Clockwork Phoenix 3: new tales of beauty and strangeness

by Mike Allen

  The vast dark stingray of the airship stirred and lifted, and as it rose above the canopy the Lady Explorer held her son up to one of its eye-windows so that he could wave goodbye to where they’d been. Offshore, a thrashing in the water caught her eye, which her fieldglass soon revealed as a pod of dolphins harrying a shark. My sins, she thought, and smiled grimly down at them; my sins.

  II.

  In the land of silver trees and golden fruit, the Lady Explorer bartered a case of tawny port, the captain’s quarters’ folding screen and rolltop desk, a sterling filigree tea service, and the airship’s only drop glider for her death.

  “What’s the vintage on that port?” the scientist inquired, almost before the Lady Explorer, her son, and two of the airship’s roustabouts had unpacked all the crates. Still breathless from the climb to the laboratory, the Lady Explorer stuck a hand in blind and rifled the excelsior. It had gone damp with the temperature shift to the glass, and the bottle that she grabbed was cold to the touch and slippery. She hefted it and squinted: half because her eyes betrayed her, half to hide the twinge her back gave as it straightened. She couldn’t help conflating her bones with the airship’s bones: each joint gradually tarnishing, gradually grinding down from shiny brass to verdigris.

  “Eighteen—sixty-six,” she read aloud, and improvised: “A fine year for the—”

  The scientist sneered. “You wouldn’t know a fine year if it bit you in the leg. The not particularly well-turned leg, I don’t doubt. Just look at you. Bristling at me like a mad dog. Your stance—your hands—you’re utterly transparent. Rings on your fingers and engine grease under your nails. That corset’s the only thing keeping your spine from snapping under the weight of that vast empty skull. Feigning at quality, madam, suits you ill.”

  Hating herself for it, she dropped her gaze. Snickering at her discomfiture, he crouched beside the crates, and as he did so a light glanced off his ankle, catching her eye. From there, a slender silver chain ran a few yards to the leg of a long table laden with flasks and beakers and the disassembled skeletons of automata. The table, she now noticed, was bolted into the floor. The skin where the chain had bitten was greenish and suppurating.

  When she looked back, the scientist was staring out a window no wider or longer than her forearm at where the airship waited, quiescent, mantling a lane flanked with marching rows of pomegranate trees.

  The look on his face reminded her of the look on her own, back when it was someone else’s airship and she and fifty others were working themselves half-dead to build it.

  The sudden sympathy she found she felt slowed her reaction to a staring inutility when, beside her, her son drew a long pistol and brought it to bear between the scientist’s eyes.

  “Speak to my mother in that way again,” he said airily, “and you’ll be scraping that smug look off the wall.”

  “I suppose,” said the scientist, “I may as well be charitable. That—” he pointed at the crates— “is utter swill, but I can take it off your hands. Perhaps it will serve to degrease the hydraulic fittings. Now then. Shall we get this over with?”

  Long accustomed to this dance, her son left the laboratory before being asked to, ushered the roustabouts before him, and had the grace not to slam the door at his back. Nonetheless his gut clenched with the certainty he’d seen the scientist—who was readying some vibrant fluid in a crucible that was a clockwork raven’s head, over a flame that was its heart—cast him an ugly smirk as he went out. His mother was occupied in inspecting a half-clockwork, half-organic specimen, which bobbed in its pickling jar amid threads of its own flesh and flakes of its own rust. She’d seen nothing.

  The three men sat in the hall (he counted himself a man now, for his voice had nearly stopped cracking—ah, now that was an embarrassment he wouldn’t miss!) and gambled rifle-cartridges and chores and coins upon a weathered pair of ivory dice that lived in the pocket of one of the roustabouts, the story behind the acquisition of which was subject to its keeper’s whim. Today he’d cut them from the belly of a black wolf in a pinewood by a lake, along with an ell of scorched red velvet, a flintlock pistol, and a mismatched scattering of bones.

  “Three scapulae and five clavicles,” he pronounced grandly, “but no mandibles or frontal plates at all!”

  At this point the Lady Explorer’s son knew the roustabout had been practicing his reading with the Lady Explorer’s medical journals again (while tempering his learnings on human anatomy with a blithe disregard of the respective sizes of a wolf’s mouth and stomach) and immediately decided to outgrow his long-lived fear of the roustabout’s yarns.

  The dice had earned him a week free of maintenance duties and a tidy heap of coins—round, ringed, hexagonal, octagonal, brass, copper, silver, lead—by the time his mother emerged from the laboratory, flushed with agitation and worrying at a sleeve. When she forced a smile and reached a hand down to help him up, he did not quite disdain to take it.

  Most of the coins he left on the floor in a sudden fit of apathy. His favorite only, which he’d been palming as a good luck charm throughout the game, he pocketed. Its reverse was obliterated but its obverse bore the likeness of a very young girl with cornsheaves in her hair beneath a coronet of seven-pointed stars. The tears she wept looked oddly dark.

  Leaving, he could not help but notice the utter silence from beyond the laboratory door. He cast a furtive glance over his mother but could discern no bloodstains on the skin or cloth or hair of her. Besides, he reassured himself, he would have heard the shot.

  III.

  In the land of violet storms and crimson seas, the Lady Explorer bartered the spare canvas for the airship’s wings, five phials of laudanum, the last kilo of salt, and the auxiliary power supply for her death.

  Her eyesight failed her in the rain, so her son read out the water-warped, mold-furred tavern sign to her: The Rotting Shark.

  He hoped she also could not see the look of surprise, half-tender, half-annoyed, that he found himself wearing at this admission of her mortality. Up till now he had fancied her close kin to the automata: ageless so long as her clockwork was wound or her engine was fed.

  For a moment he looked as though he was about to speak. Then, noticing her utter absorption in the door, he sighed and fiddled with his cuff instead.

  The noises from within the building were what they’d by now come to expect of such places: drunken shouting, and below it, lower-keyed tones from what cardsharps and cutpurses and gunslingers took delicate advantage of that drunkenness. Someone wauled a marching song from one war or another on a flute. A crash as of a flung chair followed, and the music stopped.

  In a moment, two men stumbled out the door, bearing up a deadweight third who bled heavily from one temple.

  “This time I stay with you,” the Lady Explorer’s son informed her.

  She looked away over the rumpled crinolines of meadowland, lying as if discarded at the trackless flyblown foot of seven gangrene-colored hills. As she watched, a dark bird stooped and hammered down on something unseen in a stubbled field.

  Then she shrugged and shouldered through the door.

  A figure hailed them at once from a far table; they crossed the room and sat. The shape across from them was hooded, but the voice had been a girl’s. When she pulled the hood back, the Lady Explorer’s son nearly shouted in alarm.

  The girl was two girls, bound together as in the cases of some twins he’d seen in the medical journals—but by some kind of ivy, not by flesh. Green tendrils had grown through the trunks and necks and heads of both, binding them together like a corset, hip to temple. A thick finger of ivy had crooked itself through one girl’s eye, just missing the other’s where it threaded through her socket, squashing the eyeball sideways but not quite bursting it.

  “We were expecting you,” the ivy-girls said, their voices tightly harmonized and not unpleasant. The Lady Explorer’s son wondered by what perverse whim of nature the ivy’s tithe had been no greater—and no less—than a certain
fraction of their loveliness. The Lady Explorer wondered whether they’d ever been able to climb, or dance, or run, or keep a secret.

  “From a long way off we saw you. We saw a woman who escaped the slow grind of a wretched death only to become obsessed with it, stalking it as any starving hunter stalks his prey, and wasting as acutely every time it flees his snares. A grail quest, a fool’s errand, a dog chasing its tail, and yet she persists. Before we tell her fate, we would comprehend her folly.”

  The Lady Explorer glanced over, but her son was sitting with arms crossed, gazing back at her with defiance. She sighed.

  “When we built the airship,” she began, “one of my tasks was to hold the tray of wires and electrodes when the master engineer connected her controls up to her heart. I could barely hold it still. I couldn’t feel my hands. The calluses from stitching wings—every night I’d go home and touch my stomach, where the baby grew—” a sidelong glance at her son, who flinched away, embarrassed— “and every day I felt it less and less. As if he was slowly disappearing. Or I was.”

  She flexed her fingers, staring as though she expected to parse sudden revelations from the caked grime of her gloves.

  “And so all the workers bided their time until the airship was completed? Tell us, were the first whispers of rebellion yours?”

  She almost laughed full in their faces, remembering how near she’d come to pissing herself when the shooting began. How another worker had thrust a gun into her hands and she’d stared at it, aware only in a vague sense of how it fired. How she’d hidden under the workbench with her belly to the wall, so the bullets couldn’t reach the baby without passing through her first. How she’d stayed there until the sounds of shooting turned to scavenging as the workers loaded up the ship they’d won with anything they’d found to hand, and she was dragged out by the apron-belt and tossed aboard, a spoil amid spoils.

  What she said was: “The airship’s switchboard was full of dials and toggles—the only intermediary between the captain’s will and the ship’s. I watched the engineer set each piece into place and wondered whether somewhere inside me there was a switchboard just like hers, with dials to show all my potential fears, potential loves, potential deaths. Who knows what becomes of us in the other world? Why might we not have a choice? Might it not be that each time my death is told, that that dial stops, and where it stops becomes the truth? And if I reject the death it tells, maybe I can start the dial spinning once again.”

  “Until it stops.”

  “When someone tells a death I can accept, I’ll let it stop. I’ll keep on searching until someone does.”

  The girls eyed her closely. “But what the ivy tells us,” they said, “so shall be.”

  “That’s what you all say. You tea-leaf-readers, card-turners, guts-scryers, hedgewitches, table-tappers, you’re all the same. So far I should’ve been shot, drowned, stabbed in an alley, run down in the street, fallen off a widow’s walk, been shipwrecked, hit by lightning, and perished of consumption in a garret. And yet I am here and asking.”

  Once they’d given her her death on a folded slip of paper and she had gone her way, the ivy-girls went hooded out into the rain, watching the airship shake the water off its back like a dog, bank hard, and vanish oversea.

  “Lies of omission are still lies,” said one mouth, while the other one said: “She really ought to tell that boy the truth.”

  IV.

  In the land of blue ice and red lichen, the Lady Explorer bartered half of the phosphorous matches, a foxfur waistcoat, the least mildewed of the down quilts, and the airship’s rudder for her death.

  The whaler had been stranded on the ice shelf some twenty-odd years when the airship touched down and hailed her—more as a formality than anything: she was tatter-sailed, barnacle-encrusted, glazed with ice, and the Lady Explorer half-expected to see Mary Celeste or Flying Dutchman emblazoned on her stern. What was there, however, was a palimpsest of christenings: something unintelligible overpainted with Lydia in what looked like long-dried blood.

  Someone’s sweetheart, the Lady Explorer surmised in the wan scraps of her worldliness. Some woman out of widow’s-weeds two decades gone, and taking solace where she may. She wished her well.

  For half an hour, the airship’s crew signaled to the Lydia with flags and phosphorus flares while the Lady Explorer checked the navigational instruments against five different maps and shook her head at each of them in turn. At last, the Lady Explorer in a white rage and the crew jubilant, they readied the salvage gear.

  Just as a few of the men were beginning to swing grappling hooks over their heads, and others to cheer them on, the engine-tender spotted a group of figures approaching across the shelf, each dragging two or three frozen ringed seals behind him, bound together by the hind flippers in strings like sun-dried fish she had seen once in a market on the bone-white shore of a blood-warm sea.

  Later, over the last of the airship’s Darjeeling, they sat around the Lydia’s reeking try-works, the earthbound ship’s crew and the winged one’s, and the Lydia’s bosun read the Lady Explorer’s death in the swirling oil of the try-pot.

  When the bosun whispered what he’d seen into her ear, the Lady Explorer set down her tea, clambered down onto the ice shelf, and began to walk. Slowly, faltering: her legs leaked strength like water through cupped hands these days, and her joints screamed every time a foot shot sideways on the ice.

  “She’ll come back,” the bosun told the Lady Explorer’s son when he hissed a curse and stood, brow creased with equal parts concern for her frailty and anger at her stubbornness, to follow. “They always do.”

  “How will she find her way?”

  “The ghosts’ll show her. Old flensing trails.” The bosun pointed out across the shelf, where, some half-mile inward from the Lydia’s berth of ice, a vast red stain bled up out of the endless white like overdilute watercolor paint. It spread, growing tendrils that stretched out in turn and doubled back and looked, as the Lady Explorer’s son’s field binoculars and the last late light informed him, very like the wakes of bloody booted footprints tacking back and forth around the suggestion of some hulking shape he could not see.

  “What did you tell her?” he asked at length.

  The bosun’s eyes went misty. “That she’d go out in a blaze of glory in a dogfight with a man-o’-war, all hands lost, and she’d plummet from the sky like Lucifer aflame—”

  The Lady Explorer’s son sighed.

  “Well, what d’you want me to have said? It’s what I saw.”

  “I don’t know. Something.” He tipped his head back, watching as the first pale stars came out. “She’s like an old man sleeping in his coffin to get used to the idea. I wish one of you would tell her something that would make her send it off for kindling and get back in her goddamned bed.”

  “Nothing wrong with preparing to greet the spirits on the far side of the river,” said the bosun primly, picking tea leaves from his teeth with a whalebone pin.

  “Not unless when you do greet them,” the Lady Explorer’s son retorted, “you find you have nothing at all to say.”

  Returning along a strange red path she hadn’t noticed on her journey out across the shelf, the Lady Explorer found the Lydia’s crew trying to force the airship’s rudder to fit where the Lydia’s once was and the airship’s crew strapping a new rudder in place with an elaborate harness that put her in mind of a spiderweb. The harness was seal-sinew and her son had carved the rudder with the tools they’d salvaged from the factory from a single block of ice.

  “Almost pieced back together,” the grinning bosun told her as she passed the Lydia. “Patched the hole in her hull with some pitch off a merchantman gone astray a few years back. A few dozen more seals, and we’ll have enough skin for a sail.”

  Her nerves were still raw from mediating the barter for the rudder, and her heart still kicked her every time she recalled how her son had come to her aid against their crew and vowed to get the ship back in the air, an
d though she’d tried ten times since then to catch his eye and smile, he had never looked her way.

  Coming round from the prow, somewhat stung at her son’s apparent scorn, it nettled her to discover that, for her part, she could not quite meet the gleaming violet placidity of the airship’s regard. She made a shy-eyed gesture at the makeshift rudder, then held up her bad hand for the benefit of the airship’s compound gaze. “Now,” she said, finally hazarding its stare, her face unfathomable, “we’re even.”

  The new rudder took them eleven degrees south before it began to melt. When it had shrunk from an outhouse’s size to a steamer trunk’s, then to a tabletop’s and a sawblade’s, the airship’s crew set her down on the water and took shifts paddling with whalebone oars, following their collective guesswork of unfamiliar constellations south.

  Four days’ cruising from its landing, a hunting pod of orcas surfaced around the airship and chaperoned it straight to landfall some six hundred miles on. During this leg of the journey, great clumps of kelp and cairns of fish were given to appear on deck, always at night, always when nobody stood watch, and by no agency that anyone on board could later rationally explain.

  V.

  In the land of grey houses and grey streets, the Lady Explorer bartered the greatcoat off her back, the machete and flensing knife from her belt, the copper honeycombs and amethystine glass of the airship’s compound eyes, the compass round her neck, the rainwater cistern, and the shorn iron-grey length of her hair for her death.

  She tired quickly here. She told herself it was the sullied air, the oppressive angle of the light, the smell of dust and gin and desiccated violets coming off the flocked wallpaper of the medium’s salon. But her hands were veined and mottled, her memory and bladder failed as often as they held, and she did not believe her own lies.