The Tinker King

by Tiffany Trent

  She was surprised to find Bayne in the hall, taking his porridge like a servant. “May I join you?” she asked. She hadn’t seen him since the night they’d carried Olivia into the workshop.

  “Of course,” he said. A servant came quickly, bringing her a bowl of porridge and a mug of steaming black coffee. She cupped the plain mug with her hands, relishing its warmth.

  “You haven’t slept,” Bayne said.

  “I suppose I have circles under my eyes.”

  “Yes, though I gather I shouldn’t tell you so.”

  She shook her head. “Generally not. No.”

  “What’s happened? Has Tesla figured out what to do?”

  She took a sip of coffee and realized her hands were shaking. “He wants to flense her, Bayne . . . er . . . my Lord.”

  “No ceremony here. Flense her? As in . . .”

  “Remove her flesh. He says he cannot save it, and he cannot fix her unless it’s gone.”

  Bayne rubbed his chin with his hand. She could see he hadn’t shaved in a day or two. “We should talk about this elsewhere. Finish your porridge and then come with me. I’d like to show you something.”

  “What is it?”

  An exasperated smile played about his lips. “You’re really not one for surprises, are you?”

  She tilted her head. “Not any more.”

  “In this one case, I’m advising you to live dangerously.”

  It was her turn to smile. “We should hire a scribe, I think.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “To note what you just said for posterity.”

  He raised a brow, then turned and stood. “Finished?”

  She nodded.

  He led her through halls and up flights of stairs, up to battlements she hadn’t been able to see from the side of the palace they’d entered a week ago. From up here she could see an old air-car line trailing away toward a distant clearing in the middle of one of the nearest mountains. A white dome rose above the trees.

  “We’re going there?”

  “I suppose I could transport us, but this is actually much more entertaining.” Bayne grinned as he slid open the car door. The thing swayed gently from side to side as he gestured for her to step in.

  “But . . . won’t we be using unnecessary myth?” she asked as she stepped into the compartment. She was encased in a bubble of glass stretched over a wood-and-iron frame. She was thankful the floor was solid, even if the walls were not.

  He stepped in after her, sliding the door closed. “No,” he said. He reached up and touched the roof with a glowing hand.

  The car clicked down the tracks, blue sparks spitting out ahead and behind.

  “Are you sure? Do you need . . .” She didn’t want to suggest he didn’t have enough power to handle it, but neither did she want him to waste power they couldn’t afford to be without if something happened.

  “What is the point of magic if you can’t enjoy it once in a while?” he asked. “This is how I used to use it without anyone knowing when I was a child.”

  “You stole the air-car?” Vespa didn’t know why she was surprised. The very fact that he was an Architect suggested he had a bit of a rebellious streak.

  “All the time,” he said. “It was the only way I could keep my father from knowing precisely where I was at all times. Though, of course, when I learned to use magic, that became much easier.”

  “I suppose your mentor taught you,” she said. She was grateful to think about something besides all her worries over Olivia and Syrus. And Charles.

  “No,” he said with a rueful smile. “I had to learn on my own when my father called the car back and left me stranded out there.” He nodded toward the ever-larger white dome. “Believe me, you do not want to be left alone out there at night.”

  Vespa looked around uneasily. Beneath them the City had given way to a vast necropolis, filled with monuments and crumbling headstones. The wall that protected the City had fallen in places. It was hard to tell around Bayne’s magic, but she thought she saw the telltale shimmer of warding between the fallen stones.

  “That is what I’ve been doing with most of my time lately,” he said. “Shoring up fortifications. I don’t know what my father was thinking sometimes.”

  She stopped looking down. They were far from the ground and getting farther as the hill fell into rolling ravines before it met the mountains. It made her nauseated.

  She recalled the cars jumping from track to track in the lower parts of the City and swallowed hard. “This doesn’t jump the track, does it?”

  “No,” Bayne said. “More’s the pity. I always wanted to see if I could make it fly.” He lifted his hand toward the roof of the car again. “Want to try it?”

  Vespa remembered the protective bubble they’d used to escape the exploding airship. She wasn’t sure which had been more terrifying—trying to make sure the bubble landed safely with its cargo or trying to hold it steady against the mythgas flames. “Er . . . no, thank you,” she said.

  “And here I thought you had a sense of adventure,” he teased. He was full of mischief today, as she hadn’t seen since they’d fallen in the River together. He seemed to be trying very hard to make her forget their troubles.

  “My Lord,” she said, “my sense of adventure has been taxed quite enough lately, I’ll kindly have you remember.” She smiled, despite her haughty tone.

  “Then you’d better get ready to have it tasked some more,” he said. The boyish grin that lit his eyes made her heart lurch even more awkwardly than the rocking air-car.

  She pretended not to notice. She was also pretending not to see just how very far the ground had receded or how fast they were speeding toward their destination.

  The mountain soared ahead of them, its sheer shoulders lost in cloud. Here in the lower elevations, if they could truly be deemed as such, the mist and sea wind had conspired to produce a verdant jungle that stretched across the knees of the mountains like an emerald skirt.

  “It looks like the perfect place for a Basilisk,” Vespa said. The fluttering leaves of the jungle provided the perfect cover for their feathered green scales. Vespa had read in one of the Museum codices that they often waited in the canopy of such forests, draping themselves in such a fashion that unwary travelers would look up and be dead from their glance.

  “Oh yes. That and more. But all should be well now. The Elementals here must have heard of your triumph. They’ll grant you safe passage, I’m fairly certain.”

  Vespa didn’t feel quite prepared to deal with a Basilisk, even if it did recognize her. She hadn’t packed a cockerel in her satchel, after all. “Fairly certain? You don’t reassure me, my Lord.”

  “I’ve talked more than one Elemental out of eating you. I’m certain I could do it again, if the situation required it.”

  Bayne was watching her closely, waiting for her retort. She bit her lip and said nothing.

  Then she looked ahead. They were approaching the platform at an alarming speed, and Vespa wasn’t sure how they weren’t going to run full tilt into one of the twisted trees.

  “Perhaps you ought to concentrate on docking us?” she asked.

  Too late. The car docked with such ferocity that it threw them together. His arms went round her reflexively as metal shrieked and gears ground.

  “Must be a bit rusty,” Bayne murmured.

  Vespa felt he waited longer than was necessary to let her go, and she truly didn’t mind. She wished she minded more.

  She disengaged herself as soon as she could. “Sorry,” she said, keeping her eyes cast down as they parted.

  He didn’t say anything but unlatched and slid open the doors. As he helped her out of the car, she ignored the charge that raced up her arm as best she could.

  Ancient trees dug into old paving stones like tentacles. Aerial roots and vines festooned their branches. There was a bright flash in the canopy above as a flock of something—birds or sylphids—took flight.

  “Were those bluewin
gs?” Vespa asked.

  Bayne glanced up. “Yes.”

  Vespa nodded. Sylphids, then. She’d seen them in one of the Museum bestiaries but had always wanted to see them in the wild. “Is it true what they say about them?” she asked.

  “That they bestow luck?” Bayne shrugged. “Never was able to squeeze one hard enough to find out when I was a boy. They have a pretty wicked curse.”

  “Worse than Piskel?”

  “Definitely.”

  “Of course, I let them alone once I realized it was wrong to try to extract good luck from them,” he said.

  Through the twisting trees she could make out an ivory dome. It was a very familiar shape, something she’d held and examined many a time at the Museum.

  She stopped.

  Bayne looked at her. “What?”

  “That is a skull,” she said.

  “Yes. So?”

  “So, what is a skull of that size doing here in the middle of the jungle?”

  “This is where Ximu placed it,” Bayne said. “So that the enemy could always see her own failure for eternity.”

  “Where did you learn that?”

  “Syrus. He mentioned something about it being part of the legend of Ximu. We always knew the palace was made of Titan bones, but never knew much more than that.”

  “We really should have him write some of these things down,” Vespa said.

  “If we can ever get him to sit still.” Bayne gestured. “This way.”

  Vespa picked her way carefully across the stones while Bayne ambled on ahead. She caught up to him on the porch formed by the open upper jaw and the outthrust nasal bone. The mandible held the skull up. The lower jaw was buried deep in the ground.

  Vespa shivered. “Ximu certainly doesn’t stint on making things horrifying.”

  Bayne looked up as he crossed the threshold. “You know, I never really paid much attention to it. I suppose I would have felt differently if I’d known what really happened. Growing up, I was always told that a large creature had died here and a powerful wizard had made the city out of its bones. Nothing more.”

  Vespa raised a brow. “You didn’t question your sources?”

  Bayne smiled and shook his head. “Not back then.”

  “I find that hard to believe,” she said. They passed under the arch leading up to the sinuses. Vespa remembered how the bowels of the Tower had been in Tianlong’s skull, and how the Heavenly Dragon had expelled it all and shaken free of his earthly confines. She hoped the Titan didn’t decide to wake now, though she hardly saw how that was possible. Still, stranger things had happened.

  A flood of jagged light drew them onward—the top of the skull had broken in and was open to the sun. She could see stairs curving up the dome and a telescope and other instruments on a ledge under the break. This was the new observatory, relocated from New London. Vespa smiled.

  “They say,” Bayne said, “that the old King used to come here to think. The light here supposedly provides clarity if you are having trouble deciding what to do about an issue.”

  “Is that why you brought me here?”

  “I don’t know if it’s true, but if nothing else, it will at least give you a moment’s peace,” Bayne said.

  Vespa didn’t want to say aloud that she wondered if there would be many more of those. Instead she said, “Thank you.”

  She walked to the light, her boots echoing on the stones. Shadows fled in a twisting column through the skylight—birds or sylphids or something more sinister, she couldn’t tell.

  The sun poured over her, so hard and bright, she had to close her eyes. There was a feeling of such ancient power here that her bones vibrated with it.

  “You feel it?” Bayne said.

  “Yes.” She was afraid to do much more than whisper. She hadn’t felt such power since she’d carried the Heart. It washed all around her in waves.

  “This was where my magic first quickened,” Bayne said. He was still outside the ragged circle of light. She could only see him as a shadow at its edge. “Some say there are wells of power like this all over the world, places where the magic is thicker than others. And that from these sources flow wondrous things.”

  “I can see why,” Vespa said. It was like bathing in a stream of etheric energy, a current of pleasant fire. It reminded her a bit of how it had been to stand close to the paralytic field. It was all of that and more, without the awful side effects. For the first time in she didn’t know how long, she felt refreshed.

  She drew in a breath that was pure light. And in that breath a man came to stand beside her, resplendent in Dragon robes. She’d seen him in her dreams—the Tinker King. This time she watched him place the boy in his tomb as if she stood right beside him. He regarded her with sad, ancient eyes. “Bring me my son,” he said.

  “Who is your son?” Vespa was confused. She was certain his son was already dead.

  Then he showed her Syrus’s face. “He is the last of a line descended from my sister. I’ve been trying to speak to him, but there is a curse on him. My old enemy is upon us. There is not much time. Bring me my son, and I will give you the key to your power.”

  “I don’t . . .”

  Before she could say more, she was standing in a tower in Scientia. She was looking out over a classroom of students—her students—to the hustle and bustle and the Winedark Sea tossing beyond. Mostly all she heard was the scratching of quills on paper. She looked down and saw the name of the course: Elemental Magic. Not Etherics or the Ethology of Unnaturals. Magic. She was teaching a class in magic.

  Vespa looked down and saw a cuff circling her wrist, and it was decorated with the same scarabeus symbol she’d seen on the sarcophagus. It was the cuff the king had taken off his wrist and put on the prince in his tomb. She felt as she once had with the Heart—complete, open, filled with power.

  It was a vision. She had never experienced one before, but this rang so true that she knew it in her bones. The king had shown her the future. She would control her gift, and she would teach it to others. Magic would be as common as arithmetic or penmanship. And hundreds, perhaps thousands, of children who would have been abandoned under the old regime or who would have suppressed their gifts at the cost of their own sanity, would be helping the magic to grow.

  The magic would be alive and well in such a way as she’d never imagined it could be. It would sing in the breast of every person who walked this world, no longer twisted or denied. And it would begin with her.

  “Bring him to me,” the Tinker King said again. “Together we can break the curse that is on him.”

  “I will.”

  It was such a beautiful, hopeful vision that Vespa reached out to Bayne, wanting him to share it. “Come stand with me.”

  “I . . .”

  She couldn’t quite focus on him. “Oh, come, my Lord. Just . . . indulge me for once.”

  For a moment she thought he wouldn’t. And then he was there, sliding into the light. She tried to hold on to the vision she’d just had, hoping it would appear to him, too.

  Without any warning, she found herself inside his mind. There was absolutely no sense of things slowly merging, as often happened with their magic. He knew everything she’d been silent about lately, but she had never tried to hide that either. Nothing she felt was a surprise to him. But within him . . .

  Vespa gasped in shock. She saw everything he had been hiding, everything that he had tried to keep from her—his wounded pride, his loneliness, his inflated sense of honor, and . . . his love. She understood then that something barred his feelings, something that he clung to. I swore, she heard him say again as he had the day of the airship crash.

  He moved out of the field of light as quickly as he could. “No more, please. I beg you.”

  “But, Bayne, if . . .” She stepped toward him, not knowing exactly what to say.

  “I told you before: we must leave it,” he said, his eyes afire with magic.

  “But . . .” She said it almost under he
r breath, then recovered herself. She had seen the future. And whether he joined her in that future, she felt the truth of her own destiny in her bones. She would teach magic and restore balance in the world. That was more important than anything else. She squared her shoulders. “You must do as you will. We’ll still be partners, yes?”

  “I wouldn’t want the alternative,” he said. There was a great weariness in his voice, as if he was tired of his own stubbornness.

  “Neither would I,” she said.

  They meandered for a while longer, but the mirth in their jaunt was gone. Afternoon fell quickly; Vespa shivered and rubbed her arms, wishing for her wrap.

  “We should go,” Bayne said.

  “Yes,” she said. “Thank you for bringing me here.”

  “I wanted you to experience it. I just didn’t know . . .”

  Vespa mustered a smile, thinking about the vision she’d seen. “It’s truly all right. It was wonderful. I would like to come again sometime.”

  He helped her back into the car, and they rode in silence. She was indeed at peace now. She knew what she had to do.

  CHAPTER 27

  The banging on my door begins bright and early.

  I open it to a guard, who informs me that Tesla has need of me. “Wear your best suit. The Saint does not tolerate slovenliness.”

  I growl and shut the door to change.

  I take Truffler with me, despite the guard’s protests. Truffler, of course, can fade into any setting he wishes, but I worry. All the other Elementals have vanished, and I don’t believe for a moment that all this myth Charles is using is stockpiled. Whatever is taking them could be after Truffler next.

  I am thinking so hard about how to find the other Elementals that I barely notice when the guard leads us into Tesla’s workshop. Truffler’s cry startles me out of my thoughts.

  Tesla pulls off old nullgoggles and a laboratory coat he’d been wearing over his clothes. Olivia’s silver body is carefully arranged on the slab. Tesla bends over her, dabbing the last drops of acid from her with a heavy cloth. She doesn’t appear to be awake. “Come here, boy.”