Ink, Iron, and Glass (Ink, Iron, and Glass #1)(3)
Her thoughts seemed to be slowing down, like her brain was turning sticky as honey, her skull heavy. Her head dropped and her eyelids closed.
*
On Earth, in the city of Pisa, Leo Trovatelli was dreaming.
In the dream he was on a walkway beside a canal with his brother, Aris. Mist clung to everything, the way it always had in the early mornings of Venetian winter. Aris flashed him a knowing grin, then spun around and sprinted off down the walkway. Leo tried desperately to catch up, but he was a child again, and his short legs weren’t fast enough. Aris pulled farther and farther away, fading into the mist. The cobblestones beneath Leo’s feet shook, throwing him off balance, and he fell over the edge into the black waters of the canal.
Leo jerked awake, but the shaking didn’t stop. He was slouched awkwardly in the armchair in his bedroom; he’d meant to rest his eyes for only a minute and now the whole room was vibrating. An earthquake? He’d felt his share of earthquakes, and this was somehow softer and faster, more frenetic, as if it were tuned to a different wavelength.
Knickknacks jounced around on his shelves, clattering against the wood. Something fell to the floor and shattered. Through the half-open balcony doors, he heard someone shout in the cloister garden below.
After a moment the shaking stopped, but it left behind a sick, hollow feeling in his gut. Somewhere in the world, something had gone wrong.
He shook his head and pushed himself out of the chair. Aunt Rosalinda had always discouraged his superstitious feelings, and if she were here, she’d tell him it was nothing. Better to focus on the practicalities, like cleaning up whatever the earthquake had broken.
He knelt beside the shattered ceramic. There were so many pieces he didn’t recognize it at first, but then he found part of the eye socket and realized: it was the carnevale mask, one of the few possessions he’d brought with him from Venezia. From his childhood with Aris.
This wasn’t a sign, he told himself. This wasn’t a sign of anything.
2
READING SHELLEY’S FRANKENSTEIN, I HAVE TO WONDER: AM I NOT THE VILLAIN OF MONTAIGNE’S STORY? AM I NOT HIS MONSTER? OR AM I REAL ENOUGH FOR THIS TO BE MY STORY, AND HE THE VILLAIN?
—personal notes of Jumi da Veldana, 1886
Elsa swam her way back to consciousness through a honey-thick sea of heavy dreams. When she finally forced her eyelids to peel themselves open, she was greeted by a splitting headache and a unique perspective on the underside of Jumi’s writing table.
“Ugh,” she said, lifting a shaky hand to press against her temple. “Mother, what happened?”
No one answered.
“Mother?” Elsa pushed herself up to a sitting position. The writing chair was knocked over, and her mother’s favorite fountain pen had rolled across the slate flooring, leaking a thin trail of blue-black ink.
Fear tightened her chest, but she had to keep a level head and figure out what was going on. Think, think! Elsa groped on the floor for the object she’d slipped on and came up with a small metal cylinder of some kind. She lifted it and sniffed carefully, confirming it as the origin of the sweet smoke. Some kind of gaseous chemical designed to induce sleep?
This was no accident. Someone had abducted her mother.
A thread of panic laced through Elsa, quickening her breath. She struggled to her feet, grabbing the edge of the writing desk to pull herself up. Gone, too, was the worldbook her mother had been scribing in. What did that mean? Was it valuable? Who could have taken her mother, and why?
Elsa bent over, hands on knees, breathing too fast. She was unaccustomed to the sensation of helplessness. She needed to figure out what to do; there had to be something she could do. Gather information, focus on the details, employ rational evaluation—this was the methodology Jumi had taught her, and so she forced herself to look up and observe.
Sunlight still filtered through the windows. How long had she been unconscious? Elsa scrambled for the door, her legs feeling wobbly and loose-jointed, and she peered outside to judge the time by the angle of the shadows. An hour, perhaps.
She might still be able to catch up with them. A portal from Veldana could only transport someone to the location on Earth where the Veldana worldbook was kept: the home of Charles Montaigne, the scriptologist who’d created her world. They could open a portal in the Edgemist anywhere along the boundaries of Veldana, but they could only arrive in Paris, France, inside Montaigne’s study.
They’d taken Jumi’s portal device, which had been sitting out on the writing table. Elsa clattered up the ladder to the loft, opened her mother’s clothing chest, scooped out all the clothes, and lifted the false bottom. Jumi was nothing if not dedicated to precautionary measures.
Elsa reached into the chest to take out the spare portal device and slipped it into a pouch on her belt. Next she lifted the revolver, shook six bullets out of the ammunition box, and loaded the revolver. She threaded the holster onto her belt and settled the revolver snugly into it. They were all Earth objects; Veldana had no infrastructure for manufacturing. The revolver had been a gift from Alek de Vries, a scriptologist who had mentored Jumi. Elsa knew how to operate the gun but had never pointed it at anything alive; the thought that she might have to, now, gave her a queasy feeling.
Last, Elsa lifted out a small book, its leather cover no larger than her hand. It contained her most ambitious scriptology project, and the only one in recent years for which she’d needed Jumi’s advice—her doorbook. Deciding it might be useful, Elsa took the book, along with a pen and a little bottle of scriptology ink. Through the glass the midnight-blue ink gave off an iridescent sheen, as if swirled with quicksilver. There, that was everything.