THE CAGE OF MIRRORS

 

By nine-thirty the guns have been firing for over three hours, churning black smoke into a sky of pristine blue. The sun shines with a glassy, distant brilliance that heralds the turn towards autumn.

The year is 1717. The Christian armies, united under the leadership of Prince Eugene of Savoy, have met the Ottoman Turks outside the walls of Belgrade. An early-morning fog gave the besieging force the opportunity for a surprise attack.

Now the world is a crystal of perfect clarity, and on a hillock above the battlefield Prince Eugene paces, scribbles orders to be sent to his marshals in the field, peers through his spyglass, nods approvingly and writes another missive. He is a small, clerkish man whose first great struggle was to win over his own officers. At first they were scandalized by his unorthodox ideas about making war.

Precision is the key, he often reminds them. The most important weapon you take into the field is your pocketwatch.

He is the only commander to spurn the privileges of his exalted rank and pitch his tent with the common soldiers, sharing with them the noise and stench and bad food of an army encampment. The men love him and call him Papa.

At nine-thirty the faintest trace of a smile appears at the corners of the prince’s mouth. He permits his valet to pour him a thumbnail measure of brandy in celebration of what has become a certainty. The Turks, routed at almost every point along the battle line, are going to lose. It may take a few more days to convince the inhabitants, still cowering behind the walls, of that fact. But the cross will once again rise above the minarets of Belgrade. Scarcely a single green-and-silver banner still flutters over what is fast becoming a field of slaughter.

Prince Eugene crosses himself and dispatches the waiting messengers with his final orders to the marshals now scattered far and wide across the battle line. A few more moves on the chessboard, and this engagement, as well as the crusade he has led for the past three years into Ottoman territory, should be over, praise be to God. With the taking back of Belgrade from the Turk the centuries of warring back and forth over the same rivers, forests, and mountains will at long last cease. Today the clock stops.

This was a war of time, Prince Eugene announces to his aides-de-camp. Our clocks against their musty lunar almanacs. You can’t run an efficient military engine by the phases of the moon.

The aides-de-camp nod and murmur agreement. They have heard these phrases many times. Among them is a young man named Ludwig, the only son of Count Konstantin Ostrov, one of the Prince’s veteran commanders.

Ludwig is seventeen. He has stayed all morning by the Prince’s side, held in reserve while the senior adjutants are chosen for the honour of relaying Papa’s orders. Ludwig has been fidgeting, barely reining in his desire to do something, anything, other than wait here with the Prince and his retinue on this distant knoll, which only a scattering of enemy cannonfire has reached all morning. When his turn at last arrives and the orders are signed, sealed, and tucked into the leather pouch at his side, he is off, galloping his sleek black mount down the hillside, over the trampled yellow grass, past the blood-spattered tents where doctors are sawing limbs off the shrieking wounded, between the slow columns of sullen reserve troops brought forward to fill the gaps in the dishevelled lines. He rides as if this is the whole world, the roar of the wind, the lunging flanks of the horse beneath him, the intoxication of his body’s youth and animal vigour. He surprises himself with the thought that this feeling surging up in him is an absolute joy.

I am happy, he thinks, and laughs out loud.

He remembers the letter that arrived in camp a month ago, informing him and his father of the death of the Countess, his mother, in childbirth. For the first time since that day the cold ashes in his heart have stirred to life.

I have a sister, Ludwig reminds himself. Someday, when she is old enough to understand, I will tell her about this moment.

He was sent to find his father, but it is his father who finds him. Led here by the captain who saw the boy fall, the Count at first does not recognize his son. Ludwig is stretched out on the grass, hat missing, his head propped against the wheel of a smouldering gun carriage. His hands are resting loosely, palms upward, in his lap. This is how beggars slump against walls. Ludwig’s head lolls to one side and his jaw hangs like an old man’s, as if in a single morning he has aged thirty years.

The Count dismounts and kneels beside his son. Ludwig’s eyes are closed, his face chalk-white. He sighs like a gently roused sleeper about to awaken.

The Count turns to the captain.

What happened?

The man sputters. He does not know. He saw the boy fall from his horse, he rushed over and carried him to the gun carriage. The Count searches his son’s uniform for traces of blood, gently opens the wings of his gold-embroidered coat. The white shirt beneath is spotless. At the Count’s touch, Ludwig opens his eyes.

Let’s go home, Father, he says in the tone of a bored guest at a card party.

He draws in a long, drowsy breath, as though about to yawn. His head falls softly sideways against the axle of the carriage. The Count moves closer and looks into Ludwig’s eyes.

Peace to his soul, the captain says, doffing his hat.

After a moment the Count draws his blood-crusted sabre and cuts the braided topknot, the Ostrov badge of warrior ancestry, from the head of his son. He rises shakily to his feet.

What killed him? he asks the captain, who lifts his blackened hands helplessly and lets them drop. He just fell from his horse?

Yes, Excellency. I saw him coming down the hill, then he slowed up and began searching this way and that, shading his eyes with his hand. Looking for you, I suppose. He was riding towards me when just like that he slid off the saddle and fell to the ground.

When?

I had scarcely rushed to his side and carried him here when I saw you riding by, Excellency.

The Count tucks the topknot into his belt. He gazes over the trampled ground, as if he might find the past few moments lying among the other litter of war.

Others are pausing now on their way back from the last expiring groans of the battle, to gawk, crane their necks, find out who has fallen here. There being a nobleman on hand, it must be somebody of importance. The Count glares around, his naked sabre held before him like an accusation, as if someone here knows the answer to this riddle and refuses to tell him. Young men do not just die.

Two officers on horseback canter past, pausing in their conversation to take in the scene with impassive faces. A grenadier follows soon after, leading another whose eyes are hidden by a dirty bandage, his outstretched hands shakily patting the air before him. In the distance three infantrymen have upended a gunpowder cask and are already playing cards.

The world will not stop.

The Count tosses his sabre to the earth. Tomorrow perhaps, or the next day, the Prince’s army will breach the walls and take its vengeance for the deaths of comrades, family, ancestors. He will not be among them. He will honour his son’s dying request and return home. He will mourn his wife. See his infant daughter. And devote himself at last to his long-abandoned dream.

The next morning he resigns his commission. Prince Eugene tearfully embraces his old comrade-in-arms.

My dear Konstantin, what will you do?

Puzzles, the Count says, placing his sword in the Prince’s hands. I will do puzzles.

After his son’s death Count Ostrov retired to his ancestral castle, on a precipitous island of rock in the River Vah. This ancient stronghold had been built by his ancestors on the crumbling remains of a Roman fort in the same year that Constantinople fell to Mehmed the Conqueror and Gutenberg printed his first Bible.

As a boy growing up in this castle, the Count had loved puzzles.

Cryptograms, mathematical oddities, those new criss-cross word games known in his native land of Slovakia as krizovka, riddles and philosophical conundrums, optical illusions, and sleight-of-hand tricks: all beguiled him and, so the Count came to believe, each of these puzzles was related to the others by some hidden affinity, some universal pattern that he had not yet uncovered. Their solutions hinted at a vague shape, like the scattered place names on a mariner’s chart that trace the edge of an unmapped continent. The philosophers of the age were asking why or how God, perfect Being, had created an imperfect world, a world which at the same time the new science was comparing to an intricate machine of uncertain purpose. Perhaps the answer to such questions could be found in these seemingly innocent diversions of the intellect. Was not the mind itself, the Count conjectured, a composite engine of messy animal imperfection and clockwork order?

Yet if there were a single solution to the infinite puzzlement of the world, the young Count Ostrov had been forced to abandon the search for it. In the tradition of his forefathers he had taken up the sabre and spent his life on horseback battling the encroaching Turks. At the time the thought did not occur to him that he might make some other choice. One of his ancestors, after all, was legendary for having decreed that when he died, his skin should be fashioned into a drum to call his descendants to arms. Another still led his men into battle after an exploding shell had blinded him.

Now the Count indulged himself in puzzles as he had never been able to in his youth.

He had trompe l’oeil doors and windows painted on walls. Filled rooms with unusual clocks and other marvellous trinkets and curiosities: refracting crystals and magic lanterns, miniature cranes and water wheels, ingenious traps for mice and other vermin. The few dinner guests who stopped at the castle over the years were required to solve riddles before they were allowed to eat.

We are little airy Creatures
All of different Voice and Features;
One of us in Glass is set,
One of us you’ll find in Jet.
Another you may see in Tin,
And the fourth a Box within.
If the fifth you should pursue
It can never fly from you.

He hired servants who were what he called human riddles. Massive-jawed giants, dwarves, beings of indeterminate age or sex, boneless contortionists, and people with misshapen or extra limbs. Many of the menial tasks in and around the castle were, however, performed by ingenious mechanisms installed in the castle by inventors from all over Europe. Count Ostrov dreamed of a castle in which there would be no living servants at all, but despite many attempts he had not yet succeeded in having a machine fashioned that could prepare roasted larks just the way he liked them.

Not long after the Peace of Passarowitz, the Count found his cherished seclusion threatened by another kind of invasion: that of the document men. The castle was besieged by government functionaries toting satchels bulging with documents, rolled-up maps under their arms, maps which they spread out on his huge oak desk to show him what the Imperial Survey Office and the Superintendency of Frontiers had jointly decided: the River Vah now formed the revised boundary between the Duchy of Transmoravian Bohemia and the Principality of Upper Hungary.

Like a vast bloodstain the empire had changed shape once again. And once again, as so many times before, the land of Slovakia, like a slaughtered ox, had been sliced up the middle.

In consequence, the document men told the Count, although your forests, fields, and vineyards are all situated in Bohemia, this castle stands precisely on the border with Hungary, and thus falls into two administrative districts.

Which means? the Count growled, stroking his moustache.

Which means that Your Excellency is now subject to the duties, excises, levies, and fiduciary responsibilities pertaining to both states.

Which means, the Count said, stabbing a finger at the dotted line that bisected his homeland, every time a pheasant is killed and plucked at my back door, roasted in the kitchen, and carried out to me on the front terrace, another coin will be plucked from my purse.

He argued that by their own logic, his castle did not in fact exist, as an entire castle, in either Bohemia or Hungary, and thus should be exempt from taxation altogether, and from any other meddling in his affairs, for that matter. The document men plunged into their law tomes and surfaced with an obscure ninety-year-old lex terrae stipulating that a fugitive could not be shot at by soldiers from either of two neighbouring nations as long as he stood precisely on the border. For if he be wounded in a leg that stands in one realm, the statute read, some of the blood he sheds will of necessity flow from that part of him residing in the other, the which transfer of vital humour clearly falls under the Unlawful Conveyance of Spirituous Liquors Act. Such a man, in other words, remained suspended in legal and political limbo for as long as he took not a single step in either direction. And so it appeared that by analogy the Count’s argument for autonomy was viable. Yet the document men insisted that an exemption of this kind could only take effect in the improbable circumstance that there were no separate, self-contained rooms in the Castle Ostrov.

Just as the several parts of a man’s body blend together seamlessly, they reasoned, so your castle would have to be a space in which, for example, no one could say exactly where the gaming room ended and the chapel began.

At that moment Count Ostrov had the great revelation of his life. Not only would he fill rooms with oddities and brain-teasers, he would transform the castle itself into a devious labyrinth, a riddle in three dimensions, a giant puzzle.

Nineteen years were devoted to this grand design. In the world beyond the castle, peace gave way once again to war. The Turks retook Belgrade and were rumoured to be preparing for a march on Vienna, where the newly crowned empress Maria Theresa, young and inexperienced, was already under siege by Frederick of Prussia and his opportunistic allies. Armies tramped once again across Europe, cannonballs flew and villages burned, and during a brief lull in the conflagration the document men returned to inform the Count that the border had been renegotiated and moved, freeing him (at least until the next war) from the threat of dual taxation. He treated the document men to a sumptuous dinner for their trouble (complete with the obligatory riddles), dismissed them from his thoughts and went on with his project.

Dry goods, cookware, clothing, furniture were gathered from their respective niches and redistributed throughout the castle. Ancient walls were knocked down and centuries-old doors taken off their hinges. Fixtures were unfixed, immovables became movables. There were windows set into floors and ceilings, inaccessible doors halfway up walls, winding passageways that circled back upon themselves or led to seemingly impassable barriers of stone that would slide away with the touch of an ingeniously concealed catch. Then came the tables, chairs, and beds mounted on rails in the floor, the mezzanines that lowered themselves into subterranean crypts, the revolving salons on platforms filled with halves of chairs, divans and settees whose other halves would be found along farflung galleries amid a clutter of incompatible household objects.

The workings of the castle were made even more complex by the Count’s insistence that although the rooms merged, there would be no such intermingling when it came to social classes. Once every hour through the night, the Count’s bed, and that of his daughter, Irena, left their temporary chambers and roamed the castle on their iron rails, in the morning ending up where they began. Despite this nocturnal meandering, the Count saw to it that neither of them came near the areas reserved for the servants. For their part, the servants learned to remain as unobtrusive as possible when they went about their tasks. Their presence was a constant reminder to the Count that he had not yet succeeded in creating a castle capable of functioning on its own without constant human intervention. As they made their daily peregrinations, the servants would conceal themselves behind moving pieces of furniture, or take circuitous routes that kept them well away from where the Count and his infrequent guests were to be found. Eventually he hired a Venetian metallurgist who fashioned automatons to take over some of the castle’s more repetitive chores, and to these creations he gave the Slovak name for peasant labourers. There was a robotnik that polished silverware, a robotnik that folded bedsheets, a robotnik that woke the Count every morning by playing his favourite folk melodies on the violin.

The intended result was that the castle seemed scarcely inhabited by human souls.

But the crowning achievement of the Count’s great labour was undoubtedly the library. A Scottish inventor, at enormous expense, designed a system of hidden tracks, chains, and pulleys, driven by water and steam, to create a ceaseless migration of bookcases that without warning would sink into the walls or disappear behind sliding wooden panels. Others dropped through trapdoors in the ceiling or rose from concealed wells in the floors. The entire castle in effect became the library, and no private space was inviolable. A guest at the castle might be luxuriating in a perfumed bath, or lecherously pursuing a servant when, with a warble of unseen gears, a seemingly solid partition would slide back and a bookcase or a reading desk would trundle past, the Count himself often hobbling in its wake, consulting his watch, oblivious to anything but the timing and accuracy of the furniture’s progress.

As volumes began to arrive in parcels, boxes, and crates, they were unpacked, inventoried, and given a first cursory examination by the Count’s daughter, Irena.

When Count Ostrov first returned from Prince Eugene’s campaign, Irena was in the care of her nurses, and so she remained until the day the women came to him in terror to tell him that the child had fallen ill and was near death. He descended like a thundercloud on the nursery, scattered the women, and finally got to know his daughter.

Never one to place trust in doctors, the Count installed Irena in his own bed, consulted the few medical treatises in his possession, and set to work to cure the disease himself. He spent a sleepless week preparing herbal concoctions and force-feeding them to the child, who immediately threw most of them up all over the blankets. He had her shivering body swathed in reeking medicinal gauzes. She was steamed, plastered, and bled.

Irena recovered, but the legacy of the illness, or the cure, was a weakened spine that left her unable to hold herself upright. Without the support of a pillow or someone’s arm she would collapse like a cloth doll. Eventually the Count had the girl fitted with a corset of steel bands, hammered into a poised, properly feminine shape by the castle blacksmith.

It was also at this time that the Count realized Irena was old enough to read and write, and so might be of some use to him in his never-ending work. One morning he had her brought to his study.

He handed her a small Bible.

Read some of that.

Yes, Father.

She opened the book and then looked up.

What shall I read?

What you find there.

He listened while she read from Deuteronomy, with quiet confidence, never once faltering. The secret things belong unto the Lord our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law…. He stopped her after a few minutes and gestured to the quill, inkhorn, and paper that sat on his desk.

Now write it out.

She set the Bible down, picked up the quill, dipped it in ink and began to write. After a moment he noticed that she was not looking at the book.

You know the entire passage by heart.

Yes, Father.

You must have read it before.

No.

He tested her and found that she was telling the truth. And so Irena became the permanent replacement for the string of secretaries who had attempted to live up to the Count’s expectations and had either been dismissed in a downpour of abuse or had seen such a moment coming and fled in the night.

A quiet, serious child, Irena had, not surprisingly, grown into a quiet, serious young woman. She did not greatly resemble her mother, the Count was relieved to see. The memory of the beautiful young woman to whom he had scarcely spoken during the long years of his campaigning tormented him. Irena had the same thick russet hair tinged with gold, but her eyes were sea-green rather than topaz, and her face, no matter how closely he scrutinized it while she wrote the letters he dictated, remained out of focus, difficult to see.

When she was seventeen, Irena accompanied her father on one of his infrequent visits to the Imperial Court. No matrimonial offers materialized, but at a grand ball an elderly Hungarian noblewoman took Irena aside and told her to be thankful for her unusual looks.

Ours is the sort of beauty that attracts unusual men, who are of course the only men worth knowing.

In his lucid moments the Count was aware that Irena’s unmarried state had more to do with the quality of the young men who were dragged by their avaricious fathers to the castle in the hope of a hefty dowry. Not one of these potential husbands read anything other than the numbers on playing cards, and that, in Irena’s eyes, was a fatal defect. They talked of hunting, horses, and war, and when these thin rivulets of conversation dried up, they talked not at all.

In the end, when it came to his only surviving child, the Count found himself powerless to enforce his will, and so Irena remained unmarried at the worrisome age of twenty-four.

She was rarely seen without a book in hand, and in the evenings the Count would often find her motionless near a lamp or a candle, stealing a quiet moment of reading before resuming her unending duties. My little moth, he whispered to her affectionately when he found her like this. Always hovering near the light.

As the library grew, Irena submitted her report on the shipments of books to her father, who approved or rejected each item and then allowed Irena to arrange the chosen few on the shelves, according to his deliberately arcane bibliographic system.

Almost every day shipments of books arrived from near and far. While unpacking a crate sent from Boston, Irena discovered that one of the books had been hollowed out inside, and within, another smaller book lay nested. The outermost cover was engraved with a title.

A Conjectural Treatise on Political Economy.

Irena opened the cover of the inner book, and found within its cavity yet another book even smaller, and within it, another, and yet another within that, reminding her of the dolls-within-dolls crafted by the local village toymaker. The innermost volume, its soft leather cover slightly curled, rested snugly in her palm like a tiny seashell. Only with the aid of a magnifying glass was she able to decipher the single sentence which made up the entire content of the smallest book.

The great do devour the little.

Dutifully Irena took this object of ingenious trickery to her father.

It’s a joke, a pun, a riddle, he cried. But not even the hairsplitters from the Imperial Court would disqualify it as an actual, functioning book.

Irena handed her father the printer’s catalogue, where his other books, both finished and projected, were described.

A Book Impervious to Fire
Knives from Persia
Memoirs of the Sibyl at Cumae
A book of mirrors is in the works at this time …

The Count turned the pages with an impatient flick of his finger, his eyes darting up and down the neat columns of print.

My magnifying glass, quickly, the Count said.

On the last page of the Conjectural Treatise he discovered the microscopic publisher’s imprint, under the device of a phoenix amid flames.

“Vitam Mortuo Reddo”
N. Flood, Printer and Bookseller London

Write to this fellow, the Count ordered his daughter. We must bring him here.

The river was as still as glass on the wintry night that Nicholas Flood approached the island. The castle, perched on its slick wet rock, seemed to ripple like a watery reflection in the heated air from the barge’s brazier, so that it looked to Flood as though reflection and castle had changed places.

He felt his breast pocket, where he kept the letter Countess Irena had written to him, folded in a cream-coloured envelope with a seal of red wax bearing the impression of the Count’s odd coat of arms, a ribbon twisted into a loose knot above two crossed swords.

Dusting the snow off his hat, Flood jumped from the deck of the barge and climbed the wide stairs to the portico, his ascent watched from both sides by a row of winged stone lions with the faces of women.

He looked back once at the Slovak boatmen already busy unloading the crates of his equipment onto the pier. He had travelled with them for days up the placid Danube and then the foaming, sinuous Vah. Not knowing a word of their language, he had shared their leathery bread and thin, over-peppered cabbage soup, hummed along to the sad and lovely melodies they sang in the evenings. They had not been curious about his unmarked crates, and now hard at work ridding the barge of them, the men did not spare him a glance. By climbing these stairs he had vanished to another plane of existence.

The Countess Irena met him in front of the doors with what she told him was the traditional offering to favoured guests, a glass of slivovice and a kiss of welcome. The colourless plum liquor burned pleasantly as it slid into his belly, warming his chilled and weary body. But the brief touch of this young noblewoman’s lips left his wind-scoured cheek throbbing with another sort of heat. Irena herself seemed undisturbed by this sudden intimacy, and calmly ordered the clustered servants to see to Flood’s baggage. That is how she kisses every guest, he decided.

– How was your journey? she asked him in faltering English as they passed into the torchlit entrance hall. Their shadows rose above them into a loft of darkness.

– Uneventful, Flood answered. The way I like them.

He did not speak of the dreary voyage in the Count’s strange ship, an antiquated argosy that had taken him circuitously by sea to the mouth of the Danube. It was less dangerous and less costly, the ship’s captain had explained, to pass through the eye of the Ottoman Empire than to attempt an overland journey across the plague-stricken, robber-haunted roads of the continent. The Count, he also learned, was something of an inventor and had installed a system of steam-driven winches that controlled the braces and the halyards. This meant that only a skeleton crew was needed to man the ship, and so Flood spent most of the journey in solitude, feeling as though he were sailing alone to the end of the world.

– My father has shut down the castle’s machinery for the night, Irena said.

She led Flood through a dark and tortuous passageway where votive candles glimmered from niches in the walls. Irena’s blue silk gown rippled in the changeable light like water. They climbed a curving staircase which caused Flood to stumble. When he glanced down at his feet he saw the reason: the height and width of each stair was decreasing as they ascended.

They went along another tunnel of fitfully illuminated blackness. When Irena spoke next she turned to look at him, her pale aquamarine eyes reflecting the candlelight. She seemed to him like one of the flames taken human form.

– My father wishes you to be comfortable, she said. Be prepared, however, for a few surprises in the morning.

They had apparently arrived at his chamber, although he had not noticed a doorway and saw only a bed and the indistinct shapes of panelled walls.

– May you have a restful night, Irena said. She lit the torch in the sconce attached to one of the bedposts and left him.

Even after Flood had undressed and sunk with relief into the depths of his vast, chilly bed, he kept putting a hand to his cheek in amazement. Finally he sat up, dug her letter out of his pocket, unfolded it, and smoothed out its soft creases.

To Nicholas Flood, printer and bookseller, from the Countess Ostrova,

Dear sir, It is with pleasure that I discharge the office appointed to me by my father, in offering you the following terms of employment….

He had answered her letter on an impulse. He hadn’t needed to. His painstakingly crafted, expensive novelties sold well, leaving him with no desire to crank out the heaps of pamphlets, travelogues, and fat novels that a growing reading public clamoured for. Every year he sent a catalogue to the Frankfurt book fair, boasting of new wonders to come. Impossible books that he could not imagine creating. And yet somehow he always found a way to turn his mad ideas into actual books that could be held in the hand.

No, he hadn’t needed to come. But here he was. Transported a thousand miles from home by a letter.

Who was she? he had wondered the day he first read her elegant greeting. To conjure up a Bohemian countess, he resorted to the little he knew of the nobility, a patchwork of fact and conjecture that had been sewn together more out of reading than experience. From the remembrance of some of his more salacious commissions he constructed a haughty duchess, a soft white body armoured in boned taffeta. A stabbing glance of disdain giving way to purrs of delight once blood had been drawn.

He folded the letter, tucked it back in its envelope, and blew out the candle.

Lying awake in the dark, Flood thought back to what she had said about the castle’s machinery. He remembered the bizarre ship, with its wheezing steam pipes and squealing pulleys, and he guessed that something similar awaited him in the morning. Closing his eyes and squirming deeper into the bedclothes, he remembered with drowsy amusement how soundly he had slept on that voyage, lulled by the ever-present vibration of the machines. Before he left London he had consulted Bostridge’s New Orthographical Atlas for the location of the River Vah and found it at last, after his finger had made a meandering peregrination over mountain ranges and through forests, there, an inky rivulet issuing from the remote Carpathians. The nearest large place name on the map, he had been delighted to see, was the city of Pressburg. This seemed a good omen, although the Count’s ship, at his first glimpse of it on the Thames dockside, dampened his enthusiasm for the adventure and gave him his first doubts.

He closed his eyes, exhaustion plunging him swiftly towards sleep. Through the halls of his dreams stalked a red-haired young woman in a white shift. He followed her down a tunnel lined with sphinxes, while all around them some vast hidden engine rumbled and throbbed.

He awoke to find his mattress shuddering beneath him. Fearing some calamity – an earthquake, a flood, a peasant revolt – he parted the heavy crimson curtains. His chamber, if there had indeed been one, had vanished and his bed was moving along a curving passageway into a spacious hall, gilded and corniced, lined on one side with deep window alcoves pouring ice-light. From a vaulted firmament of cloudscape and cherubs hung a chandelier, a bloated glass spider. A tall pier glass stood between each alcove, and in the sudden bedaz-zlement of reflected brilliance Flood did not at first see the elderly man in an old-fashioned campaign wig and hussar’s uniform, sitting at a table giving orders to a small group of liveried servants. The old man glanced at Flood’s bed arriving and clapped his hands twice sharply.

The assembly broke up. Servants and their wavering mirror-twins hurried towards one another and then all these moving bodies, both real and reflected, vanished with a ripple as concealed doors silently opened and closed like the valves of some giant undersea creature. The old man, alone now in the centre of the great hall, beckoned to the printer, who still had not emerged from his refuge behind the bedcurtains.

– Good morning, Mr. Flood. Welcome to Hrad Ostrovy. I trust you slept well. No need to be alarmed. All is functioning as it should. Come, join us for breakfast.

Flood ducked back behind the curtains, searched frantically, and then stuck his head out again.

– Your Excellency, I haven’t got my clothes.

The Count raised a finger.

– Yes. Just a moment.

A panel in the ceiling above Flood’s head slid open. A wicker basket was winched down to him by unseen hands. He took the basket off the hook from which it hung and found inside it his clothing, discarded in a heap at the foot of the bed last night and now cleaned, pressed, and perfumed. By the time he had hurriedly pulled on his shirt, waistcoat, breeches and stockings and had climbed cautiously down from the bed, the Count was hunched over the table, busily attacking his breakfast.

Irena had joined him, Flood was alarmed to see. And a man somewhat older than himself, strikingly handsome, wearing the skullcap and black cassock of a cleric, his long raven hair tied back in a queue.

The Count greeted Flood this time with a hearty grunt and offered him a less opulent and noticeably shorter chair than his own.

– I gather you were still asleep when the shaving machine stopped by your bed. That would have been … six-forty-five, by my reckoning. You didn’t hear the bell?

– The bell? I –

– You’ve met my daughter, the Count said.

– Good morning, Mr. Flood.

– And this is the Abbé de Saint-Foix, from Quebec.

– Of course, Flood said, startled, the name immediately familiar to him before he knew why. The writer of – what was the book called? He had never met anyone quite this famous, and all at once found himself red-faced and groping for words.

– All Europe, he tried, is talking about your novel – how do you address an abbé? – Monsieur.

The Abbé acknowledged the compliment with a smile and a barely perceptible nod of his head.

– Have you read the Abbé’s book? the Count asked Flood.

– Not yet, Excellency.

– Well, I have. I never read made-up stories, as a rule. They are, to my palate, mere concoctions of spun sugar, but since the Abbé’s conte philosophique speculates on ideas of interest to me, I made an exception.

The printer sat down, disoriented and still dazed with sleep. As he turned at the sound of his bed trundling slowly back down the way it had come, a wheeled tray laden with dishes rolled up beside him. Numbly he took a platter heaped with pig trotters, spiced eggs, and an assortment of braided, looped, and knotted pastries. The tray clattered out again.

Flood glanced cautiously at the Count, intent upon the pastry roll he was buttering. Conscious of the fact that he had not yet washed or shaved, the printer could not bring himself to look directly at Irena. Out of the corner of his eye he took in her primrose-coloured morning gown, the lace cuffs embroidered with tiny silver violets, her quilted white satin petticoat that flashed in the light as she reached across the table to pour her father some coffee. Catching sight of his dishevelled hair in the polished silver coffeepot, he thanked Providence that at least he was in clean clothes. Mumbling a quick grace over his food, he picked up a knife and fork and began to push things around on his plate, still too overwhelmed to dare plunging a utensil into anything.

He was so dazed he almost did not hear the Count asking him the same question Irena had asked the night before. He stammered a polite reply.

– And what did you think of my ship?

– It took some getting used to, Excellency.

– Did it? I confess that answer surprises me, coming from someone like yourself.

– It does?

– Light am I, the Count intoned, yet strong enough to carry a man away. Small am I, yet within me multitudes sleep, waiting to be awakened. Silent am I, yet my words cross great distances and never falter.

– A book, Flood said after a moment’s thought.

– Not long ago, the Count said, brushing at the flakes of pastry lodged in his moustache, I purchased a library from a retired colonel in Boston. One of its volumes was a book of yours.

Another panel in the ceiling opened and a servant in red livery appeared on a descending platform, vigorously brushing a pair of knee-length riding boots. He caught Flood’s eye and, with a lopsided grin that spoke of resignation in the face of madness, disappeared through a trapdoor in the floor.

The Count dug in a pocket of his dressing gown and pulled out the Conjectural Treatise on Political Economy.

– I’m sure you recognize this.

Flood nodded.

– One of my first commissions. For a philosophical society in Dublin.

– Well, somehow or other it found its way to New England. I would be willing to wager that your so-called philosophical society is in reality a revolutionary cabal. With chapters on both sides of the Atlantic.

– I would know nothing about that, Flood said. I print what I am asked to print. What people do with the books after they leave my shop is their own business.

He quickly bit into a bread roll, alarmed at the resentment that had slid into his voice.

– Of course, the Count said. What goes on in your nation’s disgruntled colonies concerns me very little as well. To tell you the truth, I was surprised to learn that there are such things as libraries in the American wilderness. I had always thought it inhabited only by painted savages and woodsmen.

While he was speaking, the Count had been removing each nested volume, until the innermost book sat in his palm.

– The great do devour the little. Ingenious.

– Excellency, I am –

– Indeed you are, Mr. Flood. A clever man. My daughter will tell you of my delight when I first saw this.

Flood raised his eyes to Irena.

– We were both very impressed, Father.

– And now, said the Count, at last – he closed his hand slowly around the tiny book – you are here. And I will tell you why. I am building a library like no other. A library of one-of-a-kind volumes, oddities, editions consisting of a single, unique copy. But there is yet, in spite of all my efforts, one book that has always eluded me. Rather than continue to search in vain, however, I’ve decided to have it printed for me.

– You have the manuscript.

– No.

– Then there’s the matter of obtaining copyright, I suppose.

The Count snorted.

– Copyright. That is most amusing. To whet your curiosity, let me say that the text of this book has never been attributed definitively to any known author. And in fact, I’ve never even set eyes on a manuscript. Intrigued?

– And mystified.

– Glad to hear it. I surmised from your work that you would be one to accept a challenge.

Flood bowed his head.

– Your generous offer has –

– Yes, yes, the Count said, scratching at his wig and stirring up a cloud of powder. I have an idea, a chimera, you might say, that I hope you will be able to help me with. The finished work will be my property, of course, although you will be allowed to imprint the colophon with your device. You will find I am not parsimonious with credit where it is due.

– Thank you, Excellency.

The Count returned to his breakfast. Irena lifted a porcelain sauce boat shaped like a Spanish galleon and poised it over Flood’s cup.

– Chocolate?

– Please.

She poured him a full cup of the thick steaming liquid, and it occurred to him he had never had a cup of melted chocolate in his life. He took a trial sip. It was good. Very good. He took another, longer gulp, savouring, then looked up, met the Abbé’s amused gaze, and set his cup down with a clunk.

– Nothing quite like it, the Abbé said. Hearing a voice as smooth as the dark ambrosia he had just tasted, Flood realized these were the first words he had heard the man speak.

– Did you know, the Abbé went on, that to the Aztecs chocolate was a sacred drink? They used to offer it to their most distinguished victims, the ones considered worthy of having their hearts torn from their chests to feed the gods.

Flood let out a nervous, barking laugh and quickly bit into a crescent-shaped pastry. I will not make another sound at this table …

– Here we don’t show our guests such courtesies, Abbé, Irena said. They usually leave with their hearts intact.

– I confess I find that hard to believe, Countess.

Flood glanced back and forth at the two of them, aware of a world unknown to him, where wit and flattery flew like shuttlecocks. The Abbé set his knife and fork down in the middle of his plate and sat back, stroking his immaculately shaven chin. Apparently he hadn’t been so unexpectedly awakened, and Flood wondered whether he was a guest or a permanent resident. The slightest of smiles hovered at the edges of his full-lipped mouth, the kind of careful almost-smile Flood had seen time and again on men of a certain distinction who desired the services of a skilled and discreet printer. I’m here but I’m not really here.

– My daughter is in charge of the books, the Count said without looking up. She will explain to you how we have arranged everything.

– I will, Father, Irena said.

The Count’s head shot up again.

– Assistants, he said through a mouthful of sausage. I expect, Mr. Flood, you’ll require assistants for the project I have in mind.

– I most often work alone, Flood said. But I would certainly welcome any –

– I have just the fellows for the job, the Count said, stabbing his fork in Flood’s direction. Wait until you see them.

Glancing into the passageway down which his bed had disappeared, Flood saw a horse being led by a groom. He looked at Irena, whose line of sight also must have included the apparition, but she was busy pouring her father another cup of coffee.

– I see, the Count said, that the brewing machine has finally stopped cranking out that godless Mahometan gruel.

– I made the coffee, Father, Irena said. We tried all morning to repair the faulty valve, but it needs a new –

The Count’s wrinkled hand paddled the air.

– We will have a look at it later.

– If I may say so, Excellency, Flood ventured, I am more concerned about where I am to work. I would imagine I could be most productive if a room were set aside –

– Set aside? the count growled, sitting back in his chair and dabbing at his lips with a white silk napkin. A room set aside, the fellow says. Young man, have you any inkling – Has no one, my daughter or some other member of my household, explained to you the workings of this castle?

– I arrived quite late last night, and as yet no one has explained anything to me. In any case, a printing press must be bolted down to prevent jarring and shaking.

– Of course, the Count said, blinking. He tilted his head back and gulped down his coffee. Of course. I will have my head carpenter discuss the matter with you later today. I am sure we will be able to arrive at some kind of suitable compromise. In the meantime, my daughter will provide you with a basic plan of the castle, and the latest timetable, to help you navigate.

– I’ll see to those now, Father, Irena said, rising and nodding to the Abbé and Flood in turn. She glided noiselessly away, her long gown concealing her feet so that she seemed to slide across the floor like one of the castle’s mechanisms. There was something in her carriage, Flood noticed for the first time. An odd stiffness.… He followed her with his eyes until a deep, sonorous bong, more a felt vibration than a sound, jolted him back to his former circumspection. He glanced quickly at the Abbé, who was regarding him now with a slightly more corporeal smile. As the reverberations of the sound died away, one of the pier glasses slid upward and a wall, panelled and wainscotted, began to slide outward into the room. At the same moment, another pier glass on the other side of the room also opened and a second wall began sliding towards the first.

A movement from the Abbé drew Flood’s attention back to the table.

– I will take my leave as well, Excellency, the Abbé said, rising and brushing at his black cassock.

– Off to work with you then, my handsome friend, the Count said over his shoulder. You cannot disappoint those fair readers who are no doubt panting in their corsets waiting for your next offering.

The Abbé bowed slightly and then turned to Flood.

– I hope we will have more opportunity for conversation. Our nations may be rattling spears at one another, but that is no reason for us to do likewise.

– Of course not.

The Abbé nodded, bowed again to the Count, turned smartly on his heel, and walked between the moving walls, which came together behind him with a soft click.

– Time, the Count said, checking the gold watch that hung on a heavy chain around his neck. Give us time, Mr. Flood. You will come to appreciate what at the moment seems only utter chaos.

From somewhere unseen a clavier struck a trio of spindly opening chords, and then a lute, a horn, and a high, plaintive voice joined in. Flood, who had never cared for music, found the noise vaguely irritating. Another distraction within a distraction, like everything else in this castle.

– Now to the heart of the matter, the Count said, rubbing his hands together. One of the possible origins for the name of my people, Mr. Flood, is the word slovo; that is, the word word. Thus we Slovaks, one might say, are the People of the Word. But what irony that our national literature scarcely exists. The republic of letters has no ambassador from our country. Tell me, can you name an imperishable classic by a Slovak author?

– Well, I –

– Exactly. The Abbé asked me the other day to recommend a good Slovak novel, and I had to tell him there were none. Not just no good Slovak novels. No novels whatsoever. Almost everything we read, everything we say, everything we think, comes to us in someone else’s language.

He sat back, fingering his white silk napkin. The ceiling above his head opened and with a groan of gears another wall began ponderously to descend. The Count sprang forward again so suddenly that Flood jerked backward before he could stop himself.

– Did we Slovaks utter the first word? No. Will we utter the last word? Not likely. Those glorious absolutes are reserved for the youngest and the oldest of nations. Consult any history book and where do you find us? We are a footnote people, briefly mentioned in vast tracts about others. All too often I glimpse our name in an index, I flip to the page and am informed that such and such an event also affected the Slovaks and the What-have-yous. Well, we are going to do something about that, you and I. When we are finished it will be possible to say that the Slovaks are truly the People of the Word.

The descending wall came to rest and immediately folded in the middle to form a corner. The immense hall Flood’s bed had rolled into earlier had vanished, and they were now in a small rectangular room, into which bookshelves began to rise from the floor. The Count smoothed out his silk napkin on the tabletop. He folded it in half, then in half again, his eyes not for a moment leaving the printer’s.

After several folds he held up a thick, compact white bundle.

– I want you, Mr. Flood, to create for me an infinite book.

– Infinite?

– Nekonečný. Unendlich. Sans fin. A book without end. Or beginning, for that matter.

The Count’s wrist flicked and the folded napkin snapped open like a sail catching the wind.

– The way you go about it is up to you. My one stipulation is that you bring every ounce of your native wit, imagination, and cleverness to this undertaking. No pasteboard trickery, no feeble jokes. I have shelves of that kind of thing already. No, this is to be a book that truly reflects what I have accomplished here. A book that poses a riddle without answering it.

– I can’t think how one could –

– Don’t try to solve the problem right now. Infinity can’t be pounced upon. It is like a walled town that must be observed from concealment, reconnoitred, mined carefully from beneath. You’re a young man. You’re still on friendly terms with time. For the moment, let’s just get you settled in. You can work on other things to begin with, like your book of mirrors.

The Count pushed his empty plate away and leaned back in his chair, nodding his head in time to the music. After a while he turned back to Flood.

– This one is called Tancovala. On she danced. Crystalline, aren’t they? From Vienna, but they do know the old songs of my land. Which proves that something worthwhile may arise now and again from the Royal Capital of Mud.

Flood opened his mouth to speak but said nothing. The Count’s hawklike eyes fastened on his face.

– Long ago I thought I was creating this castle of riddles in order to outwit a handful of government lackeys and thus protect my purse. But lately I understand more clearly what I have really been doing.

He clicked open his pocketwatch, frowned at what it told him, and tucked it away again.

– This is not a castle, this is a system. The priests and the madmen make systems out of dreams. The writers, like our handsome Abbé there, make systems out of words. I have made this system, my system, out of stone and wood and metal and glass. And why? To what purpose? Push your chair back.

– Pardon me?

– Push your chair back, I say. Quickly now.

Flood did as he asked, and at the same moment the musicians abruptly ceased playing. At Flood’s feet a narrow gap opened in the floor, a slot stretching across the floor of the room and bisecting it into two hemispheres. With a whirr of unseen machinery, a huge metal bar, an arrow, a room-length, Brobdingnagian clock hand rose out of the slot, sending Flood scrambling from his chair. When the barbed point had risen to his eye level, something subterranean and metallic went clank and the gigantic ictus stopped, wavering slightly.

– The planets, the Count began, leaning sideways to sight along the arrow’s diagonal while glancing again at his watch. The planets, the starry firmament, the unfathomable abysses of darkness and time through which we plummet without knowing how or why, the entire universe, I have come to realize, is a vast, unbounded book of riddles. A book written in the elusive and unutterable language of God.

The Count snapped shut his watch.

– What I want is nothing more or less than my own personal edition.

As Flood discovered, there were areas of the castle where one function appeared to predominate over others. The head carpenter, a curly-headed young Savoyard named Turini, directed him to his proposed workplace, a gallery circling the rim of a central cavity. The immense hole, as the carpenter explained, was originally excavated to allow the Count’s engineers easier access to the main clockworks far below. As the complexity of the castle’s design increased, this great cylindrical shaft had become a central rerouting point for bookcases and other furniture. As Flood watched, leaning over the balustrade, the cases far below him swivelled ponderously, changed direction, dropped or rose to other levels on their way through the castle. At times they passed over and through the gallery where he stood, as he learned when the carpenter pushed him abruptly to one side to avoid being run down by a glass-fronted map cabinet approaching from behind.

Down the middle of the gallery’s long sweeping curve ran a sunken rail along which a metallic angel of death glided (counter-clockwise, Flood noted) with lance raised on high. Under Flood’s direction, Turini pried loose the life-sized memento mori and replaced it with Flood’s press and work table, mounted on a small platform attached to the sunken rail in the floor. The undercarriage glided along smoothly enough that vibrations would not be a problem, except on the stroke of the hour, when everything jarred to a halt. Turini ran a callused hand through his hair and suggested that when Flood heard the clockworks beneath him tensing to strike, he would have to cease work for the next few moments. An annoyance, certainly, but not an insurmountable obstacle.

– That’s what His Excellency told me, the carpenter said, when I first came to work for him. No obstacle is insurmountable. So I’ve set my sights on Darka, the contortionist. She’s deaf and dumb, it’s true, but what a beauty.

Flood was allowed to keep his stacks of paper and casks of ink in one place, a cabinet he could reach by climbing down a ladder into the central shaft. In order to reach what he needed he soon found he had to plan his path carefully through the moving labyrinth of bookshelves.

Turini helped Flood assemble the press, a device he had never seen before, and praised its ingenious construction.

– Before there was a machine to make books, he mused, how did men get smart enough to invent one?

By early evening the uncrating, assembling, and arranging was complete, and Flood wiped his grimy hands on a cloth and stepped back to appraise, for what had to be the thousandth time, the ungainly instrument of his livelihood.

We are both out of place here. As if aware of its incongruous presence in such surroundings the ancient workhorse seemed to hunker down before him, a faithful beast of burden awaiting the next load it was to bear.

Not for the first time he marvelled at what an odd composite creature a printing press was. With its legs and its stout frame and its various handles and protrusions, it resembled at one and the same time a bed, a pulpit, and an arcane instrument of torture. The weathered wooden timbers had been scored, cracked, water-damaged under leaky roofs, set on fire (once on purpose, by an author given to drink who’d found a typographical error in his book), realigned and repaired again and again. It had been taken apart, hauled to new lodgings, and reassembled countless times before this latest epic remove. Its wood and metal parts had been scrubbed and polished every single day of its existence, and replaced only after all attempts at repair had failed. The longest-surviving timbers, from the time of his great-grandfather the Huguenot exile, had been worn to the rounded smoothness of driftwood. The inscription burned into the underside of the frame, N LaFlotte 1663, had almost disappeared.

In their games of pretend he and Meg had called the press the chimera. It was his word, gleaned from the books of fabulous stories he read to her at bedtime. As always she took everything he said as an article of faith. She truly believed the press was some kind of monster, and was afraid to go into the print shop. He remembered her sudden tears when he pretended he had been turned to stone by an evil spell. She had lost him.

The press had waited for him like this, he remembered, the day she died. She was eight years old. He was eleven, a child watching another child die. Before he began his apprenticeship in the print shop they had been constant companions. While his father worked late hours, he was the one who cooked her supper, put her to bed, and read to her from the Greek myths, La Fontaine’s Fables, The Thousand and One Nights. They invented an imaginary kingdom in which everyday things blossomed with wonder. The rooms of the house were transformed into ogres’ lairs and the mossy caves of sorcerers. Their father was the king, but his printing press stymied them for a long time. It seemed their father was both its master and its victim, and so the press could not quite be any one thing.

He and his father sat by her bedside day and night while the smallpox slowly consumed her, burning her to ash before their eyes. They washed the bleeding sores that covered her arms and legs, and finally her face. When she woke screaming from the fever nightmares he soothed her with her favourite stories. His efforts to comfort her at last became empty when she went blind.

He remembered most of all the smell of her dying. In the end she became a thing to him, the source of the graveyard stench that turned her sickroom into an antechamber of hell. He hated her for what she had become, what she had done to both of them.

On the last day she drifted in and out of delirium, shivering, babbling nonsense, and then thrashing awake, moaning that she was on fire. Papa, please make it stop. He ran through the shop to fetch cool water from the pump in the court, and each time he passed the press he was aware of its silent waiting presence, mutely abiding all.

They sat at her bedside through the night until her tortured breathing finally ebbed away. Still he remained kneeling beside her, exhausted, his heart worn as thin as paper. After some time he heard the creak of the press screw from the shop. He hadn’t noticed when his father had left the bedroom, but he was gone, already back at work finishing his latest commission. After listening for a while to the sounds from the shop, he finally left Meg and went to join his father at the press.

The work went on. Every day since then, and here, too, in this castle that was like something he and Meg might have dreamed. Flood took a deep breath and tied on his apron.

There was a noise behind him and, thinking it was one of the bookcases, he stepped nimbly aside.

– I’m sorry if I startled you, the Countess said. Sometimes I forget what this place can do to newcomers,

He was glad to see her again, the only sane soul, it seemed, in this madhouse. He hoped she would linger and talk for a while, but she merely asked him if he was satisfied with the arrangements. He told her that he was, and then wondered why he had, since he most definitely was not. She said she would inform her father that all was well, and turned to leave.

– Once I’ve finished a book, Flood said quickly, stepping down from the press platform, all I will have to do is deposit it on one of the passing shelves.

Irena frowned.

– I’m afraid no one is allowed to add or remove anything from these bookcases, she said, without my father’s approval.

– I had thought from what the Count said that you were in charge of the library

– That is how it works in theory, she said with a smile. In fact, my father inspects everything that gets done here, even down to how many mice the cats are catching. Nothing escapes his notice for long.

– Does he ever sleep?

– He does. He says sleep has its uses too. Dreams give him some of his best ideas.

She turned to examine the press, and he knew somehow that there was more she wished to say. He wondered how he might encourage her to speak, and drew closer.

– Don’t worry, Mr. Flood, I wasn’t going to touch anything.

– I didn’t think –

– I wondered, she said, if I might be allowed to watch you at work from time to time. I read a lot of books but I’ve never seen one being made.

As he quickly consented, the great clock struck the hour. Irena looked up, the eagerness fading from her eyes.

– I must go, she said, stepping away from the platform. I will return tomorrow.

– Wait, he said, suddenly remembering something that had been nagging at him all day. Now he hesitated, confounded by the delicacy of the question.

– Yes?

– I’m not. I don’t. Could you tell me how to find my bed?

The next morning she brought the assistants the Count had promised him.

One was from the Count’s collection of human puzzles, a nine-year-old boy named Djinn, who had six fingers on each hand. Even discounting the extra digits, Djinn was the most exotic creature Flood had ever seen. Kinked African hair of a blond hue, coffee-coloured skin, almond-shaped eyes with blue irises. He could speak several languages, some from as far away as China, as well as Arabic, Spanish, and what Flood at first thought was Greek but turned out to be Gaelic. The Count had acquired the boy as a present from a Turkish envoy who visited the castle with a troupe of strolling actors. The Castle Ostrov, as the envoy had guessed, proved to be ideal for the performance of a play involving trapdoors, ghosts, and descending gods. The Count was most impressed, however, with this twelve-fingered boy who plucked a haunting melody on the lute at the play’s close. The troupe reluctantly surrendered Djinn to the Count, at the envoy’s insistence. The actors themselves had found him in the streets of Constantinople but guessed that he was from somewhere much farther away.

– My father, Irena explained, thought Djinn’s fingers could be usefully applied to some aspect of printing.

The boy kept his gaze fixed on her, his mute despair palpable. She was going to leave him here.

The other assistant was an automaton of milky blanc de Chine porcelain and joints of bronze that, when wound with a key, nodded its head, moved its arms, and took a few halting steps. The automaton, clean-shaven and sporting an apple-bright spot of red enamel on each cheek, was dressed in the uniform of a cavalry officer. Kirshner, the Venetian metallurgist, had fashioned the inner workings and installed them in a porcelain body that had been cast at Meissen by the wizard Kaendler.

Ludwig, as Irena called the automaton, was originally designed only to march a few steps and brandish its sword. When her father saw what the machine’s creator was capable of he had him add other functions, and now the automaton could dance a stiff minuet, write a few words with a quill pen, and drink a glass of wine. Ludwig’s limited movements, the Count had thought, might be adaptable to some of the more mechanical press operations. Flood admitted his doubts.

– It can’t respond to my commands.

As he spoke, a bell-like echo of his voice seemed to rattle around inside the automaton, reemerging at last in a buzzing string of words.

– Can tress tomb man.

Flood stepped back, startled.

– Someone’s in there.

Irena shook her head.

– He repeats what you say, but he leaves parts out.

– Reap you tea, the automaton buzzed. Eve arts out.

Irena handed Flood a large brass key.

– The metallurgist was very clever. Certain sustained tones move sensitive weights inside Ludwig, so that you can make him do things by singing to him. Watch.

She leaned towards the automaton’s ceramic ear and hummed a long, wavering note. With a click and a whirr Ludwig’s arm rose, bending at the elbow, until the tips of his fingers touched his tricorn.

To Flood’s surprise, Irena was the one who tinkered with Ludwig’s machinery and adapted him for presswork. She returned in the afternoon with a case of watchmaker’s instruments and an odd brass-plated paper-cutter that she set on his desk and connected to a treadle and a handwheel.

– We designed this, she said, to help you with all of the pages you’ll be producing. You slide your paper in here, like so. These spools fold the sheet and then the blades cut it. And you can adjust the folding and cutting for an eight-, sixteen-, or thirty-two-page sheet.

– We designed this?

– My father and I.

She unscrewed a panel in the automaton’s back and moved aside to let Flood see the secrets of Ludwig’s design. With the tips of a tiny pair of jeweller’s forceps she tapped a toothed copper cylinder ringed with thin disks. Patiently she showed him how a system of these disks, or cams, transferred the rotary motion of the clockwork to the rods and levers that controlled Ludwig’s movements. Depending on which set of cams was put in place, Ludwig’s routine could be altered. There were sets for eating, for swordplay, for dancing. By mixing and rearranging the cams, she explained, she was hoping to approximate the repetitive motions required in printing.

– Can I stop him myself? Flood asked. If he starts to get ahead of me, for example.

– You can hold his arm, yes, but I wouldn’t prevent his motion for too long. He may be a machine, but he can be rather temperamental.

Flood asked her where she had learned such uncommon skills.

– I watched the man who put Ludwig together, she explained, and asked a lot of questions. My father and Ludwig’s creator did not … get along. It occurred to me that, once Signore Kirshner had gone home to Venice, someone here would have to be able to repair these things.

They had drawn close together to examine Ludwig’s inner workings. In the silence after her last words Flood could hear Irena’s breathing. He glanced at the boy, who was watching them with wide eyes.

– Before I got it, Flood said, what was it supposed to do?

– Live.

He detected something in the tone of her strange reply, and then it occurred to him how, in a kind of lifeless parody, the automaton resembled her.

– Ludwig was my brother’s name, she said. I never met him, but my father tells me that this Ludwig is a good likeness.

That afternoon she told him the story of her brother’s death at the Battle of Belgrade, and the Count’s hope that he might resurrect something of his son in the form of a machine.

– That’s why the Abbé de Saint-Foix is here, she said.

In the Abbé’s novel, she explained, the notion was put forth by one of the characters that the human soul might be found in the hair and fingernails. It is well-known that both continue to grow after death, and this astounding fact could be attributed to a residue of the divine spark. She quoted the novel from memory, he was dismayed to see.

– The spirit, in its longing to return to the spiritual realm, ceaselessly flows, like electricity, from the core of the body to the outer regions. The soul, in other words, might at certain times be lodged in a person’s coiffure.

– The idea, Irena said with a smile, has been very popular with fashionable ladies.

– And so has the Abbé, I’ve heard.

– My father, for his part, thinks the idea worth pursuing.

When she spoke of the Count, Flood noticed, her voice was softened with affectionate forbearance. She spoke of how her father had supplied the Abbé with her brother’s topknot. The faded hank of hair that the Count had cut from his son’s head had been mortared into oily dust and mixed with an unguent to grease the joints of the porcelain soldier, in the hope that any glimmer of vitality remaining in the battlefield memento might be transferred to the machine.

– I take it the experiment has been a failure.

Instead of answering, Irena straightened the automaton’s cocked hat and bent to kiss the boy on the forehead.

– Look after them, Mr. Flood.

When the adjustments were completed Ludwig could stand at the press much longer than Flood himself, inking the formes and tirelessly lowering and raising the platen, until his mainspring finally wound down and had to be cranked up again.

The first problem: how might one bind a book without beginning or end? On his third day in the castle Flood paced alongside his moving press and drew up a list of the ways books can be held together:

– with the hands
– with thread
– with hair
– with cloth
– with bone and animal sinews
– with wood
– with paste
– with other books
– with the teeth
– with hope

And even if you could bind such a book, how might the contents be made truly infinite, having been given an enclosing frame? The Count likened infinity to a walled town, but to Flood’s mind it was more like everything that lies outside a walled town. If the text gets over that wall, he wrote in his journal, it spills right out of the book, doesn’t it?

When he was not consulting with the Count about the other volumes he wanted printed in the meantime, Flood compiled a tentative list of possibilities.

• A cylinder of sheets of stiff cardpaper, rotating constantly around a central axle and throwing off infinitely repeated phrases, like the prayer wheels of the holy men of impenetrable Tibet. A reader can never decide that one particular page is the ending or the beginning. Note: this would be unlikely to satisfy the Count’s definition of true infinitude.

• A book that is sealed shut, with the word infinity burned on its wooden front cover. The reader cannot read the book and thus is free to entertain an infinite number of conjectures about the contents. Problem: as above.

• Philosophical idea: For every actual numbered page of the book, there exist hypothetical not-pages that … exist … elsewhere?
  No.

• By some as yet undetermined application of the principles of chemistry on the composition of ink, the printed words are not fixed on the page, but can be rearranged at the reader’s whim.

An ashen rain was falling on the morning the Abbé de Saint-Foix came to see him. Thick runnels of water slimed the panes of the windows, dimming the interior of the castle in a glaucous undersea light. Flood was restless, frustrated by his lack of progress, and did not welcome the interruption of his mood.

– I see you’ve replaced Death, the Abbé said. He was punctual, but not well-liked.

He drifted up to the press platform with a studied nonchalance.

– The Count has asked me to see if I could be of any help.

The thought, bitter and unexpected, lanced across Flood’s mind: Your fraternity was no help when my ancestors were butchered on St. Bartholomew’s Day.

– By all means, he said, setting down the tray of type he was sorting. After all, the infinite would be more your area than mine.

– It depends, the Abbé said, on which infinite you mean.

He gestured to the window.

– How many drops fall, do you think, in a rain shower like this?

– Thousands, Flood said with a shrug. Millions. I have no idea.

– One wouldn’t say, though, that the number must be infinite. Merely indefinite. Unknown. And yet for all the difference it makes to us, the number of drops might as well be infinite. We can never determine for certain that it isn’t.

The Abbé plucked a piece of type from the case on Flood’s table, examined it for a moment, and then dropped it back in its compartment.

– Then there is the useful infinite, Flood said.

– I see you know something of mathematics.

– A little. My father made it part of my training in typography. Geometry, some calculus.

– Where lovely paradoxes bloom like nightshade in the garden of the mind. My fellow Jesuit, Cavalieri, worked out a method for deriving the Volume of a solid object by assuming that a cube, for example, is composed of an infinite number of infinitely thin planes.

The Abbé’s eyes did not blink in unison, Flood noticed. The left lid lagged ever so slightly behind the right, a barely perceptible tic that nevertheless lent to his assured speech a faint suggestion of derangement.

– So, Flood said, if I could print a book with infinitely thin sheets of paper …

– Indeed, the Abbé said, seating himself in the embrasure of the window. But that is not quite what the Count has asked you for, I understand.

– No. He’s left the form of the thing up to me. It’s the content that matters to him. He wants a book that contains everything. A book without beginning or ending.

The Abbé’s eyebrows rose.

– Ah, now, there is your content.

– What is?

– Time. You must get it all into your book.

– I don’t understand.

– As St. Augustine said, If you ask me what time is, I know. If I wish to explain it to you, I know not.

– A riddle worthy of the Count. Just remove the word time.

– What if time is not what we imagine it to be? Not a smooth continuous absolute, the same for everyone.

– You mean something like the fact that right now it’s night on the other side of the earth.

– Not exactly. Perhaps, like the gods of India, time has many faces.

The Abbé tapped idly on the windowpane.

– Perhaps everything really happens at once. What if time is like the rain? We make a path through it, and a few drops touch us and we call that our lives. But if one could slip between the droplets, or gather them all, like water in a well …

Flood rubbed the back of his neck.

– My head is starting to spin. I haven’t had your schooling in these matters.

The Abbé turned away from the window and smiled.

– Which returns me to the thought of how I might assist you, he said. I have in mind certain volumes in the Count’s library which may be of help. We will, of course, need the assistance of the Countess. A remarkable woman. She knows every book in the castle, I believe, by heart.

– Yours, too, Abbé.

– Does she? I almost wish you had not told me so, Mr. Flood. After all, self-possession is difficult enough to achieve in the presence of such a woman, don’t you agree?

At the mention of Irena, the muddied pool in Flood’s thoughts smoothed to a still mirror. He looked at the rivulets of water blindly seeking their way down the dirty windowpanes, and felt an ache of tenderness for the mute, persistent things of the world. He wanted to tell the Abbé that his brief summary was incomplete, that there was another infinity he had neglected to mention, but he knew the words for his intuition, if there were any, would elude him.

Irena met them among the shelves.

– Good morning, gentlemen, she said. Shall we begin?

Armed with the Abbé’s suggestions and Irena’s unerring knowledge of the library they prowled the shelves. Xenophanes and Aristotle. Giordano Bruno’s De l’infinito universo. Newton’s Optics. The Orbis Sensalium Pictus of Comenius. Ancient and recent treatises on alchemy, astrology, and the Abbé’s favourite topic, time. The Aenigmatum of Abu Musa contained tantalizing hints, but the Count’s copy of this extremely rare book contained a hidden clockwork mechanism that turned the thin metal pages at its own set pace. Flood found the attempt to copy intriguing passages left him with little more than broken quills and pinched fingertips.

As they searched, they wandered among the shelves, and as each of them stopped here and there to examine an enticing volume, they drew farther and farther apart, until they found themselves calling to one another from different levels. Flood made his way back down to the last place he had seen Irena vanish among the bookcases, but when he peered around a shelf he saw her with the Abbé, the two of them sharing a laugh. He backed quietly away and waited until they came looking for him.

At the end of the day Flood’s work table was barricaded with a wall of books. He spent that night and the next three days reading, collating and taking notes, gathering and comparing the thoughts of poets, mathematicians, philosophers, and mystics, searching for ideas that might somehow be applied to the physical object known as a book, a finite sequence of words printed upon a finite number of sheets of paper. Invariably he found that what each of these authors had to say about infinity was both too much and not enough.

Hoping at least to organize his acquired material, he decided it was possible to divide his growing swarm of infinities into two main categories:

1) the same thing recurring endlessly;

2) almost the same thing, but not quite, recurring endlessly.

In an argosy of Hellenistic authors he found an amusing diatribe against the reading of novels.

Section XXVII:

• Lassitude during public debates indicates the chronic reader of books full of lies, coincidences, and impossibilities.

• Some of these pernicious works have been known to bring on fits of sneezing, others cause blood to flow from the ears. Those which contain didactic passages may fill the lungs with mucosity and impair breathing.

• Inflammation of the eyes from protracted reading of such works may be alleviated by drinking slightly watered wine.

• Care should be taken of the books given to a pubescent female; if the breasts begin to swell to unusual fullness, reading should cease.

• These noxious books are often hastily bound with pastes derived from the boiling of animal hides. The inferiority of such bindings is usually matched by the worthlessness of the contents.

• Curiously, eunuchs do not read these books, nor do they go bald.

He was intrigued by Sabbatai Donnolo’s comparison of God to a book. If you could cradle this fearful volume in your hand, and were to open it anywhere, beginning, middle, or end, you would find that between any two pages there would be always a third, between any two words there would be always another, between any two letters would be an unheard, invisible letter, a doorway to the void known only to mystics, where reigns a silence so profound that the roar of the entire universe rushes to fill it.

Each morning Irena arrived, took away the books that he had sifted, and brought him new ones. When no one was about, Flood did some searching of his own, often turning up volumes that revealed the Count’s weakness for puns and riddles. The Little Treatise on the Teeth, a disguised case for combs. A fat tome titled Fuel for Enlightening Thought, which turned out to be a solid block of cleverly painted pine.

Yet everything he read and examined, no matter how frivolous or profound, how elliptical or to the purpose, left the completion of his task as remote from the reach of his hands as the moon.

Well and good, he told himself, slamming shut another long-untouched volume that sent up a plume of fine dust. I will carry on. I will go along with this, I will stay here and humour him, as the Abbé does, because it is profitable. And because in so doing I am honing my craft and thus not really taking advantage of anyone.

And because of her.

– Irena Ostrova, Flood whispered to Ludwig later that day, and leaned close to catch the buzzing reply.

– Rain. Trove.

He turned to see Djinn watching him with his steady blue eyes.

He had more or less ignored the boy until now, but Djinn’s extra digits, Flood quickly realized, would be of tremendous help in the laborious composing of type. The problem was that they would have only the bare rudiments of German in common to converse with. Having chosen to print in English to begin with, Flood would have to teach the boy to set type from manuscripts he could not read. It was not long, however, before Djinn had learned to fill and lock up a chase in half the time it took Flood himself.

He could be Mongol, Iroquois, from the Moon, the Count had said, for all he can tell you of his earliest memories. Which, when at last Flood was able to converse with the boy, amounted to little more than a hazily recollected glimpse of green hills beyond the flap of a tent, and in what seemed to be a memory from a slightly later time, his own feet, foreshortened in water, kicking lazily next to those of someone else, a girl who seemed to be a little older than he, since he was listening – but in what language he could not remember – as she instructed him to watch out for the biting turtles.

As the days passed he became familiar enough with the Count’s system to be no longer startled by walls, floors, and people vanishing and popping up where they were not expected. He looked forward to every opportunity to see and talk with Irena, yet often found his attempts frustrated by the metamorphic nature of the castle. On his way to fetch ink or water for cleaning the type, he would glimpse the Countess at the other end of a corridor. Hastily, but with what he hoped was the appearance of nonchalance, he would head in her direction, only to have the corridor bifurcate in front of him so that Irena slipped away down one passage and he was sent stumbling into another. He would wander into an unfamiliar region of the castle from which a servant had to help him find his way back.

Often he leaned back from his work table to see the Count on a higher gallery, circling the central hollow of the castle and gazing down like a watchful hawk.

7:00 a.m. Wake, get out of bed, wash at revolving basin, dress.

7:15 a.m. Pluck breakfast from cart while descending to mezzanine level to pick up fresh sheets for the day’s work. From there leap onto passing shelf containing collected works of Leibniz and step off into the upper clock works. Duck immediately to avoid getting coat caught in gears.

7:25 a.m. If clothing & self still intact, return to platform and commence work.

8:00 a.m. – 2:00 p.m. Work.

2:01 p.m. Eat remainder of breakfast among moving shelves until north wall panel swivels open. Dash through, blocking panel with large book to provide quick route of escape. Climb stairs to observatory level and stand at oriel window.

2:15 p.m. Irena takes daily stroll along terrace with Abbé. (What do they talk about?) If she glances up, remember: smile, do not stare.

2:16 p.m. Return to work by circuitous route (must remember map next time) to avoid Count. Remove jammed book from wall panel to avoid suspicion.

2:30 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. Work.

7:01 p.m. Take refreshment and await invitation to dine with Count.

7:30 p.m. If no invitation forthcoming, return to work.

Hurrying to keep pace with the huge moving bed, Flood handed the Count a single blank sheet.

– I’ve been working on the book of mirrors you asked about, he said. If I can make the paper reflective, the words will reproduce each other and thus repeat the text endlessly.

The old man, propped up on a bastion of pillows, a tasselled nightcap on his head, turned the paper over and over.

– An intriguing notion. Has it yielded a result?

– I’m still working on a gloss for the paper, he said. One that will reflect light yet hold ink. This stage has proved more difficult than I expected.

The Count thrust the sheet back at Flood.

– Try something else, he said as his bed rolled away. Toy around. See what you can do.

– There’s another difficulty, Excellency, Flood said, trotting to keep up. I haven’t replaced my type for quite some time. The faces are getting worn out, and it’s beginning to show on the page.

– One wonders, Mr. Flood, if you take proper care of your tools.

Flood bit his lip.

– I’ve filed and polished, but the metal will take only so much of that. To speak plainly, I don’t think my type is quite up to the task.

The Count pulled at the wings of his moustache.

– Then we’ll get you some new type. There must be a foundry in Pressburg. Or more likely Vienna, since they can get all the lead they need by mining what passes for brains at court.

– The Countess told me about the metallurgist from Venice who created the automatons. Samuel Kirshner.

– Yes. The ingenious Jew. What of him?

– His foundry makes type as well. The Countess showed me some samples of his work –

– As I’ve found, it can be troublesome doing business with those people. They’re always getting themselves hauled off by the Inquisition or driven out of town by angry mobs, and then where are you? Out of pocket. Or, as in Signore Kirshner’s case, they make grand projections and fail to deliver. But you rate his type-work highly.

– The finest I’ve seen.

– Write to the man, then, if you must. Order what you need, or we’ll bring him here again if we must.

Flood drafted a letter to Kirshner, outlining the nature of the problem and inviting the metallurgist to come in person. He was hoping to avoid it, but mention of the word infinity managed to find its way into his letter.

He returned to his platform and lived on it for three days, pacing to the edges while Djinn set type and the automaton printed, looking down into the rumbling chasm of bookcases like a sightseer gazing into the crater of Vesuvius. He neglected to shave, and slept under the press on a bolster, waking up to find food and drink at hand and hoping Irena had been the one to bring it. From time to time the Abbé, wandering by on his own mysterious peregrinations around the castle, would wave distantly to Flood on his platform as if to someone on a ship about to vanish over the horizon.

As she had asked to do, Irena came now and then to watch him work. He took her through the stages, starting with Djinn at the composing desk, turning a manuscript page into neat rows of type. As they watched Djinn’s fingers dance over the compartments in the type case, he told her that each size of type had a name. The smallest, six-point type, was known as nonpareil. The sizes most commonly used in books were long primer, and pica.

– Although I prefer small pica. Or as its sometimes known, philosophy.

– Small pica, or philosophy, she said. It sounds like the title of a novel. With a girl heroine.

He showed her the various parts of the press and how they worked together.

– This sliding carriage is called the coffin. You crank the rounce and –

– I see, she said. The coffin slides under the stone slab —

– The platen –

– And slides back out again. I see now. That’s why the inscription on your books. Vitam mortuo reddo. I wondered about it.

Flood nodded.

– I restore life from death. It was the motto of the family business long before I was born.

A stab of regret silenced him. He thought of the crude unvarnished box they had laid Meg to rest in. Though they worked side by side for countless hours, there were many days when he and his father said nothing at all to one another, unless it were to correct a fault or call for a brief halt. He looked back on that time in his life as a great silence.

A printer can be of service in many ways, his father once pronounced when he took a commission for a collection of bawdy ballads. Sometimes by not printing.

Books as novelties, as jokes. Books to gratify the whims of a lunatic nobleman, to win the admiration of his daughter. He saw his father, wiping his hands on his greasy apron and shaking his head in dismay. There was little doubt what he would have to say, were he still alive. Reckless, reckless.

At last Flood showed Irena his first finished trial piece: a scroll inspired by the Ostrov coat of arms. In order to make sense of the story, one had to unroll it entirely and join the ends into a loop, but with a twist, so that the paper seemed to have (or perhaps did have) only one side. For a text, he used an old legend he found in Zecchino’s Antiquities, concerning the founding of Venice.

– There were two wealthy Roman families in Aquilea, he told Irena, who each had one child born to them on the same day, a boy and a girl. The children were wondrously beautiful, but the local sibyl warned that should they ever meet, they would instantly fall so deeply and irrevocably in love with one another that they would expire on the spot, their mortal bodies too frail to withstand such unearthly and absolute desire.

He paused, seeing Irena frown as she handled the unwieldy ribbon of paper.

– Go on, she said. I’m listening.

– The two families had a city constructed on the sandy islets in the lagoon. A city designed as an elaborate maze of walls, streets, and canals, something like this castle, if you will. The idea was to prevent the boy and girl from ever meeting. By the time they reached the age of sixteen, however, they had both heard rumours of each other’s existence, and understood that the city was in fact their prison. So the boy and the girl escaped into the streets to find one another.

– The looping design, Flood went on, reflects their endless pursuit. The boy’s story is printed on one side, the girl’s on the other. But when the ends are joined, both follow the same single-sided story, so to speak, unaware that only if one of them stops moving will they be able to meet.

He waited for some comment from her, and when she handed the scroll back without speaking, he said,

– You don’t think the Count will care for this?

She glanced up with a look of confusion, as if she had woken suddenly from a dream and still expected to see its landscape around her.

– It’s very clever. I think you should show this to my father.

He did so that afternoon, despite his misgivings.

– Have you ever been to Venice? the Count asked, handing back the scroll.

– No.

– If you had, you likely wouldn’t have chosen a romance for your text. The Queen of the Adriatic is toothless, senile, and smells bad. Still, this is a clever contrivance and I am not displeased. Persevere, Mr. Flood.

Instead of persevering he stepped out for a breath of air and a leg-stretch on one of the parapets. He walked up and down, rubbing his hands together, glared at by gargoyles with long icicle noses, their gaping jaws dribbling water into an abyss of cornices, spires, slate roofs, and flying buttresses. He stood gazing out at the outside world that for days now he had virtually forgotten. How long had he been here? Today made it … eleven days. Only eleven days.

The river was frozen over but for a narrow scar of black water. The pines on the mountains were cloaked with snow, the ribbed white roof of the sky streaked with smoke rising from the village. From the forested hillsides came the sound of trees being cut, the axes striking the wood in an irregular tattoo that somehow soothed him. If not for that vaguely pleasing sound, the world would have seemed locked away in crystal. Had anything ever changed in this valley? For all he could see or hear that revealed otherwise, it could be the year 1000. Or the year 1400, Gutenberg’s invention of movable type still half a century away.

What would he be if he had lived then? A scribe, a monk, if he was fortunate. But more likely he would be down there in the forest with the timber-cutters, one of those who had likely never held so strange an object as a book in their callused, dumbfounded hands.

About the time this castle was built, according to the Count, the Mainz goldsmith had begun his cataclysmic innovations. And now, three hundred years later, the world was just beginning to drown in books. Like the magic wine cask in the old story, the press, once set flowing, could not be stopped by human power. Everyone, rich and poor, inquisitive or merely bored, was clamouring for things to read, and here he was, in this spellbound corner of the world, busily adding his own trickle of inked paper to the biblical deluge that was surely coming.

Someday books would even spill into this valley, and the people down there would scoop them up out of curiosity and drink, and learn the taste of knowledge, which always left one thirsty for more. And then that pleasantly distant sound of axes would grow much louder, as freshly sharpened blades started biting into the roots of this castle.

He heard a sound near him and peered around the corner of the parapet to see the Abbé de Saint-Foix, wrapped in a thick cloak, pacing and reading a letter. When Flood approached he glanced up as if emerging from a deep cavern.

– You’re only in your shirtsleeves, Mr. Flood. Aren’t you afraid to catch a chill?

– I thought winters in Quebec were a lot worse than this.

– They are. Why do you think I left?

For the first time, they shared a smile.

– I see that the Countess Irena takes quite an interest in your craft. If only I was staying on here. The three of us might have worked together on your impossible project. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, Book without end, Amen.

– It sounds like you’re planning to leave soon.

– I must. In any event I have found life inside this giant clock a little confining. I will be returning home, to Quebec, at least for a while. This letter informs me that my brother, Michel, has gone to his eternal reward.

– I am sorry.

– You needn’t be, the Abbé said, meticulously folding the letter and tucking it into his cassock. He was brother to me only by accident of birth. Life under his rule, after our parents died, was rather like life here at the castle. Come to think of it, Mr. Flood, I have a story about my childhood that may be of use to you in your labours for the Count.

THE ABBÉ’S NARRATIVE

During Sunday Mass, wedged with his squirming brother and sisters between the sombre bastions of his parents, Ezequiel listened to the priest expound upon the eternity of bliss enjoyed by the righteous in heaven, or, more often, the eternity of torment awaiting sinners in hell. He would attempt to form a picture of it – what would an eternity of bliss be like? — since he never seriously contemplated the possibility that God would send him elsewhere, and in any case the priest already supplied a vivid description of the other place. He had much to say about what activities would be occupying the hours of the damned in hell, but he never went into similar detail about what the blessed would be doing with all the time at their disposal, other than singing the same hymns they sang here in church, only even more interminably.

What did it mean to say that for those in heaven, bliss would never end? How could that be? A thing only made you feel good because there was a time when you didn’t have that thing, and so when you did, you could remember how much less enjoyable life had been not having it. Eternal bliss meant you were happy always and at every moment, without ever passing through a time when you were not happy. Every moment of that timeless time you would be aware that, yes, you were in heaven and this was bliss. Always. An unpassing passage of time, it seemed to him then, that might be like the long, dark winters of this land, like the fields of snow that stretched out endlessly beyond the walls of Quebec, perched on its rocky height above the silent white river.

His mind, like his delicate stomach the day his brother forced him to eat a scrap of the leathery cured meat favoured by les coureurs de bois, instinctively rejected the idea. That was no escape. It was mindless, the dream of slaves. He realized quite early how life in the colony was ruled by the clock. Each spring, when the ice broke up and he waited with everyone else for the arrival of the first ships from France, it occurred to him that time was their creator. Quebec did not believe in its own existence until those white sails were sighted on the horizon. Then the people around him, the pale ghosts of winter, would jerk to life like marionettes, pat one another on the back, drink toasts, observe that the ships were early this year, or late, or right on time, and place bets on just when the wind was likely to bring them into port.

Every year, the same performance.

He burned with the feverish desire to grasp time, hold it and cage it, so that he might find out what was left in its absence. He wanted not so much to escape his enemy as to subdue it. He became obsessed with numbers, and during Mass would keep a running tally of coughs and sneezes, or do sums with the rows of pearl buttons on his coat, in the hope that even such exercises in futility would use up a little more of that hated all-pervading element.

On that particular Sunday, he was attempting to count slowly enough that one tally of all the buttons from collar to skirts and back would last from the opening hymn to at least the profession of faith. But he swiftly tired of this old ritual and was left with things as they were, with himself as he was, stiff and itchy in his starched jabot, trying to ignore his older brother’s finger jabbing him mercilessly in the ribs under cover of his folded arms. Far from a state of bliss.

All at once he felt the dim approach of something, a presence, first as the faintest trembling in the air. Then the wooden pew beneath him began to vibrate, like the grinding of the river ice as it broke up in the spring. He glanced furtively at his brother and sisters, his parents, the other members of the congregation. No one seemed to have noticed it. No one else but him even seemed to be breathing.

And then, descending towards him through the clouds of incense came a dark sphere, revolving and growing larger by the moment, the deep vibrato of its ponderous spin growing louder, pressing like a physical force against his eyes, drumming through his bones, roaring in his blood.

His adversary.

– Each instant, the Abbé said, gazing out across the wintry valley, and every insignificant thing it contained, like the counting of those buttons on my coat, all my moments of weakness and humiliation, my every movement and eyeblink and thought, every twitch and tremor and cough of each and every other soul in that church, in the colony, in the world, not only flowing into the next moment and the next incarnation of itself, but solidifying. Each instant, each button and jab and cough and thought accreting into this grey impenetrable mass. This was the universe, and the universe was only this, an iron prison I was helping to build with every breath. This was time.

The Abbé smiled.

– You look pale, Mr. Flood.

– For a child to see, or even to imagine, such a thing …

– Well, I assure you its terrors have faded somewhat in the intervening years. I’ve come to see it as a sign, if you will, that with such powers of fancy I was destined to be an author. But at the time, yes, it did make quite an impression.

It was then that he suffered his first bout of the recurring apoplexy that was to leave him unfit for any career but the church. A thunderclap to the brain that pitched him forward, the crown of his head colliding with the back of the pew in front of him. His body lying rigid, his mind aware of everything that was happening but unable to will a limb, a muscle, an eyelash to move, staring up at the vaulted ceiling of the church and into the indifferent gaze of an archangel, until he was at last lifted and carried out by his red-faced and puffing father, his weeping mother dabbing at his bleeding head with a handkerchief, his older brother, Michel, and his sisters trailing after, their eyes fixed on him in mingled fear and suspicion.

He was brought home and installed on the sofa. The doctor, who had followed the family from church, knelt to examine him, lifted his hand by the wrist and let it drop, poked the soles of his feet with a penknife, waved a lit taper in front of his unblinking eyes. When at last he ushered Ezequiel’s parents out for a whispered consultation in the next room, his brother suddenly appeared and stood over him, his face as expressionless as the stone archangel’s. Finally Michel leaned forward, placed a hand over Ezequiel’s mouth and stuck two fingers up his nostrils.

His body began to scream silently for air. He closed his eyes, unable to bear Michel’s impassive gaze, then opened them again when panic overpowered him. Finally, as his vision clouded over and he felt himself sinking into black flames, the hands went away. His lungs shrieked, flooding with air.

That evening, Ezequiel defied the doctor’s sombre prognostications, got up off the sofa as if nothing unusual had taken place, and joined his astounded family at the supper table where they had been eating their soup in morose silence. Michel, eager to forestall any mention of his little prank, led everyone in a prayer of thanksgiving for his brother’s recovery. It did not occur to Ezequiel to turn informer. Michel, like time itself, was a tribulation as inevitable and pointless to protest against as an illness or lessons in Latin.

And there was of course his secret refuge: the library. His father used the room only on those rare occasions when he wished to impress an important visitor from France. Most days the room remained locked up, and, ever since Ezequiel could remember, forbidden to the children. His brother’s relentless persecution, however, had led him to steal the key from the steward’s cupboard and shut himself up from time to time in the library, where one day he discovered the blank books.

Since all books were meant to be read, he assumed that these called for a particular kind of reading, one which he hadn’t yet been taught. Perhaps these books, and not the tall glass cabinet filled with frosted decanters of red and black liquor, were the reason the room was forbidden. And so he read the books, one at a time, not starting a new one until he had worked his way through every page of the one before, each volume a compact Canada of perfect snow-white pages. He would touch the cool, creamy surface of the paper with his fingertips, his cheek, his lips. From the marbled endpapers rose the faintly intoxicating, hermetic smell of binding paste.

When he turned the pages they rattled softly, like far-off thunder.

The vision of time he had glimpsed that day in church still haunted his sleepless nights, but now he had something, a bulwark of books to seal himself in against it. Here and there among his treasures he found a printed volume. The sight of its neat blocks of text was distressing, as if a thorny hedge of words lay between him and the other book, the one he truly wished to read. The only ordinary printed book he treasured was his father’s atlas of the world, in which the names of fabled places like London and Paris were neatly printed alongside tiny fairy-tale countries of blue and pink and green. Perhaps in one of those true places he might be something more than a figment of time.

When he was twelve, his parents died at sea, while making a crossing to France, and Michel was now officially the master of his brother’s destiny that he has always considered himself to be. By then Ezequiel had come to understand that the blank books were not meant to be read, that they were in fact only part of the façade of gentility that was his father’s life. Still, having read through more than half of them by this time, and looking forward to making his way through those that remained, he was crushed when Michel sold off the entire library, to finance the building of a gaming salon.

– For six years, the Abbé said, I endured the prison that my house, my city, had become under my brother’s merciless and arbitrary dominion. Michel was now the lord of time. Of the cycles of the year, the epicycles of the months, the stations of the week. Every hour of my day and every minute of every hour circumscribed and entered in advance in his ledger. Every moment of idleness, unless it were his own at the gambling table or the brothel, ruthlessly punished. Finally, at the age of seventeen, when it seemed to me my life was already over, I was suddenly free. Michel had already had our sisters tucked safely away in convents and now he wanted me out of his sight, too. So I was sent to Paris, to the Jesuit College, to begin my studies for the priesthood.

There, he discovered Versailles. Or rather, like so many exiles before him, he was caught by it as if by gravity, and revolved in that glittering orbit like a grubby coin circling a collection plate. Before long, his greatest ambition was to become confessor to the true power in the realm, the king’s mistress.

– Things did not turn out that way, Flood said.

– Fortunately, they did not. I soon discovered I was not cut out to be another painted lackey, scurrying to the palace every morning to witness the awesome spectacle of the royal toilet. Dukes standing at attendance with towels, while others vied for the honour of holding his chamber pot. The great achievement of Versailles, I saw, was to make time turn in a never-ending circle around the sun of ceremony. But it was a false eternity, an illusion inviting its own demise. I turned away from it, and began to write. And since one cannot expect people to read a book of blank pages, I wrote a novel.

While the Abbé was telling his story, light flakes of snow had begun to fall. The two men looked at one another, shivered and went inside, laughing and brushing the snow from their hair.

– You must have overcome your dislike of print, Flood said. You know so many of the Count’s books so well.

– Of course, the Abbé said. Within every book there lies concealed a book of nothing. Don’t you sense it when you read a page brimming with words? The vast gulf of emptiness beneath the frail net of letters. The ghostliness of the letters themselves. Giving a semblance of life to things and people who are really nothing. Nothing at all. No, it was the reading that mattered, I eventually understood, not whether the pages were blank or printed. The Mohammedans say that an hour of reading is one stolen from Paradise. To that perfect thought I can only add that an hour of writing gives one a foretaste of the other place.

– What are you working on now? Flood asked. To his surprise the Abbé’s face darkened.

– Don’t you know, Mr. Flood, that is the one question you must never ask a writer?

Irena was always the first member of the household to awaken. Long before the servants had begun their daily circumnavigations she would open her eyes. The sun would not yet be up, and since she had never overcome a childhood fear of the dark she would quickly light a candle.

This morning, as always, her bed was back in its chamber, motionless for the moment, and in the stillness she could listen to the rest of the castle. All around her, the clock ticked. Far below, the boilers rumbled. All sounded as it should.

She rose in her shift, pulled on a morning gown, and hurried on bare feet through the corridors, to a tall oak cabinet set into a niche. Slipping a small brass key from her pocket, she stepped up into the niche, unlocked the cabinet, swung open its narrow doors, and gazed upon the tarnished silver of her mother’s face.

When she was a little girl Irena had asked her father where the poor Countess was that the nurses often talked about in sad whispers. The Count told her that her mother had died bringing her into the world. On Irena’s twelfth birthday he brought her to this cabinet and revealed his gift, the first of the automatons fashioned by the Venetian metallurgist: a mother of polished steel and brass. The creature shuddered to life, whirring like a startled pheasant, tilted forward, and spread its arms wide to take the girl into its embrace. Irena screamed, bolted in terror, and could not be made to go near the thing again, despite her father’s command that she do so. Eventually the Count locked the automaton away and forgot about it, and only then, much later, did she come to the niche on her own, when no one else was there to see her. She opened the cabinet, closed her eyes, and allowed herself to be caught by these cold, metallic limbs.

Now it was a ritual for her, even though, after years of neglect, the automaton’s inner workings had rusted and the arms no longer moved when the cabinet was opened. Irena said nothing to her father, not wanting him to know about her secret morning visitation.

She leaned forward and kissed the gleaming forehead, held the immobile hands in hers and felt the warmth of her own body flowing almost imperceptibly into the icy metal, until she could no longer tell where she began and the machine ended. She wondered why it was not possible for that warmth to bring a pink flush of life to cold metal, to light a spark in eyes of glass, as her father had tried to do with the replica of Ludwig. On mornings like this she would stay as long as she dared, listening to her own heart beat against the automaton’s unyielding skin, until she heard the clanking of pots and dishes from far below as the cooks began their day.

And the printer. She closed her eyes and heard it, barely audible amid the clatter of the awaking castle, but there nonetheless, running on its own time, apart from her father’s clocked and precise system. The creak of the press. She felt her heart quicken, and smiled. There was no hiding it from herself here. She would be seeing him soon, when she brought him more of the books he requested. She wondered why his scroll had disturbed her so much. Or perhaps it was his obvious pleasure at having created the thing. Just like her father when he posed a particularly difficult riddle.

– She is beautiful. The image of her daughter.

The Abbé stood just below the niche, his hands clasped behind his back.

– This is not my mother, Abbé Ezequiel.

– But I gather it was intended as a kind of surrogate.

Irena looked away.

– I see I’ve intruded upon your privacy, the Abbé said with a bow, and I will take my leave.

– No, said Irena, swinging shut the doors of the cabinet. You’ve reminded me I should be getting to work.

– Well, at the very least please forgive my crude attempt at flattery. When a man admires a woman, such trite phrases are woefully inappropriate, are they not?

– There was no harm done.

He bent his head.

– You are very gracious, Countess. May I tell you what I admire in you?

– This will be a more refined attempt at flattery, then?

The Abbé laughed.

– It is so refreshing, he said, to talk to someone like you. Do you know, you must be the only woman I’ve met in my travels who is capable of more than rehearsed coquetry.

– I doubt that. Perhaps you did not give those women enough time. To show you who they really were.

– Well, with you, may I say, very little time was needed. I saw enough right away to incline me to stay and learn more.

– I’m glad. But now I should be getting on with my chores …

The Abbé stepped forward.

– At the risk of offence, let me tell you, Countess, what it is I’ve learned. You are most pleasing to look upon, but vastly more important, you are the most intelligent woman I have ever met. If my awkward declaration offends, let me excuse myself by admitting that I would be more at ease with a woman whose mind did not continually surprise me. And yours does. Surprises and delights me, challenges me. I can only confess that you’ve crumbled all my defences.

Irena locked the cabinet doors. She turned to face the Abbé.

– It wasn’t a planned attack, she said coldly. I’ve enjoyed the conversations we’ve had, certainly …

– That is precisely the point, the Abbé said. We’ve begun without the usual tedious moves and countermoves.

– Begun what?

– You and I, Countess, have the opportunity to be what few men and women dare to be in this painted, mercenary age.

– And what is that?

– Friends.

– We are that already, I had thought.

– True friends who speak candidly to one another, keeping nothing back. Baring their hearts.

– Abbé Ezequiel …

– Countess, I am speaking of feelings that rise above our differences in other matters. Believe me, I am well aware of your reservations concerning the ideas put forth in my novel.

– Tell me, then, do you believe your own theory of the soul?

– Were I not here, your father would find someone else to encourage him. Like the Englishman, for example. Perhaps you should ask Mr. Flood how long he plans to spend trying to print an infinite book.

– It is not my place.

– I agree. This is not your place at all.

He turned and walked to the nearest window.

– You belong out there, he said. In Paris, Vienna, Milan. Your place is among men and women who think and act and change the world, not here in this madhouse.

– That is not what I meant, Irena said.

– Then let me state more plainly what I meant, the Abbé said, facing her again. I have inherited my brother’s estate in Quebec, and I must return there before the government or the Church tries to appropriate it. So as you see, I have no intention of further encouraging your father’s dreams. On the contrary, I have dreams of my own. Dreams which can only become reality with your help.

– I don’t understand.

The Abbé stepped up to Irena and took her hand.

– Countess, in the months I’ve spent here I have come to see that with you as my confidante, my intellectual sparring partner, my severest critic, I might accomplish a truly great work.

Gently, Irena slid her hand free of the Abbé’s grip.

– Is this a declaration of your feelings, Abbé Ezequiel, or are you simply looking for an editor?

The Abbé frowned.

– I am thinking of a coupling of minds, yes. But I also dare to hope our concord would be ratified as often as possible with communion of a more physical nature.

– Abbé, you are a handsome man, and a fine writer. But as any reader will tell you, there’s no accounting for taste.

The Abbé stepped back. Muscles pulsed in his jaw.

– This has nothing to do with taste, he said, his voice trembling. I am speaking of love. The divine madness.

Irena lowered her eyes.

– I am truly sorry, but if it is a divine madness, I do not share it.

The Abbé recovered himself, took a deep breath, and bowed.

– So it must be. To spare you any further embarrassment I will leave for Vienna this very afternoon.

– You tell me, Irena said, that you cherish honesty above all. I am only telling you what I think you already know. That this is not really about me.

She turned from him and locked the cabinet. The Abbé stared at her.

– You mean to imply, he said slowly, that my regard for you is feigned. Or perhaps you think that I offer you this chance for freedom out of pity.

Irena faced him, an angry flush darkening her pale features.

– Pity?

– A writer learns to be observant. I’ve watched you. The way you walk. The way you rise from a chair. I’m curious to know how old you were when the disease struck that crippled you.

Irena slipped the key back into her pocket. She stepped down from the niche.

– No, I don’t think you pity me. I think you were looking to distract yourself from something else, something that you hoped I might help you forget, at least for a while.

– What a novel idea. Have you mentioned it to your friend the printer? I’m sure he will be impressed, as he always is, with your keen insights.

– I don’t know what it is you really want, Abbé Ezequiel, but I sincerely hope you find it. You seem to me to be a very unhappy man.

He closed one eye and peered with the other through the narrow glass panes. He could see her, sitting motionless at a table, writing. She was wearing spectacles. He had not known she wore spectacles.

His blunt fingers awkwardly plucked at the tiny latch and finally succeeded in opening the window. Carefully he reached in a hand and gently touched the little porcelain figurine.

He withdrew his hand and stepped back from the display case, marvelling and strangely saddened at the same time. The entire castle, in miniature, down to the last detail. There was even a crank at the base of the model for setting its walls and floors in motion.

He froze, suddenly aware that something around him had changed. He had been so absorbed in the miniature that he had forgotten the real thing, and in a moment he realized that the castle had stopped. The walls, the floors, the roving furniture frozen and silent. The stillness sent a tremor of dread through him, as though he had just been told someone had died.

He hurried to the edge of the gallery, fighting the urge to call out and see if anyone was there to answer. On the level below him, Irena was kneeling on the bare floor of an aisle between two shelves, holding a large cloth-bound book, her gown spread around her like a cataract of pale blue silk. At first Flood imagined that she too, like the castle, had somehow come to a halt. Then her hand stirred, turned a page, came to rest again. The look on her face was one of guileless concentration.

As if her slight motion had started the castle working again, metallic banging and hammering began to drift up from the lower floors.

Irena glanced up, saw Flood leaning over the rim of the gallery and rose hastily to her feet.

– The fusee went out of alignment and threw everything off schedule, she said. The engineers have had to stop the entire works in order to get at the problem.

– Your father must be displeased.

– He is away, she said. On business in Pressburg.

– This quiet is unnerving, he said. I’ve become so accustomed to the constant noise.

– I think the silence is beautiful, Irena said, sliding the book back into place on the shelf and brushing at her gown. It’s like the enchanted castle in the old stories.

She climbed up the ladder to where he stood.

– May I ask what you were reading?

– An old encyclopedia, she said. It’s called the Libraria Technicum.

– I know it, Flood said. I worked for a while with the man who printed it. Synonym Wilkins, we called him. Did the Abbé recommend it?

– The Abbé has gone. He left last night, in the coach with my father.

– He told me he might not be staying much longer. I don’t think he was happy with the … clocks.

– He didn’t tell me so. I hope he will find the clocks more to his liking at his next destination.

– So what did you find in old Synonym’s encyclopedia?

She told him she loved books from places she had never been. Reading the Libraria Technicum she believed she could hear, behind or within its dry, technical sentences, the bustle of the port of London, the cry of the gulls, the ever-present rattle of carriages through the busy streets. She had always wanted to know if her image of the City of the New was in any measure accurate. She had heard so many wonderful tales about London.

– The people of highest and lowest class mingling together in the streets, greeting one another without ceremony as fellow citizens.

He said that it was true everyone mingled in the streets, but it was not because of overflowing love for one’s fellow man.

– It’s the result of cramming so many people into such a small space.

Wasn’t it true, though, she asked, that the city was full of surprises? It was said you could find anything there.

He told her that if she wanted to know what London was like, the castle would give her a good idea.

– People are always in motion there. No one stays in one place for long.

– Here the walls and ceilings and floors move, she said, and the people stand still.

He looked into her eyes and at that moment a truth that he should have seen right from the beginning became clear to him. The castle, the automatons, the clockworks, all of this was her father’s system and functioned by his rules, but Irena had her own system, quietly running on its own inside the Count’s. He was not sure why she had disabled the great clock, but felt a rush of hope that she had done it to bring about this encounter with him. Feeling the colour rising to his face, he turned to his press and saw that Ludwig had wound down at the bar.

– And you, Mr. Flood, she said. How do you feel about the clocks?

He hesitated, and was aware again of what seemed an unearthly stillness.

– I like them at the moment, he said.

By dinnertime the problem with the castle’s machinery had not yet been resolved. The servants were thrown into confusion by the change in their routines, and so Irena herself saw to some of their tasks. Later that evening she brought fresh candles to replace the guttering stubs on Flood’s work table. As she approached, a gust of air followed in her wake and overtook her, blowing out the flames and plunging the room into blackness.

– Wait a moment, he said.

She heard his chair scrape on the floorboards as he pushed it back. A moment later she saw a fuzzy patch of faint green light bobbing in the darkness, approaching her.

– What is that? she whispered.

His face swam closer to hers. The pale green glow came from a sheet held in his hand.

– I’ve coated the paper with a tincture that absorbs not only ink but light.

Now she could see his hands and his forehead as well, which also faintly luminesced.

– A book you can read in the dark, she said.

He held the paper to the dying spark of a candle and it crackled into sullen flame. She quickly relit the other candles and smiled over the bouquet of light she was handing him. As the paper burned up she saw through the green flames the image stamped upon it, melting and writhing. She asked him if he had chosen the phoenix as his symbol for just such moments.

– Salamander, Flood said.

– What?

– The creature is supposed to be a salamander.

The little dragon that dwells in fire, he explained, without being consumed, was a reassuring thought for people who work with paper. Originally he wanted a chimera, but the engraver he hired had gotten his mythological beasts confused.

– We have them in the castle, she said. The real sort of salamander, I mean. In the underground crypts, among the gears, where it’s dark and damp.

– It sounds a lot like London. The sort of climate where printers thrive.

– If that’s so, she asked, why did you leave?

He felt his face burn.

– I can’t resist a challenge.

– We can move you to the crypts if you wish, she said with a smile.

She left him, and Flood went back to his platform. Instead of sleeping he worked fitfully through the night, dozing off and waking again with a start, until he suddenly found morning in full possession of the castle. Djinn appeared at his side, yawning and rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. Flood rose stiffly from his chair. His head swooped, and he had to clutch the table edge to keep from toppling over. When had he last eaten?

He patted the boy on the shoulder.

– Let’s see if we can’t find something for breakfast.

As they followed the smell of baking he went over his conversations with the Countess. Something had been nudged to life inside him. Something for which he did not yet have a name. He was in love with her, of course, but there was something else. Something more …

He and the boy finally tracked down a tray standing unattended near the kitchens, loaded with baked goods and coffee. They helped themselves, grinning at one another as they stuffed rolls into their apron pockets, and then sat together at the bottom of a curving staircase to eat their ill-gotten gains.

I like her, he thought. That was it. He looked at Djinn, sleepily chewing his buttered roll, and a laugh bubbled out of him. The boy glanced up quizzically.

– Good?

Djinn nodded.

– Yes, it’s good, Flood said.

That morning, as the printing platform rolled past a row of narrow pier glasses, he caught sight of his grinning face, dyed to a bluish swarthiness with ink. The sheen of sweat on his brow. His neck and arms, muscled like a bullock-driver’s from years of heaving the bar. His stained apron and holey stockings.

Look at yourself.

The days and months and years of apprenticing, the fluid dexterity he’d had to develop as he moved from one step in the process to another, the gallons of ink that he’d no doubt absorbed into his skin, all of it had turned him into a sinuous, oily creature best suited to the dank dungeon of a print shop. People came to him for what they needed, they bantered with him, exchanged jokes and gossip, politely ignored the reek of the urine he used to soften the leather ink bats overnight. He was a good listener. People had always confided in him, told him family stories. Secrets.

They would haggle amiably over the price until they saw he would not budge an inch, and then they left, with or without their commissions engaged but always with a smile, usually not to be seen again, unless he caught a glimpse of them frequenting some other printer’s shop.

Unlike the handsome Abbé, he had never been pursued by any woman, let alone a continent of them. He was almost thirty, and the one amatory interlude that had embellished his life thus far had been with the woman who came into his shop early one morning and asked him what he sold besides books. As he began to run through the stock — prints & mariners’ charts; journals & pocketbooks; embroidered letter-pouches; bills of lading & shipping paper — she slipped off one glove and ran a slender white finger along the surface of a ribboned stack of envelopes – best gilt, black-edged, post & plain writing paper; sealing wax & wafers – she unpinned her hat, shook her hair out, and began to tug at the strings of her bodice … ink & ink powder … scissors & penknives … bookmarks & booksnakes…. He never found out the woman’s name or anything about her other than the obvious fact that her passion was aroused less by his charms than by stationery. He looked at his trade with new eyes after that day, aware of just how many solitary women frequented his shop. But after that one frantic encounter, half-clothed atop his desk amid spilling paper, life went on as before.

He was a printer’s son, a printer’s grandson and great-grandson. Despite the notoriety of his creations he was simply a tradesman. The wealthy were the only people who could afford his books, and yet he did not know them. He was appreciated best when unseen, like one of the cogs that moved the hands of the immense clock. Or the pumps and gears down in the crypts where Irena had said she’d seen salamanders.

He wound up Ludwig and got him started on a fresh batch of sheets. The printing platform appeared in another mirror, one with a flaw in the glass that caused his reflection to elongate and ripple slightly, as if he had turned to water.

It was as if she were still there before him. The air stirred faintly by the sweep of her gown as she turned. Her slender neck as she reached up to light the candelabra. He saw himself drawn towards a fountain of white flame. Crawling out of cold muck, his hands reaching into the light, to replenish himself in that fire.

– Salamander, he said in a louder voice.

– Alam, came the buzzing echo from Ludwig. Djinn’s head shot up from his tray of type.

– Alam. Does that mean anything? Flood asked the boy. Djinn nodded. He had learned a little English by this time, but out of shyness or some other motive Flood could not discern, preferred to speak to the printer by way of his craft. His insect fingers scuttled across a tray of italic type and in a moment he handed over his composing stick. Flood spelled out the backwards English phrases.

Flood thrust the composing stick back into the boy’s hand.

– I am not your lord, he said.

Love is always a conspiracy against some part of the world. In the end, Flood could not doubt what had passed between the two of them the moment Irena looked into his eyes and he guessed that she herself had stopped the castle clock. He would draw near the flame.

Setting aside the book of mirrors, he began work on a small octavo volume, the text an old sermon taken from his stock of waste sheets. The sectarian preacher in London who’d commissioned the work had fled the country, and so Flood had been forced to break up what he had already set in type and find another use for the already printed pages.

He inked the formes in a kind of delirium, laughing and humming to himself. He prayed the Count would not appear unannounced and see the idiot grin on his face. As he stitched the signatures together his hands shook.

When the secret book was printed and bound, the word Desire gold-tooled on its spine, he tucked it away with the seventeen-volume Libraria Technicum. In order to make his interloper fit on the shelf, he had to remove the seventh volume, Helix-Longitude, which he tucked away in the concealed compartment of his type-cabinet, the place he always kept dangerous manuscripts.

In the morning the requested cases of new type arrived from Venice, along with a tarnished spoon, and a letter.

I’ve already been to the Count’s giant orrery. The only reason I might be tempted to return would be to see the Countess again. However, I will simply ask you to give her my good wishes.

I trust the cases of type are as ordered. The other enclosed item is my response to your comments about infinity. My father always used to say, The spoon tastes not the broth.

Regards,
S. Kirshner

She stood beside him, her hands cupped together, waiting until he swam up out of his thoughts and became aware of her.

– I didn’t hear you, he said, rising from his chair.

– I know, she said, nodding to the lines and angles he had been drawing. You were in the land of geometry. I found something down in the cellars. Something I think you’ll like.

She lowered her hands to the desk and opened them. On her palm sat a small, shiny creature, like a frog but with a tail. Its S-shaped body a glossy black speckled with bright yellow spots. He realized he had never seen a real, living salamander.

– She’s a beauty, he said. Or is it a she?

– I’m not sure. We have Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae, but it wasn’t much help.

– Oh, yes. The Swede who’s invented categories for all living things.

Irena nodded, her eyes brightening with amusement.

– He suggests animals be classified on the basis of whether or not they have breasts.

In the silence that followed they both examined the creature intently.

– She led me a merry chase though, Irena finally said, stroking the salamander’s back. They live among the steam engines and the gears, where the dungeons used to be.

– It’s not moving, Flood said. Is it … ?

He extended a tentative finger. Before he could touch it the salamander writhed out of Irena’s palm onto the desk and disappeared into a surf of loose paper.

– Where did it … ?

– There –

– Got you!

Flood’s hand rose with a flourish. Between his thumb and forefinger was a short stub of yellow-and-black tail. He grimaced.

– I’ve dismembered the poor thing.

Irena shook her head.

– She’ll grow herself a new tail. If you’d pulled off her leg she could grow that back, too.

– Not even the mythical salamander can do that.

– I read about it, in Pliny.

She closed her eyes.

– An … insectivorous batrachian, that springs from some unknown Source, appearing during great Rains, or, according to ancient Authorities, arising from the Midst of the most ardent Flames. When seiz’d by their Enemies, these Creatures elude Capture by leaving a Leg or a Part of their Tail behind, the Missing Extremity soon replaced by the growth of another –

She broke off as the salamander emerged. Flood gently scooped the creature up and returned it to Irena’s hands.

– I should take her back where I found her.

There was a stutter of gears as the castle started into motion again, a hiss of steampipes venting, a long groan of metal against metal, and then silence. Irena leaned over the balustrade of the gallery and peered down into the depths.

– Has your father returned, Countess?

– I am expecting him any day.

– Do you ever leave here?

– My father trusts only me to maintain things in his absence. At least until the day he perfects his system.

They heard a muffled shout and saw, on the far side of a lower gallery, Turini the carpenter with his arms around Darka, the contortionist. She was trying to squirm free, her face flushed with delight.

– My father’s dream, Irena said, is a completely self-regulating mechanism, like the spheres of the planets. He sees the castle, long after he and I are dead, without a living soul in it. Walls and floors and furniture making their transits in silence. Forever.

Flood argued that nothing in this world lasts forever. Metal rusts. Gears wear down. Wooden beams warp, rot, get gnawed by insects. And people never leave anything alone. They will always pry, and interfere, and try to improve, correct, or tear down what is supposedly finished and perfect. That was why printing was so difficult. The press was a nearly flawless invention, almost capable of working on its own, but it produced as much opposition and interference as it did pages.

She asked him why, if he believed that, he persisted in printing.

– My father liked to say that by multiplying the number of books in the world we multiply the number of readers. And with each new reader the ranks of the book-burners thin out a little more.

– Is that why you’re here? she asked him. To escape the book-burners?

– I’m here because of a letter, he said. I wanted to find out who had written it.

She slowly turned away, cradling the salamander in her hands. He sat for a while after she had left, astounded at himself, and then craned his neck over the balustrade. He caught sight of her now and then as she made her way in a meandering spiral down into the depths of the castle.

He turned back to his drawings, took up his pen, and traced the curve of her movements.

A spiral.

He scribbled a set of numbers, took up his rule, and drew a rectangle. Inside the empty frame he inscribed a single character:

He thought back to his father’s lessons. Are you listening, Nicholas? The golden section. A proportion based on a ratio in which the lesser value is to the greater as the greater is to the sum. It can also be found in nature …

In the spiral of a seashell, for instance, which is itself only a fragment of a greater spiral of increase. An infinite one.

Yes, Father. I remember now. Thank you.

Having the entire library filed in her head, Irena knew she had never seen this little volume with Desire gold-tooled on the spine. It had to be a creation of Flood’s, even though she had warned him not to place anything on the shelves without her father’s permission. Perhaps he had thought to conceal his indiscretion by tucking it away here.

That night she took the book to bed with her and by candlelight skimmed through the sermon it contained.

 … these Earthly Promptings that come like thieves in the night and rob us of sweet Tranquillity and Reason.… Intimations in the Flesh of the Soul’s one right Desire, for Communion with the Radiance of Eternal Truth….

After several pages of this she shut the book, set it on the night table, and blew out the candles, disappointed. He had hidden the book where he did, she was sure, to let her know it was a message. But not the message she had expected. Was he warning both of them not to go any further?

She became aware of a faint illumination against her eyelids, and staring into the darkness saw a pale green glow along the book’s fore-edge. She sat up and opened the book again. In the spaces between the lines of the sermon, repeated on page after page in unbroken cursive pica, she read her own name.

She was in bliss and torment at the same time. Unable to gather her thoughts, her first impulse was to hide this confession that lit up the curtains of her bed. As she reached down to tuck it under her mattress, the book slipped out of her hand and hit the floor with a terrible bang. Irena climbed from her bed, letting it trundle on without her while she crept back along the passage. The incriminating volume lay splayed open, bathing the walls and ceiling with its spectral glow.

Stooping quickly she picked up the book, wrapped it in her arms, and started off after her bed. Her mind and her feet were not pursuing the same course, and after a while she discovered she had managed to accomplish the unprecedented and lose her way. She stood still, listening, her bare feet chilled by the icy stone of the floor. Something was approaching, and soon she saw that it was her father’s bed. He was not there, she knew, but still she backed slowly against the wall, holding her breath and hugging Flood’s book tightly to her breast as the bed rumbled past and slowly vanished.

The next morning she kept Desire with her, concealed in the folds of her gown, breathless at the thought that she was leaving an unaccounted empty space on one of the shelves, a flaw in her father’s system. Whenever she could steal an unobserved moment during her daily rounds, she opened the book and turned its pages, mouthing the bituminous phrases of the sermon with secret delight.

At the end of the day she returned the book to its place on the shelf, having decided upon her fate. Taking a ring of keys from her apron pocket, she unlocked a trapdoor in a remote passageway. Glancing around quickly to make sure she was unobserved, she climbed down a ladder into the dank underneath of the castle and in an instant was swallowed up by steam and darkness.

In the evening she brought the printer coffee on a silver tray. As she passed Ludwig at his post beside the press she tickled his jutting porcelain chin. Djinn was dozing on a settee, wrapped in Flood’s threadbare bombazine coat. He stirred as she went by and mumbled words in one of his half-remembered languages.

Irena set the tray on the work table at Flood’s elbow. Beside the coffee decanter lay the small octavo volume of Desire.

Flood stared at the book without daring to look up into Irena’s eyes.

– When the clock tells a quarter past three tonight, she finally managed to whisper, my bed will pass yours.

She turned and went back the way she had come. Flood sat, frozen, then reached out and put his hand on the cover of the book.

That night, as the striking of the great clock reverberated through the draughty halls of the castle, Flood, in shirt and breeches, leaped barefoot, like a pirate boarding a galley, from his moving bed to Irena’s. He found her sitting at the head with her arms around her knees, eyes glittering. She was still dressed in her blue silk gown, but her long russet hair had been released from its pins and lace and spilled about her shoulders.

Just as he was about to move towards her, he stopped. Her face was contorting, her eyes squeezing shut, her mouth dropping open — Was she about to weep, or scream … ?

– Countess –

She sneezed. They looked at one another for a moment and then laughed.

– We’ve confused the dust, she said.

– Do you always wear your gown to bed? he asked, not daring yet to do anything else but speak.

– You don’t know much about women’s clothing, do you?

– No.

She leaned over to the side of the bed and blew out the candle.

– I dismissed my maid early. I need you to help me with all of this.

Shyness constrained them to take things methodically:

Laced modesty piece in the French style.
Damask stomacher stitched with silk rosettes.
Back-lacing jacket bodice.
Apron of printed Indian cotton.
Overskirt of cream silk embroidered with gold thread.
Watered-satin petticoat.
Quilted camlet under-petticoats (2).

– You have to do this every night?

– And every morning, in reverse.

Whalebone birdcage-style hoop.
Persian stays (also stiffened with whalebone).
Double-stitched pocket-ribband with perfume sachet.
Linen chemise á l’Angloise.

– There.

When she set aside the last garment he reached for her and his fingers touched cold metal.

– Go on, she said. That comes off too. I won’t be needing it tonight.

There was no time.

In the darkness they devoured one another, fell back into themselves, spent, and came together again.

– I want to see us.

She lit a candle. They looked, dazed, at their gleaming bodies. Together they were a new world.

He blew out the candle and they lay nestled against one another in the blackness. The bed rolled through the castle, stopped, moved on again.

She told him of her childhood illness, and how she had come to wear the cage. He told her about the sister he had lost.

– How old were you when she died?

– Eleven. But I remember it all so clearly, as if it only happened yesterday.

– Perhaps everything did, she said. The past is who we are.

In the half-light before dawn he finally saw the cage, lying tenantless at the foot of the bed where he had cast it with her other clothing.

– I don’t want to put this back on you, he said. Every day …

– I’ve gotten used to it over the years. It’s part of me.

Flood’s bed approached like a comet returning in its long revolution. She told him her father was expected home today. When they embraced one last time, he said it was strange, the way they had been drawn together. As if, like the Count’s automatons, they had no choice.

– He’s been working on machines, she said, that will one day replace both him and me. We’ve been waiting for the casings to come from Meissen.

– He already treats you like a machine. I want to take you away from here. We could go to Venice. Hide there, find a ship to take us to England.

She shook her head.

– Nicholas, I …

He rose and cautiously parted the curtains. His bed was almost abreast of hers.

– If he found out, what would he do?

Without answering, she kissed him. As he made ready to leap he dug in his pocket and handed her a small T-shaped piece of metal.

– It’s a quoin key, he said. If something happens, leave it on my work table.

He was gone, leaving a faint glow of phosphorescence lingering on the sheets and on Irena’s skin. She held her hands in front of her and watched the light vanish into them.

At breakfast the Count placed a sealed letter on the table, propping it against the chocolate boat.

– I almost forgot, he said casually to Irena. The Abbé asked me to give you this.

– Thank you, Father.

The Count turned to Flood.

– I’m pleased you could join us, my friend. I so look forward to hearing what you have accomplished during my absence.

As he spoke, Irena slid the letter off the table and slipped it into her pocket.

– Ah, my dear, the Count said. I thought perhaps you might favour us with the contents. I find I already miss the Abbé’s intelligent conversation.

He smiled at Flood’s look of surprise.

– There are no secrets at this table, sir.

Irena carefully slit the letter open with her knife, unfolded the paper and read.

Countess,

Your kindness will always remain impressed upon my soul I fear that pen and ink cannot express how attached you have become to my heart, as if with unbreakable bindings. I will always treasure the memory of our too-brief acquaintance, and I thank you for the undeserved respect and consideration you showed me from first to last. Believe me when I say that I hope someday to have the opportunity to repay it.

Yours with all due respect and esteem,

Saint-Foix

– Hm, said the Count, sipping his coffee. Surprisingly conventional, for a man of his talents. Although bindings, now, strikes me as somewhat original. Bonds is the more usual figure of speech, I believe.

He gave a wheezing laugh.

– It sounds, Mr. Flood, as if he’s borrowing his metaphors from your trade.

He had been aware for some time of a presence stalking the halls and galleries, someone or something that moved at the periphery of his vision, like a mirror-self glimpsed down a distant corridor, but which vanished whenever he turned to look directly at it. He felt its shadow like an invisible eclipse moving across the faces of his many clocks, causing tiny errancies in their usually flawless timekeeping.

At first he had blamed the disruption caused by the printer’s activities. The nautical creaking of the press screw, the click-clack of type slugs dropping into place in the boy’s composing stick, the flutter of sheets drying on cords, stirred by the cold draughts that found their way into the castle despite his best efforts: all these annoyances had disturbed the order of things, but he knew that this other presence was something more than mechanical. It was intangible, amorphous, and therefore a true threat. After his return he could not sleep, and rising in the night followed mysterious glowing handprints on walls, naked footprints on floors, tracks that swiftly faded and disappeared before he could arrive at their intended destination. He felt it in tiny, subtle shifts of mood and energy shown by his servants, the way one will be aware of an oncoming bout of influenza long before the actual symptoms occur. He saw it in the face of his daughter, who had begun to neglect her duties, an unprecedented dereliction, and was often found staring dreamily at nothing, no longer even with a book in her hands to explain these lapses from her day’s well-ordered round. At first he thought the presence of the handsome Abbé had distracted the females of the household. But now the suave Frenchman was gone and it was the awkward Englishman, he was forced to conclude, who had introduced an unknown, pernicious element into his smoothly running system, one which he was determined to track down and root out.

To that end he scrutinized everything done and everyone doing it more minutely than ever, eventually noticing that one of the bookcases seemed to be gliding with the merest suggestion of an imbalance, an infinitesimal disturbance in his grand design manifesting itself in the form of a slight wobble.

A brief search confirmed his suspicion: there was an empty space on the lowest shelf. Missing was the seventh volume, Helix-Longitude, of a foreign encyclopedia that he had not consulted in many years. Only one person could be held responsible for this outrage. The Count’s hands shook.

– Irena.

He tracked down her empty bed as it rolled along its accustomed route. He emptied out the night table, stripped away the sheets, tossed aside the pillow and found a paper neatly listing women’s toiletries – powder, pomade, scented soap, rosewater – and their estimated cost, a list she was no doubt going to submit to him the next morning for his approval, as she did without fail every quarter. The list, belying its innocence, was tucked into a small octavo volume the Count had never seen before. Slowly, and then with increasing swiftness, he turned the pages, a tremor beginning in his hands and along the grey ridge of his chin.

– My moth, he muttered hoarsely. My little moth.

On the fourth night that Flood leapt through the red velvet curtains of Irena’s bed, he found the Count there with two of his huntsmen brandishing fowling guns.

– You neglected to consider how much I enjoy a good riddle, the Count said. He held up the book of Desire so that the pages faced Flood, who saw faint patches of rust on the paper and then realized it was Irena’s name, visible here and there amid the straight black pews of the sermon.

– Your recipe for secret ink, the Count said as Flood was seized and carried off, stands in need of serious modification.

He was taken down into the clockworks, to a stone chamber with a huge toothed gear for a roof. Pungent steam rose from a grate in the floor.

There was a straw pallet against one wall and above it a narrow embrasure that let in a weak, nacreous light. He could hear water trickling somewhere. Once every hour the gear overhead creaked to life and with a dull clunk ratcheted around one tooth, splattering oily water into the cell.

The Count came to inspect the new arrangements, sliding open the door’s spyhole to have a look at his prisoner.

– You can’t do this, Flood said when he saw the old man’s eyes fastened on him. I am not one of your subjects.

– If you were to consult the most recent surveyor’s maps, the Count said, you would find that this castle does not exist. And now, neither do you.

Flood sank onto the straw pallet.

– At least let me have my press. I can still work on your book.

– I’ve changed my mind concerning that, I’m afraid. Books need readers, and when I am dead, there will be no one here to do any reading.

– Where is the Countess?

– Oh, I’ve brought her to see you, the Count said, stepping away from the spyhole. Since the two of you will never meet again, I thought it only fair that you should have the chance to say your goodbyes.

There was a rustle of silk and Irena’s face appeared. She gazed into the cell, expressionless.

– Countess, Flood whispered, unable to move.

– She was not for you, the Count’s voice said.

His long thin fingers spidered up to Irena’s temples, sank in like talons. With a click her face came away in his hands. All that remained were her eyes, two naked orbs in a hive of twitching, buzzing machinery.

The panel slid shut.

He howled. Pounded the door, scraped at the walls until his fingers bled. Wept himself into exhausted sleep.

After a murky expanse of time he heard a sound overhead and a basket on a rope came down through the gear housing with his meal: a heel of loaf, a stone bottle of water, half of a stale meat pie. He left everything where it was and did the same when the basket came down the next day. The day after that, the basket failed to appear. When it finally descended again three days later he snatched at its contents greedily and from then on ate every last crumb.

He set himself to ignore the sound of the gear before it drove him mad, until he realized that the mental effort needed would lead even more quickly to the same result.

He tormented himself with questions he could not answer. What did the Count mean by showing him that clockwork parody of her? Was she dead? Or had that thing been her all along? No. Another of his riddles. An insidious joke. She had to be alive. She was the only thing in this prison that was.

Horror-struck at the abyss beckoning his sanity, he set himself a daily regimen of imaginary printing. Unencumbered by the limitations of real paper and ink, the dumb recalcitrance of inanimate objects, he was free at last to dream a book unlike any other. In his head the calculations based on the golden section flew together in angelic concord. It all made sense now. The book would climb into being on the infinite spiral of the Fibonacci sequence. The frame, the container of the words, was the key.

The various stages of producing each sheet were parcelled out by the ratcheting of the gear. To make the work expand to fill the vague gulf of time before him, he went about it more slowly than he would have with a real press, setting and printing only one single sixteen-page forme every hour. As night fell and the cell sank into darkness, he would peel an invisible sheet from the type, blow on its intangible surface, hold it before his unseeing eyes to check the quality of his nonexistent impression.

In time his phantom presswork failed to distract him from his situation and he sank into a torpor out of which he would jolt awake in the dark, having sat heedlessly on his pallet through an entire day. He eventually decided that he was neglecting to imagine the text that was to fill his spectral pages. To his inner vision the impression was always clean, unblemished, his best work, but the matter remained utterly obscure, veiled from him as if he had lost the ability to read. He had always relied on his customers to supply him with the text that he would print and bind, but now, he realized with dismay, he would have to become author as well as printer.

No other possibility presented itself than that of beginning with Irena. He had already filled a book with her name. This book would contain everything else about her that he could remember, their first meeting and all that followed. He filled column after imaginary column with the timbre and nuances of her voice, with every word they had spoken to one another, with the changing colour of her eyes, the coolness of her hair streaming across his naked chest, her body, volcanic, supple, entwining with his, the scent and taste of her skin, until, remembering his last sight of her, on the far side of the gallery the morning of what was to have been their fourth night together, he was so overcome with despair that he left his work and curled up in a ball on his pallet, seeing and hearing nothing and hoping only for death.

To survive he would have to begin elsewhere. He recalled a passage he had found in one of the Count’s books, a commentary on the tenth-century System of Al-Kindi, who postulated the causal influence of everything upon everything else. The entire cosmos, from the tiniest atomies to the vast silent spaces beyond the moon, formed a web of connectedness within the mind of God. From this astounding proposition the Arab philosopher conjectured that a complete knowledge of one single thing, any single thing, be it a chair, a feather, a raindrop, the merest trifle, will lead at last, through the web of relations, to an understanding of everything else. A radiant knowledge of All. The tiniest pebble under one’s feet a mirror in which the entire Creation was invisibly reflected.

Casting about for an object to be the seed of a universe, he plucked a straw from his pallet and described to himself its length, shape, coloration, and texture. From there began a meticulous survey of the pallet from which he had taken the straw, followed by an inventory of every square inch of his roughly trapezoidal cell, each stone of the walls and every crack and crevice in the mortar between each stone, the mouse droppings he found each morning on the bare floor, the comings and goings of the rats and the many-legged vermin that nested in his pallet and that ate the mouse droppings, the tiny scraps of dry and scaling skin that would fall from him like snow whenever he scratched his burning limbs, the tremulous webs of light reflected from the water that ran beneath his cell, the reef of dirty ice that slowly formed on the embrasure when winter came and just as slowly thinned and wasted away the next spring.

His senses, their sphere of action limited, did not grow dull but rather began to sharpen on what little was available to them. In time the soft patter of a centipede’s legs resounded for him like the tread of a column of marching men. He could watch the stones of the walls settle a little farther each day into one another as they sank slowly towards the river. Lying awake at night he smelled the blood moving under the surface of his skin, felt the tug of the rising moon in the glands of his neck and groin. One day, instead of printing, he sat on the floor and watched a spider build a web in the crook of his arm.

Everything was woven into his work.

He moved, inch by inch, through the halls of the castle and into the world.

From time to time he heard the panel in the door slide open. He would not look to see who was observing him. He kept on with his printing. Let them wait. They would get their book when it was damned well ready.

Chewing his heel of loaf he bit into a rolled cylinder of paper. A note from Djinn. The backward message, once he had deciphered it, told him that the Count had gone with his men to a hunting salash in the mountains and that if they acted quickly Flood could be freed and spirited out of the castle that night. The printer sliced his finger on the edge of the paper and sent back a message scribbled in blood, asking Djinn to wait, if he would be so kind, until his work was finished.

One spring the river rose through the grate in the floor. He climbed from his bed one morning into ankle-deep icy water.

The flood subsided after a few hours, but not before collapsing a section of the wall opposite the door. Behind the fallen stones stood a gnarled trunk of bare wet rock. The unhewn roots of the castle. When he put his ear to the crevices at dusk he could hear the squeak and flutter of bats waking.

A pair of night herons nested for a season in a corner of the cell. Their luminous eyes followed his movements back and forth across the tiny space. After a while he ignored them, certain that they were mechanical toys belonging to the Count.

Time became spherical. Past events gathered around him like words in a book he could read as he pleased, in any order.

One day he stepped back from the press, wiped his brow, hung up his leather apron, and peered out the window of the shop. It was a cold winter morning in Lady Chapel Court. Snow was falling softly, silently, and the stones of the court had vanished under a covering of white. He wiped at the frost on the warped pane and saw a small figure in a red cloak. Meg, making snowballs. She looked up, saw him in the window, waved and shouted, although he could not hear the words. Come out, Nicholas.

He went to the door and opened it. The court, the snow, Meg had vanished. He turned back to the shop and he was in his cell.

From time to time he was visited by people he had known. His rivals in the printing trade. Papa Martin, the playing-card maker, one of his father’s old friends.

And people he did not recognize. An elderly white-bearded man in a green cloak stood near him all one evening at his work.

– Do I know you? Flood finally asked.

The old man did not speak, but held up his large, powerful hands to reveal strange characters burned into his fingertips. Letters, Flood finally realized, of the Hebrew alphabet.

He awoke one morning to find that the space where his imaginary press stood was taken up by the wooden skeleton of a real press. He approached the empty frame warily, wondering if by relentless mental exertion he had imagined part of it into existence. He spent the rest of the day collating sheets rather than give in to the temptation to touch the apparition and have it vanish into nothingness.

The next day the impression assembly — the screw, the bar, the platen – had joined the frame. He could no longer resist, and smiled as his hands slid into their old familiar grip around the well-worn contours of the bar. This, his hands told him, was his press, the old workhorse of the House of Flood and Son.

The following morning the carriage assembly was there: rounce, coffin, tympan and frisket, the ink bats hanging from their hook beside the ink block. He set a forme of imaginary type and was about to lock it into the coffin when he stopped, set the forme on the floor, and lowered his own face to the cold surface of the press stone. Like a rider greeting his mount he stroked the smooth, dark wood.

He slept fitfully that night, and was awakened at dawn by an unfamiliar sound. He sat up and peered into the corners of the cell, searching for the source.

A key, scratching like a mouse in the lock.

The heavy wooden door swung open with a faint squeal of hinges that told of the recent application of oil. A slender dark-skinned young man stepped warily into the cell, carrying a tray of type. He was followed by a girl of ten or eleven with pale russet hair, dressed in a boy’s waistcoat and breeches. Her eyes in the stark light gleamed a watery aquamarine. The young man and the girl stared at Flood for a moment, then at each other. Finally the girl stepped forward.

– Greetings, Signore Flood, she said in English. My name is Pica. I am your daughter.