood around her. Like Lady Florel, they wore masks, but these covered their entire faces. Their clothes looked as though they had been stitched together from pieces of various costumes from the past hundred years, and all of it—even the masks—had been dyed and painted a crimson red. Even the boots. They stood in broad-shouldered, perfectly symmetrical formation, silent and still as de—

Lockwood snarled and launched himself at the
crimson guard, a full-fledged assassin.

“Lockwood!” I yelled.

The following seconds blurred with blue uniform among the long crimson coats. Lockwood's assault created a flurry of torn fabric and sprawling men. I dove into the brawl to pull Lockwood away.

For a moment, I was suspended in a silent snarl of limbs and crimson.

The tangle of fight spat me out. I hit wall.

Lockwood fought on, and I didn't need to be an experienced fighter to see that with our fights before, Lockwood had
tolerated
me. With these trained guards, he slipped out of their grasp and twisted arms behind backs and used their own weight to throw them on their heads.

One pulled a pistol from a holster at his waist; Lockwood kicked it out of the guard's hand, sending it flying into the empty fireplace.

A blurred moment, and the fighting refocused and paused. The masked guardsmen untangled and stepped apart.

Lockwood had gone. Crisp footfalls faded in the distance, beyond the tower door.

“He'll be off to fetch the guard,” said Lady Florel, motioning me out the door after her.

“Yes—yes, very keen, Lockwood.” I ran down the
stone stairs after her, the broad subject of Hope speeding my feet. The crimson guards hurried us on in perfect step. “I'm—dead glad you're back, Lady Florel! Did—did you say
cure
?”

“
Quite
right,” she said, flashing me a smile as we entered the grassy courtyard. “Follow me.”

“That's grand!” I exulted, practically bounding after. “Let's get it to my fath—”

I tripped over something and knee-planted into the spongy grass. Twisting around, I saw it was a fallen yeoman, his lantern glowing on the ground a length away. The light reflected in his open eyes. Automatically I was at his side, checking his pulse. But his skin was already cold.

“He's—dead!” I said.

“Yes, my masked guard can be
very
enthusiastic,” said Lady Florel. “Put this on, please.”

Her guard promptly strapped a mask over my face. It covered my nose and mask, the tubing at the chin hissing. I gagged on a breath of ice-encrusted air as the Tower of London courtyard glowed on its own accord. Fantillium. Suddenly the world was sharp and clear, and my horror at the dead yeoman faded into a dull footnote. My lungs froze with liquid ice.

“It's a traveling illusionarium,” Lady Florel explained, buckling a similar gas mask around her head. The guard
surrounded us in a perfect crimson circle, each wearing his own gas mask over his facemask.

In the fantillium light of blues and grays that glowed almost white, in the center of the courtyard by the White Tower, Lady Florel illusioned. She illusioned with the brick wall of the tower as her canvas, her hands twisting in and out and thoughts pulling away from her fingers in thin wisps.

An arched doorway formed before her. I recognized it as the door Lady Florel had illusioned on the
Chivalry
—and the same door that stood on the other side of the building. The White Tower's door.

Except it was different. The wood was decayed and splintered, and moss grew in the cracks. Rotting. The brick around it crumbled at the corners with Lady Florel's illusion.

Her hands trembled as she finished, and the illusion on the wall before stood complete. An ancient door of old wood and iron pocked with age. Lady Florel twisted the rusting latch and opened the door.

It didn't lead into the inside of the White Tower.

I half recognized where it led now. Before us stood a mirror image of the Tower of London courtyard. The fortress walls lay before us, but crumbling and ruinous, and the scrubby grass of the rolling courtyard hills was an overgrown mess of weeds. An abandoned-for-years
version of the Tower of London: a mess of broken buildings below a sea of airships.

Shouting filled the courtyard. Yells echoed across the stone walls. I whipped around to the sight of Lockwood charging from the far wall, leading the head yeoman—dressed in a nightshirt—and a flock of soldiers at his heels.

“Our Arthurisian friends!” Lady Florel cried with delight. “Why don't we give them a very
warm
Nod'olian farewell!”

On cue, a masked guardsman streaked past me in a crimson blur. Silent as a prayer and smooth as a zephyr. Several yeomen broke away from the group and chased after him, the head yeoman barking orders. I regarded this all with mild, fantillium-tinged interest, watching the guardsman dart to the vertical tower in the middle of the courtyard and then up to the airship dock, a structure of X-beamed steel. He leapt, grabbing the beams, and began climbing it, hand over hand with utter ease and speed, ignoring the lift entirely.

The dock platform loomed high above, old regimental airships docked along it in a neat row. The crimson guard leapt onto the platform in a graceful arch and leapt again onto the first airship, scaling it with dexterity until he reached the balloon's envelope. A blade flashed in his hand.

He plunged it into the balloon, making a long slit.

The inner workings of my soul, like an old clock, groggily awakened and groaned. Orthogonagen was dead flammable, and a lungful could kill a man, besides. The fumes of the gas warped the guard, who clung still to the ribbing of the envelope. With a twist of his hands, he produced something within his many-pocketed jacket. I instinctively knew what it was before I even saw the flicker of an orthogonagen match.

“Lady Florel,” I said, alarm growing. “He's—”

Spark.

Boom
.

I felt the impact before I saw it. The explosion threw me back and smacked me against the brick of the White Tower. The airship's balloon billowed into masses of yellow-orange florets. My eyes burned with the light. And slowly, slowly the ship pitched, a mass of fire, and began to sink over us, encasing the courtyard. Lockwood and the yeomen, who'd been racing to us, quickly raced to the lift to rescue those still in the airship.

Boom
. The airship docked by the one aflame caught fire, the burning explosion throwing the yeomen back.

“Now is the time to make our exit!” Lady Florel grasped my arm and yanked me through the illusioned doorway, into the ersatz Tower of London courtyard.

The moment my foot crossed the decaying threshold, a change occurred.

Every cell and microbe that made up my entire self went . . .
blip
. . .

. . . and shifted one millimeter to the side. My vision flashed black. I tumbled onto the dew-drenched weeds, gasping for breath. Cool air kissed the skin around my mask.

I scrambled to face the doorway behind me. The courtyard beyond glowed brilliantly with fire. The burning airships had crashed into the courtyard, their flaming envelopes draped over the fortress walls, trapping everything in Death. The yeomen had disappeared.

One figure lay near the illusioned doorway, a dark silhouette against all the flames. Sprawled across the grass, unconscious. He wore an eye patch.

Lockwood, I thought, and my conscience roused.

“Lockwood!” I yelled as flames licked around him. I dove back through the illusioned doorway, back into the Arthurisian world.

“Jonathan!” Lady Florel yelled.

My organs reorganized, sending stars through my head. A barrier, a great wall of flame, surrounded us and seared my eyes and skin. I couldn't bear the light. I threw myself at the lieutenant, beating the flames out of his uniform. He roused and kicked me away.

“Stupid!” I yelled, lurching back onto my feet. “I'm trying to
help
you, idiot!”

The fire roared to an inferno, a vortex of blistering light. Lockwood struggled to his knees, coughing. Fire encased us. Our only exit was the illusioned doorway.

Which Lockwood could not see
.

I inhaled deeply, held my breath, tore the fantillium mask off my face and pressed it against Lockwood's nose and mouth. He struggled against it.

“Breathe!” I seethed.

He cough-inhaled. I knew the fantillium was running through his veins when he threw his hand up and shielded his all-pupil eye, cringing. Blotches formed in my eyes, my lungs screaming for a breath of air. I grabbed Lockwood by the shoulders with one arm, dragged him to his feet, the mask still clamped over his mouth, and we dove together through the illusioned door.

Stomach, lungs, heart, and spleen all twisted themselves inside out. A hiccup of mortality—

—and cooler air swept over us. I gasped. The doorway behind me dissolved into the crumbling wall of the White Tower. I lost my grip on Lockwood and collapsed into the mess of weeds. The old brick fortress spun.

Around us, the masked guard stood like red chess pieces. The weeds parted with Lady Florel, who looked at us and shook her head.

“Oh, Jonathan,” she said with a weary smile. “Welcome to Nod'ol.”

L
ady Florel's masked guard spirited us away from the strange Tower of London ruins. I was so exhausted, everything passed before me like a dream. The sun rose, its light warped through the giant glass ceiling. A large, old-fashioned airship flew us across the city—a place of familiar and unfamiliar buildings, all in decay—to the center. Here stood an unfamiliar marble building of white pillars and domes. Unlike the rest of the city, it looked tended to.

The airship docked at a platform on the roof, and after disembarking and descending through a gabled rooftop, down stairs of thick rugs and corridors of large paintings, we were escorted to an atrium sitting room, a parlor of hanging plants and palm trees and spindly furniture. It smelled thickly of perfume.

Lockwood paced the far side of the room like a caged
tiger. I collapsed on the nearest sofa, smearing it with soot, fire still flaring in my vision.

Lady Florel arrived at the room just moments later, already washed and in new clothes of pieces and layers. I leapt to my feet and confronted her.

“What did you do that for?” I said angrily. “I—I—I hardly know what to think, Lady Florel! You didn't have to go and blow everything up! Isn't our life's work to save people's lives? I mean, didn't you used to save lives on the battlefield? What's happened to you, Lady Florel?”

Lady Florel ignored my words with a smile and turned to a long table at the side of the room, where a spread of food steamed in tureens. Unfamiliar food. Roasted orbs—probably potatoes—sugar-encrusted pears. Roasted chicken—
all
of the chicken, with wings and legs still attached. All our food on Fata had to be shipped from the south, which meant it came in pieces, and I didn't quite trust food that hadn't been cut up into God-fearing chunks. I fumed as she ladled food onto her plate.

“Lady Florel,” I said slowly, putting the entire weight of it in my words, “I think you might have
killed
people.”

“Oh, yes. I'm terribly disturbed by it, of course,” she said. “Also, Jonathan, I'm
Queen Honoria
here in this world. I would appreciate it if you referred to me properly. Try the potatoes?”

“Excuse
me,”
said Lockwood, glaring at us both from the far side of the room. “But where, exactly, is
here
? Are we inside an illusion?”

“Lieutenant!” Lady Florel set down her plate of food. “What an—
unexpected
surprise to have you with us!”

Warily, Lockwood took a step back and eyed the windows behind him. Lady Florel strode to an ornate gold-trimmed chess set, sitting on a small side table, and turned her attention to its figures.

“In answer to your question, Lieutenant,” she said, “no. We are not in an illusion. Tell me, have you ever played chess?”

“No,” said Lockwood at the same time I said, “I have.”

“Of course you have, Jonathan. How many different moves can you make? If you are the player to open?”

“Twenty,” I said without thinking.

Lady Florel's hand hovered over the pieces of ivory and ebony. The craftsmanship was so fine, individual strands of hair had been carved into the horses' manes. She pressed the knight's head between her fingers and moved it over the pawns to a black square.

“The universe is . . . quite a bit like chess,” she said. She smiled at my expression. “Let us say, in my first move, I choose to move my knight
here
. Then what happens? The game progresses in a very different manner than it
would have if I, perhaps, moved it
here
.” Lady Florel moved the knight two squares to the side. “It could be completely different, in fact.”

“Perhaps,” I admitted. “But probably not
entirely
different.”

“Precisely. Let us say—” Lady Florel took the other knight, and mimed the pieces splitting apart onto the two legal squares. “Let us say that the
very moment
you decide to move the piece
here
, your same self decides to move the same piece
here
—and the game . . .
schisms
.”

My brow furrowed.

“Sorry?” I said.

“So there are two games being played at once.” Lady Florel set the knights back in place. “One, where you moved the knight here, and one, where you moved the knight
there
. Each on their own dimensional plane, invisible to the other. And let us suppose that each of
those
games schism at each move. How many different schisms and worlds where the same chess game is being played could there be?”

“Thousands,” I said. “
Hundreds
of thousands.” Comprehension dawned over me. “Lady Florel, are you—you're saying that—this world is a sort of—
other
version of ours? That we broke apart somehow?”

Lady Florel, beaming, tossed the knight at me. I caught it in one hand.

“Precisely!” she said.

“What an utter load of rubbish,” said Lockwood.

“Fantillium is the key to the doorway between these worlds,” Lady Florel explained. “If you can illusion something identical to another world—specifically, a door—down to the very speck, the mortar and brick—you can somehow
manipulate
the physics of the world into thinking it belongs to the other world. Do you see?
We can create gateways
.”

I sat down, head pounding in my ears. If this were true, it explained why this world had a Tower of London and other buildings like in Arthurise, yet different ones as well. When did it schism from ours? And—did this all mean there were
other
worlds? Hundreds? Or even thousands? My mind feverishly algorithmed. There could be
billions
of different worlds! I pressed my hands against my head.

“And you just discovered all this when you were curing diseases, did you?” said Lockwood coldly from the corner.

“Actually . . . yes,” said Lady Florel, coldly smiling back. “Medical scientists work with a lot of chemicals. Several years ago, I began working with fantillium. I discovered it had
unusual
properties. And I became an illusionist.”

“What, and you just
happened
to illusion the right door?” Lockwood spat.

Lady Florel didn't seem upset at all by his tone.

“Of course not,” she said kindly. “It wasn't chance at all. There are other illusionists who have gone before me, years ago. I found their work, lost books in old libraries, hidden words. That's how I learned. Of course, it was easier to illusion a doorway that already existed. I have no doubt the Tower of London exists in hundreds of other worlds. Nod'ol is just one of them.”

“Nod'ol, Nod'ol.” I echoed the city's strange name. “But—Lady Florel—why would you even
want
to—to—go somewhere like this? What about Our Lady's Charity Hospital in Rochdale? Weren't you busy establishing that?”

The life in Lady Florel's face faded. She suddenly looked old, and sad.

“I came here, Jonathan, and I realized how much they needed me,” she said. She walked to the wall of windows and looked out over the city. I got to my feet and followed her, taking in the expanse of city through the window. It really was an ugly tangle; buildings were missing their tops, and it looked as though holes had been eaten through their sides. The closer it got to our marble building, the more civilized it became, the more buildings appeared to be inhabited. And closer to us, rows and rows of brick walls and hedges surrounded the building. A maze.

“They don't need me in Arthurise,” she said.

“Of course they—”

Lady Florel held up a hand.

“They don't,” she said. “They did, once. But I'm old now. They see me as a relic, something to write books about and give medals to and dust off every few months.”

I tried to speak up again, and she silenced me.

“But here—here in Nod'ol—they
need
me.” She nodded to the landscape of dilapidated buildings. “Look at it. This city used to be the center of a vast empire. Look at the Archglass! Could Arthurise build anything so
massive
? But it's fallen, Jonathan. There's nothing outside the city—No Kowloon, no New Amsterdam . . . it's only us in the city now. And everyone here lives in airships. They don't even live in the buildings anymore. This empire, unlike your Arthurisian Empire, is almost fallen.”

Lady Florel's brown eyes glittered with tears.

“When I came here, years ago,” she said quietly, “I promised I would save it. I would bring it back to its glory. It's a marvelous feeling—like stitching up mortal wounds on the battlefield.
Nothing
matters more to me than this.”

She was almost crying. I shifted, uncomfortable.

“Not even finding a cure to the Venen?” I said. “Arthurise is dying, too, Lady Florel. And Arthurise was your city first.”

Lady Florel unexpectedly brightened and said, “That
reminds
me!”

From the inside of her many-pocketed jacket/dress, she produced a tiny brown bottle and offered it to me.

“The antitoxin,” she said.

I snapped to life and snatched it out of her fingers, cradling it like a starved man. I examined it, reading the label, and though I didn't recognize the compound listed—
arsenic trioxide
—I
did
recognize the arsenic part. So my father had been right! Arsenic was a key piece in the cure. Administer by mouth, three doses in the bottle. So you
could
bottle Hope!

“The Venen has been in this world long before me,” Lady Florel was explaining as I turned the bottle in my hands. “They found this cure years ago. No one even contracts it anymore.”

I could have wept. Instead, still gripping the bottle in my hand, I swept Lady Florel into a bone-crushing embrace.

“Really, Jonathan!” she said as I released her. “That was very nearly inappropriate.”

“May I keep this?” I said. “Are there more?”

“Yes to both. Though I suspect your father could formulate something from just that sample.”

“He could,” I agreed, and collapsed into a nearby chair. “Marvelous! Lady Florel, let's illusion that door and get back to Fata! Ha!”

“Of course, we ought to discuss how you will pay for it.”

I slowly placed my feet on the ground.

“Pay?” I said.

“Naturally. Did you think you could just take it?”

“But—Lady Florel, people are dying,” I stammered. “King Edward would pay you, I'm sure of it—”

“I want payment from
you
, Jonathan. I want you to illusion for me.”

I shifted uncomfortably on the chair and glanced at Lockwood. His narrowed eyes darted from Lady Florel to me.

“Nothing difficult,” she assured me. “Something like what you illusioned in the
Chivalry's
brig hall. There's an illusionarium that begins in only a few minutes, and I want you to illusion for it. It won't last longer than an hour, I swear it.”

I frowned at the brown bottle, turning it from side to side. Payment? That didn't seem like Lady Florel.

“There are people dying, Lady Florel,” I said. “Even waiting an hour could kill them. Surely we could bring this to my father, and then come back? I'll illusion for you then.”

“There's no time,” said Lady Florel. “If we go now, you'll miss the illusionarium. But if you participate and do well, I'll illusion the door and we'll leave straightaway after. I promise.”

I pressed the bottle between my hands. The glass cooled my skin.

“You
swear
it won't last longer than an hour?” I said.

Lockwood made another feral noise. Lady Florel smiled.

“Not even that long,” she assured us. “Last year, this same illusionarium lasted only ten minutes.”

I stood.

“Fine,” I said. “And if I make the illusion last a half minute long, we'll leave after a half minute, right?

Lady Florel beamed.

“Anything you want,” she said.

A regiment of the strange red-uniformed masked guardsmen arrived at the door, rifles in their hands. I drew back slightly; Lady Florel adjusted her gloves and said, “Excuse me,” and egressed with them, leaving me alone with L—

Lockwood attacked. The room spun. In a flash he'd slammed me against one of the glass windows, wiping it with my face, and had taken and twisted my arms behind me like a pretzel, sending pain coursing up and down my shoulders and spine and rendering me incapacitated.

A voice close to my ear snarled, “Do you know what this is, Johnny? It's a Knutsen hold position number one, a military fighting technique that twists the arm far
enough you could scratch the back of your eyeballs with your thumbnail. Position number two—”

Lockwood adjusted his grip slightly, twisting my arm further and sending stars in my vision. Anger seared through my bones. Lady Florel was still talking to the guardsmen at the door, ignoring us both.

“—may very well snap the nerves in your joints and possibly cause paralysis and you
don't
want to know what position number three can do—”

“What is your
problem
?” I managed to gag.

“Hmmm, let's
see
,” he drawled. “Maybe because you're helping a ruddy
murderer
? Possibly?”

“Oh, that's right!” I snapped back. “
You
want Arthurise to die of the Venen, I remember now!”

“I'm going to sort this out the
right
way, and I won't make deals with liars and demons to do it!” he snarled in my ear. “I'll find the way back home myself, Johnny, because if you think she'll
actually
curtsy us into Arthurise, that makes one of us incredibly stupid and the other one incredibly
dead
—”

“My dear lieutenant,” Lady Florel's voice broke in. Lockwood's pressure eased one iota; I managed a glance back. Lady Florel was smiling as her masked guard streamed around her to us, bearing hissing steam rifles, their emotionless, masked faces fixed on Lockwood.