The Palace of Illusions

by Rowenna Miller

Genres: Dragons & Mythical Creatures; Historical Fantasy; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

This enchanting and atmospheric fantasy brings readers to a Paris breathless with excitement at the dawn of the twentieth century. But for a select few there is a second, secret Paris where the magic of the City of Light is very real. 
 
In the run up to the 1900s World’s Fair Paris is abuzz with creative energy and innovation. Audiences are spellbound by the Lumiere brothers’ moving pictures and Loie Fuller’s serpentine dance fusing art and technology. But for Clara Ironwood, a talented and pragmatic clockworker, nothing compares to the magic of her godfather’s mechanical creations, and she’d rather spend her days working on the Palace of Illusions, an intricate hall of mirrors that is one of the centerpieces of the world’s fair.
 
When her godfather sends Clara a hideous nutcracker for Christmas, she is puzzled until she finds a hidden compartment that unlocks a mirror-world Paris where the Seine is musical, fountains spout lemonade, and mechanical ballerinas move with human grace. The magic of her godfather’s toys was real. 
 
As Clara explores this other Paris and begins to imbue her own creations with its magic, she soon discovers a darker side to innovation. Suspicious men begin to approach her outside of work, and she could swear a shadow is following her. There’s no ignoring the danger she’s in, but Clara doesn't know who to trust. The magic of the two Parises are colliding and Clara must find the strength within herself to save them both.

Release date: June 10, 2025

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 416

Sample

PARIS WAS BEAUTIFUL. Even in winter, with its long evenings that stretched pale and gray into a swift nightfall, even with the cold rain driving into the Seine and spattering the broad avenues. The lights only shone more brightly through the gloom, and Paris remained, always, beautiful.

At least, that was what Clara Ironwood had been told. Many times. Usually while she was squinting at her notebook through smudged spectacles or wrestling with a particularly finicky bit of clockwork, adjusting some wheel or cog with her minute silver-and-walnut tools. Always in the vaguely sympathetic, slightly chiding tone that told her that other people simply didn’t understand.

Work was beautiful. And Clara liked work. She loved it. Work was, in fact, as necessary as breathing, as water. If she had a problem to solve, she was happy. If she had diagrams to draw or grease on her fingers, she was in heaven. Paris—what could sudden rain showers and crowded sidewalks have over creating something beautiful?

She had been in Paris for months, through a cold autumn and into a gray winter, and she was already behind. Not behind on the official timetables given to her by the Exposition Universelle, of course, but on her own exacting schedule. The Exposition was set to open in less than six months, and she had every week of those months carefully chiseled into precise blocks of time.

This week’s strictly ordered calendar was devoted to finalizing the placement of the mirrors, mechanics, and electrical wiring for the ambitious masterwork she had been invited to help design: the Palace of Illusions. She needed to have her plans drawn within the fortnight, ready to begin manufacture in the dedicated workshop. The architecture of the palace was complex, and the mirrors that created the illusions, already in production, revealed every corner and left few places to hide the gears and pulleys and, most novel of all, electric lights that produced, on demand, a particular kind of effect not entirely unlike magic. It was a challenge greater than any she had ever encountered.

And she would not, no matter what happened, ask Fritz for help.

She sketched out another few lines in her notebook. All the guts and gears of the palace had to be invisible despite all those mirrors. She considered another angle, then imagined the placement—no, that didn’t work, either. Nothing had ever taken her so long, and she was beginning to question her skills. The numbers were larger, the scale greater, and the inclusion of electricity made the project more complex than her usual fare of clocks and music boxes, but it should not have been as difficult as it was.

“Still fiddling with it?”

Fritz Krieger. Damn it.

“Good afternoon, Herr Krieger.” She set down her glasses. By Jove, they were dirty.

“It is now more accurately good evening, Miss Ironwood. I thought someone ought to inform you that the staff is leaving. If you insist on staying late again, you will need to lock up on your own.” As if to spite Fritz’s impeccable manners and perfect diction, he had rakish dark curls and a single dimple set deep in his clean-shaven cheek, so that he always looked like he was about to pull some prank at Clara’s expense. He hadn’t, of course—that would have been horribly unprofessional for a well-respected architect like Fritz Krieger. His firm didn’t win the bid for one of the buildings for the Exposition Universelle by keeping a delinquent on staff. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that he wanted to put ink in her tea or drop crickets down her back.

“That’s no trouble,” Clara replied. She shifted so that Fritz couldn’t see the sketches, but it was too late.

“Still trying to mask the machinery completely? You are asking too much of your own exceptional work, Miss Ironwood.” Fritz shook his head. There it was—the constant suggestion, never stated yet always implied, that he was her superior in the fine art of clockwork. Whether that was on account of his being German and she American, or the difference in their sexes, she was never quite sure, but it grated on her. “Now, I will ask again, given the polite nature of our working rapport. Would you care to have dinner with my sister and me on Sunday?”

“And I will decline again, with my regrets.”

“I do hope it is because you have some dashing Parisian beau taking you on a long stroll down the Champs-Élysées, not because you are planning to work all afternoon.” Fritz smirked.

Clara’s teeth set themselves on edge. “Tell your sister I give her my thanks for the kind invitation.” Fräulein Alma Krieger was a perfectly lovely woman, all downy blond hair and broad smiles, the faint scent of gingerbread trailing her everywhere. But Herr Krieger’s insouciant smirks and patronizing suggestions over Sunday ham—that would be too much to bear. Clara had already, to her chagrin, agreed to attend their Christmas Eve party, and had yet to concoct an excuse plausible enough to extricate herself from that particular hell. At least she had several weeks before she had to subject herself to rounds of charades and pass-the-button and forced conversation.

“Do not waste all your hours here, Miss Ironwood. Paris in the first snowfall—ah, it is very beautiful.”

Clara inhaled slowly, and exhaled before replying. “Good evening, Herr Krieger.”

She began again on her calculations, fighting a headache that crept into her temples as she ran the numbers again and again. It simply wouldn’t work. She sighed. It was almost as though her thoughts were blocked, bottlenecking at some narrow point in her brain and never making it onto the page.

The headache, she decided, was to blame, even though she wasn’t entirely convinced it hadn’t been caused by trying to wrangle those calculations. The lights blazed over her worktable, but long shadows had overtaken the windows, and she decided it was time to lock up for the night.

Fritz was right—it had started to snow, a light swirl of flakes settling on bare branches and melting on the streets. Winter here would be nothing like home. Milwaukee, she was sure, would be blanketed in white from Thanksgiving onward. The streetlamps came on as she walked home, passing the new Pont Alexandre III, the gilt shimmering in the last of the sunset. At least, she thought as she skirted a pair of children catching snowflakes on their mittens, no one would chide her for working through that holiday here, as Parisians and Fritz Krieger alike were blissfully unaware of the customs of turkeys, oysters in stuffing, giblets in gravy, and dining room tables overflowing with relatives.

She felt a brief pang of something she could have mistaken for homesickness as the children laughed together, comparing the intricate snowflakes outlined in brief intensity on their dark mittens before they melted. She and Louise had done the same thing as children, until Godfather showed them the trick of catching snowflakes on dark cardstock instead. The flakes lasted longer, and he let them borrow his magnifying glass so they could examine them more closely. She wished she could tell the two girls that particular trick, but her French was abysmal and, of course, she was a stranger to them.

Godfather—she shook her head. She hadn’t written to him since arriving in Paris, and they hadn’t parted on good terms. He had been agitated, angry even, at the thought of her taking the job with the Exposition. He clearly didn’t think she was good enough yet. But then, of course, she was never good enough for Christian Elias Thrushman, master clockmaker, and she never would be.

“Clara! Miss Ironwood!”

Madame Boule, her landlady, waved enthusiastically from the door of her first-floor apartment. No, not premier étage—Clara corrected herself. Ground floor. There was a French term for it, she knew—but couldn’t recall it and gave up, frustrated. “Bonjour, Madame Boule, et comment—”

“Thank you as always for your kind attempts in French, Miss Ironwood, but I do appreciate practicing my English!” Madame Boule was too polite to say what she meant—it was Clara who needed practice, but months of trying hadn’t produced much improvement in her accent. “You had a package arrive today. I kept it in my apartment instead of leaving it at your door—thieves and busybodies multiply at Christmas, n’est pas?” She beckoned, and Clara followed her.

Madame Boule had been a widow for thirty years, her husband lost during “the 1870” as Madame Boule put it. She kept a framed photograph of him on the mantelpiece, draped in black crepe, and had assiduously run the building she had inherited from him ever since. It was tempting to cast Madame Boule as a tragic character, a modern-day Miss Havisham ever mourning her lost youth, but in reality, she was a merry, red-cheeked woman who, for all accounts from the longtime neighbors, was a shrewd businesswoman. She had turned the management of a middling-rate building into a real estate career spanning fine properties in several arrondissements.

“And here it is—from America, non?”

Clara took the box, brown paper smudged and stained after a transatlantic trip. It took both hands and some support from a hip to manhandle the package. “Yes—that’s my parents’ address,” she confirmed.

“A little Christmas good cheer, no doubt. You are coming for Christmas dinner after Mass, yes? I will not hear of you eating alone on blessed Christmas Day!”

“Of course, yes, thank you.” Clara backed awkwardly toward the door, wrangling the box through the doorway.

“If you wish to come to Mass, you are most welcome then, too!”

“Thank you, but no, Madame Boule, I—” The box corner caught on the door and Clara wrested it free. “I am not Catholic.”

“Oh, yes, but still. You are always welcome nonetheless. There are always many—how does one say?—eligible young men at Mass on Christmas. Their mothers make them attend.” She winked, and though Clara would typically have grimaced at such a suggestion, when it came from Madame Boule, she couldn’t help but laugh.

“Thank you, but dinner is more than enough festivity for me.” She managed to get the box up two flights of stairs and into her own apartment, a feat that nearly involved several complex equations, and finally heaved it onto her rickety tea table.

She caught her breath. Her mother’s delicate handwriting on the paper, their family’s address in Milwaukee inscribed in familiar script. She could almost see the house between the loops of the letters, its turrets and porches of brick near the lake, her mother’s joy and her father’s pride. It would be decorated for Christmas now. Every year Mother directed the long-suffering maids Georgie and Beatrice in hanging holly and evergreen and red velvet bows while her sister, Louise, quietly followed behind, straightening bows and taking down excessive greenery and arranging artful bouquets of white roses and red berries. Soon they would be baking gingerbread and mince pies and a grand snowy white cake for the Christmas Eve party.

She clamped her eyes shut on a pair of unexpected tears.

There was a keen letter opener in her desk, and with a few deft swipes Clara had the paper off and the box open. On the top was a letter from Mother, several pages in perfect handwriting, and another from Louise, full of charming observations and funny stories about people Clara would never have thought to ask about. And underneath—Mother had outdone herself. Tins of shortbread and ginger cookies, hardy enough to survive the trip, and homemade pralines and divinity, and marzipan and sugarplums from their favorite candy shop. To add some cheer to her admittedly spartan apartment, paper poinsettias and impossibly detailed paper snowflakes. At the very bottom, several brightly wrapped packages were marked in bold print, Do Not Open Until Christmas.

She set them on the table one by one, the cheerful pink and blue paper tied with gold ribbon. Two were marked from Mother, one from Father, another from Louise and—

She stopped.

A misshapen little bundle at the bottom, wrapped in wrinkled gold paper, with her name written in a thick handwriting different from her mother’s. Godfather Thrushman.

She held it warily. Whatever it was, Godfather hadn’t bothered with a box, instead padding it with tissue before mangling a bit of gaudy paper around it. Perhaps it was a peace offering. He had always given them the most wonderful Christmas presents when they were children; sending her one now could be a sign that he wanted to go back to how things had once been between them, doting godfather and precocious godchild. She traced the familiar handwriting, bold and almost jarring, the script of a man who wrote too quickly for niceties.

Then again, it could be another jab taunting her imperfections, shipped thousands of miles in the guise of a gift. She pulled her hand away from the familiar script. “Do not open until Christmas,” she whispered to herself, and set the package next to the others. Then she noticed the leather book that had been tucked underneath the gift.

Her breath catching a little, she recognized the book of foolish children’s stories Godfather had written for her. For Louise, too, ostensibly, but they were always really for her. He made them up, off the cuff, she was sure, and then wrote them down later in his book, in his best handwriting, not the scrawls and scribbles he used to take his personal notes. When she had been laid up with measles, Godfather had relayed the story of a conniving mouse queen living under their kitchen stove; she remembered the story and the malaise of fever mingling together and flipped through the slim volume, finding “The Queen of Mice” between “The Glass Palace” and “The Ugly Mr. Sandmann.”

She laughed at the discovery of that story. Mr. Sandmann had been an acquaintance of Godfather, or perhaps of Father—she had never been quite sure. He came sometimes in the evenings, sitting with Father and Godfather in the study and smoking cigars, talking over, as Godfather put it, “gears and clocks and sealing wax, cabbages and kings.” Clara had always hated Mr. Sandmann.

She didn’t know why—he was, it was true, a very ugly man, with a bulbous nose and almost bulging eyes, but Godfather was not very handsome, either, and that never upset her. There was something that roved, greedy and slippery, in Sandmann’s eyes, something that put her in mind of a grasping crow in the fingernails that he didn’t keep clipped.

“Silly Miss Clara.” Godfather had laughed when she had burst out that Mr. Sandmann scared her awfully. “Let us write him into a story or two and then he shan’t be any bother ever again.”

Never any bother again—she traced the old ink steeped in Godfather’s voice, the stories dragging poor Mr. Sandmann from one misadventure to another.

Once, there was a king who kept no army. His people were happy with this situation, as they did not want to send their sons to war, even if the sons occasionally complained that there was no honor in harvesting barley and digging ditches and all the other tasks they were set to. This was all due to the fact that there were no enemies or foes to fear in that part of the world, save one, whom only the king knew of and only the king knew how to fortify against. The king had only one rule, lest he be forced to instigate conscriptions like the neighboring kingdoms did: that no one be allowed to question who this foe was or why the king employed his particular methods of defense.

This arrangement suited most of the subjects well, and for many years they lived happily in prosperity, and nothing threatened the little kingdom. The proclamation, however, extended even to the royal family, and though the queen let the business of the state alone and busied herself perfecting her recipe for sausages, the king’s only child, a daughter, grew to appreciate that something was rather strange about her kingdom compared to the histories and geographies her tutors made her read.

For one, the guards on the ramparts of the castle were not men, as you have assuredly already guessed, astute reader Louise, as you know all the farmers’ sons were busy digging ditches instead of serving in the army. Instead, the guards were all clockwork owls with eyes as wide as dinner plates. For another, the king’s personal bodyguards were not soldiers, as you must know without my telling you, esteemed listener Clara, but clockwork foxes with tails as full as bottle brushes. The reason for this, the princess ascertained, was that the major general of the Forces of Defense was a clockmaker.

Despite the internal consistency of this logic, the princess was quite certain that it did not square with the lessons she had learned at the insistence of her tutor, nor with the descriptions of other lands that her correspondents, princesses all, sent to her. In fact, she was forced to describe the entire situation as “quite peculiar,” with no uncertainty.

Still, she was well aware of the prohibition on questions, and knowing her father the king to be a disagreeable man when crossed, she instead sought out the clockmaker, who served as, you will recall, intelligent reader, major general of the Forces of Defense. It was a strange title, she thought to herself, as there were no subordinates to salute the major general aside from clockwork animals, but she found it less strange to call him simply “sir,” and he seemed quite content to be addressed thus.

“Sir,” she said, upon entering the offices he kept on the top floor of an underused tower in the east portion of the castle, which was quite stuffed full of his inventions. They would be too many to number here, but the most dazzling were a golden bird who could recite the longitude and latitude of all of the major cities in the northern hemisphere, a little dog who danced a mazurka, and his prized creation, a nutcracker of surpassing beauty that could crack any nut that had ever been found in the shell. “Sir, may I inquire as to how you are able to keep so many clockwork owls in good working order on the ramparts?”

“You may indeed,” he said, and he took the girl all over the castle on his rounds, demonstrating his particular methods of oiling and calibrating the owls. They peered over the land with their dinner-plate eyes, and scrutinized the princess as she mimicked the clockmaker’s movements.

“Sir,” she said when they had finished their ministration, “may I inquire as to how you are able to keep the foxes in such good working order?”

“You may indeed,” he said, and he took the girl to their particular barracks, which consisted of a hutch made of silver and glass, lined with silk cushions. The foxes preened their bottle-brush tails and stood to attention when the clockmaker commanded, and they marched proudly before the princess as she mimicked the clockmaker’s orders.

The princess, emboldened by her success, then asked, “Sir, may I inquire as to how the owls and the foxes, as keen and bright of toys as they may be, are able to protect our fair castle and country?”

The clockmaker pursed his lips and scowled. “You know very well that you may not make such inquiries. You must learn to ask fitting questions.”

The princess considered this all the next day, and as evening fell, she found the clockmaker making his rounds to the owls. “Sir,” she said, “may I inquire as to how we are so fortunate as to never be attacked or even put at ill-ease by any aggressive forces as I have so often seen in my histories?”

The clockmaker pursed his lips and scowled. “You know very well that you may not make such inquiries. You must learn to ask fitting questions.”

The princess considered this all the next day, and as evening fell, she found the clockmaker amid the foxes and their silken cushions. “Sir, may I inquire what our walls are made of, to be so strong?”

“You may indeed,” the clockmaker said. “Our walls are made of the hardest nuts, mortared with marzipan, so that no force may breach them. And when the castle is locked up quite tight, by my own good clockwork, there is no way in or out.” This was quite true—to the clockmaker’s exacting specifications, the castle had been built much like a music box.

“What could breach such walls?”

The clockmaker pursed his lips and scowled. “You know very well that you may not make such inquiries. You must learn to ask fitting questions.”

Fascinated by the clockmaker’s revelation (though not entirely surprised, as she had long held that the walls bore an uncanny resemblance to almond paste), the girl turned instead to her tutor. A wily and untrusting sort of man, he set the girl to work canvassing her books for the answers to such questions as “what can break thick marzipan?” and “what can surpass nuts for sturdiness?” but the books yielded very little.

Undeterred, the tutor set to work in a small laboratory he had made for himself on the top floor of an underused tower in the west portion of the castle, and devised a projectile made of one-half saltpeter, one-half nightshade, and one-half good tea. He tested it upon a secret passage deep in the recesses of the castle where he thought no one might notice. Alas for him, the clockwork mice in the walls took note in an instant, and within the half hour, the foxes had put him under arrest and he was summarily shut up in a casket made of gingerbread and banished to sea.

The clockmaker was beside himself, tearing his hair and weeping openly, much to the embarrassment of the king and of the queen, who had brought out a platter of her best sausages for the occasion of the banishment.

“Most unhappy clockmaker am I!” he said between sobs. “I, who have done all my most esteemed sovereign has asked, have left this castle open to attack!”

The princess, who had her fill of being told her questions were not fitting, implored her father that, as his heir, she must be informed as to the nature of their defenses. The king, having quite forgotten that his daughter was far past old enough to be trained in her future office of monarchy, confided that their only neighboring enemy was a horrid pastrycook named Sandmann who had so utterly rotted his teeth that he was turned back by the very sight of marzipan.

The princess at once grasped the gravity of their situation, knowing that there was now a gap where the wicked pastrycook could breach their walls.

“What are we to do?” she asked of the clockmaker, which, though it was quite necessary, also produced an unfortunate deluge of fresh wails from the beleaguered man.

“Most unhappy clockmaker am I!” he cried again. “There is one who was my best and most crowning achievement, and I must now send him to guard the passage that was ruined by that fool of a tutor.” There was more gnashing of teeth and incomprehensible wails, but eventually they coaxed from him that, with the proper almonds no longer available to make the marzipan, only a stout and hearty guard could serve in place, and only one such guard in the entire palace would serve.

And so the nutcracker, a sturdy and handsome fellow of nearly three feet tall, had to be installed alone in the lower parts of the castle, away from all his friends and relations (that is, the other inventions of the clockmaker), to serve as guardian until such time as the castle fell to ruins or disuse. To give him the honor due his position, he was named chief chatelain of the castle and given the key to the gates to guard as well. It may be said, to the princess’s credit, that she learned her lesson well, and never again asked a tutor the sorts of questions best left to a clockmaker.

“I’VE QUITE NEARLY figured it out,” Clara announced as Fritz wandered into the workshop at a little after ten o’clock, buffering the pride in her voice. It had taken an infuriating week, dozens of sheets of scratched-out calculations in the bin, and several more late nights ending in headaches before she had finally dragged the correct dimensions onto formal plans. But she refused to be foiled in the perfection of the Palace of Illusions.

“You have worked out how to lay out the lights? That is—”

“No, I’ve figured out how to set up the underlayment without it reflecting in the mirrors.” She gathered the sketches and equations she’d been working on through the dim predawn hours and handed them to Fritz before he’d had a chance to take off his overcoat and hat. “See? It just means adjusting the placement of the back rows of mirrors slightly, and building lower-profile casings, which will mean raising the platform in the back slightly.”

Fritz’s brow tightened and then released as he scanned the pages. “You are right, fräulein. I would never have admitted it could be done.” He seemed genuinely pleased, which surprised Clara—she had expected antagonism.

“But I still need to work out how to incorporate the lights. Lights! Of all the novelties we could have to deal with, electric lights must be the most difficult to manage.” All the wires, the lines, the difficult calculations, the potential for setting something on fire. “I’ll work on those refinements so we can get plans to the construction foreman.”

“You needn’t bother, you know—they won’t start working on it until after the New Year. You have holidays in Milwaukee, yes? Or does everyone work through the Christmas season in America?”

“No, it’s just me,” Clara replied blithely. Fritz’s teasing couldn’t dampen her spirits—she had solved a puzzle, and that was her favorite feeling in the world. Now on to drawing up the formal plans, even if they wouldn’t be needed until January. That gave her plenty of time to perfect the designs, and perhaps begin to work out the timing of the lighting clockwork.

“Do you ever take a rest? Upon finishing a project or”—Fritz waved the sheets of paper covered with her sketches—“working out a particularly difficult problem?”

“Solving one problem just makes me want to solve another.” Clara permitted herself a small smile. “Perhaps I can help with some other project, if it’s necessary.”

“We are quite on schedule in this office, so I don’t believe that will be required.” Herr Krieger leaned closer with a conspiratorial smile. “As I hear it, several other firms have projects that are quite behind. At the main entrance gate, I’ve heard, the turnstiles have hit a snag that has descended into a quagmire, and I am given to understand that the marble to finish the finials in the Petit Palais is delayed, and there’s some sort of stall on the Quai des Nations—well, that is always the way of these things.”

“I can only imagine all the ways an endeavor of this magnitude can go wrong,” Clara said, trying very hard not to imagine any such thing.

“Yes—and of course, having snapped up the privilege of hosting in the auspicious year 1900, the board is quite determined this shall be the most impressive world’s fair ever known. Monsieur Lavallé on the board, now—do you know, he was haranguing me just yesterday that we cannot produce a reasonably realistic clockwork automaton for one of his displays?”

“Perhaps we could,” Clara said. “It would be quite an experiment, though.” Godfather had made mechanical dolls and animals, but their peculiar and repetitive movements left quite a bit to be desired when it came to realism. A humanlike automaton would be something worthy of the new century’s first Exposition Universelle.

“Even you do not have the time, I am quite sure, Miss Ironwood! Once they start outfitting your Palace of Illusions, they will have many questions and find plenty of things to ask you to change.”

“I haven’t been in the building itself since—oh, it’s been over a month. Do you think I could ask someone to let me in?”

“Ask someone! Why, I have never had any trouble just telling the workers and whatnot I am there with the—oh, I see.” Fritz paused as Clara raised an eyebrow, chagrined for a rare moment. Of course the workers assumed confident, competent, and male Fritz Krieger had business being in the under-construction buildings for the Exposition. Clara, on the other hand—a nondescript woman asking to be allowed in? Hardly the same. “I say, I can take you over this afternoon.”

“But you’re busy, and I don’t have to go today—it’s only that I wanted to get a sense of those ceilings again, just in case—”

“No, nonsense! The fresh air will do me good. At any rate, I haven’t seen le Palais des Illusions since they started the interior work. It would do well to get a better idea before they go installing those mirrors and lights.”

Clara acquiesced. Sometimes, she allowed, Herr Krieger was not unpleasant company, even if it often seemed he was forcing words into silences that were quite happy being left alone. Still, he did seem to know everyone and everything about the Exposition, and that was helpful.

Fritz insisted on buying a ham-and-butter sandwich the size of a baseball bat from a street cart and sharing it with Clara as they walked. The Palace of Illusions was part of the Exposition grounds on the Champ-de-Mars, adjacent to the Palace of Optics. Clara had thought, upon receiving the initial invitation to work for the Exposition, that the use of “palace” was a fanciful European affectation for what must be, in truth, something more like the exhibition halls at the state fair. She had been thoroughly disabused of this idea when she had been given the initial tour of the Palace of Illusions and its neighbors.