The young men scrutinized their cards, searching for the vital names.
“The game will conclude in the winter, on the solstice,” Simeon went on. “You have until then to fulfill your challenge. Those who succeed will join as full members of the Cisneros Society. Those who fail—well, we’ll try not to feel too sorry for you.”
This was met with laughs, some more good-natured than others.
“I have one more important point to convey before we join the party.” He paused. For a moment he looked around the room, looking meaningfully at one or two of the men. “This card is also a contract. Keep the card, and you must keep silence as well. Nothing that happens here at the Manse, nothing that’s part of your challenge, nothing relating to Cygnets or the Cisneros Society in any way can be shared with anyone, dead or alive.” He grinned. “I’m sure I need not detail the consequences that could be effected by a roomful of powerful men with spirit thews.”
Now the responding laughs were a little strained.
“All right,” Simeon concluded. “Have you the moths?” There were calls of assent in reply, and a few men held up glass jars sealed with fabric and twine, the trapped insects inside hardlyvisible in the candlelit room. “Excellent! To the ballroom!” He knocked on the double doors, and they were thrown open from the other side. The men crowded through a short corridor, led by Simeon, arriving at a grand ballroom where they were greeted by the applause of at least two hundred guests.
The ballroom was lit by chandeliers, their candle smoke casting a dusk over the room. Some of the young men hesitated at the edges, while others sailed directly into the center, toward the waiting arms of older gentlemen who surrounded them to offer welcome and congratulations. I recognized most of their faces but not all of them: men too powerful to bother with the enchantment of tokens, comfortably unbeautiful with their sagging bellies and unruly beards, yellowed teeth and stooped shoulders. Men who directed weather patterns, who built spires of metal and glass in the city, who shipped enormous quantities of goods across the globe, who ran factories with machines that never stopped and never tired—all through the power of enchantment. Most wore a decorative piece of armor, even if it was only a rondel attached to the lapel of the coat. They were drinking champagne, and eating oysters, and smoking cigars. Here and there among them, distorted by the smoke, stood their pale spirit thews: white against the black suits.
A stage had been erected at the center of the ballroom. Nothing too large, only a few steps up and a few feet in diameter, but enough to rise above the crowd. Mounted on the stage was a roughly human-sized lump covered with a burgundy cloth. Beside it stood a smaller lump with an identical cloth. Under the burning lights of the chandeliers, they looked diminutive and unimpressive. But their importance was signaled by the presence of the host, who stood protectively nearby. His name was Karl Draken, though everyone referred to him as “the Embalmer.” He knew asmuch, and liked it. He had a heavy black beard, cut square, and shoulder-length black hair, streaked with white. An assortment of jeweled rings studded his thick fingers, and his jacket was similarly dotted with prize tokens—brooches and tiepins and even a pair of earrings. On anyone else they might have looked ridiculous, but somehow they suited him. He stood directly beside the small stage, never budging from his place, and his spirit thew stood attentively across from him in a defensive posture.
The guests at the Manse this night were the elite of Massachusetts society. Judges, bankers, diplomats, two mayors, a dozen military men, and countless men of enterprise. The wealth amassed in the room rivaled that of many small nations: fortunes made on the islands in sugar and rum, to the north in timber, to the south in rubber and cotton and coffee. I saw many professors from Commonwealth University, clumped together as they liked to be, peering at one another through their thick glasses.
Simeon’s father, Norbert Trench, stood with his spirit thew, speaking earnestly to one of the railway men who had connected the north shore to the city by means of a floating metal bridge, their heads bent toward each other in exuberant mutual appreciation. Most of the thews looked aloof, but Trench’s thew was casting sharp glances this way and that, searching for someone in the crowd—probably Simeon. I’d lost sight of him briefly as well, for he’d melted into the crowd along with the young initiates who’d abandoned themselves to the champagne, the haze of smoke, and the jovial conversation.
Suddenly a small red flare went up from the stage with a pop and fizzle, and the crowd gradually fell silent. The Embalmer stood upon it, waiting for the guests to quiet. He surveyed the room, smiling slightly behind his well-groomed beard. When every eye was upon him, he raised his glass.
“Gentlemen,” he called out, in a voice amplified, I suspected, by his thew, “welcome to the Manse!” There were cheers and hoots from the floor. “It’s my great pleasure to welcome you to the autumn gathering of the Cisneros Society, the august body that has now served its members for two hundred and twenty-two years!” Greater cheers, and a smattering of applause from the few men not holding champagne. “A particular welcome to the young men who are here for the first time as Cygnets, novitiates who will, we hope, join us as full members in the new year. It’s for the benefit of these young men that I’ll say what everyone else in the room already knows: any enchantment of significance that occurs in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts flows through the Cisneros Society. You see before you an unfathomable concentration of power. These are the men who shape our world.”
He paused here, and there was a solemn silence of collective self-appreciation. “It’s for the benefit of all of you that I’ve created a very specific concentration of power, a tool of enchantment the likes of which has not existed for hundreds of years. Some time ago, I decided that our Society, given its unmeasured accomplishments, deserved a vestment modeled after the famous cloak of Torquemada. As you may recall from your student days some five or ten or sixty years ago”—he paused for the rumble of laughter—“Tomás de Torquemada, grand inquisitor of Castile in the fifteenth century, wielded unimaginable power through the cloak, which has been lost to time. I have reimagined the cloak in the more durable form of steel-scale armor. Behold, gentlemen, the Cisneros Steel.”
Draken reached out and pulled aside one of the burgundy cloths, revealing the armor on a wooden clotheshorse. A murmur of awe rippled through the room, and the Embalmer allowedit to grow. The armor’s steelwork was remarkable. It had been designed by the eminent armor scholar Professor Ernest Throckmorton and assembled by the famed armorer Miles Gaudet. The Embalmer had never taxed his own resources more, for each small scale contained a piece of human bone. I had witnessed him making it myself. The scales were engraved with swans in different postures: flying, diving, floating serenely. From a distance, the fine engravings weren’t visible, but the suit was still impressive. Polished to a high shine, it winked and glittered like hundreds of bright coins in the chandeliers’ light.
“I think you will agree with me, gentlemen,” Draken said, “that many people in this frivolous, modern age have forgotten what the true power of an enchanter can be. They take for granted the wealth and well-being that we provide through medicine, commerce, and construction.” Murmurs of agreement chased through the room. “But we do not exist to pamper and enrich a society in decadence. We exist to create. Consider the power of the ancient crusaders, who won battles and shaped kingdoms with enchantment. Consider Reynaldo Murcia de Quintanilla, whose thirteenth-century bones rest only a few miles away at Commonwealth University. Murcia, who made the five great creatures to assist the Crusades, as you all know.” Draken paused for emphasis. “The Cisneros Steel will allow us to raise those great creatures again.” Exclamations of awe and shock came from the men around him. “Yes—Murcia’s Five. For the defense and glory of Cisneros.
“The suit will reside here, at the Manse,” the Embalmer continued, raising his voice over the excitement. “But it will be available to all the Society’s members. Tonight we’ll hold an auction to see which of you will have the pleasure of donning thesteel first.” There was a chorus of eager cries, and the Embalmer grinned. “So that you shall not doubt the power of this magnificent creation, I’ve arranged a small demonstration.” He turned to the side, and his spirit thew drifted onto the stage. The crowd fell silent in anticipation as the thew took the Embalmer’s champagne and removed his jacket, revealing a billowy white shirt. She then lifted the armor from the clotheshorse and settled it gently over the Embalmer’s torso, fastening it at the sides. The armor flared slightly at the shoulders, creating an effect not unlike a spray of metallic feathers.
For a moment, the Embalmer simply stood with his arms extended, basking in the admiring stares of his fellow enchanters. Then he raised a hand. “Release the insects.”
His spirit thew reached down to the smaller lump that stood beside the clotheshorse and pulled aside the cloth, revealing a large birdcage. It was filled with moths. Instantly, the moths began to flutter outward from the cage, dodging uncertainly into the room, their movements eager and yet aimless. The Embalmer held a hand out toward a cluster of moths near him and whispered,“Mujeriar.”
Immediately, a half dozen of the moths shuddered mid-flight. Then they swelled, their wings expanding rapidly, their bodies bulging with fur that rippled and stretched and turned to smooth skin, faintly brown and faintly pink. As they grew heavy and bloated, they plummeted to the ground, and the men around the stage made way, stepping backward quickly as the writhing forms grew, the bodies now human-sized, the wings several feet wide.
The Embalmer didn’t wait for them, turning instead to another cluster of moths and whispering the same word, so thatthey also began their ungainly transformation. The creatures that had grown full-sized now lay huddled on the floor, to all appearances giant moths, until one of them stood unsteadily and revealed its full figure. A collective gasp swept through the room. The moth had the body and face of a woman.
Her eyes were large, set far apart, and wide with fear. A tremor of terror shuddered visibly in her throat. Long, brown hair fell in disordered waves over her chest and back, tangling her wings. She pushed off gently and began flying upward, toward a chandelier. But whether out of the wish to save her from the candle flame or out of some other, more sordid impulse, a man’s hand shot upward, seizing her by the foot, and then others helped him, and she was pulled back down to the floor and found herself surrounded.
In this moment, the restraint that had held the room back was broken, and the sense of wonder turned to grasping curiosity. Everywhere on the floor of the ballroom, the women who had been moths found themselves hemmed in by the prodding and goggling of enchanters. The young men who had brought their own moths pushed forward, eager to see their own tiny prisoners transformed by the Cisneros Steel. Loud exclamations filled the air, dissolving the silence into chaos.
I saw one man, at least, who wasn’t pushing his way urgently toward the moths but was, instead, lounging comfortably by the double doors of the ballroom. Simeon was smiling, watching the transformations with an air of easy languor. To the casual eye, he seemed almost indifferent to this spectacular achievement, the likes of which no man in the ballroom had ever seen. But I’d been watching Simeon for more than four months, and I knew he was not indifferent. I could detect what others would not: the glint of a calculating avarice in his eye.
Suddenly, an older man stamping a cane shuffled in through the open doors beside him. “Don’t tell me it’s all over!” this gentleman exclaimed, aghast.
Simeon turned his smile to the older man. “Not at all, sir. It’s only just begun.”
Clem: May 12, 1885
Dearest Mother,
Father has told me. I cannot believe it.
But he says he has seen you. More than two years ago, when he was called to Commonwealth University to administer a language exam. He said you were there, and that you saw each other from a distance. He said this like it was a fate worse than death. I don’t understand. It is better—infinitely better. I said that and Father flew into a rage, so that I hardly recognized him. He said, “You think it is better for your mother’s spirit to be deprived of rest, chained to another man’s will for eternity?”
Of course not. What I think is that if you are here, there is hope.
