* * * * *
When Johann opened his eyes after the attack, it was the aftermath of the Siege of Calais all over again. Except this time, it was Master Félix who hovered over him. Because Conny was gone.
He wanted to rage, to fight off the tubes and pipes and insist they go after Conny’s abductors, to find the traitors who’d given them away, but he could barely stay awake for all the aether, and all his speech was slurred and slightly crazed. Each time he closed his eyes, he dreamed of the raid, trying this time to stop Cornelius from being taken, but each time he failed and woke on the table with Félix peering worryingly at him through his tinker’s goggles.
As he healed and they began to dose him with less aether, Johann realized his clockwork had changed. His left arm had been replaced, and he had a metal, articulated brace over his right flesh wrist. His legs were different also—subtly so, but he noticed. It made him ache, to lose not only Conny but his clockwork too.
Félix hushed him when he tried to ask after his lover. “Not now, child. The others are hunting him down, but right now your duty is to rest. You have a great deal of healing to do.”
Johann wanted to ask more about this, to find out who was hunting Conny down and how, and were they coming back for him, but the aether claimed him again before he could organize the query. The next time he opened his eyes, however, Crawley, Olivia and Valentin hovered over him, looking relieved. Before they could begin speaking, though, Johann interrupted them. “Where is Conny?”
Crawley grimaced. “We’re not sure yet, but we’re starting to narrow it down. Félix put us in contact with Elizabeth’s spy network, but we can only use the wireless to the French border, so the best information is delayed.”
Olivia stroked his flesh arm above the cuff. “I’ve got someone on the wireless every hour of every day, looking for news. If anything comes through, we’ll fly out in a heartbeat and bring him home.”
That would be suicide, Johann wanted to tell them, but even thinking of explaining why made him weary. He contented himself to listening to them instead, glad they were there with him.
When the others left, Valentin lingered. He clutched the French-German dictionary in his arms as he approached the bed. “Hello. Are you feeling well?” he asked in butchered, horrible German.
Johann smiled through his weariness and answered in French. “I’m better. Thank you.”
Val nodded and came hesitantly closer. He switched back to French to speak now, but spoke slowly in deference to Johann. “I’m doing my best to help find Conny. We all are. Thank you for trying to save him.”
Johann averted his gaze. “There were too many soldiers. I couldn’t be strong enough. Even with the heart.”
“Félix says without the heart, you would be dead.” Val sat on the edge of Johann’s bed. “They brought you back in pieces. It was horrifying, but also revealing. I didn’t understand how much you loved him until I saw it. The archduke’s men wouldn’t have wasted time torturing you if you weren’t fighting them. But you fought them with everything you had in you, didn’t you?”
Johann nodded woodenly. “It wasn’t enough.”
“Yes, it was. But now you don’t have to fight them all yourself. We’ll help you. I will help you.” He flipped through the dictionary on his lap. “I wanted to ask you something. I’ve been studying this so I could speak with you more easily. But I don’t understand all these marks. These lines above words or sometimes letters. Did you and Conny make these? Are they notes that can help me learn, if I know the code?”
Johann peered at the book, frowning. Yes, he remembered those marks from his own lessons. He’d assumed they were notes from whomever the book had initially belonged to. But this time when he looked at them, he assumed nothing. He remembered where the book had come from. What Cornelius’s mother had done to the note she’d sent to warn him away.
“Have you shown this to Félix?” he asked at last.
Val shook his head. “No. Do you think I should? Why?”
“Because I think it might be a code.”
Val’s eyes widened, and he took the book back, clutching it hopefully. “A code that might help Conny?”
Johann hoped so.
Val left him then, and after another drift on aether, Molly appeared. She didn’t weep, but her brown eyes shone, and she stroked Johann’s face tenderly. Johann fumbled to take her hand, a gesture difficult with his new metal wrist.
“Molly.” His voice was a rasp, rough with sleep and pain. “Molly, I’m afraid I won’t get him back.”
“We will, darling. I promise we will.” She kissed his hand and held tight to the metal of his arm. “Félix and Olivia are poring over that book Val had. Heng and Crawley are bribing everyone they can find, trying to find a trail. Mateus is helping too—he feels sick the abduction happened in his house and wants to prove he had no part in it.”
“I want to help too.”
Molly smoothed his hair from his face. “Right now you do that by resting, love. Rest and get strong. Your tinker needs his soldier hale and hearty.”
Yes, he did need to be strong. Stronger than he’d been. Stronger than the other soldiers. He’d tell Félix he wanted armor, enough to bash in doors and take down walls. He would find Conny again if he had to smash everything in France.
But first he had to rest just a little longer.
Just a little bit longer.
* * * * *
The first two weeks of Cornelius’s imprisonment were a nightmare.
Nothing happened to him, outside of enduring Savoy’s innuendo as they worked together. No, he was installed in what under other circumstances would have been the workshop of his dreams. He had every tool, every material he could dream of, workspace enough for an army of tinkers. Assistants who would lift and carry and work in whatever way he demanded. He had food and drink, even absinthe to his heart’s content. His bed was as soft as an angel’s wings, and his bedchamber adjoined his workstation. He was fine. But every night he did not produce the heart, he was escorted to the dungeons so he could watch his mother be tortured because he hadn’t finished his work.
He pleaded with his workers, with his jailers, with anyone he thought might be able to bend the archduke’s ear. On the third night when his mother’s whipping sent him into hysterics, he held an improvised knife to his own throat until they brought his father to him.
“What is it, boy?” The archduke looked impatient, unimpressed with Conny’s dramatics. “Why was I dragged out for this performance?”
Cornelius would not waste his audience. “I can’t make it work. It’s not the real heart. It’s nothing more than a decoy. I’ve seen the real thing, worked on it, and this isn’t it. Stop torturing her, because I cannot make this heart what you want it to be.”
Francis clucked his tongue. “Dear boy. I’ve seen you build miracles out of bits of scrap simply because you were bored. You can make this heart work in a fortnight, no matter what it might be now. Because if you don’t, I’ll start taking your mother’s fingers. And I’ll make you pull the lever that lowers the knife.”
With that he winked, saluted and sauntered back down the hallway.
That night was the worst. Conny sobbed into his pillow so hard he eventually had to stop and throw up. When even this didn’t lessen his hysteria, he drank barely diluted absinthe and took cocaine directly through his nose until the world’s edges didn’t simply soften, they evaporated. He lay on his bed, staring at the ceiling as he watched it shift and transform. He drifted in and out of sleep, got up to piss.
When he stumbled back to his bed, he found Johann lying in it.
For a moment he was overjoyed, thinking he was rescued, but then he noticed Johann didn’t have any clockwork, and if Conny blinked too hard, he vanished. So Conny stopped blinking. He sat carefully on the other end of the bed too, in case too much movement disturbed th
e mirage.
“I wish you were truly here,” he whispered.
Johann smiled and leaned back on the pillows. “Don’t think about that. Talk to me. Tell me your troubles.”
Conny’s laugh was strangled. “My troubles? I’m captive in some French fortress by my father, who is torturing my mother until I produce something I don’t have the skills to create. My monitor tells me daily how he would like to fuck me, and I think he might be the one man in France I wouldn’t let you order to have his way with me.” He didn’t wipe the tears leaking from his eyes. “Johann, I think I should kill myself. I don’t want to, but it seems the only way out. I only wish I could save Mother first.”
“Come now. There’s always another way.” Johann stretched, revealing large, muscular arms, both of which were hale and whole. “You’re a tinker. This is what you do: you invent your way out of problems. Come. Stop panicking, and think about what it is you need.”
It seemed like such a simple question, but when he tried to answer it, Conny’s mind exploded with conflicting directions and goals. “I need to build a heart, but I can’t. I need to get my mother out. I need to get myself out. If I could get us out without building the heart, I would, but I don’t know if I can invent an escape before he starts taking her fingers. So I have to make the heart. But I can’t.”
“You know very well he won’t spare her once he has the heart. He’ll keep her constantly in peril until he breaks your mind. Turn you into one of his soldiers. Ironically, the kind of control I once feared from you.”
Conny wagged a finger at him. “Stop that. You sound like me, not Johann.”
Johann rolled his eyes and made a very French gesture with his hands, suggesting Conny was hopeless, but what could a man do? “Darling, of course I’m you. Once you’ve solved this snarl you’ve gotten yourself into, you can imagine me properly. But for now, isn’t it better if I help you think?”
Why could Conny not stop crying? “I can’t see the way out of this. I don’t know how to invent around this trouble.”
“That’s because you aren’t breaking it down. You need to get the two of you out, but you don’t have the means, and you need more time. What means do you require? What is the tool you’re missing to escape?”
Conny considered. “I could get us out of the castle, I think, but I’m not sure where we are or what we face outside the keep’s walls. Even if there were no soldiers—which, of course there are soldiers—I don’t know what direction to aim us.” He lay on the bed, close to imaginary Johann’s foot but not touching it, so he didn’t have to watch it disappear. “I could build a small dirigible, I suppose. We could go out in the cover of night. But I’d still need time to do that, and some way to disguise it while I worked.” He ran his tongue over his teeth, which he absently noticed were fuzzy. “I could possibly steal an airship, but my father isn’t stupid. He’ll have those well-guarded. If I knew the lay of the keep, I could possibly work around that, but I don’t, and they’ll make sure I never learn my way.”
“What if you didn’t have to build it or steal a ship? What if one came to you?”
Conny frowned at Johann. “How in the world would that happen?”
Johann shrugged. “You could call one. You could call The Brass Farthing.”
“Call? Like a bird?” He stilled. “Oh. On the wireless. Like Rodrigo’s in Italy. Except even if there were a station here, it wouldn’t be connected to Naples.”
“You can connect it. Build your own wireless transmitter.”
“How? If by some miracle I could manage it, they’d see it—and it would have to somehow get over the mountains. Never mind even if I could get this done in less than two weeks, you and the others would have to still arrive here. This assumes they’re still in Italy. That you aren’t dead. Meanwhile, my mother will suffer because I can’t produce a heart.”
Johann tucked his hands behind his head and smiled. “Then I guess you’ll have to do both. Build a wireless transmitter and a clockwork heart.”
Conny stared at him, certain his drunken projected self had tipped into the ridiculous. Johann stared back, still smiling.
Then the idea began to gel inside Conny’s head.
It wasn’t terribly intelligent to work with delicate tools when drunk and hallucinating, but Conny did it anyway, laying out schematics and building prototypes. His assistants were all asleep, and he didn’t want to know what Savoy was doing, but he decided he preferred working alone, because it meant he could keep talking to his hallucinated version of Johann, which he found more helpful than thirty pairs of hands.
“I hope you stay once I’m sober.” Conny glanced at Johann through his goggles. “I suppose I could stay drunk, but I worry I’d make too many mistakes.”
Johann, perched on a stool near a window, smiled. “When you work hard enough and long enough, your mind will relax and I’ll reappear. In the meantime, feel free to keep talking to me. Even if you can’t see me.”
Conny’s throat tightened. “I miss you. The real you.”
“Then keep working, so you can see me again.”
Conny did. He worked that whole night, until it was morning and the servants tried to bring him his breakfast and his assistants tried to come in to help. Conny tossed them all out, not wanting to break his concentration. His first task was too critical, nearly impossible, and he couldn’t afford any distractions.
The heart Félix had planted as a decoy was more than worthless—it was practically designed to confuse and entrap anyone attempting to use it or copy it. What it was good for, however, was reminding Conny what it wasn’t. He had worked extensively now on Johann’s true clockwork heart. He knew what it did and what it didn’t do. He couldn’t remember how all the internals functioned, and some parts of it of course he’d never seen. But the more he worked with the decoy, the more he remembered, and the more he understood.
By the end of the third day, he had the schematic, or enough of one to carry him through. But this was only step one of his plan.
His father watched him carefully. When he realized Conny wasn’t flailing any longer, only working, he stopped the dungeon visits, but he never missed an opportunity to remind Conny what fate awaited his mother. He gave Conny everything he needed, but he began to install more monitors to report back on what Conny was doing. Sometimes the archduke watched him work too.
“It certainly looks like a heart,” he remarked dryly, “but I’d hate for you to develop designs of heroism.”
Conny ignored him and continued working.
The monitors never left him, trading shifts throughout the day and night, and Savoy demanded constantly for him to explain himself. None of it mattered, because Conny knew not even Savoy understood what he was building. He barely understood it himself, sometimes.
“What is this small box for?” Savoy asked, holding up the transmitter.
“It’s a mechanism for adjusting small mechanics inside the heart,” Conny lied. He held it up and shook it gently. “Would you like me to explain them to you?”
Savoy only glowered and turned away. This was because, as Conny had learned, Savoy was actually quite a miserable tinker. He was a passable physician, and he made an adequate tinker-surgeon, but for all his boasting of electronics, he was very poorly skilled. Conny suspected his “successes” came from his assistants in a lab Conny had yet to see.
And so Conny continued his plan without interruption, without Savoy or his father or anyone in the castle knowing what he truly did.
He finished his first heart on the evening of the fourteenth day of his incarceration. His father came to the workshop flanked by eight official-looking men. They peered curiously and a little suspiciously at the heart for a few moments, and then a patient was brought in.
At first they brought in a corpse, which Conny immediately sent out. “That will never work. Automation of that level requires
brain surgery as well, and I don’t even begin to know the ins and outs of that, let alone enough to restart one once it’s been dead.”
“I can do it,” Savoy said with a leer, and snatched the heart away.
Of course, Savoy could not, largely because Conny had designed the heart not to.
“It doesn’t work.” The archduke glared at Conny, then waved at one of the guards. “Fetch Elizabeth.”
Conny swallowed his revulsion. “It works. But not on a corpse. I can replace a failed heart in a living person, but I cannot reinstall life or animate a corpse.”
One of the generals, a larger, older man, stared carefully at Cornelius for several seconds. “Can you prove the heart works, without a patient?”
“Yes. I can demonstrate it here on the table if you like. It’s a terribly simple machine once it’s working. It pumps blood. It must be cleaned and cared for, but yes, this heart is functional. Better than one of flesh, in fact.”
The general nodded curtly and stepped forward. “Then you may install it in me.” The others gasped, and the archduke paled, but the general held up a hand. “The doctors have told me I’ll have another attack any day. Even if this fails, it will be worth the risk, and at least then I’ll have died for my country.”
And so Conny ended up installing the first heart not in a soldier, but a general. He tried not to reveal how much this excited him, but in truth it was more perfect than any scenario he could imagine.
He hadn’t lied. It was a perfectly working clockwork heart, one that functioned better than Johann’s, if he could be so bold. It was just that it wasn’t only a heart. And as the general recovered from his surgery and made plans to travel to Marseille to check on the troops stationed there, Conny wished the general Godspeed.
Because he’d sent, in the French general’s heart, a small transmitter emitting a coded frequency all but the most refined, modern tinkers would think useless noise.
This is Cornelius Stevens, and I’m being held prisoner in a French castle somewhere in the Southern Alps. The man broadcasting this message is bearing a clockwork heart that I was forced to produce. I am making more, and my father wants to use them for terrible things. Please follow the frequency link from this heart back to my main transmitter and give the location to Captain Crawley of The Brass Farthing at Rodrigo Milani’s villa in Naples, or to Félix Dubois, also in Naples. I wish to stop this war, and I believe I have the means to do so.
Clockwork Heart: Clockwork Love, Book 1 Page 21
