“It’ll melt your brain,” he’d said.
That was what made Isabelle interested in the first place, and she’d stolen her brother’s math primer and read it by moonlight. Maybe it was the moonlight that did it, but it was as if she’d wandered into a secret treasure cave. The numbers opened up to her, and they talked to her, and they said the most amazing things.
Marie came to a halt on a dryish patch of ground. “You’re not supposed to do math or philosophy.”
“You’re not supposed to steal cookies, or climb trees, or ride straddlewise, either,” Isabelle said. “If you think about it, if you don’t do anything you’re not supposed to, there’s hardly anything left. You might as well just sleep all day.”
“The Temple doesn’t care about cookies, but they do care about math. It’s against the Builder.”
Isabelle sniffed her contempt at the theological argument. “The Temple already thinks I’m Breaker marked because of my wormfinger and because I’m unhallowed. I don’t see how doing math is going to make it any worse.”
“Maybe not for you,” Marie said.
“You can go back if you want, but you won’t get to see what I’m going to do. Besides, if you quit now, you’ll just have to climb up the way you came, and you’re already more than halfway down. Going down and then taking the road back up is much easier.”
Then Isabelle bounded away.
“Hey!” cried Marie. “No fair. Wait for me!”
By the time Marie caught up to Isabelle at the bottom of the alley run, her shoes were sodden and her hem was muddy, and since she couldn’t do anything about it now, she apparently decided it didn’t matter. “Race you to the point,” Marie said.
Isabelle almost darted away, but she heard a familiar adult voice singing, loudly and without musical merit, “… but a woman’s shift and apron they were no use to meeee…”
Isabelle grabbed Marie by the back of the shirt with her good hand and pulled her behind a mucky rain barrel just as the musketeer Jean-Claude staggered by, a quart mug in one hand and a wine sack in the other. He fetched up against the rain-dampened corner of the warehouse and stood nose-to-brick with the building, as if challenging it for the right of way.
Isabelle wrinkled her nose and whispered, “He’s drunk.”
Marie said, “He’s always drunk, my mother says, a disgrace to the uniform, doesn’t know why your father keeps him around.”
“He has to; le roi makes him,” Isabelle said. “I don’t know why.” Or at least she didn’t believe the story she’d been told, that the king had foisted Jean-Claude on her parents as a punishment for having Isabelle. Who exactly was it supposed to be punishment for? Whatever the case, she could not remember a time when the beer-stained musketeer hadn’t been around, staggering into and out of her path, mostly oblivious to her presence, mostly at inopportune moments like this one.
Unfortunately, Jean-Claude was just the sort of adult who could take Isabelle by the ear and drag her back to the manor house without fear of repercussion, and if he didn’t shove off soon, Isabelle was going to miss her chance to try out her experiment, and she might not get another chance for weeks and weeks. She was just about to climb back up the slope and come down a different way when Jean-Claude heaved off the wall and lurched down the street at an angle that suggested a skyship at odds with the prevailing wind.
Isabelle traded glances with Marie. Marie looked ready to scamper back the way they’d come, but Isabelle gestured for her to follow and sneaked to the mouth of the alley. She peeked around the corner in the direction Jean-Claude had gone just in time to see him disappear into the next alley down the street.
Isabelle hesitated; the next alley was a dead end. There wasn’t any place for Jean-Claude to go except the butcher’s hanging closet. Should she and Marie try to sneak past before he came out, or should they wait? As like as not, he’d gone in there to make water and would be facing the other way … maybe.
Isabelle screwed up her courage, gestured for Marie to follow, and scurried past the mouth of the alley. The quick glance she risked showed what looked like the musketeer wrestling with his trousers and losing.
She didn’t slow down until she’d reached the next intersection and slipped around the corner. Marie joined her. They held their breath, listening for pursuit, then locked eyes with each other and broke into giggles.
They hurried down to the wharfs, past the net makers and the lumberyard and the warehouses that would soon be full of fine spring wool from the skyland’s famous Lande Glacée sheep. They climbed up on a bale of sailcloth to stare up at the race-built ship, a two-masted schooner of the newer, flat-bottomed style, long and lean like a reef pike with the turvy masts slightly longer than the tops, the bowsprit horizontal like a fencer’s thrust. It was clearly a merchant’s ship, brightly painted with a sprawling mural of great colorful birds carrying long silk banners. Isabelle itched with the desire to sneak aboard and get a look at the aetherkeel, to see, just once in person, how the great machines were put together.
Marie got bored with the ship before Isabelle and said, “Come on, let’s go see this secret philosophy thing of yours. People are staring.”
Isabelle spotted a cluster of ragged-looking men loitering by the schooner’s gangway. Their faces, tattooed with sigils of the saints, marked them as Iconates. They believed something about the Risen Saints being ghosts that got involved in people lives, which seemed like an awful lot of bother for a bunch of dead people.
Marie was right, though; several of the men were bestowing them dolorous looks. Isabelle slid off the back of the bale. She and Marie looped around a warehouse to get out of sight and then hurried to the far end of the quay, which was usually abandoned at this time of day. Isabelle looked back along the docks. The Iconates were still huddled like supplicants at the foot of the schooner.
Satisfied that they hadn’t been followed, Isabelle crouched amongst the piles and unlimbered her shoulder bag. She withdrew two glass phials, one with a cork painted red, the other green. She held up the green one proudly. “Distilled aether.”
Marie eyed her accomplishment dubiously. “Looks empty to me.”
Isabelle considered trying to explain how she’d contrived a galvanic compressor to pump the sublimating infinitesimal proto-gas into the phial, but Marie didn’t stay up nights worrying about things like that.
Instead Isabelle said, “Only one way to find out. The red one really is empty; if it falls faster than the green one, we know the green one had aether in it.” Otherwise it’s back to the books.