The Tinker King

by Tiffany Trent

  The guard releases me, but I just stand there, staring.

  Tesla looks back at me. “Are you going to help or not? Come here.”

  I force myself to move, because I know I need to see her. I need to hear what he says. It’s still just hard for me to believe.

  “Come and look at this,” Tesla says. There is an eagerness in his voice—an almost boyish excitement.

  I’m afraid to look. Seeing Olivia this way is somehow even worse than if I had chanced to see her naked. But if I’m ever to get free of this place, if there is any way we can still save Olivia (though now I truly don’t know how), I will have to at least pretend that I’m interested. I will have to bury my rage beneath my cunning. The best hounds do that, too.

  “This is the most exquisite construction I have ever seen,” Tesla says. He passes his gloved hand over the collarbone and upper arm. With all the flesh stripped away, I can see the intricate circuits and servos, the tiny gears and pistons that had driven her. The mechanisms had been so smooth, the magic that maintained her so seamless, that none of us ever guessed what lurked beneath her flesh. I am intrigued despite myself; must be the Tinker in me.

  “Have you ever seen its like? Do you have many of these sorts of things here? I have had many visions of such things in the future of my world, but none of them have been created yet.”

  “She isn’t a thing. She’s a person. But no, I haven’t seen anything like her.” Despite our agreement to trust each other, I still feel wary. If what he said about Charles’s plans is true, I’m afraid to trust him with the location of the army.

  I look down along the silver length of Olivia’s body. In her midsection, right where the navel on a human would be, is a keyhole. A winding key. If she is some sort of clockwork, it’s entirely possible that she requires some kind of key to keep her wound. But if that’s the case, where might the key be? Her father could have stowed it anywhere.

  “Syrus.” Tesla leans toward me over the table.

  I look into his eyes and see the same earnestness I saw yesterday.

  “I want to help you. Tell me how,” Tesla says.

  “I think we’re going to need a key.”

  And I think I know just the one to ask.

  I nearly fall over Vespa as I leave Tesla’s workshop.

  “I was just coming to get you,” she says.

  “Oh?”

  “There’s someone we both need to meet. Lead me to the old palace.”

  I can’t keep the surprise from my face. “How do you know about that?”

  “I think someone has been trying very hard to get a message to you. Maybe finally it’s getting through.”

  She explains it to me as we walk, how she’d been having dreams since New London and how those dreams got very vivid once we got to Scientia. She still hadn’t realized what they’d meant until this morning.

  “Bayne took me to a special place—the observatory in the Titan’s skull. And . . .” She seems a bit embarrassed.

  “What?”

  “Well, I had a vision of the Tinker King. And he told me that you are under some sort of curse and that I should bring you to him.”

  I nod. I’d had my suspicions about the black wolf, and they’d been confirmed yesterday when he’d shown me the army awaiting its General underground. I wasn’t sure why he’d never appeared to me in human form, but I’d assumed that perhaps as a ghost, he couldn’t. I’d truly not had many dealings with ghosts. Nainai hadn’t liked them and was always trying to scare them away as much as possible.

  All we can hear in the haunted palace are our own footsteps. There is no other sound. The black wolf is nowhere to be seen, and the ghostlights don’t flicker on as we approach the stairs.

  “Do you know where we’re going?” I ask.

  “To his burial chamber,” Vespa says.

  She makes a light carefully in her hand, and I follow her down the stairs. Instead of going straight toward the pit, she turns left, into the chamber I’d sensed before, the one filled with sadness.

  Gold gleams everywhere we look. There are beds and tables and chairs. It amazes me that all this treasure is still here. Why has it not been stolen by greedy Grimgorns? It amazes me even more that this once belonged to a Tinker. What Nainai could have done with all of it!

  It’s not until we near the sarcophagus that I see the form bending over it and startle.

  I’m unpleasantly reminded of Olivia as we draw closer. The sarcophagus is open, and a body lies in state there in rotting cloth of gold.

  “This was his son,” Vespa says to me.

  The Tinker King turns. His eyes are amber and piercing as they are in wolfshape. “Yes,” he says. “Killed far before his time by Ximu.”

  “She is coming again,” I say.

  “She must not be allowed to take this City back.” His gaze sweeps us both like fire. I feel terribly unworthy to stand in his presence. He’s not just a ghost but a hero, a legend.

  “I have brought your son to you so that we can keep that from happening,” Vespa says, curtsying deeply to the King.

  I look over at her, and I’m about to ask her what she means when his cold hands are on me, the ice so deep, it nearly freezes my heart. It reminds me very much of Charles nearly choking the life out of me once. The fear and anger nearly send me into houndshape again as it did then.

  But these hands reach inside me and find the dark place within. They tug and rip and shred until that dark place no longer remains. The memories flood me. The dreams. The knowledge that I have been spying for Ximu since New London. She is coming for me, expecting me to bring her an army. She is almost here. I can feel her and her army marching across the Plain as if they’re the Creeping Waste come to destroy us all again.

  The King takes my darkness and replaces it with an iron core of belief. “You are my son now, the last of my line. Only the descendants of the wolf can defeat the great spider.”

  Something falls around my neck, a cold key by the shape of it. “Take this and awaken my army. They will send Ximu back over the sea at your command!”

  “Xiexie, my King,” I say when I can finally catch my breath from the shock. “Xiexie ni.”

  CHAPTER 28

  Vespa hadn’t yet told anyone about the encounter with the Tinker King. It still felt unreal. But every time she looked down at the scarabeus bracelet that now graced her wrist and felt the surge of power from it, she knew it had happened.

  She decided to return to the sunken garden she had found the other day and test whether or not such a simple thing could be true. There was cold-blooming jasmine here, but, aside from the trumpet vine that Charles had forced to bloom the other day, everything else was already dreaming of winter. A catwalk ringed the courtyard from above, allowing passersby to take in the heady scents during the proper seasons.

  An observant maid who had seen her enter the garden brought tea. “Thank you,” Vespa said as she set down the tray.

  Piskel joined her from where he’d evidently been snoozing up in the arbor and yawned as he inspected the tray for cake.

  She went to the rose garden. She remembered what it had been like trying to coax the vine into bloom. It had happened eventually, but it had taken a great deal of concentration. She spread her fingers against the rose and focused her power through the scarabeus. Almost before she thought of it, the rose had budded and bloomed. She spread her influence wider, and then the entire rose garden was blooming.

  Applause from under the arbor made her start.

  Charles.

  Vespa blushed a bit. She really had wanted to experiment with the scarabeus on her own.

  He closed the book he was reading, sliding his hands along the cover and setting it down on the wooden bench beside him, before rising to greet her.

  She glanced at the title. Holy Bible. Without the Scientific in the middle. Almost identical to the one she’d seen encased in glass in the Emperor’s Cabinet of Curiosities over a year ago and that she had often wondered about sin
ce. Presumably, this was a copy Charles had gotten in Old London.

  Vespa was filled with questions about Old London and was still incredulous about how he’d gotten there and back again, but she’d rather not ask now. She wanted to be finished with the conversation as quickly as possible.

  “Miss Nyx,” he said.

  “Mr. Waddingly.” She looked toward the door, at the catwalk above, anywhere but at him.

  “It’s very disheartening to me that you still find me menacing,” he said.

  “I don’t think menacing is the proper word.”

  “Disconcerting, then?”

  She shook her head.

  The sun glinted in the sandy-blond curls about his face. His brown eyes were full of mischief. He was making fun of her.

  “I suppose I can’t expect much more, truly,” Charles said. “You didn’t know me before the Grue took hold. I didn’t even recognize myself back then.”

  “And what were you before you made your deal with the Grue?” It was something Vespa had wondered often in the last year, and even more so since Charles had admitted he’d been too weak to choose other than what the Grue offered him.

  “I wanted to be you,” he said.

  Vespa looked at him in surprise.

  “You must understand—as I said before, I came from Lowtown. My father was a tanner. My mother a laundress. We were poorer than poor. And yet I was bright. I showed aptitude for things I shouldn’t. Rather than abandon me beyond the Wall, my mother tried to hide it. She paid dearly for a crude dampener, rather like the sort your father gave you in that jade toad. But it didn’t work on me.

  “An Architect found me in a ditch, nearly dead from eating what filth I could find or trade small charms for, after my father had forcibly removed me from his house. I’d learned to do rough, dark magic to stay alive, but there was still much I didn’t know. The Architect took me under his wing. He helped me learn, and he got me a position in the Museum with your father.”

  “Bayne said you betrayed their order.” Vespa knew from both Bayne and Syrus about the fight that had raged through the Archives after Bayne had discovered his dead masters. All of them dead at Charles’s hand. It was hard to imagine that this man who smiled ruefully at her and clasped his long fingers in front of him almost as if he were about to recite a poem was the same person who had murdered and enspelled so many with alacrity.

  Yet in a way she almost understood. The Heart had given her untold power, and it had been hard to give it up. What could I have done with the Heart had I been allowed to keep it? she thought. She had a feeling the scarabeus would teach her.

  “I did, but it was betrayal out of fear and revenge. They were about to vote me out of the Council. They felt my ideas were too radical, too ambitious. They wanted to teach me a lesson.”

  “But you taught one to them first.”

  “The Grue did,” Charles said. “It’s the custom if one is dismissed by the Architects that one either drinks the little potion they send you the day afterward, or one of them will come take you to the Creeping Waste.”

  Vespa just stared at him.

  “You didn’t know that about them, then? They have strict rules for vow-breakers. When Garrett founded the Architects of Athena, he forced his disciples to swear very binding oaths. If they broke any of them, they were expected to drink the potion to erase their memories, or the Architects would come and take their lives. Either way the magic must be forfeited.”

  “All that for an oath of secrecy?”

  Charles laughed hollowly. “Ah, the oaths were much more than that, Miss Nyx. Secrecy, yes, but chastity and obedience as well.”

  Vespa frowned. “Chastity?”

  “Garrett had been Athena’s lover. When her father recaptured her and had her put to death, it destroyed Garrett. He made it part of the Architect’s Oath that none would love or form lasting ties beyond the Order. Part of that is simple protection; Garrett knew how easy it was to coerce a man when his wife or children were threatened. But they especially forbade congress between a witch and warlock. ‘For to love a witch is death,’ so the Oath reads. They did not want the business of magic jeopardized by love.”

  Vespa’s heart sank as understanding finally dawned. She remembered Bayne’s whisper when they had been in the golden country of their magic. I swore . . . and his silence when she’d begged him to tell her what he had sworn.

  “He did not tell you?”

  “No,” she whispered.

  “I’m surprised. I would have thought, judging from his marriage to Lucy Virulen, that he had considered himself forsworn. Or that, more logically, he would have considered himself free of the Oath when he discovered all the Architects dead. Either way, I thought he would have told you long before this.”

  She shook her head.

  “I suppose he still considers himself an Architect, even though all the rest of them are dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I am very sorry, Miss Nyx, if I’ve given you unpleasant news. I know he is your business associate, but I hope you had no further expectations of him.”

  Vespa was silent. She was not sure how to feel. Buried behind the wall of his oath, she knew that Bayne loved her. But if he could not break the wall down himself, it didn’t matter. Even though she had made her peace with it, she still found it a bit hard to bear.

  Arms went around her. Tentatively, very gently, Charles pulled her close.

  Vespa stiffened at first. Then she realized that this could be a way to get closer to Charles, to understand whether he was still a menace or if he had changed as he said. The cloth beneath her cheek was coarse and yet inviting, like Father’s coats had been. And it smelled even nicer. Like warm sunlight and leather-bound books, paper and ink. Gentle, normal things that she could understand. She allowed herself to melt. Just a little.

  And yet there was an edge there too. A whisper of power. Something dark and mysterious contained. There was muscle in that wiry frame.

  She felt him swat something away—Piskel, from the buzzing sound of it—before patting her on the shoulders.

  “There, there,” he whispered. “We have suffered so much, you and I. Two people should never suffer so much for magic.”

  A shadow fell over them from above. Vespa drew back.

  And looked straight up into Bayne’s eyes. The expression on his face—shock, hurt, betrayal, rage even—struck her almost like a physical blow. But the scorn that followed was almost worse. He didn’t bother with the pretense of a nod. He simply retreated, his face like stone.

  She wanted to call after him, but she knew better. She looked back at Charles. He smiled. “Oh my. I don’t think he liked that much, did he?”

  Resignation rose up on the heels of her sorrow. “Most likely not,” she said.

  The luster went out of the day. She sensed that Charles had gotten what he wanted—a delicate twist of the knife she’d very nearly removed from her heart.

  “I’ll take my leave, Miss Nyx.”

  “Thank you. I’m sorry if . . .” She wasn’t really sure how to phrase it. She wasn’t sorry that she’d doubted him before. How could she not? He had always been an enemy. She had never had the opportunity to think of him differently, and she still wasn’t sure she should do so now.

  “No need for apologies. I hope that you can forgive me for what I did when I was not myself. Perhaps you will even allow me to be your friend. I realize, though, that the circumstances in which we find ourselves are not the best.”

  Vespa thought about everything that had brought her to this moment. And now Bayne had seen her in an embrace with Charles. “No, they are not.” The sun seemed to have vanished behind a cloud, and Vespa hugged herself, wishing she’d brought a shawl for warmth.

  Charles nodded then, picked up his bible, and was off.

  CHAPTER 29

  She comes to me as has become her habit in the hours just before dawn.

  Usually, I am deep in the cave with her, bound in her silk,
defenseless.

  This time, it’s different. It’s as though I’m looking into a shimmering lake of fire. I can see a dark shape off in the distance.

  A girl cries out to me, and I see her wavering form at the edge of the lake of fire. “Oh, finally! You can see me! I’ve been waiting for ever so long.”

  I have no idea what she’s talking about.

  “Syrus! That is your name, isn’t it?”

  I pause. I’m trying to place her disheveled hair and scarred features. I don’t know her—maybe she’s tricking me, using my own memories against me like Ximu does. Perhaps she is one of the drowned ghosts of the palace, a fancy woman who met an untimely end.

  “Don’t be daft, boy!” she says. “Your name is Syrus?”

  I’d recognize that tone anywhere, though.

  “Lucy?” I ask.

  “That’s Lady Virulen to you!” She puts her hands to her face, and when her fingers drop, she looks around in confusion. I feel as though she’s seeing things that I can’t possibly see. She reaches out, and it’s as if there’s some sort of impenetrable membrane or wall between us. “Or that’s who I was. Once.” She looks at me, and her eyes are wild with fear and terror. “Lucy will do.”

  I look beyond her. “The shadow is moving,” I say. I feel compelled to tell her.

  She looks behind her and suppresses a scream. “Oh Saint Newton, oh Saint Darwin,” she cries. She whirls to look at me, and then I see it—the faint resemblance to that high-bred young lady I once despised. Only this girl has been utterly crushed, nearly dissolved into nothing.

  “Please, you’ve got to help me. This has all been such a mistake . . . such a mistake. If he just hadn’t let go of my hand . . .”

  He let go of my hand. I remember her words back in the Museum. Those sad, telling words.

  “What can I do?” If she is asking to be released from Ximu, I have no idea how that can be done. Charles says he’s free of the Grue, but I still find that hard to believe.