The tulip shipment was the most valuable thing to enter the harbor in a very long time. A king’s ransom, or a city’s, or an entire winter without hunger for those desperate and bold enough to risk tulip soup. Of course it was guarded. Metal troopers, machines like Jax, weren’t the worst problem. The real danger was their human commander, once he realized a rogue Clakker was loose in the warehouse.
Willem’s compulsion rose within Jax: a searing ember that couldn’t be extinguished, hot enough to consume him if he resisted.
Jax shredded the bunting and then shoved the rags into the holes in his skull with enough force to bend the rims of his ears. No matter. They could always be hammered back into shape. But now he couldn’t hear an order to desist.
Nor could he hear the guards. But he’d served in more than one army in the centuries before he was sold to the navy, and knew the tactics of the human minds who commanded the clockworks. They sought human offenders: impoverished thieves weak from hunger, or French saboteurs.
Jax leapt upon one of the iron pillars spread throughout the cavernous warehouse. Stiffened fingers and toes punched rivet-sized holes through the beam as he scrambled into the shadows above the lights. A rain of iron doughnut holes pattered upon the concrete slab, oddly silent to Jax’s close-packed ears. A waxy half moon shone through the empty skylight frame.
Bullets ricocheted through the iron scrollwork of the ceiling beams. They struck sparks that flickered in the darkness like fireflies in high summer.
Jax swung himself up through the broken window and back to the roof. One round creased his foot and another dented the plating where the small of a human’s back would have been. He sprinted to the edge of the roof and flung himself over the alley to an adjacent warehouse. He crossed the gap between buildings folded into a sphere, while the queen’s guards on the streets below mustered into squads with clockwork precision.
He rolled to his feet, sprinted to the edge, and repeated the process. He couldn’t stop to watch the search. Even now, the Clakkers from the warehouse would be climbing after him. Any delay threatened failure to comply with the geas Willem had laid upon him, and that was impossible for a Clakker without a Key.
Jax crossed one rooftop, and another, always following the tug of the compass rose in his chest. According to the map he’d studied with Willem, Vermeers Street was a narrow slash northwest of the city center.
The pounding of his heavy feet dislodged a roofing tile. It cracked free, bounced along the eaves, and tumbled three stories to shatter on the street like a flowerpot. It drew his hunters as sharks to blood, warlords to weakness. He bounded over the next alley faster than the humans could bring their weapons to bear, but not faster than the Clakkers could respond. Three more bullets pinged from Jax’s balled-up body.
The mechanical men carried rifles, which they wielded and aimed far better than any mortal could achieve. Their human controllers carried tar guns and sand sprayers.
Any Clakker found in possession of a counterfeit Key—any slave with the gall to pick the lock on its own soul—was subject to summary execution in the dreaded forges of The Hague. So said the Highest Law since the time of Huygens, when his publication of the Horologium Oscillatorium begat three centuries of Dutch ascendancy. Even the British, with their insistence that Huygens had stolen the alchemical researches of an obscure natural philosopher named Newton, had fallen silent when elite legions of clockwork fusiliers marched through Westminster. Only the French had stood firm in their enlightenment: first Paris, then Montreal had been the seat of a government that espoused the ideal of universal human rights for mechanical men; a dangerous and irresponsible policy to the Dutch point of view. And thus the holy crusade.
The compulsion flared anew, like a white-hot fishhook snagged in Jax’s mind. He stumbled. He would fail Willem and violate the geas if he led his pursuers to the machinist. He turned west, and made a show of it.
It brought him closer to the guards from the warehouse. They brought their clockwork perfection, and their rifles, to bear on the bunting wrapped about Jax’s ears. He ducked, spun, and flipped over another alley. Their shots drew more sparks where they dimpled his body, flares of pain that lit the night like flashes from a semaphore lamp. One round snapped his head back; another shattered the crystal in his left eye socket. The world went flat.
Jax kicked up a tile. He hefted it while he ran, got a sense of its weight and aerodynamic properties, while turning to again cross over the human pursuers. The loss of binocular vision made it difficult to aim. And the geas raged like a conflagration against the hard boundaries of the mechano-alchemy that had imbued Jax with life. No Clakker could harm a human being unless specifically bidden to do so with elaborate bindings and special geas; a simple compulsion like Willem’s could never overcome that.
He could, however, knock the tar gun from unsuspecting fingers and use it against his pursuers. Jax let the tile fly and dove into the alley.
Several hours later, when he finally limped to Vermeers Street alone and unpursued, his chassis had more dimples than a golf ball. His knees groaned with metal fatigue. The piston rods in his right arm were warped and immobile. Sand scoured his cervical bearings when he turned his head. Smears of tar covered his face and dripped from his ears.
It hurt to move. But not moving, ignoring the geas, hurt more.
He knocked at the machinist’s. The door opened almost at once. Willem gasped. Jax couldn’t hear what he said. The AWOL lieutenant pulled him inside.
They stood in the shadows of presses and lathes, saws and drills and welding equipment. Their feet kicked up eddies of sawdust. A mundane and law-abiding workplace : not a pentangle or pendulum to be found; no sign of grimoires or gears. Clockmaking, and the associated arcane arts, were the sole province of the queen’s forges.
The man who emerged from the shadows had the large callused hands of any laborer, but the peculiar haunted eyes of one whose study of alchemy hadn’t deadened his conscience. He appraised Jax with a long look, and betrayed no reaction when doing it. The machinist snapped at Willem. The lieutenant looked abashed.
The machinist retrieved a metal can from a cabinet. Jax saw it was turpentine. It didn’t take long with the two men working together—one on the left ear and one on the right—before Jax could hear again.
Willem said, “Jackivantus, heed my words, for as a human being I claim my right to release you from your geas.”
This snuffed the blistering heat of compulsion more completely than an avalanche could extinguish a candle. Moving still hurt, but not moving was no longer agony.
“I’m so sorry,” said Willem. The machinist kept working to clean the smears of tar from Jax’s head. “I didn’t know. They never told us it hurts you.” He looked ready to cry. “I thought I was helping.”
The machinist glared at him, and spat. He dipped his wire brush in the turpentine, splattering all three of them in the process, and set to work scrubbing Jax’s forehead.
I wouldn’t be here now if not for your geas.
Jax slumped as the sense of urgency left him. He’d found the Underground Railroad. Soon he’d have a Key to unlock his soul, and not long after that he and Willem would be in Quebec. He closed his eye and thought about baseball.
The machinist stopped scrubbing. He muttered to himself. Jax watched him produce a pair of spectacles and squint through them. Then he tossed the brush aside and said, “I can’t pick this lock.”
“What?” What?
The machinist poked Jax in the forehead with his little finger. “A bullet sheared part of this sigil.” Poke, poke. “Changed its meaning. That could be fixed, given enough time and somebody who knew the work. But this”—his thumbnail made a tinny clink against the keyhole—“is the killer. Lock’s damaged. It won’t rotate the sigils.”
The spiral of symbols on every Clakker’s forehead formed a unique alchemical anagram that, when properly reconfigured with a Key, would unlock the soul, transmute brass to flesh, and imbue free w
ill. His finger traced a dent along the hairline seam outlining the tumblers deep within Jax’s skull. Jax knew this for truth, because he felt no tingle when the machinist touched the keyhole. It was dead, the soul-freeing magic shattered.
I, I, I don’t need a Key. Jax’s fingers clicked against one another, stuttering like stuck typewriter keys in his haste to respond. Tell him, Willem. We jus–s–st ne–e–ed to get–t t–to Queb–b–b–ec.
Willem did. And he added, “We’ll find somebody who can fix the damage once we’re safely north.”
The machinist knelt beside Jax on the cold, hard concrete floor. His hard eyes had softened, and his voice came out quiet and flat, crushed beneath the onus of destroying one dream and two lives. He spoke to Jax.
“It’s not a matter of skill. Fixing the lock requires forging a new anagram.” He touched Jax on the temple with a gesture both firm and compassionate. “It would mean taking you apart. Melting your skull and the lock and recasting them anew. Your soul would burn like a moth on the sun. It wouldn’t survive. You wouldn’t be you any longer.”
“The fix needn’t be permanent,” said Willem. “Just until we reach Quebec.”
“The railroad won’t take you, son. Not while he’s incapable of disobeying an order. They won’t tolerate the risk. You run into trouble, the men hunting you can make him to turn on you and anybody helping you. That’s why I’m the first stop on the railroad. But they won’t take you if I haven’t picked the lock.”
I’ll plu–u–g my ears again.
“I know these men. They won’t risk it. I’m sorry.”
When Willem spoke again, his voice came out cracked and brittle, like a ceramic roofing tile. “Please.”
The machinist sighed. He removed his spectacles, bowed his head, pinched the bridge of his nose. Without looking up, he said, “Given the choice, would you live forever as you are now, or die like a mayfly with a soul?”
I have wanted nothing more these past two centuries, Jax signed, than to become human. His fingers didn’t stutter. Willem relayed his answer.
The machinist strode into the shadowed recesses of his shop. He returned with a diamond-tipped chisel, hammer, steel vise, book, block of maple, and an electric drill.
“This is mending tattered cobwebs with hemp twine and a railroad spike,” he said. “It won’t last. If it works.”
“How long?”
“Impossible to know.” The machinist shrugged. “A few hours. A day, perhaps.”
One day seems nothing to you, whose soul is his birthright. To my kind, it is an eternity.
The men helped Jax lie on a workbench. The vise bit into his temples. Pulling a jeweler’s loupe over his spectacles, the machinist said, “This will hurt. Far more than any damned geas.”
Willem stroked Jax’s hand. But the machinist pulled them apart. “Don’t do that if you ever want to use your fingers again,” he said, then placed the maple in Jax’s empty palm. “Now be quiet.”
He spent many minutes studying the damaged sigils. Then he pressed the tip of the chisel to Jax’s brow and—
Jax convulsed. Wetness ran down his arm and dripped to the concrete. And he did something he’d never done before: he screamed. His birth cries cracked the foundation of the machine shop.
Jax stood on the roof, facing east, catching the first rays of dawn on his face. Sunlight had become something warm and silky, no longer sliding across his body with a sterile, slick disdain for metal. It lingered and caressed.
This skin, this strange moist elastic covering, it fairly burst with sensation. He’d never imagined. Even the simple play of a borrowed shirt across his chest—he was breathing!—made his toes curl with delight. (He had toes, and they curled with delight!) Unimaginable treasures to a creature that all its long life had only known yearning for freedom and the torment of compulsion.
“I could stand here all day,” he said to himself. He said what he thought just for the twin pleasures of feeling the words bubble up in his throat and hearing his voice. It was raspy and inconstant, unlike Willem’s. The machinist judged this a result of the screaming. It would heal, eventually, if Jax lived long enough.
He wouldn’t. Already there was a flutter in his chest where his heart beat. (Where. His. Heart. Beat.) Faint, but growing.
“If you wish,” said Willem. “It’s your day.” Tears thickened his voice, but he hid it well. “But we should leave soon if we’re going to meet our guide.”
“As you say,” said Jax, bracing for a lightning bolt that never came.
He turned his back on the rising sun. It was more difficult than it might have been a few hours earlier; the steep angles of the dormer challenged his frail human ankles, threatening to snap them like green timber. Capricious things, these human bodies.
But then he realized what he’d done, and laughed. (Laughter felt like sunlight in his belly.) Two hundred years of ingrained behavior made for difficult habits to break. It came with a twinge of sorrow that he wouldn’t have longer to relish breaking them. (Sorrow and laughter together? Miraculous and contradictory, too, human bodies.)
And then Jax said the words of which every Clakker dreamed: “No. I don’t want to do that.” He looked at Willem. “I don’t want to run for Quebec. It doesn’t matter any longer.”
Willem wept openly now. But he nodded. “Anything you want, Jax. Anything.”
“I want to eat an apple.” (The gurgling in his stomach, was that the thing called hunger?) “I want to be tickled. I want to sing in the bathtub. I want to lie in green grass. I want to see the Breuckelen Dodgers play baseball. And when I die, I want to be in your arms.
“That,” said Jax, “would be my perfect day.”
THE BLADE OF HIS PLOW
Jay Lake
They tell stories about me. A lot of those are wrong. I was never called Ahasver. I wouldn’t know how to make a shoe if you paid me. No one cursed or blessed me. Really, I just am.
When you realize you are deathless, you gravitate to certain lines of work. Not a lot of call for immortal bricklayers. Doesn’t take much luck or skill to follow a plow, beyond knowing the business of your own fields. Standing behind the sharp end of the sword is what I do.
Used to be I kept count of how many men I’d killed. Then I just counted the battles I’d been in. After a while, I lost track of that and started counting the wars. Now, well, they count the wars for me. Finally, you people are finishing the job that Yeshua Ben Yosef started all those years ago on top of a dusty hill too far from his home or mine.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Blessings upon you, all that are in my power to give. I know God has an eye on me; lets me direct His gaze to your heart.
Well, maybe not that last.
Longinus had already walked the earth six times longer than the life of a mortal man. He had fought in Syria, in Scythia, among the Parthians. He’d changed his name a dozen times. No matter how far he ranged, he eventually found his way back into the legions.
He’d settled on the rank of tesserarius, always being vague about his exact history while showing enough of his experience with weapons and maneuver and the business of wrangling men to be convincing to a signi-fer or centurion desperate enough for skilled bodies to ignore the irregularities. The older the empire grew, the easier this became. There were always men discharged for drunkenness or brutality who drifted back into the ranks.
And by the gods, Longinus knew one end of a spear from the other.
This time, though, he could see the end coming. Not his own end. Not anymore. He’d taken enough blows, caught enough arrows point first to know what would happen to him. It hurt like crazy, but the wounds always closed up. So far no one had tried to cut off his head. He wasn’t looking forward to finding out how that went.
This time it was not his body absorbing the blow. It was the Eternal City herself. Alaric’s armies were at the gates for the third time in two years. The Emperor Hon-orious was long since decamped. Everyone of consequence in the senate an
d the army had gone with him.
Only the broken legions, and those whose masters could not arrange their timely withdrawal, remained.
Longinus watched the smoke rise from the fires near the Salarian Gate. Rumor among the centurions and their troops was that slaves had let the attackers in. Not that it had done the poor bastards much good. The Visigoths seemed pleased to kill anyone unlucky enough to be in their path.
Now, atop a house part way up the Aventine Hill, he no longer wondered how long it would take them to reach him. A band of the Celtic warriors had ridden into the Vicus Frumentarius perhaps half a glass earlier and set to the serious business of smashing their way through the homes here.
He had four men with him—two of them drunkards, one barely old enough to shave, and another veteran like himself. Longinus had only bothered to learn the old soldier’s name—Rattus—as the others wouldn’t live long enough for him to need to remember them.
“We could just bugger off.” Rattus was slumped against the rooftop parapet sucking down the last of a broken amphora of wine from the house stores. The kid had been useful at least in handling the petty thievery on behalf of the older veterans. It wasn’t very good wine, though. The vinegar stink rose up like pickling time in the kitchens.
“Bugger off where?” asked Longinus distantly. He wondered how many of the Visigoths would make it to this house. They were visibly drunk, and not moving with their reputed efficiency.
“Skin out of our kit, flee with the rest of the meat.”
Longinus understood from Rattus’ tone that the old soldier wasn’t serious. “Die here, die there,” he said. “They kill everything.”
Rattus burped. “What’s so special about dying here? If we die there, might have a little longer to live first. Something could happen along the way. A man can be lucky.”
Human for a Day (9781101552391) Page 2
