Chapter Twenty: Secrets of a Canvas

 

“There is no doubt that it was the Origin Mage who was at the site today. Even the conspiracists cannot deny it, as her active magic was registered all over the site and every detector in the four magic layers of the world indicated her exact position. Furthermore, surveillance feeds show her giving the wards of the Crelussa Sanitarium to—”

 

I took a deep breath as the small boat pushed away from the broken dock. We had to be dark on comms for this initial portion of the journey, but Constantine had set up a small passive feed to receive news as we navigated the extremely swift underground river that traveled a natural path from Crelussa to a small ski town where we’d find our next transport.

 

“Also, it was definitively proven today that Alexander Dare is a Bridge. In a stunning and terrifying display, he and the Origin Mage connected the site to thousands of minds in the layer.”

 

I looked down at my fingertips. “I’m sorry.”

Sorry that I hadn’t been able to do it on my own; that he’d been forced to reveal himself.

“I’m not.” Axer was holding steady to the spell that commanded all the oars while surveying the river banks. Defensive spells were ready on his fingertips, hidden beneath an identity signature stolen from one of the techs on our way out. He was multitasking our real escape as paper butterflies carrying wisps of our magical signatures flew south.

“But you—”

“You don't like to risk others,” he said softly, looking at me. “It is a testament to your caring nature. But this is a fight that was already in play before you were born, a fight you didn't design, a fight where all of us were already at risk.”

I fought tears and looked at Constantine, who was mending a string and pretending that the cat sitting on the floor of the boat wasn’t watching the actions with mesmerized eyes. He’d gone from wide-eyed shock in Crelussa to blankness by the time we’d hit the tunnels.

“You had that whole speech about the orphans. And you were the first to drop your cuff. You were going to sacri—”

“You are obviously a bad influence,” Constantine said darkly, but at the same time he stroked the bond that was all the brighter between us. “And you”—his gaze lifted to Axer—“I don’t know whether to murder you or run from you. What in the scarping whole of the Second Layer were you thinking?”

“That finally, finally I’m free.”

“Free? You have never been more chained. You exposed us both. After years of hiding.”

Axer shrugged, gaze on the shoreline, as if a life changing event wasn’t being discussed. As if he could hide the tightness of his shoulders. “They will blame me. They will say that the powers of a Bridge are even worse than anticipated, or they will say that they are worse combined with gifts from the other side of my parentage. They will say that I caused so much duress that people simply gave me their knowledge.”

“Why?” Constantine demanded, shaking with rage and something more complicated.

Axer looked at him finally, gaze zoning in. “Because I don’t want to hide anymore. Today just made the choice easy.”

I remembered the look on his face back in fall quarter, back when he was facing down the Bone Beast. He had been ready to expose his powers to save campus, but his expression had been resigned. There was none of that resignation now.

Constantine seemed to sense the same thing, tense in a way I hadn’t seen him before. “Why?”

“Because hiding has felt like acid eating away at my soul since Salietrex. Because I am caught by regrets that even time hasn’t softened. Because even though I’ve long wished to feel any other way, I will always try and save you,” he said quietly. “That was the one thing I never regretted about Salietrex. Even when I wished that I had been the one left behind instead, and in the bitterest years afterward.”

Constantine looked away. “With you in his possession, Verisetti could have wrecked the whole of Asiatica. Farther even. And you'd already be Stavros' pet, because Verisetti is careless with his toys.” Constantine tried to shield his emotions, but not before I could see the ones he couldn't visually hide. “And you've saved a million others since then. Mages who would have died without you being free.”

“But I didn't save the first,” Axer said, gaze connected. “Nameless faces, but not the one I knew, not the one I cared for.”

Constantine's jaw worked. He closed his eyes, then something—some weight he'd been carrying—dropped, along with his shoulders. “Mother understood. She knew what would happen, should either of us be taken. She wasn’t a powerful mage, just a...good one. She understood the stakes. And she wanted you safe. Us safe. She always wanted that. She always chose loved ones over herself. She was never going to leave either of us behind.” Constantine’s fingers worked over the string almost blindly.

“Why did you?” Axer asked quietly.

Constantine’s fingers curled, then he looked at Axer. “I knew something fundamentally had broken in me with the use of the hooks and the sustained mental torture. Something that disconnected me from humanity. You kept trying to share it. You kept trying to share my pain. It was for your benefit as much as my own to break every tie I could.”

“But after—”

“After Sera healed me, with you fretting behind her and providing most of the magic—I hated you. You, always the knight triumphant, except this one time. You, trying desperately to reconnect the bonds. You, my only tether left. Seeing myself in a broken mirror of what I used to be as I looked at you. It was utterly, blindingly obvious—you had to go. And it was easy to blame you. You accepted the blame without a thought otherwise.”

The memory played in their minds—Constantine spitting out the words you killed my mother, get out—so vividly that I could see it. “You still accept the blame,” he said. “When it was quite obvious who was to blame.”

“Verisetti.”

“Right.”

“Con—”

He closed his eyes. “Revenge is easy. It was always easy. Not having connections is easy. Not having to deal with losing anyone else. Not needing anyone else again. Especially not anyone as close as you.”

“I would have shared all of it.”

“I know, and I hated you all the more for it. Broken toys don’t understand they are broken.” He looked down at himself, streaming with connections, and gave a sharp laugh. “And now look at me. It’s like a tingreal infestation, once she gets her hooks in you.”

Gratitude and love, fierce and sharp, pierced me from Axer. I blinked, slightly dazed, uncertain if I should be apologizing to one or hugging them both.

“And here you are again, and I can feel the bonds reconnecting, I let them reconnect, and it’s just my fate to be in the same position yet again,” Constantine said bitterly. “For I know how this will end. Losing the people closest to me. For all that I protected myself from it.”

Axer did something cautiously with his magic that made Constantine close his eyes then slump forward abruptly, chin dropping to his chest.

“I hate you,” Constantine said, but I could see the way he was pulling Axer’s magic into him, like a man who’d been starving for years.

“I know,” Axer said softly.

“I refuse to stop.”

“That’s fine.”

“We are cursed.” Constantine’s voice was resigned. “We are all going to die.”

“Or we are saved,” Axer said softly. “And we will all live happily ever after. That was always your ending. Better than my bloodthirsty vengeance.”

“I was a stupid child.”

Axer reached over and touched his forehead, slowly swiping his thumb across it in a mimic of what I’d unconsciously done on the Bloody Tuesday battlefield so many months ago. Ultramarine paint bloomed beneath his skin, and the scars beneath faded further. “We can be smarter adults.”

“Is that what we are?” there was the tiniest bit of humor underneath the resignation.

“It’s possibly too soon to tell,” Axer said, with the duplicitous earnest playfulness I never saw outside of when we were alone or with his inner circle.

It was funny. By exposing the scars between them, they had ripped away at the scar tissue. And while everything between them was red, raw, and inflamed, it also sought some sort of resolution.

The broken magic swirled around them in a different way than before. Before, they had been completely cut off from one another. Now they were two halves of a broken whole—the ripped edges on one side a match for the other's wounds.

“Stavros will be there,” Constantine said. “In some form. He’ll know when we get to the ferals.”

“Yes,” Axer murmured. Wards burst from him, connected through and with Constantine, layering around us. He looked at me. “What did you get from the Kinsky, Ren?”

I touched my cloak and pulled the burlap wrapped parcel free. Examining it, I carefully stuck my fingers inside.

“Darling,” came the resigned sigh.

Even Axer was looking at the burlap with a carefully controlled expression that couldn't hide both censure and excitement.

“Wait until she sticks her hand into rotting floorboards,” Constantine said idly to him. “You can’t hide that spike of adrenaline and anticipation. Death wishes, both of you.”

“There are two alarm wards in the twelve you have going between you,” I murmured, fingers running against the material inside. “I can feel each of them.” So easily, the way they were pulling from each other and layering their powers together. “What could go wrong?”

“Are you kidding me?” Constantine demanded.

I smiled, and stroked the connections which were inching closer together. “Yes.”

Though the outside of the case was scratchy, the inside consisted of a soft, protective coating. Stevens, Constantine, and I had created something similar in the lab, but there was a marker here that was different. Kinsky's magic instead of mine. It hummed harmoniously beneath my fingertips.

I pulled the object free to reveal a portrait. It was not an unexpected find, but I frowned at it, fingers moving carefully under the frame. “She’s looking elsewhere in this one.”

“The same woman, though,” Constantine murmured. “Always the same woman. No one’s ever known her name.”

I looked at him.

“Kinsky’s Muse. Artistic use of the word, only, as far as the world knows—nothing else was ever substantiated.”

“No one knows what happened to her or who she was,” Axer said. “I searched.”

It wasn’t a surprise that he had searched for anything Kinsky related. He had given me a set of Kinsky’s papers after all, and a deep well of knowledge surrounding Origin Magic from an outsider’s view. And he had been collecting and defending against it specifically since we’d started working together.

He’d just pulled my paint forward in Constantine.

Origin Elite—I wondered if he would pass that test, too, after today.

I thought about how Kaine had disappeared inside the other portrait a split second after the woman had ejected the portrait. It bothered me that Kaine could travel that way—a way that I had thought solely mine.

“Kaine hardly bothered with us really—he was almost solely focused on the painting,” I murmured. I tilted the portrait, watching the paint shift. The profile of the woman inside tilted back the slightest amount. “He sped up when it was being targeted, then defended it specifically. Defended it over grabbing us.”

“The Kinsky, the storage vats, the ferals, Stavros’s plans… The ties are here,” Axer said.

I regarded the portrait, trying to figure out what it was about this one that was different. The woman was standing in an empty kitchen, head turned away and barely moving as she seemed frozen in the motion of looking toward the window. It was the embodiment of an eternal sigh; the last turn as you watched your love leave.

In all the others I had seen, the women had been facing the viewer, and each had gone into motion at seeing me, waving me forward or offering something. Though this one was different from the full-on invitations of the others I had seen, spoken to, or traveled within, there was something similar in the feel—the promise of something more, something hidden beneath the crests of paint.

I touched the edge of the frame and the taste of the sea and feel of despair burst upon my senses. The tones encasing the woman were earthy and melancholic. The lost love. The earth maternal. A breeze dotted with salted tears came through the open window to her right, to the direction she had started to turn. There was the barest hint of a tormented sea beyond the Cornish field through the open frame. The curtains moved inward in the breeze, washing over the side of the woman's face in her frozen turn.

It was an odd juxtaposition—the woman moving in small twitches versus the living scene around her. Like she kept trying to turn, but was constantly being pulled back by a gravitational force acting from the exterior paint of the portrait.

There was no sign of a turn, of her holding forth a piece of paper, like the other Kinsky inhabitants—the portrait at Ganymede Station, that I hadn't had the chance to explore, and the portrait in Alexandria, that had asked me where I wanted to travel and giving me the first taste of an Origin Circuit.

This one seemed too small to travel through, though as a mage I had learned quickly that being thought constrained by non-magic physics was a disability in thinking.

But there was something about the painting that felt small. That felt...contained. Like it was specifically created, not a full experience.

Looking at the woman, I thought of my brother. Of how even though I was past the immediate grief, I was still taken by it sometimes, in the dark, when other things bled from the forefront of my thoughts. Lost love, lost family. I let the barest hint of sympathetic magic spiral through my fingers as I caressed the corner.

The woman's head tilted toward me just the smallest bit in real time, like she was checking her peripheral view, then the fingers of her turning hand reached back to the lower, opposite corner and pulled the edges of the painting around her like a cape.

I reached forward automatically as the picture changed with the swirl of oil.

In the woman's place was a chest containing a miniature portrait of the woman on the decorative latch. The background was bare as a Vermeer white-washed wall, and equally as complicated in its devious simplicity of muted tones and shadows of light.

I reached toward the latch, and the chestnut and mahogany colors started to swirl. My lips curved a tiny bit automatically. It was still thrilling to watch art come alive, even after months of doing it myself. And this was a master's work—like seeing the Mona Lisa finally open her lips to tell me her secrets. Thrilling.

I touched the oil, which turned slick beneath my fingers, then thrust them inside. The metallic latch was cold under my fingerpads, and the woman watched me in miniature—as if in this incarnation she could only be captured in small scale.

She said nothing, made no movements to help or hinder me, and offered no items, but there was an anticipation in the way she watched me—her weariness washing away with the displacement of paint. So, I lifted the latch and carefully pushed back the hood of the chest, watching as the oils shifted and moved, and as she disappeared from view.

Inside the chest was a single item, a hand-bound book. I was reaching for it as soon as I consciously understood what it was.

I pulled the volume out and as soon as it was free, the picture swirled and warped once more, and an empty table stood in its place. The woman's peasant dress flowed freely around her legs as she walked across the field toward the sea, visible through the still-open window in the stark room.

I stared at her steadily disappearing figure until she lifted her arms and was carried into the sea-swept vanishing point. Freed. Liberated. Unbound.

I turned my attention to what I held without opening it. The leather-bound volume contained twenty or so pages, each thick and uneven opposite the binding. A book made from separate but deliberate pieces, not a blank book filled in haphazardly.

Kinsky's mark—a bird in flight—was stamped into the lower right corner of the cover.

My hand shook in realization. This was likely an artist’s journal. Sergei Kinsky’s artist’s journal. Given to me in desperation, and unlocked with emotion.

I looked back at the portrait, but it was no longer a portrait—the woman was gone. The only animation in the otherwise empty room was a breeze blowing the hem of the curtain. Everything alive about the painting now came from outside the inner frame.

I carefully lifted the cover of the journal. Magic puffed from the pages, like dust from a forgotten tome on a forgotten shelf. The dust swirled and hovered above my hands.

The pages were thick, and zings of twilight magic drifted along the fibers as my fingers caressed the edge of the first page. Kinsky's magic was a world of vibrant and muted grayscale. But peeling back the layers of each picture showed a shocking amount of color hidden carefully beneath. I was looking at a full, vibrant hidden world stuffed beneath depression. The grays were rich in tone, texture, and variety, and it was hard to tell whether Kinsky was saying that it was the default state he was trying to highlight, or the secret of it.

Five of the pages lifted upright and vibrated. Paint, pastels, and charcoal flew from their canvasses and into the air in front of me, coiling together in broad and small strokes to show moving images of an event. I reached out and let the magic wrap my finger and the taste, smells, and sounds of the event swept over me, pulling me inside. I gasped as a woman with smoky eyes beckoned. I knew her. She was the woman from every portrait. I walked forward in anticipation—no, Kinsky walked forward with anticipation—I was just experiencing the memory.

The memory swirled, and the woman’s once beautiful warm skin was unnaturally blanched and sweating. Dark circles underlined her eyes as she reached up with stuttering last words…

I pushed away at the sudden realization of death, but the magic held me tight, and I saw Enton Stavros in an immaculate suit present himself at her funeral along with a man I didn’t know—Oler Mussolgranz—an imposing man with cold, dissecting eyes. Stavros could give me back what I had lost and more. He could shield me from all those who would hunt me. He knew what I had long suspected and hid about my abilities—abilities only Priyasha had encouraged. Always Priyasha.

Stavros was building a place for rare mages. The Zantini Institute. He wanted to help fix what had been lost in the Third Layer and create a think tank for the future. His offer was generous, but I felt unease at this man with the soulless eyes. Nothing like my Priyasha’s warm, honest, fiery gaze—a woman who lived in the sun and loved the salt of the ocean.

But Mussolgranz touched Priyasha’s dead hand and I could see her soul—the inner fire of reds and yellows and deep earthy golden browns that always swirled around her—hover above her cold lips. That light of life had gone out the moment she had breathed her last—taking all the wonder of life and my future with her. And here was a man, telling me he could bring her back.

And I said yes. Always, yes.

I broke away with a heaving gasp.

“Ren,” Axer said sharply, both he and Con were holding me up as the story world dissipated.

“He promised Kinsky he would return Priyasha. His love. Her name was Priyasha. She died.” Paint spewed from beneath my fingernails, sizzling on their cloaks where I gripped them. “He lied. He lied.”

“Who?” Axer brought my gaze up to his, making me focus, even as he spread a palm above the sizzling patches on their cloaks.

“Stavros. Mussolgranz.” I had heard the latter’s name before. In the Ganymede Circus art store. The snobbish magicist woman had said that it was the only kind of Kinsky she would purchase—one made under the direction of Mussolgranz when at the Zantini Institute.

Axer sat back on his heels, mouth going grim. “The Zantini Institute started as a think tank for rare mages. Oler Mussolgranz ran it.”

“It started as a think tank, then turned into what?”

“The Institute became part of the Department when Stavros became Prestige. Renamed the Chamber, it was a laboratory and research base just as the Institute had been. They were always making great strides,” he said. “But their methods were...questionable.”

“What, that’s...is there no one with imagination there?”

Axer frowned, then touched my neck, fingers lightly brushing my skin. “Ah. Translator. Basement, Department, Chamber—all those names are far more complicated in their original language.” He smiled. “I like your translation better. Better to make them simple. Simple can be defeated.”

He leaned back. “Mussolgranz died with Kinsky, and the Chamber died with him. Stavros survived...” He twisted his hand. “And the Basement was born.”

I looked at the path ahead of us. “Time to see it first-hand.”