“Gods dammit,” Tesso hissed, and he redoubled his assault on Locke, punching and spitting and biting.
“Keep hitting,” Locke sputtered. “You just keep hitting. I can take it all day. You just keep…hitting me…until…Jean gets back!”
III. REVELATION
“Nature never deceives us;
it is always we who deceive ourselves.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
From Émile ou De l’éducation
CHAPTER NINE. A CURIOUS TALE FOR COUNTESS AMBERGLASS
1
AT HALF PAST the tenth hour of the evening on Duke’s Day, as low dark clouds fell in above Camorr, blotting out the stars and the moons, Doña Sofia Salvara was being hoisted up into the sky to have a late tea with Doña Angiavesta Vorchenza, dowager countess of Amberglass, at the top of the great lady’s Elderglass tower.
The passenger cage rattled and swayed, and Sofia clung to the black iron bars for support. The sweaty Hangman’s Wing fluttered at her hooded coat as she stared south. All of the city lay spread beneath her, black and gray from horizon to horizon, suffused with the glow of fire and alchemy. This was a point of quiet pride for her every time she had the chance to take in this view from one of the Five Towers. The Eldren had built glass wonders for men to claim; engineers had crafted buildings of stone and wood in the Eldren ruins to make the cities their own; Bondsmagi pretended to the powers the Eldren must have once held. But it was alchemy that drove back the darkness every evening; alchemy that lit the commonest home and the tallest tower alike, cleaner and safer than natural fire. It was her art that tamed the night.
At last, her long ascent ended; the cage rattled to a halt beside an embarkation platform four-fifths of the way up Amberglass’ full height. The wind sighed mournfully in the strange fluted arches at the peak of the tower. Two footmen in cream-white waistcoats and immaculate white gloves and breeches helped her out of the cage, as they might have assisted her from a carriage down on the ground. Once she was safely on the platform, the two men bowed from the waist.
“M’lady Salvara,” said the one on the left, “my mistress bids you welcome to Amberglass.”
“Most kind,” said Doña Sofia.
“If it would please you to wait on the terrace, she will join you momentarily.”
The same footman led the way past a half dozen servants in similar livery, who stood panting beside the elaborate arrangement of gears, levers, and chains they worked to haul the cargo cage up and down. They, too, bowed as she passed; she favored them with a smile and an acknowledging wave. It never hurt to be pleasant to the servants in charge of that particular operation.
Doña Vorchenza’s terrace was a wide crescent of transparent Elderglass jutting out from the north face of her tower, surrounded by brass safety rails. Doña Sofia looked straight down, as she had always been warned not to do, and as she always did. It seemed that she and the footman walked on thin air forty stories above the stone courtyards and storage buildings at the base of the tower; alchemical lamps were specks of light, and carriages were black squares smaller than one of her nails.
On her left, visible through a series of tall arched windows whose sills were on a level with her waist, were dimly lit apartments and parlors within the tower itself. Doña Vorchenza had very few living relatives, and no children; she was effectively the last of a once-powerful clan, and there was little doubt (among the grasping, ambitious nobles of the Alcegrante slopes, at least) that Amberglass would pass to some new family upon her death. Most of her tower was dark and quiet, most of its opulence packed away in closets and chests.
The old lady still knew how to host a late-night tea, however. At the far northwestern corner of her transparent terrace, with a commanding view of the lightless countryside to the north of the city, a silk awning fluttered in the Hangman’s Wind. Tall alchemical lanterns in cages of gold-gilded brass hung from the four corners of the awning, shedding warm light on the little table and the two high-backed chairs arranged therein.
The footman placed a thin black cushion upon the right-hand chair and pulled it out for her; with a swish of skirts she settled into it and nodded her thanks. The man bowed and strolled away, taking up a watch at a point that was politely out of earshot but within easy beckoning distance.
Sofia did not have long to wait for her hostess; a few minutes after her arrival, old Doña Vorchenza appeared out of a wooden door on the tower’s north wall.
Age has a way of exaggerating the physical traits of those who live to feel its strains; the round tend to grow rounder, and the slim tend to waste away. Time had narrowed Angiavesta Vorchenza. She was not so much withered as collapsed, a spindly living caricature like a wooden idol animated by the sorcery of sheer willpower. Seventy was a fading memory for her, yet she still moved about without an escort on her arm or a cane in her hands. She dressed eccentrically in a black velvet frock coat with fur collars and cuffs. Eschewing the cascading petticoats the ladies of her era had favored, she actually wore black pantaloons and silver slippers. Her white hair was pulled back and fixed with lacquered pins; her dark eyes were bright behind her half-moon optics.
“ Sofia,” she said as she stepped daintily beneath the awning, “what a pleasure it is to have you up here again. It’s been months, my dear girl, months. No, do sit; pulling out my own chair holds no terrors for me. Ah. Tell me, how is Lorenzo? And surely we must speak of your garden.”
“Lorenzo and I are well, considered solely in ourselves. And the garden thrives, Doña Vorchenza. Thank you for asking.”
“Considered solely in yourselves? Then there is something else? Something, dare I pry, external?”
A night tea, in Camorr, was a womanly tradition when one wished to seek the advice of another, or simply make use of a sympathetic ear while expressing regrets or complaints-most frequently concerning men.
“You may pry, Doña Vorchenza, by all means. And yes, yes, ‘external’ is a very proper term for it.”
“But it’s not Lorenzo?”
“Oh, no. Lorenzo is satisfactory in every possible respect.” Sofia sighed and glanced down at the illusion of empty air beneath her feet and her chair. “It’s…both of us that may be in need of advice.”
“Advice,” chuckled Doña Vorchenza. “The years play a sort of alchemical trick, transmuting one’s mutterings to a state of respectability. Give advice at forty and you’re a nag. Give it at seventy and you’re a sage.”
“Doña Vorchenza,” said Sofia, “you have been of great help to me before. I couldn’t think…well, there was no one else I was comfortable speaking to about this matter, for the time being.”
“Indeed? Well, dear girl, I’m eager to be of whatever help I can. But here’s our tea-come, let us indulge ourselves for a few moments.”
One of Doña Vorchenza’s jacketed attendants wheeled a silver-domed cart toward them and slid it into place beside the little table. When he whisked the dome away, Sofia saw that the cart held a gleaming silver tea service and a subtlety-a perfect culinary replica of Amberglass Tower, barely nine inches high, complete with minuscule specks of alchemical light dotting its turrets. The little glass globes were not much larger than raisins.
“You see how little real work I give to my poor chef,” said Doña Vorchenza, cackling. “He suffers in the service of such a plain and simple palate; he takes his revenge with these surprises. I cannot order a soft-boiled egg, but that he finds a dancing chicken to lay it directly on my plate. Tell me, Gilles, is that edifice truly edible?”