Illusionarium by Heather Dixon Wallwork
I scratched my head, distraught. My fingers tangled in the snarls of my curls. I knew she wouldn’t.
“Jonathan, why can’t you illusion a doorway back?”
I frowned at Anna.
“Of course I can’t,” I said. “A door—even a simple door—I mean, I’d have to know every chemical construct of wood and metal and—no, that’s impossible in such a short amount of time; it’s far too many elements—”
Anna laughed and stood.
“You’re joking, right? Jonathan, have you even seen yourself illusion? That illusion today! You set the entire theater on fire! You made Queen Honoria’s arrow into an—an—an inferno! How? Not even Constantine could illusion it away! And this is—what, your fourth illusion? Do you realize how powerful you are?”
I stammered, pride surfacing in my chest. I’d been so used to being sort of, that being something surprised me.
“Maybe I could,” I said, hope stirring within. “I’d—I’d have to find the right chemical structures, of course. Divinity had an old biology textbook but—well, it’s ruined now—”
“I know where to find books!” Anna crowed. “Old books! Books about how to illusion, even!”
“Really?”
“Sure as the sun rises. I know the city quite well—when I’m not lost. What else?”
“The cure. I’d need that, too, of course. It’s still in the theater.”
“Oh, I’ve broken out of the theater loads of times,” Anna bragged. “Getting back in will be a morning breeze! What else?”
“Fantillium. We’d need that, too, to illusion the door.”
“The miners usually have fantillium,” Anna said. “I’m sure we could find our way onto one of their airships. This is exciting! What else?”
“Lockwood,” I said, surprising myself. It felt so astoundingly right the moment I said it that I repeated it fervently. “We’re going to need Lockwood.”
CHAPTER 13
Back at home, Hannah had outdistanced me in light signal terminology. She had a better sense of rhythm, I supposed. She disliked it, however, which didn’t seem quite fair. If you hated something, you shouldn’t be good at it. Especially if you had a brother who was required to take all of Light Semaphore Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced because he was a boy.
Anna had scrounged through the moldy pile of blankets and produced an orthogonagen lamp with a mostly used cell, which would give us about thirty minutes. I sparked a light in it and filled the tower with brightness and shadow and set it at the window, hurriedly explaining the system of light signal semaphore and sending messages through the sky, what the flashes of shorts and longs meant, and how different colors were different channels. She nodded as though she understood—and if she was anything like Hannah, she probably did.
“If Lockwood is out there, he’ll see this,” I said, turning the dimming knob on the side up and down with a clickety-click-click rapidity, sending flashes of light in a sequence of bursts. It was daytime and the lamp was faint, so I assured Anna with: “Airguardsmen scout like mad for this kind of thing. And Lockwood’s the maddest of them all. He’ll see it.”
“So will everyone else,” said Anna forebodingly.
I glanced up at the airships, streams of bronze and black over us, and continued to signal with the lamp in coded flickers.
When my hand grew tired, Anna took over. She didn’t know what the string of clicks meant (“ATTN: LOCKWOOD—TOWER OF LONDON ASAYAW,”19 over and over) but she had memorized the rhythm, and the light flashed in perfect sequence. I took over again when she started to slow.
A quiet clink sounded behind us. Anna and I turned around sharply.
A masked guard, dressed in layers of crimson, stood at the open door. The deadbolt hung limp from its screws.
Anna lunged and was tearing at his uniform in an instant, yelling and throwing herself against him. I hurried after and grabbed her wrist, ready to flee with her out the door. Anna writhed from my grip and made a great effort to slam the masked guard against the wall, which was about as effective as attacking a brick.
The masked guard did nothing to stop her; he just stood there under her delicate assault, somehow managing to look amused through the mask.
“Hello,” it said. A familiar voice. Only one piercingly blue eye shone from the eyehole of the mask.
“Lockwood!” I said.
Lockwood took Anna’s hand as she lunged and spun her away as though in a dance. She stumbled, then rebounded and was at Lockwood’s jugular once more—to no effect.
“This is a lot like fighting a butterfly,” said Lockwood, spinning her away again.
“Anna, stop—”
“I’ll fight! I’ll fight!” Anna snarled, raining blows over Lockwood. “I’ll fight until I die!”
“Hold off,” said Lockwood, looking concerned. He quickly removed his mask, revealing his roguish face, mussed blond hair, and eye patch. Anna froze mid-blow. “No need for that,” he said. “See? I’m nothing worth dying over.”
“To be sure,” I agreed.
Pink flooded Anna’s cheeks, and she withdrew to my side, mortified.
“Oh,” she said.
“Sorry,” said Lockwood, and he actually did sound apologetic. “Didn’t mean to frighten you. Couldn’t guess what I’d find here. Certainly not Johnny with a girl.”
“Thanks for coming, Lockwood,” I said, and meant it. Meant it. I was glad to see him. Never would have thought.
“You’re still alive,” he said as he removed his numerous crimson coats and threw them aside, revealing the blue uniform underneath. He straightened himself crisply, re-pinning the crooked sword clasp at his neck. Like me, he was a scratched-up mess. Unlike me, it served to make him look rakish. I only looked pathetic. I tried to straighten my collar. My clothes had dried stiff with mud, and I reeked of moat.
Lockwood glanced at Anna again, and then Glanced at her. An odd expression crossed his face—the same expression a fellow gets when he watches airships crashing into each other and can’t tear his eyes away from the brilliant, beautiful explosion.
Immediately, he smothered the expression into Slightly Bored.
“So,” he said smoothly, producing a freshly printed newspaper page from his uniform pocket and unfolding it. “You’re the girl from this article, then?”
Anna and I gathered around it. Above a large picture, the headline read:
QUEEN HONORIA COMMANDS:
“FIND HIM”
The picture below was of the theater lobby. A blurred, panicked mass of people running for the doors. Masked guardsmen among them. Queen Honoria and Divinity flailing wildly, and Constantine running up to the mezzanine. In the very center of the staircases, I held Anna in my arms with the same dazed expression I’d worn in the picture before—but also, with a sort of . . . solidness.
There was no fire captured in the photograph. The masked Nod’olians all looked mad, running from nothing. Of course the camera wouldn’t capture an illusion.
“Yes, that’s me,” said Anna, after a pause.
“Ha. So, Little Johnny does have a spine after all. Never would have guessed.”
“Thanks, Lockwood,” I said. “Good to see you’re still a classification A twerp.”
“I’ve actually been looking for you.” Lockwood strode to the window and peered out into the sky of glass and airships, where the sun shone through the Archglass like a severed gem. He looked worn out. “The whole city’s hunting you down. Can’t let them kill you; you’re my only way back.”
“That’s why we need you,” said Anna.
Lockwood looked rather pleased by this.
“Well—let’s have a merry chat about it on the way out,” he said. He nodded upward. Several airships had broken away from the sea of balloons above and were steadily flying in our direction. Including one with crimson pennants, that looked similar to the Westminster. “I’m not the only one who saw your sig. Paper says they won’t start Masked Virtue without you, and they’re hu
We left the tower as the airships slowly converged, slipped out of the broken front gate as they docked, and descended into the dark grime of the city. Anna led the way, cautiously, and Lockwood and I followed after, navigating with care through abandoned, fallen buildings, broken statues, and pieces of giant, fallen skybridges. From the ruins, it looked like this city had been even grander than Arthurise. Now, it stank of decay.
Lockwood held a dagger that he had produced from the endless supply in his boot, watching warily for Riven and listening to Anna’s hurried whispers with a tightened jaw. He gave a short nod after each point Anna laid out to him, and she tied it all up in a bow with, “. . . and I know where to find the sort of book he needs. There’s a giant library not far from here. It’s really old. It has to be there.”
“And Jonathan’s just letting you do this out of the kindness of your heart, is he?” said Lockwood.
“’Course I’m not,” I said, bristling. “I’m going to get her out of the city.”
Anna halted, the grit scuffing at her feet, and slowly turned to look at me with wide eyes. I ignored her, locked in a Death Glare with Lockwood. His eyes could have pierced a boiler plate. I didn’t back down—the words had come out unexpectedly, but felt exactly right.
“Will this be before or after you save Arthurise?” said Lockwood.
“Either. I’m not choosy.”
Lockwood blinked first.
“You surprise me more and more, Johnny,” he finally assented. “I might as well help with that, too, as you’ll probably bungle it all up.”
“Thanks, Lockwood.”
He spun the dagger in his hands, and we continued on through a giant unused aqueduct. It was strange to walk through such large structures and be so alone. Beetles scurried beneath our feet. Lockwood went on ahead to scout for Riven, claiming he’d become very good at it in a day’s time.20
“You don’t have to do that,” Anna whispered to me, when he was out of earshot. “I know you don’t have much time. Anyway, you saved my life! This is repayment. I want to help!”
I smiled at her and said nothing. Frustrated, she kicked a piece of broken pavement at me. It was just like being with Hannah back on Fata.
Somehow, amid the shadows of airships high above and Riven hiding behind every corner, we arrived an hour later to a more organized piece of the city. An open courtyard with a dried and weedy fountain stood among rows and rows of genteel abandonment. A townhouse loomed at the end in decaying grandeur. Water had stained the brick white, and mold grew black in the windows.
“Here it is,” Anna whispered.
She led us up through the rusting gate, and quietly, without knocking or ringing, she opened the creaking door and slipped into the dark entrance. It smelled of rotting wood and polish.
“Lord Glamwell is a Riven,” Anna whispered as we followed after.
Lockwood and I jolted.
“Sorry, should have told you that,” she added.
My eyes adjusted, and across the walls and up the vaulted ceiling, mounted animal heads hung. Things I’d only seen in books: tigers, deer with fangs, a massive beast with tusks and trunk and ears the size of heat lamp wheels. An elephant! They had been stuffed, frozen with glassy-eyed ferocity.
“Hello?” a man’s voice called out when I clicked the door shut behind us. It came from a closed, musty parlor just off of the hall. “Who’s there? Someone’s here! I know it! Come out!”
And then:
BLAM.
A hole blasted through the wall by my shoulder. It steamed, the wood splintering out. I grabbed Anna’s hand and with Lockwood, we fled down the hall.
“Oh. He’s a hunter,” Anna panted. “Sorry, I should have said that, too.”
“Great, thanks!” I said as another shot rang—BLAM!—and a puff of smoke shot through the wall, right where I’d been the moment before.
“I’ll track you down!” the man’s voice hoarsely yelled.
I caught a glimpse of a limping beast of a man, perhaps as young as an airguardsman, stumbling out of the parlor door, wearing a torn dressing gown and mussed necktie, his face a pasty white and his nose-and-a-half flaring. I counted three eyes, two of them swollen shut from sagging forehead skin, before I pitched around the corner. We followed Anna up a flight of stairs and across a mezzanine—the wood had rotted out in the center—and careened through double doors into a library.
Anna had been right. The observatory library was nothing to this. Books covered every surface—from ceiling to floor, levels upon levels of mezzanines and leather-bound books, ringed with tall ladders. Books strewn across the floor, as though a hurricane had hit the library. It all smelled of rancid pages. The ceiling stretched high above us to a distant skylight.
“This is going to take hours!” I said, hurrying to the nearest wall of books. Philosophy, they read.
“Don’t have hours,” said Lockwood. “How fast can you two find it?”
BLAM.
“Twenty minutes?” I said.
BLAM! Closer now.
“Make it ten!” said Lockwood, bounding for the door.
“You’re going to get your head blown off!” said Anna, pale and running after him.
“And I will savor every second of it!” he said with cavalier energy, taking her hand. He parried with an underarm turn and sent her twirling back into the room. He dove out the door and slammed it as another BLAM! sounded.
“Ha! Missed me!” Lockwood’s voice rang. “You’re a pathetic shot! Those animal heads can’t be real!”
“Reckless idiot!” Anna said, pale as snow.
Lord Glamwell yelled something back. I threw a book of geography down and ran along the wall, the spines’ titles blurring past in my broken-glasses vision. Biographies. Some names I knew. Some I didn’t.
BLAM BLAM! More shots sounded. Lockwood’s laughter rang in the distance.
Anna hurried up a ladder with wheels and shuffled through books. I ran across to the other side of the library, treading on books and torn pages. The books here: Fiction. Who read that stuff? I punched the spines in disgust.
“Botany,” Anna called. “Sciences! I bet chemical books won’t be far from here!”
Unless illusioning books are as rare as Divinity said, I thought. Then he’d keep them somewhere else, like a glass case or his desk—
—which would be the place an illusioning book would be kept, in which case, he’d hide it exactly where no one would look—
I hated my brain sometimes.
“He’s going to get killed,” Anna said through gritted teeth.
“Not Lockwood; he’s like the undead,” I said. “You couldn’t just shoot him; you’d have to sever his head and bury it before he actually died.” I bounded across the room, slipping on books and almost crashing into Anna. Books in this part of the library had fallen from the shelves to the floor, lying in tall neglected piles. I picked one up and found a how-to-build-a-cozy-hothouse diagram on its pages.
“Great,” I said, throwing it down.
The library doors banged open.
“Lockw—” Anna said.
BLAM.
Wood splinters showered over us. The bullet had gone through the walnut shelves. Great job, Lockwood, I thought, and grabbed Anna’s hand, my heartbeat roaring in my ears. Lord Glamwell’s face appeared at the end of the aisle.
“Thieves!” he yelled. “I’m tired of you—breaking in and—stealing my furniture and—my food—” BLAM!
The rows of books flashed by, and Anna and I hit a wall displaying marble busts. We turned around and ran along them, their faces staring pupil-lessly ahead. Another BLAM! and the head of Bach behind us exploded into powder.
I threw myself to the ground, dragging Anna with me and smashing my face into a book—
—which read, “. . . must know the very basics of the elements, to start with, the chemical makeup and bonding, iron, for example—”
I slowly picked it
The Illusionist’s Handbook, it read at the top of the page.
“Anna,” I said, flipping through the pages. Diagram after diagram of elements, chemicals, and equations fluttered in my vision. I laughed. “Anna, I found it!”
Anna answered me with a grip on my arm so tight it cut off the blood flow. I looked up quickly.
And met the barrel of a hunting rifle, pointed straight at my forehead.
Lord Glamwell was attached to the other end, every one of his eyes narrowed at us, breathing raggedly. The pistons of his weapon hissed and reeked of bad oil. I stared transfixed at his bared teeth, rows and rows of them. . . .
“Drop the book,” he growled.
I gripped the volume so tightly I couldn’t feel my fingers.
“Drop the book,” he said again.
“Drop the gun,” growled a different voice behind Lord Glamwell.
Lord Glamwell straightened slightly and slowly opened his many-fingered hands, and the rifle clattered to the wood floor.
Behind him, Lockwood stood with an ornate hunting rifle pressed to Lord Glamwell’s back. Two more rifles were slung over Lockwood’s shoulder, and he had a hunting knife tucked into his belt.
“Hello, Johnny, Anna,” said Lockwood conversationally. “You can stand up now. Find what you needed?”
I nodded and stood slowly, keeping a wary eye on the penitent Glamwell. I held the book up for Lockwood to see.
“Well done, Johnny!”
“Please,” Lord Glamwell wheezed, half-bent, his hands up in surrender, as we skirted around him. He looked pathetic. “Don’t kill me. I—I’m not myself lately—”
Lockwood slung the rifle over his shoulders. It clattered against the others.
“I don’t shoot people begging for their lives,” he spat. “Even if they tried to blow a hole in my head.”
Lord Glamwell closed his good eye and exhaled, and across his distorted face were distorted emotions—years, maybe, of regret and sadness and one fleeting iota of hope.
“Lord Glamwell?” I said, stepping forward and clearing my throat. “Could we borrow this book?” I held The Illusionist’s Handbook up. “And—by borrow, I mean, probably, we won’t be able to return it. Is that all right?”