Masquerade Read online

  LAURA LAM

  Masquerade

  PAN BOOKS

  To the readers who kept the magic alive.

  Thank you.

  Contents

  PROLOGUE THE DAMSELFLY

  1 FEVER DREAM

  2 ELIXIR

  3 RECOVERY

  4 THE FLAME AND THE FIRE

  5 INFIRMARY

  6 SYRINGE

  7 FLAMES AND RAIN

  8 THE OPERATING THEATRE

  9 THE PRINCESS AND THE LILY

  10 STREET MAGIC

  11 THE SHIMMERING GIRL AT THE PALACE

  12 THE BOY WITH HORNS

  13 THE HOSPITAL

  14 THE FETE AT THE PALACE

  15 THE NICKEL DAILY

  16 SWEET ELIXIR

  17 AHTI’S SCION

  18 RETURN TO SNAKEWOOD PALACE

  19 THE NEEDLE

  20 SIDE EFFECTS

  21 THE SPARK

  22 THE RESURRECTIONIST

  23 PROPHECY OF LIES

  24 THE BLURRED MAN

  25 THE KASHURA

  26 THE AFTERMATH

  27 HOMECOMING

  EPILOGUE: THE MASQUE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  PROLOGUE

  THE DAMSELFLY

  There was no one left alive who remembered the world as I used to know it.

  I told the others to call me Anisa. I had gone by many names, experienced many lives in various forms for thousands of years. The land they now called Ellada was a very different place. There were still so many humans, fascinating and frustrating by turns. They lived that one life and then that was it – they either left their mark and they were remembered, elsewise they were forgotten in the fog of time.

  Humans were lowest on the hierarchy – though that was not to say they were poorly treated. At the pinnacle were the Alder: tall, ethereal beings, long-limbed and beautiful. Blueish skin, large eyes, those thin necks and willowy waists. They were our guardians, our shepherds, perhaps in some way our gods. They stayed separate, yet they watched us, gave us cryptic instructions, shared their technology with us. Our lives were better with them guiding us, perhaps, but there was also that disturbing sense that those lives were not our own.

  In that world there were also the Chimaera, like me. We were somewhere in between the human and the Alder. I was a Theri Chimaera, which meant my primary aspect was humanoid with a slight influence of Alder features, yet large dragonfly wings rose from my back. There had been so many of us. Chimaera with manes like lions or tails like fish. A glimmering of scales on flesh, or nails sharp as thorns. Eyes that glowed blue, purple, or green in the darkness. I had a friend called Matla who flew in warmer skies with me, her wings like a giant owl’s. So many lifetimes ago.

  Not all of us looked so varied. Many Chimaera were entirely human but for gifts bestowed by the Alder. They were called the Anthi. They lived with us in the gardens strewn throughout the world, when all had been so green and verdant. When one of my lives ended, I’d be reborn into another Dragonfly body. If one was not yet available, I’d spend time in a body of metal and gears until I decided I wanted to live within flesh once again. Sometimes, I hibernated in a small disc called an Aleph. Once, I’d had an entire people that looked like me. Once, I’d had a home.

  That world was gone, in fire and flame, in no small part thanks to my own failures. The Alder left us. They could have helped put our world to rights, perhaps, but they did not wish to. The Alder had tasked me and my partner, Relean, with raising Chimaera. Someone murdered my charge, and it haunted me. I never discovered who did it, but I had my suspicions. Years later, when I was tasked with two more charges, I was determined to protect them with my very life. I loved Ahti and Dev dearly. Ahti was a Theri: scaled, and more powerful than any other Chimaera I’d ever come across. It could overwhelm him, putting everyone nearby at risk. Only Dev, an Anthi, could absorb the powers and bring Ahti back to equilibrium. Dev was a Kedi – both male and female, physically and within.

  Ahti’s powers made him a target. A faction of the Alder called the Kashura began to mistrust the Chimaera and their growing powers. They decided they were dangerous and that the world would be better with only the pure, and weaker, humans. I tried to protect Ahti as best I could, knowing the Kashura would want him, for he was the key to their plan.

  My protection was worth less than nothing. Relean and I were captured and thrown into a cell with Dev. They took Ahti away, and he was frightened. I could feel his terror, even through the stone walls separating us. Dev could not help him. The world burned, the Chimaera were gone.

  The Dragonfly body I wore turned to ash with the others, but Relean had spirited away three Alephs. I survived, but I never found the Alephs of Relean or Dev. My guess is that they perished, all those centuries ago. I had lived many lives with Relean. We had always found each other. Now he had been gone almost as long as we’d been together.

  I slept for a long time, deep within the metal, buried in the ground. Eventually, my Aleph was found, sold a few times. Anything the Alder left behind was valuable in this new world that rose from the broken remnants of the old one. Though they did not fully understand how this Vestige worked, they used it, fighting with each other because they were so desperate to collect as much power as they could in their short lives.

  My Aleph rested on mantelpieces in fancy houses. Occasionally, I’d awaken from my slumber, listening idly to their conversations, trying to understand how the world had changed. If I reached out to them, no one heard me. I drifted back into hibernation.

  Eventually, I ended up in a circus that travelled around Ellada. They used my Aleph in one of their funfair tents, replaying an old recording of my Dragonfly form. Occasionally, the real me would emerge from the Aleph and watch the humans who came to visit. Again, if I spoke to them, no one heard. They saw only the recording, the mist from the card ice in water, the swirling paint on the cloth of the tent. I was called the Phantom Damselfly, and it fit, for I was nothing more than a ghost.

  R. H. Ragona’s Circus of Magic paused in the city of Sicion last spring. For the first time in so, so many years, I felt a call. Chimaera, powers emerging, reaching out in the darkness. A tarot reader named Cyan, in a circus, reading minds to tell others what they needed to hear. A girl, Iphigenia Laurus, trapped in the gilded cage of nobility, desperate to escape. No, not a girl. A Kedi. Others, dimmer, more distant, but present. Growing.

  I was limited in my Aleph form, but I watched them. Eventually, I reached out in subtle ways. It took patience, but I had plenty of it.

  One night the Kedi, Iphigenia Laurus, or Gene, overheard her parents speaking and discovered that not only had a man called Doctor Pozzi left her on their doorstep as a baby, but that her adopted parents planned to operate upon her to make her more ‘marriageable’. Gene ran away from home, shedding the dresses and donning trousers, reinventing himself as Micah Grey. He came to the circus, as I knew he would, and joined as an aerialist apprentice. When Micah came to my tent the next night, I spoke to him. He heard me.

  I scared him terribly, and he stayed away. Time passed. Micah Grey rose through the ranks of the circus. He grew close to his fellow aerialist, Aenea, though he was too afraid to tell her about his past. Micah also connected with one of the white clowns, Drystan, who was another hidden member of the nobility.

  Micah’s family searched for him, even hiring a private investigator to try and find him. When the Shadow grew close to his quarry, a shadow of a different sort fell over R. H. Ragona’s Circus of Magic. Micah tried to flee, and told Aenea that he was a Kedi, but she was hurt by the lies. Bil Ragona, the ringmaster, figured out who Micah was and captured him, intending to turn him in for the reward to save the failing finances of the circus. When Aenea and Drystan tried to help him, Bil,
in a rage, struck Aenea and killed her. Drystan stabbed the ringmaster with the hidden blade in his own cane – on purpose or accidentally, it was difficult to say – and they escaped. Several members of the circus gave chase, but it was the night of the Penmoon. When the moon was fullest in the sky, the blue Penglass scattered through the city glowed. Chimaera had an affinity with it, they always did. Micah touched the glass and it brightened, blinding their hunters.

  On the run, Drystan took Micah to an old friend who owed him a favour: Jasper Maske, once known as the great magician, the Maske of Magic. Since losing a duel with his embittered rival, Penn Taliesin, fifteen years ago, Jasper had lived in his dusty theatre, tinkering with old Vestige and contraptions for his magic. Drystan collected on his life debt with Jasper and also convinced the magician to teach them the tools of his trade. He did, and those pieces I’d so delicately laid down began to come together.

  Cyan, the tarot reader, appeared at the Kymri Theatre after running away from Riley and Batheo’s Circus of Curiosities. She helped Maske and the others with the séances, being an understandable boon thanks to her Chimaera abilities. She and Micah began to discover what they were, and bonded together as I knew they must. Drystan and Micah fell in love, slowly, then completely.

  When Maske’s rival discovered that Maske was teaching magic again, Taliesin challenged Maske to another duel, this time through their apprentices. Desperate for a chance to perform magic again in the limelight, Maske accepted. Micah bowed out of performing, preferring to stay behind the scenes, so Drystan and Cyan were Maske’s Marionettes.

  Yet the Shadow would not leave Micah alone. With help from his friends, Micah discovered the Shadow was named Elwood, and snuck into his home and found proof that he was falsifying his findings and cheating his clients. With a well-placed package of information left on the Constabulary steps, Elwood soon was no longer a problem, and Micah hoped life as Iphigenia Laurus was well and truly behind him.

  The night before the grand duel, one of the machines for their finale broke, and I helped them fix it, showing myself to Maske for the first time. Micah, once more, had to spill his secrets, but at least that time the results were not near as disastrous as they’d been in the circus.

  Maske and his Marionettes went up against Taliesin’s grandsons, called the Spectre’s Shadows, and the duel began. Taliesin never liked to leave things to chance – he tried to sabotage Maske’s act. Micah managed to stop it, and Cyan and Drystan finished their performance. They won – the Princess Royal of Ellada herself congratulated them. It was as if everything had finally settled into place for young Micah and his newfound family.

  Micah did not realize there was a second Shadow darkening his path. I knew someone followed him, but it took me too long to realize who it was and what it truly meant.

  Lily Verre, a woman who worked in a magic shop and had begun courting Maske, was a spy all along. A Shadow working for Pozzi, the Royal Physician himself. Micah had met Pozzi after a séance and he’d warned Micah that he might be ill. Lily followed them from the circus and had Micah touch a disguised Mirror of Moirai, a piece of Vestige that she could use to track his movements.

  I had to watch as Micah moved closer to this momentous encounter. Seeing Lily Verre pushing her son in his wheelchair down a street in Imachara. Micah finally realizing that her son was a Theri Chimaera, skin covered in a gleam of scales. The very picture of Ahti, and Micah was so like Dev. They circled closer, caught in each other’s orbit. History was repeating itself, and my heart broke in both fear and hope.

  Then Micah fell ill with a fever that I did not see coming. It worried me, to have such a thing surprise me so. His fever dream contained many hints about what happened long ago and what was to come. I wondered if he would ever be able to forgive me. My little Kedi. My newest ward. Our last chance.

  1

  FEVER DREAM

  A fever may burn a man alive. Some of the wise men who called themselves seers would summon a temperature. They said the fever dreams bestowed them knowledge of their fate, and the fate of those who followed them.

  — ‘Mystics and Seers’, A History of Ellada and its Colonies, PROFESSOR CAED CEDAR, Royal Snakewood University

  Someone carried me.

  Disjointed flashes: the pavement, the yellow glow of a street lamp. The sound of a door being opened. Footsteps up the stairs.

  Then darkness.

  My eyes opened.

  Blurred forms surrounded me. I squinted at the brightness. Where was I? At least I remembered who I was. I’d been on the roof with Drystan, following the woman in the red dress, who had turned out to be none other than Lily Verre, someone we’d thought a friend. We had followed her over the rooftops of Imachara. Her child was Chimaera, covered in scales, curled within his wicker wheelchair and well-bundled against the cold and prying eyes. We’d followed her and she’d led us right to the door of someone we had every reason to distrust: Doctor Pozzi, the Royal Physician of the Snakewood Monarchy. The man who had found me and given me to my adopted parents, who had told me that if I ever became ill, it could mean that I was dying.

  The last thing I remembered was burning with the fever that still clawed at me and turned the room fuzzy and dim. Drystan had leaned over me: ‘I’ll take care of you.’

  Where had he taken me?

  Drystan had told me he loved me. I held onto that love, but even that began to dissolve around the pain of the fever. I dreamed, but only remnants lingered, like a word on the tip of my tongue.

  More darkness.

  I drifted. When I came back to myself, a face, half-hidden by a doctor’s mask, leaned over me. I knew the clipped beard that was underneath and those eyes that imitated warmth but still held coldness at their core.

  Behind Pozzi, I glimpsed a shadow of bat wings, but I blinked and they were gone.

  A pinch in my arm. A sharp flare of pain. The push of the syringe, and something flowed through the needle and into me. Pozzi leaned closer, peering at me above his doctor’s mask.

  ‘You’ll be all right, Micah.’

  Will I? I asked. And it was only when Pozzi’s eyes widened that I realized I’d spoken to him with my mind and not out loud. No one but Cyan could ever hear my thoughts, but he had. I didn’t have the energy to work out what that meant. My mind was heavy, my body burning with sweat and then freezing.

  He met my gaze. It will feel worse before it feels better.

  My eyes closed. I dreamed of fire, pain, and blood. I saw the end of the world.

  Part of me knew it was a fever dream. That didn’t make it any less frightening.

  I was not me. Anisa was flying, or falling, through skies on fire. All was red, orange, black and gold. I reached out my hands and they burned to nothing. There was no pain. I closed my eyes.

  I woke up and I was no longer myself. My body was human, my skin the peach and cream of a newborn. No swirling silver markings of my family. No dragonfly wings rose from my back. I was clipped. Earthbound. I skulked through the streets of this strange new city of Imachara, keeping to the shadows. I came to the market square before the palace, with a large stage set up in the middle, but no audience. Storm clouds rumbled overhead.

  The phantoms, the parts in this play to come, walked across the stage. The woman in the red dress whose son was eaten from the inside. My new charge knew who she was now, and what she had done. Things might still fall into place the way I thought – hoped – they would. The way the world whispers to me that it might.

  The doctor with the clockwork hand appeared onstage, smiling that self-satisfied grin, though he was as ignorant as all the rest. He did not even know what he wore against the stump of his arm. The ones who sided with him floated around him, waiting in the wings. The young girl with the lie around her neck. The one who was Matla, young Cyan, her powers just beginning to unfurl. The boy Drystan, who despite his lack of power could destroy everything. And my little Kedi, my newest charge, the one called Micah, or Gene, or Sam – my last and great
est hope.

  The stage lights extinguished, leaving me in the night. My lungs burned with the memory of smoke and soot. I was alone in the darkness. No one called me forth.

  A door in the darkness opened, and the boy Ahti came towards me. But as I reached my arms to him, he fell, his legs unable to support him, his skin grey and green. He wailed, covering his eyes with his hands. He wasn’t my Ahti. A flash of bright blue and red light. A dull roar. A young girl, screaming. Micah Grey, the one meant to help, to save everything, crying out. A flash of blinding blue.

  They were all dead and gone, and the world dead and gone with them.

  Darkness fell.

  I knew what I needed to do to stop it, but how could I commit that evil, too?

  I would do anything to save the Chimaera.

  Anything. Even what was to come.

  2

  ELIXIR

  I have found it. I have found the elixir that will change the world.

  — From the unpublished medical notes of the Snakewood Royal Physician, DOCTOR SAMUEL POZZI

  When I woke again, echoes of the strange fever dream swirled in my mind.

  Drystan held my hand. We were not at home in the Kymri Theatre.

  ‘Where . . . ?’ I managed.

  ‘Pozzi’s apartments,’ Drystan said. His blonde hair stood up around his head in a messy halo. He had dark circles under his blue eyes. ‘You’ve been out for four days.’

  I let out a shaky breath, pushing myself onto my elbows. The room was as white and pristine as a hospital room, the floor softened with rugs. The bed’s linen was so crisp it crinkled. I wore a plain tunic and felt a surge of panic.

  ‘Where are my clothes?’

  ‘They’re here.’ Drystan nodded to a chair in the corner.

  I lowered my voice. ‘Is the Aleph safe?’ Anisa’s disc. Drystan took the Aleph from my trouser pocket. I held my hand out and he dropped it into my palm. My fingers closed around the metal. Swirling, Alder script was etched into the sides, the Vestige metal shining green, purple and gold in the light. It thrummed in my hand. Anisa was silent.