“There should be a river a few miles along. We want to make for it. We’ll follow it most of the way if…err….nothing happens.”
The sounds of the river came up to meet them soon enough. It was a broader, shallower waterway than the one they’d crossed to reach the rune. The horses splashed across it, and they dismounted to drink and water the animals.
Grimehug dunked his whole head in the river and pulled it out again. He paused, his small ears pricking up.
“You hear that, Crazy Slate?”
“Hear what?”
“Kinda grinding noise. Like a big millstone.”
Slate cocked her head. After a minute she heard it too, very faintly, a rumbling, scratchy noise. “It’s coming from downriver.”
The other three heard it soon after. Caliban pushed between the pack mules, coming down to join the woman and the gnole at the water’s edge.
“Think it’s coming closer,” said Grimehug, leaning out over the stream and nearly falling in.
Caliban caught him by a handful of rags. “Should we get out of here?”
“I’d like to know what it is,” said Learned Edmund.
“So would I, since we’re planning on traveling downstream anyway. We’ll run into it anyway, and I’d rather pick the ground.” Slate chewed a nail. “Let’s move the horses away from the river. Then we’ll wait—from a safe distance—and see what it is.”
The horses seemed oddly unconcerned about the strange noise, even as it grew louder. They moved up the bank anyway, until they found a vantage point, and sat down to wait.
It took nearly half an hour, and when it finally arrived, it was so bizarre that Slate wasn’t entirely sure she hadn’t fallen asleep while they waited and dreamed it instead.
There was a stone fish in the river.
At first, Slate thought it was merely stone-like—its skin hard and grey, patchy with lichen and wet with moss. But the sheer weight of the creature was rapidly obvious, as it ground its way up the rocky riverbed. Stone screamed on stone as it pushed through a shallow patch of rapids. Sparks jumped and flashed from the contact.
In shape, it resembled an enormous salmon, nearly six feet tall at the humped back, at least twenty feet long. The stone tail thrashed in slow motion, driving it forward, and a mossy, underslung jaw clapped with a sound like an avalanche. Its eyes were broad, fist-sized lumps, and the scales appeared to have been carved.
“That’s a crazy big fish,” said Grimehug.
“It’s not moving very fast,” said Slate, after watching it rumble by for nearly a minute.
“Yeah, but it’s doing pretty good for a rock,” said Brenner.
Nearly ten minutes later, it had passed the rapids and was partially submerged again. Once in the water, it made somewhat better speed, and eventually vanished around a bend in the river.
It left behind a trail of round stones, spherical as geodes. Learned Edmund reached into the water and picked up one up, examining it from all angles. It fit neatly into his palm.
“Is that an egg?” asked Slate.
“I…many-armed lord, you know, I think it might be.” Learned Edmund’s eyebrows drew together. “If you figure that creature was like a salmon spawning…” He gazed at the rock.
“Is it going to hatch?”
“Only one way to find out, I suppose.” He tucked the stone carefully into a saddlebag. “Assuming it doesn’t hatch on a geological time scale, in which case none of us may be around to see it.”
Privately, Slate thought that the way things were going, they’d be damn lucky to be around to see it hatch on even a normal flesh-and-blood time scale, but she kept that to herself.
* * *
After that, the Vagrant Hills started to get truly odd.
They followed the river as well as they could. The trail left by the stone salmon was obvious downriver, scrapes punctuated by the round egg-stones. Learned Edmund scribbled rapidly in his journal
Every time they had to turn aside from the river, to avoid a bluff or detour around an impassable thicket, it got weirder.
Most of the things they saw were, like the stone fish, unsettling but harmless. There was the clearing full of spiders, weaving a long and intricate mural detailing the rise of an arachnid civilization. There was a gully full of stones, each one with a keyhole in it. (Brenner tried to pick one with a pin. After forty-five minutes, he succeeded, and it crumbled into dust in his hands.) There was a tree with broad fleshy leaves that made kissing noises as they passed, and one that pulled vines tight in around itself and moaned.
It was nearly noon, and they were following an old game trail, when a rabbit hopped slowly into their path.
It was large and brown and leggy, and it sat up to look at them. Its nose twitched.
“Bunny!” said Grimehug happily.
The rabbit flicked its ears, looked up at Brenner, and said, in a deep, thoughtful voice, “You’ll die laughing, you know.”
They stared at the rabbit. It flicked its ears again.
The assassin’s hand went for the hilt of a dagger, and the rabbit bounded off the track, kicking up mulch and bits of bark. By the time his blade cleared the sheath, it was long gone.
Brenner was left sitting on his horse, holding a knife, with a bemused expression.
“Look on the bright side,” said Slate. “At least it didn’t say when.”
They passed through one band of trees and into another. Pine needles gave way to rotted leaves. The woods seemed darker and denser, and the brambles got thicker and required longer and longer detours. The ground sucked at the horse’s hooves.
“This is not a good place,” said Brenner.
“It feels…unholy,” said Caliban gravely.
“You’d know.”
“Indeed.”
Slate heard a rustling in what looked like a blackberry thicket. She looked over into it, and something looked out at her and giggled.
She started to warn her companions and was seized with a sneezing fit so explosive that she thought the top of her head was going to come off. She put out a hand to thin air, as if to ward off the suddenly excruciating scent of rosemary, and Caliban put a handkerchief into it.
Where the heck is he keeping all these, anyway? I know I never give them back. And they’re always clean, too.
“Thanks, but—snrrk—something’s in the bushes. Magic. Ackchoo!”
“Hmm.”
Another giggle came, off to their left. Slate sneezed again.
“’Ware the bushes,” said Caliban, as calmly as if shrubs laughed at him every day. He pulled his sword free.
Something flashed between the trees ahead, running low to the ground. It got ten feet and dropped with a squeal. A blade quivered upright in it.
Brenner drew another knife and nudged his horse forward.
The giggles were replaced with angry, squirrel-like chatters.
“Perhaps we should not antagonize them,” said Learned Edmund.
“Does killing them count as antagonizing them?” asked Brenner, holding up his quarry on the end of his knife. “And what the hell is this thing? It looks like I just knifed a turnip.”
They crowded the horses together in the center of the clearing. Learned Edmund peered down at the bulbous brown thing on Brenner’s blade. “I think it’s a mandrake root.”
“Do they often run around?”
“Never, as far as I know.”
“I think we want to go, guys,” said Grimehug worriedly. “Bad vegetables in the trees, now.”
Slate clutched the handkerchief to her raw nose and followed the gnole’s gaze.
Something that looked like a cross between a rat and a potato was clinging to a tree trunk at head height, chattering at them. It had a number of beady black eyes and two separate heads.
Another one skittered up a tree trunk as she watched, then another. Slate looked around, seeing the straight trunks grow lumpy boles as mandrake after mandrake scurried upward.
Brenner got back o
n his horse, sprawled awkwardly across its back for a moment, then managed to get upright. Learned Edmund tugged on the mules’ lead rope.
A pebble bounced off the back of Caliban’s head. He winced and ducked.
“They’re throwing rocks. Hurry.”
The next one took Brenner in the shoulder, and then a veritable rain of stones came showering down from the trees. The horses stamped, neighing furiously as pebbles stung their hindquarters.
“I can’t hold them!” yelled Learned Edmund, as the animals crowded him, a tangle of hooves and outrage.
“Then stop trying!” yelled Caliban back, and spurred his horse forward, trying to cover Slate.
They fled. It was not glorious. It could only be described as a complete rout. The mandrakes chased them, herding them with showers of stones. They did not dare strike back for the river. Every time they tried, rocks pelted down, and the horses bolted back for the safety of the woods.
When they ran out of rocks, they threw nuts. When they ran out of nuts, they threw owl pellets, and after that it was almost a relief when they went back to rocks again.
The mandrake roots appeared to have a particular loathing for Caliban and Brenner, pelting the men with so many stinging stones that they looked as if they’d been attacked by angry wasps. Slate and Learned Edmund came in for less abuse, and Grimehug got away almost unscathed.
“They’re herding us!” shouted Caliban.
“I noticed!” yelled Slate. “What do you want me to do about it?”
Her horse took an acorn to the haunches and lunged a few feet forward. Its feet slipped, and Slate clutched at the saddlehorn with a shriek. The animal lunged, caught itself, and then it was half-galloping, half-sliding down an embankment.
Slate had time to think, Oh, no, not again! and then the horse was prancing and jittering to a halt in the center of the open road.
Learned Edmund and the line of mules, with a squawking Grimehug, came crashing down behind her. The mules in particular were not pleased: they were cow-kicking at the air and braying, while the gnole clung to his makeshift saddle.
The stones stopped.
Slate looked down the road, which was broad and dusty and possibly the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. She was just in time to see Caliban and his horse come charging down a few hundred yards away. His horse reared up. The knight clung with his knees, still holding his broadsword in his free hand, despite the weapon’s demonstrated ineffectiveness against thrown nuts.
A minute later, Brenner’s horse came down behind them, with an empty saddle. A minute after that, the sound of cursing announced the arrival of Brenner.
And so it was, flailing at the air, the horses neighing and stampeding under them, in complete disarray, bloody and cursing, they arrived at the end of the road, less than five miles from Anuket City.
* * *
“We made it,” said Slate. “We made it. We…can’t have made it. This is impossible.”
They had followed the road, arguing about where it might be, until it had joined up to another, larger one. People and animals streamed by them: ox teams grunting and horses high-stepping around them, carts laden with squawking chickens in cages, people on foot with baskets piled high on their heads.
Then they had all argued some more, until Caliban had simply walked out into the road and asked a woman with trays of bread on her head where they were.
“The west gate of Anuket City,” he said, returning to them. “And she looked at me like I was an idiot and I said we’d been in the Vagrant Hills, and she said, ‘Ohhh…’ and offered me a sweet bun.”
He took a bite of the sweet bun in question. The other three humans stared at it with envy. Grimehug said, “A gnole said that’s where it was.”
“So that’s it,” said Slate. “We made it. We lived.” And then, staring at the distant gates, with the heartfelt intensity of prayer, she said “Well…shit.”
She got off her horse, rummaged in the saddlebags, and pulled out a hat. It fit low over her eyes and she honestly hadn’t expected to live long enough to need it.
“So now what?” said Caliban. “We just…go in?”
“Why not?” said Brenner.
“Because we’re…uh…” He gestured at all of them. “We’re…well, you know.”
“No one will even notice us,” said Slate.
She tried to get back on her horse. It didn’t go well. After three tries with her foot not even reaching the stirrups, Caliban dismounted and came over to her.
He knelt down. “My liege,” he said, under his breath.
“Don’t start,” Slate warned and he chuckled.
She stepped into his linked hands. There was a moment, just before he lifted her into the saddle, when she gripped his shoulder and felt the muscle underneath, and Caliban turned his head and met her eyes.
He smiled in a way that made her heart turn over just a little.
Stupid to think that when we’re going to die… she thought reflexively, and then another thought intruded. We’ve made it this far. Who knows how far we’ll get?
She turned her head and saw Brenner watching her, his face unreadable.
A wail went up suddenly from Learned Edmund. Everyone started.
“What’s wrong?” said Slate.
“If we’re here…” said the dedicate, staring at the map unrolled across his saddlebow. “If we’re here, then we’re not here…” His finger skipped back and forth, trying to reconcile their location. “Which means we could have been anywhere in the Vagrant Hills! Anywhere at all!”
“Okay?” said Slate.
“You don’t understand!” wailed the dedicate of the Many-Armed God. “If I don’t know where we were, I’ll never be able to tell anyone where to find the wonder-engine!”
Brenner rolled his eyes. Slate shook her head. Learned Edmund looked ready to turn around and ride into the woods, mandrake roots and all, but Caliban leaned over and grabbed his reins.
“Later,” he said. “We have other things to worry about. And your Brother Amadai to find.”
“Yes…” said Learned Edmund slowly. “Yes, I suppose we do. And the rest of his journal to translate. I’ll need to find the key to the second cipher.” He sighed. “I suppose it will have to wait, then. But I hate to leave work undone.”
“Trust me,” said Slate, spurring her horse forward, “there will be plenty of work for us in Anuket City.”
The others followed. Slate rode looking up at the gates, and slowly, step by step, the city reached out and swallowed them.
Coming Soon
Slate, Caliban, Brenner and Learned Edmund
will return in
Coming in Spring 2018
Acknowledgments
AKA
“The Single Most Embarrassing Acknowledgement Section I Have Ever Written”
* * *
I started this book during Nanowrimo of 2006, which makes it eleven years in the writing. My books frequently take several years to write, but even for me, that’s extraordinary.
2006 was a bad year. I was extremely depressed and in denial about my first marriage failing. In that dreadful emotional pressure cooker, I kept starting books and abandoning them after about twenty thousand words.
I don’t recommend this method of inspiration.
When I am depressed, I play video games. In particular, I started playing Neverwinter Nights 2.
NWN2 was a weird flawed game in many regards, but it had some really entertaining writing. There were characters that you really enjoyed spending time with.
And then there was the goddamn paladin.
The love interest if you played as a female character was a self-loathing paladin who was guilt-wracked over…something or other, I don’t know. He moped a lot. He had no evident sense of humor. This was supposed to be attractive.
This is an ongoing problem with just about every paladin ever. Everybody seems to want to write them like crapsack Jedi—endlessly teetering on the brink of damnation,
one bad thought ready to turn them over to the dark side, all of them as moody and self-absorbed as teenage boys.
In a burning rage about how paladins were being written wrong, I hammered out forty or fifty thousand words that would later form the bones of Clockwork Boys.
A few years went by and then a few more and life got better and once in a blue moon I’d put a few more words on what became known in my head as “the thing with the paladin and the ninja accountant.”
Then I started playing the Dragon Age games, and damned if we weren’t back in the land of self-loathing paladins again, knights with dark and terrible secrets that were blaming themselves for everything, blah blah blah. (Blackwall, I am looking in your direction)
In the back of a car driving through south Texas, chasing rare birds, I turned on my laptop and wrote the vast majority of what would become The Wonder Engine. By this point, the story was alive in my head and it was going somewhere, but we were careening past 130K with no end in sight and I realized if I tried to make this one book, it could be used to club burglars to death. (I had already had this experience with the Digger omnibus and did not wish to do it again.)
So I split it in half and send the first half to my editor, saying “I think this is a light swashbuckling love story?” and she sent back a lot of words about how apparently those don’t include carnivorous tattoos and dead nuns and rotting demons in one’s head and no amount of banter was going to get past that.
Great thanks go, therefore, to K.B. Spangler, for editing it anyway, even if her margin notes occasionally just said things like “You should be screaming and running now!” and “eating a stick of coping butter.”
Even more thanks to my long-suffering husband, Kevin, who had a manuscript thrust at him with “Tell me if the dudes work!” and without whom, Brenner would have even fewer redeeming qualities.
Thanks to my copyeditors, who have suffered untold indignities over the years, with no end in sight.
Clockwork Boys: Book One of the Clocktaur War Page 23
