Corsets & Clockwork

by Trish Telep

  He looked at his daughter with the shrewd glance of a man who believes everyone schemes against him, even his own flesh and blood.

  "And why would you have me do that, Princess?" he asked.

  Disdain etched the faces of all his courtiers. I will never forget how we all sat there, like statues in the vortex of the horrid weapon in the Huntsman's hands while the trees wept leaves all around us. I will never forget the battle of wills, of calculation, that passed between the Emperor and his daughter as we all waited for her reply.

  "A matter of scientific study, Father." She looked at the Manticore, and the flash of her eyes belied the cold facts of her words. "We know so little about the Greater Unnaturals; this is a perfect opportunity to understand them better. I'm sure the University would ..."

  "For what reason need we understand them?" the Emperor cut in.

  "Surely," she said, ever so calmly, "His Most Scientific Majesty does not question the Doctrine of Logic to which we all ascribe?"

  I couldn't help but smile. Well played, Princess, I thought.

  She looked at me then, and her small smile hooked me straight in the heart. All she had to do was tug. If I had felt the first stirrings of admiration when she flashed her anger at me in the clearing, it was nothing compared to now when her gaze stripped me bare to the bone.

  I cast my eyes down to my pommel, certain she had bespelled me in that moment.

  Through the ringing in my ears, I barely heard the Emperor reply, "Take this Unnatural thing to the dungeons. It is very nearly my daughter's birthday; I shall acquiesce to her desires as a gift to her."

  The Huntsman bowed his head and sheathed his knife. He unlooped a coil of silver chain that hung across his saddle.

  Athena dismounted. "Let me," she said.

  She went to the beast, who had ceased weeping. She whispered something I couldn't quite catch, and the Manticore bowed her head and allowed the Princess to slip the chain lightly over her neck. I thought I saw Athena's hands tremble, but when she turned and led the Manticore toward her mount, her face was as impassive as always.

  There was murmuring. The Emperor seldom gave gifts, especially not in public, certainly not to his eldest daughter. What was he thinking? Were the winds of favor shifting? I could see suitors who had given a lackluster performance rethink their strategies. Others mumbled that she had now gone beyond the barriers of good sense and enchanted her own father. All the while, I wrestled with the knowledge she'd given me, wondering what to do with it and why she'd trusted me. And whether I could believe her.

  There were no easy answers, and I followed the procession as it wound back to the City with the Manticore at its heart, trying to ignore the trees that wept at her passing and followed us on the suddenly chill wind.

  * * *

  The Manticore was taken deep into the Emperor's dungeons. I refused to think about it or anything else I'd experienced in the Forest. I resumed my duties, as usual, ignoring the whispers of witchery, fending off the jibes of my regiment about my involvement with the mad witch. I drank and diced, did my drills like any soldier, and hoped for the promotion that never came. Every morning, despite the princess's admonition, I drank the Imperial Tonic. I was the Emperor's man, after all.

  And if I fancied that I heard the Manticore's silver voice raised in dirges of mourning on the border between waking and sleep, if I dreamed of running through the Forest on four feet instead of two, what of it? What soldier didn't wake in the night, hearing the croaking of the Tower ravens on the sill, and wish he'd chosen another path every now and then?

  Every fortnight, we rotated through a night watch. I was grateful when my turn came, hoping it would banish my increasingly frequent night terrors. If I wasn't meant to sleep, at least I could be doing something useful.

  Again, it seemed that Fate, if the saints aren't to be believed, had a hand in my assignment. I was to patrol the Throne Room and Main Halls. I cursed myself for wishing that I'd been assigned to the Imperial suite. I still saw Athena's face as it had been in the Forest--open, alive, full of light--and I wanted that back. But did I really think I would see her this late at night? It wasn't as if I had access to her bedchamber. At most, I might glimpse a shadow of her behind her bed curtains or in her easy chair by the fire. I would certainly not see or speak to her. And even if I did, what then?

  I tried to banish the flutter in my stomach at the mere thought of her name as I paced up and down the echoing marble halls. This was ridiculous, and I knew it.

  Clocks lined the walls, squatted on little tables and loomed in cabinets everywhere. The Emperor was deeply curious about Time, so it was said, and he had made it part of his personal study to explore the Horological Arts. Why he needed so many clocks to do it was a mystery, but their numbered faces glared at me as I passed with my everlantern and pike. Their ticking measured out my worries in discrete units of consternation.

  I had just returned for the sixth time that night to the notion that I should request a transfer to some outpost on the edge of the Copernican Wildlands, when something whispered across the stones at the edge of my light.

  "Halt!" I said.

  Click. Creak. Whoever it was refused to heed me.

  The hallway was lined with doors, and the few everlanterns that circulated in the high ceiling made pools of light and shadow as they passed.

  A whisper of white, the edge of a bare foot. A ghost? I ignored the tingling on the back of my neck, but raced forward and slid my pike between door and frame before the door could be shut and locked.

  "I said, Halt!"

  I thrust my lantern into the unlit room.

  It would have all been much easier if I'd seen who I expected instead of who I'd hoped. I'd expected a petty thief--perhaps some member of the house staff pilfering candlesticks, that sort of thing. I'd hoped foolishly for Athena, even though I couldn't imagine why she'd be roaming the halls at this hour, even though I didn't know what I would say to her. Why should she even remember me?

  Athena glared at me from the circle of light.

  She was in her nightgown, a darker dressing gown wrapped loosely around her. Her feet were bare, and I couldn't help noticing the fine arches, the perfect fan of her toes against the marble.

  "Are you going to stand there gawking at my feet or help me?" she asked.

  I think I must have blinked before I found my voice. And even then, I couldn't think of a single thing to say beyond, "Eh?"

  "Just ... get in here," she said.

  I stepped inside the room, trying to muster up what was left of my dignity. "Princess, you shouldn't be here. I'll escort you to your chamber now, and we'll pretend like none of this happened ..."

  "We will do no such thing," she said.

  I opened my mouth, but that piercing stare shut it for me.

  "I could make you go with me," she said, "but I don't think I've misjudged you that badly. Will you help me?"

  I swallowed all my questions, except one. "What are we doing?"

  "Why, freeing the Manticore, of course," she said. "You truly aren't that thick are you, Garrett?"

  Then she did something completely odd.

  She leaned forward and sniffed me.

  I frowned. "Does something offend you, Highness?"

  "You're still taking that blasted tonic, aren't you? I can smell its stench on your breath." She sighed.

  I wanted to cover my mouth, but my hands were full. Flushed with shame, I nodded.

  "Look around you," she said. "And tell me that I've played you false."

  The Emperor's Cabinet of Curiosities was generally kept locked. I had never seen inside it, though there was much speculation about its contents. It was the sort of room you'd find tucked under a staircase or in the eaves of an attic. The sort of room I'd never been in, I suddenly realized. The floor yawned beneath my feet. It was as if I was standing here and running across the Forest floor--fleet, four-footed, furred--all at the same time.

  "Garrett." She bit the end of my nam
e so hard it brought me back into the lantern light.

  I blinked.

  Portraits, newspaper clippings, books, cases of strange insects ... All were scattered willy-nilly. There was nothing especially out of the ordinary about any of it at first glance, but as I looked closer, the marble floor tilted under me again.

  A portrait entitled Butcher Vaunt, of the Emperor in his bloody apron, holding up a freshly killed goose, with a little girl beside him who might have been Athena. A picture of Saint Darwin, looking terribly ordinary in a suit and bowler hat, rather than the green, vine-covered robes held up by apes in the stained glass of the Church chapel. Newspaper clippings with the wrong dates and mentioning places and people I'd never heard of. A globe with countries I'd never seen, and a battered map spread on the wall that was of an unfamiliar city also called London. A book under glass that only said "Holy Bible," rather than "Holy Scientific Bible" as all bibles did.

  "What is all this?" I said.

  "These are all things from the real London. Things my father doesn't want anyone else to see. Things he can't bear to get rid of, even though they incriminate him for the fraud he is."

  My eyes wandered the chaos of the long, narrow room, trying to take it all in. One piece drew my gaze and wouldn't let go, a softly glowing thing that throbbed like a beating heart in its case.

  I went to it, spreading my fingers on the glass. Its power seeped through to my fingertips, buzzing up my arms and into my skull. It looked very like a heart, but none that I had ever quite seen, comprised of metal and light and whirring parts that I had no names for.

  "And that is how we got here," Athena said over my shoulder. "The Heart of All Matter."

  "How?" I said. I couldn't take my eyes off of it, even to look at her face.

  "Tesla used it to power a secret experiment to create wireless electricity," she said. "He never realized that the Heart is much more powerful than mere electricity. It ripped a hole in space and time. It brought us, along with buildings and artifacts from all of London's history, here. Our ancestors from the real London called this place Fairyland, Arcadia, Elysium, Shangri-La, Tir Na Nog ... any number of names. They apparently weren't sure it existed. But it does. And now we're trapped here."

  "But ... surely ..." I was so mesmerized by the Heart's pulsing light that I could barely think to form words.

  "No," she said. "No one knows how to use it. My father, of course, has tried. That's why he founded the University, after all. He thinks his scientists will find us a way home."

  I tore my gaze from the Heart. "And you don't?"

  She shook her head. And then came that sardonic smile that made my insides flutter. "I surely hope not. Leave all this to become a lowly butcher's daughter again?"

  With so few words did she remind me of her station. And of how far below her I truly was. "I suppose not. You will be Empress, after all," I said stiffly.

  She swatted at me then, and I looked her in the eyes.

  "I was joking, you ninny!" she said. "You know I don't care a fig for being Empress. But it's true I don't want to go back. This world is so fascinating, so thrilling, so very beautiful. I want to explore it. I want to find out everything about it. Don't you?"

  Truthfully, I had never thought about it. I had done my duty every day, and the Forest beyond the City walls was something strange and awful I seldom contemplated, except in my nightmares. All I could think about now was that if there was anything beautiful or thrilling or fascinating about this world, she was standing right in front of me. And as much as I wanted to find out everything about her, I knew that it could never be so.

  I also knew that she heard exactly what I was thinking. Her lips parted, soft and shining in the light of the pulsing Heart.

  She reached, as if she would touch my cheek, as if she was trying to decide if I was real.

  But then her face hardened and her hand fell back to her side. That icy resolve returned to her eyes, and she said, "Fetch your lantern and pike, and follow me."

  She opened the case that held the Heart and gently lifted the thing into her hands. Instantly, its pulsing grew faster, its light stronger.

  "What are you doing?" I asked, unable to take my eyes off its light, unable to take my mind off of the moment that had just happened between us. What had happened to alter it?

  "You'll see."

  She led me to the end of the room. A portrait hung there of a woman I didn't recognize but felt I should--a young queen sashed and crowned with white roses. The plaque beneath the portrait read "Victoria Regina."

  Athena slipped her hand along the edge of the portrait and the wall slid away seamlessly, very nearly soundlessly.

  Marble stairs curved down into darkness.

  "Leave the lantern here," she said.

  I was about to protest that we would surely need light, but as her foot touched the first stair, Athena's hand blossomed with the Heart's light. She smiled at me then, and that swift hook tugged me after her down the stair.

  I wasn't surprised that the Emperor had his own secret access to the dungeons, but the fact that the passage saw frequent use definitely made me wonder. There were no cobwebs, no signs of disuse. Doors were well oiled; the marble treads were quite well worn. The possibilities of what he did here were unnerving in the extreme.

  Athena had no caution about her whatsoever. She hurried ahead of me, pushing through doors and rooms as if an invisible string drew her deeper into the labyrinthine prison. Any good soldier worth his salt knows that you don't go charging headlong into an operation like the one she was undertaking. I tried to hang back, but she urged me onward with a raised brow and a gesture of her flame-ridden fingers.

  At last she came to a door that required a bit more muscle to open; it was a sealed hatch with great gears and pressure valves. It reminded me of the entrance to a boiler. I approached it with foreboding.

  "Help me," she said, setting the Heart down in an alcove nearby. Its light went out of her hands and danced in little currents through the still air as she tugged on the door.

  "Where does this lead?" I said. "Shouldn't we consider what might be on the other side? Do you know if your father keeps guards stationed down here?"

  "I thought you would know that," she said. "Clearly, my plan to use you for ill gain has failed."

  I stared at her, and then realized she jested again. I had never quite expected her to have a sense of humor.

  "I can feel the Manticore beyond this door," she said. "I hope we're not too late."

  I dared not think about what the Elementals in the Forest might do if we were. Or what would happen after we helped the Manticore escape. Instead, I put my hands near hers on the wall affixed to the door and turned. Her arms curved under mine; her shoulders pushed against my chest. The top of her head was just at my chin, and her hair smelled of cloves and oranges, of holidays long forgotten. We fit together so perfectly, like pieces of a puzzle finally coming together, that I wanted to put my arms around her and stay.

  She coughed delicately. "Corporal Reed, you'll recall that I can hear your thoughts."

  I pulled hard on the wheel and stepped away. "Yes. Sorry." The heat in my face was from exertion, I told myself.

  I saw an amused flash in her eyes as the door swung open. She retrieved the Heart.

  The deep well of the chamber echoed with labored breathing. Something below, I knew, was in terrible pain.

  I put a hand out to warn Athena, but she had already begun creeping down the curved stairs. A glow rose from the floor, and then the stairs turned enough that I could see.

  The Manticore lay across a long slab of table. A great machine squatted over her, its hoses and needles like the searching tentacles of some oceanic horror. Though the beast was secured at various places by silver chains, it was the machine that truly kept her bound, its needles nosing into her flesh and drawing out her shining blood and replacing it with viscous ichor. The machine throbbed and hummed like the demonic twin of the Heart in Athena's hand.
Steam escaped from its joints with each pulse.

  Behind the machine stood the Emperor, working its levers and checking its dials, while the Manticore struggled to breathe.

  Athena stood staring, a trembling hand raised to her mouth, the Heart's light abruptly doused. Then she raced down the remaining stairs, her bare feet slapping the stones.

  "Athena!" I hissed. But she ran on, heedless of my warning.

  "What are you doing to her?" she cried. "Stop this at once!"

  The Manticore tried and failed to raise her head. Child, you must not. Pain tarnished her voice.

  I saw only half of the smile that sliced the Emperor's face, until he stepped from around the machine to confront his daughter. He hadn't yet seen me, and I hoped he hadn't heard my warning. I slid slowly down the stairs, keeping as close to the wall as possible, praying my pike didn't rattle and give me away, but my hands shook almost uncontrollably. I couldn't bear to contemplate what I might have to do to protect Athena. Was I not the Emperor's man?

  "Whatever do you mean?" the Emperor asked. "Was it not you who said we should use her for scientific experiments?" His smile was the ugliest, most self-satisfied smirk I'd ever seen.

  "I only meant ... I didn't mean ..." I could hear the tears in her voice.

  "I know," the Emperor said. "You thought you would buy her enough time until you could figure out some way to help her escape. Look well upon what you've wrought, daughter. There will be no escape from this."

  I could see the Manticore's head and chest. Where there should have been red velvet fur, muscles over ribcage, there was a gaping hole of darkness.

  The Emperor had taken her heart.

  Athena ignored him. "We're getting you out of here," Athena said to the Manticore.

  Leave me, the beast said.

  "And just how do you think you'll do that?" the Emperor sneered at Athena. "If you unhook her from my machine, she shall surely die. And we will have lost valuable understanding of the Unnaturals. You were correct, daughter. They are well worth our investigation--the properties I have discovered in her blood alone! They are worth so much more alive than dead. I shall bring all I can here into the dungeons. We shall create a world more rich than any we could possibly have imagined before, and when the time is right, we shall force the gate back to the old world open. London, Britain, the Earth itself will be ours."