The Secret of the Rose and Glove by Unknown Read Free Book Online Page A

flames. And moreover, he had repaired the mechanism.
    The elevator door clanged shut, cables and counterweights engaged, the whole powered by the ancient hydraulic technology sometimes called the Azlanti Screw. Norret ascended, feeling not so much like a phoenix arising from his pyre as a crippled alchemist about to make a crucial discovery.
    A walkway bridged the vault, opposite the largest, whitest wall in the chateau—and likely the greatest mural—but what Norret was interested in at the moment was the dancing lights. They moved like lanterns carried by capering ghosts, in and out the patterns of a figure, multiplied by the mirrors of the gallery into a sea of constellations.
    Norret shuttered his own lantern so he could observe them more clearly. Thankfully, he was tall and so could look down on them slightly, seeing the shapes they traced in the darkness repeated to infinity in the mirrors, slightly angled, like bones landing in a spiral. The patterns were not just choreography, but mathematical figures, combinations spun clockwise and widdershins.
    The wheels of the valves in the pump room formed a similar line, and Norret realized that, just as the dances of the masque ran in sequence, so could the valves be turned in the same pattern.
    There was one troublesome light, however. One that moved through the constellations like a wandering star or bobbed at the corner of the set like a wallflower at a dance. Norret looked at it in the darkness a long while, pondering its meaning, before at last speaking aloud. “What are you doing here?”
    “I could ask the same,” said the light. It was an inhuman voice, like the voice of the armonica, its tone too pure, too clear, too cold. “Why is there no terror?”
    Norret recognized it. A will-o’-wisp, one of the death-fires that followed armies, feeding on the fear of dying soldiers.
    “Everyone I loved is dead. I’ve no time for terror.”
    “How tragic,” the corpse light said, and vanished, swallowed up by the darkness. “Perhaps now? I can see you but you cannot see me….”
    There was a virtue to being blind in one eye: Despite being half deaf as well, Norret had learned to use his hearing that much more, and could sense vaguely where the voice had drifted, near one of the dead chandeliers. He reached to his bandolier, retrieving a small metal tube like a child’s tin whistle. He raised it to his lips and blew a blast, but instead of sound, what issued from the end was shimmering glitter.
    Twinkling, it dusted down, a preparation of powdered mica, luminescent phosphorus, and crushed moon moth wings.
    The will-o’-wisp reappeared, now glowing a ghastly greenish-white rather than witchy blue like the rest of the lights. The chandelier’s remaining crystals winked and glittered with the illumination and a faint odor of garlic filled the air, a curious property of phosphorus.
    The corpse light screamed, an unearthly howl like all of an armonica’s crystal bowls touched at once, and launched itself at Norret.
    Norret held up a hand to ward it off, his numb hand, still clutching the duchess’s perfume atomizer. A bolt of pure voltaic energy sparked from the will-o’-wisp, but glass was an insulator, proof against any and all galvanic power. Unfortunately, brass and silver were not, and the fittings drew the electricity inside, bottling the lightning and volatilizing the mixture of acids.
    The atomizer atomized.
    Norret felt the pressure rather than pain as the explosion drove splinters of glass through his gauntlet into his hand and slammed him back into the railing. The garlic scent of phosphorus was replaced by that of vinegar—searing, eye-watering, and caustic. Vinegar was said to be the sign of Cayden Cailean’s displeasure, but the god of Accidents and Ale was either sending mixed messages or else equally displeased at everyone, for the expanding force of the acid gas also flung the death-fire back into the elevator car.
    Norret held his breath. If the