When the chatter died down, the princess turned to me and gestured to Bashaya. “She wants her ring, now.”
I removed the emerald from its hiding place beneath a stack of fabric bolts in the corner of the wagon. We had placed it there after returning the jewelry box to the trunk where we had found it, hoping no one would come looking for it and discover its wrecked lock anytime soon. The moment Bashaya saw the ring, her eyes lit. A bright smile unfurled across her face. She snatched the ring, jammed it on her finger, and proceeded to admire its sparkle in the lamplight.
“I’ve held up my end of the bargain.” I glanced at Genevieve, a silent request for her to translate. “Now you hold up yours. Tell us about the animals.”
Without looking up from her ring, Bashaya spoke. I watched the faces of my companions as they listened and understood. Yet again the frustrations of my ignorance burned through me, hot and sour like acid. As the snake charmer talked, Gideon’s face went from mildly interested to curious, to awestruck. His eyes were wide and his mouth had fallen open. Genevieve wore a similar expression.
After waiting patiently through what had turned into a rather long story, I nudged the princess with my elbow. “I can’t stand the suspense. Fill me in.”
She raised her index finger, a silent request for me to wait a moment longer.
The snake charmer glanced up from her ring and fell silent. She studied the faces around the room before settling her gaze on me. She nodded, and Genevieve explained all, staring with a huge exhalation of breath, as though she’d been holding it for the entire length of Bashaya’s story.
The princess shook her head and gave me a wry smile. “You’re never going to believe this.”
Chapter 19
A Brief History of Svieta the Tinkerer
As a young woman, Svieta dreamed of attending the Collegium of Engineering in Toksva, the capital city of Varynga. Students from that university were known as the Continent’s finest mechanical engineers. Rulers and military generals from around the world competed to attract the best and brightest graduates who were employed to design the greatest new machines, both for industry and especially for war.
The Collegium’s engineers designed mechanisms that reshaped the world, both in politics and in landscape. They erected contraptions that moved great mounds of earth, building canyons or mountains to suit their masters’ needs. They shortened the distance between two points in time by inventing ever faster modes of transportation. They created technologies that could raise cities, or raze them, depending on the requirements of the highest bidder.
Svieta had every intention of becoming one of these shining prodigies of the machine age. Instead of commanding elements like lightning, fire, ore, or water, she would command the principles of physics: pulleys, gears, and levers. Oil. Steam. Clockwork. For a while, her studies and work placated her, and she rose among the ranks of her peers, designing faster, deadlier, and more efficient machines. Military agents from every nation courted her like a penniless noble courts an heiress of a marriageable age.
Svieta, however, was not satisfied with faster trains, weaponized dirigibles, or rapid-firing guns. She knew wars were won by the nation that wreaked the greatest destruction and took the most lives. She also knew that the side suffering the least casualties stood the greatest chance of winning. Even more than winning wars, Svieta dreamed, like her classmates, of being a god.
Unlike her peers, however, she understood the true nature of divinity: Humans created death, but only gods created life.
So, to the dismay of her classmates and professors, Svieta turned away from machines of chaos, mayhem, and destruction, and devoted herself to creating something new, something original and unique. Something compelled to exist and live and survive. The Collegium’s professors insisted all things that existed in the world eventually died or decayed or both, but Svieta had put her mind to proving them wrong.
She worked in secret, avoiding the biting and bitter comments of her fellows and the disapproval in her professors’ eyes. The Collegium tolerated her secrecy because of her proven genius and because those with smaller minds and darker, envious hearts believed anything Svieta created could be twisted to serve their own purposes.
At first the Collegium held fast to that belief, despite the rumors. Gossip circulating around the school hinted that Svieta’s research had crossed the boundary of the physical into the realm of the metaphysical. And while schools of alchemy certainly existed where students studied ways to successfully combine the laws of science with the laws of Magic, the Collegium held strict views against such meddling.
The ancient, elemental gods were dead or dying, and Magic was the residue that lingered in the wake of their demise. Machines were the world’s new deities, and the foulness of Magic was never to taint their existence. For as surely as the elemental gods had declined, so too would their Magicians, and mankind was fully destined to worship at the altar of the machine.
Svieta believed humankind’s folly was its willingness to worship itself. That idiocy would be civilization’s undoing, and what would be left in its wake except rust and dust? The only thing that lasted forever was death. Or, more correctly, that which came after death—the afterlife.
Limitless potential existed in that place the worshipers of ancient gods had called the Shadowlands. Many of Svieta’s peers scorned the belief of such a place and called it superstition—a trap for false hope. Svieta had seen the gods, though, or what remained of them. Her grandfather had been a Magician in Toksva, in the court of the Tsar of Darkness, god of everything that flourished in the absence of sunlight. As a child, Svieta had played at her grandfather’s feet, in his laboratory at the palace. She believed in Magic, and she believed in the Shadowlands.
It was upon that belief that Svieta attempted to build her greatest device yet.
She started small. A bird. A chickadee.
Years before, her grandfather had told her the gods, or the source from which the gods had sprung, valued all life because everything had been made with a soul. All creatures from behemoth to runt were granted an eternal existence—although the exact nature of that existence had never been determined. No one had ever crossed the veil between living and dead and returned to talk about it. If the gods had any knowledge on the subject, they had kept their wisdom to themselves. The Magicians, those who stood as the gods’ right hands, had speculated. They had studied and postulated and formulated spells. When those spells failed to provide the desired results, the Magicians threw them out and devised new ones.
Over hundreds of years of study, the Magicians had never successfully crossed through the veil, but they had occasionally thinned it, made it temporarily transparent. Svieta’s grandfather had even managed to pierce that incorporeal boundary. The breach lasted for the length of a heartbeat, but in that instant, he’d managed to grasp a soul, nothing more than a nebulous flicker.
But it had been real.
The Tsar of Darkness had died shortly thereafter, and a Magician who loses his god soon loses his purpose. Madness claimed Svieta’s grandfather, taking his mind and his wits. He died having never perfected the spell, but had left notes to his granddaughter, a promising young Magician in her own right. Lacking an ancient god to whom she could dedicate her services, Svieta had pledged herself to a new deity: the machine. But she’d never forgotten what her grandfather taught her.
That chickadee was Svieta’s first success. She built a body of copper and brass with miniscule springs and gears to operate its wings and give it flight. With her grandfather’s spell, she gave the body a spirit, trapping the ephemeral soul in a prison of mundane metal. The chickadee took to the air like it had burst from an egg, shrugged off its mother’s protective wing, and leapt from its nest. The chickadee flew out the window in Svieta’s laboratory, and it never returned.
She tried again, something less prone to flights of fancy.
Svieta took a week to build the body: a cumbersome shell and four plodding legs. A rounded head and a pointy tail. The tortoise, once it received its spirit from the Shadowlands, trudged around the laboratory in quiet moments, but retreated into its shell when startled. The creature, body of a machine and soul of a beast, proved the possibility of Svieta’s theories, and she fashioned ever bigger and grander creatures, often working in the secrecy of a small workshop at the outskirts of Toksva. The few with whom Svieta entrusted the knowledge of her creations celebrated her achievements and implored her to share her discovery.
At least, until she began experimenting with the souls of women and men.
The outcry was thunderous. The Council of Magic’s response was vicious and swift.
Svieta found herself ousted from the Collegium, penniless, without resources, and threatened by some with death. Under the cover of darkness, she and her beastly compendium snuck away from the city.
Eventually, they found their way to Le Cirque de Merveilles Mécanique.
Chapter 20
“Over time the menagerie grew,” Genevieve explained, still translating for Bashaya. “It took nearly thirty years for it to reach its current state.”
“And she’s been with the circus that whole time?” I asked.
“She’s the most loyal of us all,” Bashaya said through Genevieve. “She was with Falak’s mother and father in her early days, but when they left and went home to enjoy a slower pace in their old age, she stayed with the circus. It’s the only place that lets her be who she really is.”
“Has she continued her experimentations?”
Bashaya nodded again. “Unbelievable things, but we dare not mention them. The circus is a place for people who do not easily fit within the bounds of society. We protect each other and allow each other the freedoms the world would forbid us from seeking.”
I thought about Svieta experimenting with the souls of human women and men and shivered—a mixture of wonder and horror. Forbidden indeed. “So, there’s the spirit of a real lion in Sher-sah? Is that what makes him so lifelike?”
“A lion soul muddled with a bit of Magic. He is not merely a lion. He is something more than. They’re all a little something more than just animals.”
It explained so much, and the near impossibility of Svieta’s schemes and designs nearly baffled me. But I could command thunder and lightning with my will, and I’d seen what Jackie and Ruelle Thibodaux could do with Magic. Why should the existence of creatures such as Sher-sah, Ajej, and Ynnua come as any surprise? The morality of Svieta’s actions was a subject I hadn’t the time or luxury to thoroughly debate. Although they were trained and used as circus acts, the animals were treated well. Svieta seemed to be a gentle and loving master, and that would have to be enough, for now. Having accepted the truth what Bashaya had told me, I sighed and released the last of my unease and concern.
“Thank you for telling us.” I rose, shuffled past Gideon, and reached for the door. “Svieta’s secret will go to the grave with us, I swear it.”
Bashaya squeezed past me and descended the steps to the ground.
“One more question,” I said. Gideon, standing at my side, caught my glance and translated for me.
The snake charmer huffed but waved in a gesture that seemed to say, go ahead.
“Why is the ring so important to you?”
Bashaya’s smile wiped a dozen years or more from her face. She nodded toward Gideon in a knowing way, and his face flushed as he translated. “She said...” He cleared his throat. “She said one day perhaps someone will give you such a ring.” The snake charmer’s smile fled, and she said something else. “Sometimes love comes at a steep price, and you’ll be willing to pay it, no matter the cost.” She said something else and retreated toward her wagon.
“What was that last part?” I asked.
